Ketalar

Whatever was or was not confined by that svelte stream coursed its way under my skin, releasing its sweet body into my salted estuaries, sharp and scarlet by vice of their ferrous casket. Course uncaged, but body unblent, it travelled onward, gathering into a blister at the back of my brain, pressing the pillow as it flourished. There it negotiated the doors of my perception, and slid asunder the drapes of the stage, the dramaturge dropped his puppets about me, infused life but buried the edge glancing, gashing the depth of their eyes. Once alive, now waxen mannikins of taxidermied psyches, their skins seemed leathered, as my fingers felt, sliding, flowing over one another, gloves lubricated by cool lather. Not mine. Nor those foreign legs, limbs in exile.

Onwards floating, a hair's width above the bed, sails covered eyes and mast twisted, sinking the vessel and drawing living water to my loose lips. A gasp, savoured and spewed, a gulp of smog. I released it outside the window, from a modest pipe, whiffing beneath the tongueless chimney, a mere beacon for paper pigeons, pinions defiled yet safe from deflagration. Crows, cut-outs of deadly nightshade, nested in the smokestacks, distilling from soot some flat import as impinging as it was void, or slit the sky, shadow marionettes speaking hollow stories outside my Cave.

My sight shifted from item to individual, brief infinities lapsing before their forms sharpened, each stare stabilising a shaky world, deluding me into illusions of normalcy. Yet eldritch was my ensnarement in a slough of nowness, the past in ken and reach, but for a brigandine of reeds, an iron tent dissecting instant from reminiscence and future. I traced my life entire, but left it unpeeled, I'd flake away with the wallpaper of that chamber, eternally enclosed, a gap in time.