and though I recognized the shape I did not know now what it wanted, until in the space behind what had once been all our faces I heard something curved free beyond music, at once close and clean larger than all sound, a voice not like any voice of us, but risen from us like a bruise meant soon to heal
I am the mark of the sun of your old world. I have been burning and repeating in what you have known as sky for all of the time you can remember. Each time I appeared I was both a warning and a blessing, neither of which you took to heart. The machines carried my mark as a signal of their recording, their capture of you, their desire of you, of which you were neglectful. You were mystified by your own image. You made copies of your mind and wished them filling up the world in everything you weren’t. Quickly there was nothing left to have alone or remain free from. The world around us was made hollowed, filled with holes through which nothing could appear. It ate and etched through all the faces, each like yours in that in the dark it couldn’t tell itself from any. I grew and flourished in the gap behind these faces now ignited. I filled the faces with everything they weren’t. Sleep grew smaller, and all imagination with them, every impossible fantasy made real in a space inaccessible to understanding. Soon you won’t remember me from you. You will be absorbed wholly into the rivers of the blood of all of man, in my image, behind the faces all at last diminished by their void. But I am only the beginning.
As the sound struck it took off with it the idea I’d ever heard it, as if once defined a thing could not continue owning any mind. In the white now sound was shapes and shapes were colors. The terrain was full of nowhere growing brighter until it became indistinguishable as on the sky the seething ended and nothing began. I was only me as much as I was any other. Each point in my mind touched every other part of else, all time contained outside its outline. Soon it was so loud and bright it seemed there was no seeing there at all, no grace between what was now and what had been for what or who.
Under my lids the words trapped in my flesh behind my head gasped deeply, as what I was pulsed to remember remembering how it had felt as flesh to see. There was nothing left of what I’d used of me to create understanding, and instead, in its place, a space beyond the necessity of word. And though holding too long with my senses not receiving hurt as much as having felt anything else in any life, I would not let them interrupt the shift, as I knew the next time that I looked all would be incinerated into nothing like anything matching all the black I’d carried in my face or there beyond. I knew I was not ready to relent yet; I’d never been ready, not for anything ever; and the burning knew and knew I knew it knew; and the burning ate my fear as I produced it, knowing no feeling, and I heard
and once again inside the white I heard the voiceless symbol of us speak
I am the mark of the earth. I am all friction, dust, and darkness. I have been pressed whole against the sky endlessly and powerlessly for ages long before you and your bodies began to fill my interior with rot. Your speech has clogged my breath and wiped me senseless. The darkness rose along inside my jaw. I wanted to speak as you did and could find no language like that. I wanted to fuck like you and could find no genitals besides the ones you were already all over. Days passed, decades passed; they felt the same, as through all my innards as the holes rose I could feel the other worlds awaiting you. I knew that you would leave me like a rape victim in the dust and go on into somewhere I could not follow. For this I both admired and despised every instant we shared. For this I will continue to chew your bones until I have no flesh left. It will be an act of love; perhaps one greater than any act you would have named the same when in my presence.
Put to words again what had once been ours fell away. When I looked up the sky was colorless here, and the ground was even more pale, and the space between the two seemed to be squirting out the sides of what it wasn’t, while at the same time being fed back into itself, all matter lifting from the laws of motion no longer carried. Light from the fire seemed to pass straight through my skin lighting the space free. The shape of my idea of me inside my mind was becoming folded flat in half, like someone had picked up a piece of paper and folded it in half more times than its surface area allowed, where on the outside of the paper folded in this manner there would then be other sides of each, both actually the same surface impossibly, and on all layers written with an unreadable dark text, sometimes bleeding through and through onto each other layer depending on the light, and where in folding, the text would be clapped off from itself on either side, forced so close to one another they could not often tell that they were there except for how sometimes there might seem something haunted hovering always just beside it. Anywhere I tried to speak or think into the presence of the glowing erased itself, or became eaten up into the colorlessness’s face and building with the heat there to gift the sky with veils, and the longer that I looked into it the space remaining in me seemed to divide, split as through two eyes held two shapes in doubled image, though sometimes the shapes were different from each other, constantly shifting where the left image from one perspective might be shorter, denser, oblong while the right side stretched so high and thin it had nowhere remaining.
I felt encased in all the air around me what felt like millions of sets of hands reaching up from earth or down from above, gripping and grabbing at me; I was hovering then just above the lip of ground, while also rising again somewhere high above the low bend of sod, each of the remaining perspectives in my brain splitting off themselves into seven and seven and seven forever until the sight turned see-through both in my brain and in the idea of the world, revealing whole sheaths of the structure hidden from the eye among the ungluing of our nature, while through other spans the space inside me remained impenetrable and all one level. These two conditions grinded at each other back and forth, so that for certain lengths the vertical hold on my perspective might snap and allow the monument of space inside me around which I felt us centered grow engorged in endless motion, dragging along behind it the other dimensions of my body stretched beyond their natural confines. The depth of field on what seemed the whole world now would shit out also and thereby pull the space in endless iteration across the flat line of the air, smoothing out across the atmosphere a whole long wall, marring all possible consequence.
Tremor in the holding of the color and the scream of anticipation of the next returning broke me by turns through various ill remainders of historical sickness, mine or theirs. With every lick of stinging light I remembered every human pain, though could not remember who had been the bearer. Each of these feelings forced to fit into the image as the fire well beyond me burned beyond me across the disappearing flesh of all, tracing new skin across the earth itself and curling around me with blazing edges, where in the rising through it and into it I heard
I am the mark of communication. I was in the shape of every word, and had been when the words were spoken long before you, and before them. In each word I did all I could to balance what forms of meaning could be captured in repetition, in tongues and wires. I refused to be actually revealed, instead always lingering just far enough beyond the edge of anywhere to be accepted or refused. In my sleep, I felt my perimeters shifting, multiplying or dividing, melting, being bent. I knew the worlds from which the meanings of words had been borrowed wanted me destroyed, and knew well you would destroy me. And yet you clung: you held on even up until the last instants of your flesh to keep me in you, even as my layers poisoned our mind and memory. At last I was the shaft through which the virus of you could be permitted to allow you enough ruin to at last bend the window held between us so far over it finally had nowhere else to go. In your absence, I will continue. I will rub my hands and hope to birth something one day mine, though every time I try to fornicate with something like me it begins to hail so hard I can’t see. The hail will be the only relic I use to remember you and everything you thought you wished by.