And now the sky inside my head was silver and ground was gray. I knew the speaking wounds could mime any of our voices as they grew negated in all minds; they had watched us in our entertainment; their malformation had been written in our flesh, masked in the ark of every hour we’d been forced into these bodies, carved free now of our blood: names of corporations; names of days and books spanning the bedroom and the den and rooms apart; names of places and fleshless surfaces of persons, their creations. Even crushed up against the rush of burning all around me, it was impossible to say if the negating would ever end, as through my mind’s widening cavity scrolled bright names upon the flesh of the large surrounded burning space gleaming like little windows held in houses burning too, where as each name burnt itself off of wherever it had come from there was a marring left behind; a blot not disappeared but caved behind itself, a remembrance measured just offscreen inside the floods inside me being dragged beyond their form, sharing the same air as the dry face of the blazing growing larger on all existence, all of its crackling like tongues in tongues of nothing.
Inside my head then I saw a larger head combining in from what was not: a head like I remembered of my reflection, but refined in all its dimensions, sharper and wider in all features, speaking the fire of the altar. I saw the head had silver eyes, in each eye more eyes than I could ever count, and each inscribed with white wounds unlike any we’d healed. As I read the silence of the bruises, the skin around the air turned silver to match the head around us both, melting slick into our sockets and spreading through me like an acid. The head was desperate to evict the language from my body where it’d hidden clustered in bumps against the index of my cerebrum screaming; it wanted my last rite for itself; and again I felt the space inside me crushing down on my memory, my faith, and as the hole of my speech became pushed open in the pressure it began moaning as in the throes of contextless human anguish. I tried to remember how to chant the prayers I’d bore through days in rhythm with the burning, to claw them hard into the burning world by making of them now a dream to be remembered, though each time I felt me moan the shape of what had been language again outside my head I felt them emerging only more deformed, disguising themselves to keep the pinlike eyes of the head inside my head out of their meaning, and preserve the words as near to what they’d meant to be forever to what they were being altered into. Each syllable begged in the same voice for my eternal attention; they begged me not to leave them, never to leave anything, not to let them here again be killed as had the voices of the people in me begged once, their bodies bowed and pounding, stacked up and on fire both inside and outside my surface, and in the begging I heard
I am the mark of pain. Where you thought you wore flesh through your whole life I was your body. The ground is covered in me now. In your absence I rub and hump against the ground if only to remind it of your name over and over. I am your name, only a relic. Nothing of you for this world will remain. I will wear the color of the dark skin around your asshole in my dreams as a hood over the face of all the animals left to colonize any relic of your life. The water of the world flows through my eyes. It wraps around what your fantasies designed as other planets. The sky fills with me and pours upon me. I masturbate in my own absence. What I ejaculate will become the most beautiful child any kind of history has seen. It will rise again in the battlefields and bottoms of oceans with a new crop of heathen to slosh around this ship with, driving me wild with ecstasy in want of only more of me. I do not require your cooperation to live forever already in the outfit of your childhood, actually eternal in the way you always thought you were, though what I sing is all mine.
And so our pain had disappeared then, replaced with new pain, where for what it was now there was no analog. No color clasped close enough to be believed in human language. Inside this rising smoke I heard your roar. Even among the many millions of whatever I could make you out. It was any of you. You were begging to be held, you were calling the names of those you spent your life beside in small rooms waiting, though now their names were also any word, and so the speech came flooding from you, and you did not know, and you were frightened.
Your voice was mine. All these voices as they knitted filled my body and held on to it, and it hurt. Why did it have to hurt, I asked, and so it didn’t. All I could see now even inside me was the color of the razing in the space folding again in barfing orbs of stolen air from its black lungs to feed the surroundings a humming coat. It hurt because it is what happened, because I remember not having in my sleep and in my being stacked the bodies here so high, piling their skin on skin here on the center of where our experience had once been, some minor point on which to begin the baking where the dead knew and gathered into packs, where they held their place as they’d been settled skull to skull in silent waiting to be ended all apart, lids and laps and asses, bones and nails and hair, faces and napes and drapes of desiccated blood. It hurt because the vision of the burning cut me harder than the seeing before had before.
The burning hovered in the bump snug all around anything. It was so near it was no longer near enough. Inside my space a child was singing. I was screaming. In the smoking fields beyond me there were veins strummed with countless ridges pulsating at the crust of black with milk or something pumping fat beneath me. It felt so hard to look into the smoke for too long that it was hard to do anything beyond and hard to remember why or which way else I’d ever seen something else not so seizing to look into, where there was nothing else to see but that. How hard it was to see out there even with the intuition knowing not seeing burned the vision even more, our bodies squirting through and through themselves at distances profane to bring the destroyed flesh of anyone’s own most believed back underneath us all as if no time had even passed; as if the burning could have lasted an eternity if we had had enough flesh to fuel it, if we had found a way to copulate in flames, and yet the flames were being already forgotten in the instant they began, in the order of the names and ways of you and me unending impacted rolled up bitten through and teased at with white lightning rods of organs in the body of us kissed like cameras in our guts projecting spools and spools of years and years clasped into one shape constantly shaking.
Imagine trying not to die, no one was saying; imagine trying not to want to die for any hour ever in the presence of the fire you only see when you can’t see, dressed in blood on the flesh napkin of the flue of you eternal from you in the holes you’ve made with fingernails and swords and teeth of wars, lathered in shitstorms above the cusped crease of the sky under the heavens buried with the blood we were not and are now and are and were and will be born and burned again on frames and frames of days and days of buried cities scourged in fertile artworks, priceless weapons, dead fields watched by planes, glow-killed photos of your body you have never seen clasped in the fleshy flats and houses of those who have managed in their imagination of trying not to die to actually survive so long they couldn’t even recognize themselves as they were dying, bringing all those they had touched to death inside them too, nothing to miss, and again inside the light I could feel the burning turning me open in slow seasons, and inside my head inside my chest I heard every other living word spoke all at once, and I heard