i sit in a vague fugue as the flies buzz through the open window
they know death is near, blood seeping through the thin cotton of a school uniform. integrals curl up into manifolds as my vision blurs
i think of a rope around the neck, a bullet through the head, a clarity
from the yellow-wallpapered fluorescent hum
an eyelid twitches, mirroring the left leg. i push my knuckles against the edge of the desk. sharp metal bites a quick counter-subject to my mental funeral march.
i pick up my pen; the lecture wriggles back into the cerebellum with silver-tipped pincers and many many legs.

a man so petty and cruel in life could only love like the ringing of a hammer on steel. i am a coward, as is he; so he beats the cowardice out of me. he tells me all other people delight in schadenfreude, as does he. it is only us against the world; no one else could love something as cruel as he is, as am i.

avoiding the same mistakes baked in genetically is harder than i thought; i only wanted to be worthy of my own pain, trying to be a noble man, a mountain of debt piled up from **** and beatings and gallons of midnight oil burnt, kerosene down the drain, fuel spluttering in a six-cylinder engine. i think i understand original sin now, one rib torn out, trauma passed to the bottom left. god looks down at me and wonders where i'm going. standing at the altar in His house with a stolen rosary and a hand dipped in the baptismal font as though it cancels out the theft like some game of divine arithmetic, heavenly haggling at the gates, staring at the pews like one does at a stranger's grave.

i still look for you in endless skies and infinite depths, in artificially beating hearts and macro-micro scale, past the schwarzschild radius, inside the electron orbital. the mere thought of you dwarfs everything that could be and can be conceptualised or philosophised or made, even as our descendants reach for the stars and become gods and synthesise emotions and transcend physical form, when history is a nightmare the human consciousness is trying to wake up from, there will be others too who love and lose like i did.

you're not catholic, per se, but you never quite felt okay with not feeling pain

god are you there? please talk to me

god?

please