Bosch is not like any man.
He eats his metaphysics raw.
Great and globular,
A sanguine fruit looms forth infinitely.
Stars, like gleaming berries picked,
Lay strewn across his astral dining set.

He breaks bread with the Abstract Entities,
Devouring the Earth and all its mortal sentiments.
He voices his distaste for the fibrous pulp,
Formless nose scrunched and curled
With loathing at the terrestrial filaments
Stuck between his teeth.

Bosch's belly is an endless hollow
Where darkness swallows light.
There is no air, no sound.
Its abysmal blackness knows no bounds.
His hunger insatiable,
He drinks in the Milky Way,
Eager to fill the emptiness
Of his ever-expanding void.

Like the gaping, empty mouth
Of an infant child, I yearn,
My mind an arid expanse.
I live in its dunes as a beggar,
Thirsting for nourishment of thought—
A taste long forgotten by the tongue.

Along a dusky road, tail lights glare ahead—
Glowing, beastly eyes of some ****** origin.
There is no going
To be done. The heart and hum of motion has died
And drifted far along the blistering wind.
Pungent smells of death plume
With night-blackened smoke,
The foul breath of burning tires and gasoline sludge.
The air is acrid with it all.
Yellow men in hats and heavy dungarees
Wheel in their stock of the river
And let the blaze drink it dry
With unquenchable thirst.

Her mouth sits agape,
Shallowly wafting stale, dank air.
Each breath drifts down to her lap,
Resting there in a sour cloud.
It reeks of dead fish and swamp mud.
And her middle is drowned in feelings of despair
Which seep sluggishly through the chambers of her heart.
The drunken reflux stains her linen black—
Black as the bottom of some lifeless lake.

She rises from her place at the edge of her bed
Wading through her sorrow—
Through her own viscous thoughts...
She does this
With what little spirit she can muster.

It is the last of what she once possessed.

Night floats above us like the breezy underside
Of a great, black cloth,
The sky tattered and torn
And spattered with brilliant, glowing stars.

We pull it’s coolness over our heads,
As a child would a blanket,
A temporary shield against the devils
Of our own imaginings.

We are both watchful and resigned,
Knowing that the sun will return
And soon resume its rage, unaltered.
We do not sleep.

Instead, we wait and wait
In shades of black and blue,
Drinking in the coolness.
We wait.

My limbs pinned and flayed.
A curious crowd of men hover overhead,

Floating faces bobbing closely
Like great bearded balloons.

In a flash of white and sharply gleaming silver,
They swiftly strip my leather skin

And, upon prying the cage, are astounded to have found
Only a cavity in the place a heart should be.

Throughout my warren of vein sits the last true proof
That anything once flowed there—

A thickly pickled ichor to make sickened
Wives’ stomachs turn at their evening roast.

The ache of this deficiency sustains me.
It grows like a babe in my middle,

Yet the physique it makes is not at all alike.
There is no luster here,

No rosy flush or glow.
No promise.

And this bulge which I see exists merely
As a faulty figment in my mind's eye.

The only fluttering kick I feel
Is the vacant, restless quiver of my gut.