The Sickness

The sickness is upon me... it plays across and tautens my cello-string nerves, and tricks my spine into forming unaligned maggots of ache. Makes me dream heavy-handedly of the infiniverse; a reversed spy-glass with a lens spidering over my vitreous humors. As I try to lend my fevers quixotry, I summed it up as a helix of bubbles, drawn causally backwards, from the surface of gangrenous water that sucks on me, foetal at the bottom of a brine barrel.

I have the flu. It is enormously uncomfortable, a reckless house-guest who uses all the toilet paper in lighting my mossy mattress on fire... and like all the painful things that've ever happened to me, I'm trying to keep it welcome... divine some sort of temporary truth out of its feverish twilight shroud. Thinks me of birds and how they fly even when they sing - fly how they sing; how the enflamed heart casts ever-greater shadows that pull a luminary low-pressure system behind them; how the human pace has gorged on the colourful rays of its limen, subtracting either vowel from 'feast' at its fickle convenience; how we are each a knot longing for a weave, each a salt-stained architect of dreams stuffing cotton balls into the punctures of our carapace of Will... our mis-takes lengthening the tension cords of our mistakes; with honour, our ablative sense of originality denies our sense of character: honesty is attained only through repetition - only through the rhetoric of peripherally glimpsed errors do we attain our character, that by using and reusing the same jokes, we find our self. We've achieved and killed and wall-mounted psychology and we call it 'post' to impress and enenvy the bounty-hunter friend ... that we mock urgency in pantomime with our democracy (a substanceless itch of insects humming above our temporal tar-pit), hiding our constant violence with everything beneath concepts of creation: I feel that it is our imperative to kill before we can create... in essence, we can only re-create when the dogs are dragging the carcass into the dust.

I dreamt about my illness before it happened, a small plaque of green rot creeping up my throat, seen Henry Sugar-style in a mirror. It relieved me to know that it made it up to my jelly-fish last night, shared with me the show of unshowable unsharables. Now I feel justified to feel so ear-blocked and throat-bloated. I am going to sit upon the shed roof under the sycamore in the back.

"Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!"