We cannot escape. Black smoke fills the hotel. Twenty three are dead.
Two days pass. The smoke has coalesced into a flesh-like sludge. One of the bellboys trips on floor 17 and is coated. He screams and screams and screams. We barricade the entrance to the floor.

Ten days pass, uneventfully.

I feel safe now. The sludge has moved away from my room. The lawman tells me the end will come soon. He gives me a hotel mint.

I sometimes hear the whispers of that poor bellboy, vibrating through the wooden belly of this geometric construct. He tells me he is fine, and he is happy.

A maid throws herself out of a window. I cannot fathom why. We are so near.

The bellboy tells me how his life was once filled with meaning. Motivation that drove him, ideals that enticed him, and responsibility that crushed him. He is nothing now. He is free.

We open the door to floor 17. I see

it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is moving it is lies there torn like tar stretched across ****** gills there is starlight in the gape of his throat pitch in his dead dull eyes father passes me a cup and I drink his blood father passes me bread and I feast on his flesh father

Philadelphia is a sweltering 70 degrees today! Whew! I think I’ll go to that cute coffee shop across the street, and try one of those new pumpkin lattes.

The new bus system *****! How is anyone suppose to get anywhere on time? Grr!

These muffins are so adorable I just want to throw up!!!

The park was especially lovely this evening. The flowers were in bloom, and this one little girl just kept sniffing them and sneezing and sneezing until she couldn’t breathe and was driven away in an ambulance.

Red blue red blue, they taped off the block today. Pipes burst beneath the road, a bus overturned and the streets flooded with bodies.

little faces pressed against the pavement little faces pressed flat little faces pressed like flowers flat flat flat flat a poem

don’t make me remember please stop

There’s a dead deer’s head in the foyer above reception. The rest must have rotted. They cut away the animal and left only the carcass, the severed space. Our bodies contain us, they are a boundary, and when we tear at the surface we open up and flood the world with emptiness, or perhaps the world floods us. I think that deer burst and they hung its face on the wall to remind us that this hotel is filled with emptiness, and that death will bring only more emptiness. Maybe we’re meant to connect like shaking hands and football and insider trading fill ourselves with foreign emptiness distract retreat like shaking hands always nervous smiling and empty.

I am not here I have never been here go away I was someone but not anymore

These muffins are disgusting they fill the insides with cream and jam and fruit and it is sick and false no one can escape this pointless stupid life go fill yourself with things filled with other things doesn’t change you are a void pulling in everything light itself devourer spinster

Today was one of the best days of my life.

Today was one of the best days of my life.

Today was one of the best days of my life.

Today was

The lawman tells me I have slept for six months. I ask him about that day on floor 17. He tells me there is no floor 17.

We have run out of hotel mints.

There is a gap. There is a gap in my perception. There is a blackness constricting the edges of my vision.

There never was a bellboy. There never was any smoke. The maid is alive. She is alive. I can touch her. She is alive.

We sit in the cafeteria. She pours me bitter black tea, her arm arching in such a manner that would not be possible were she in that twisted ****** state on the day of her suicide. We share this moment every day for a week.

I have begun noticing small grains at the bottom of my cup.

Today I feigned sickness and took the tea to my room. It burns my skin but I do not react. It is as I expected. I am drifting out of my flesh and I cannot stop.

THIS IS NOT THE SAME HOTEL. THIS IS NOT MY BODY. I AM SURROUNDED BY LIARS.

I am going to find the bellboy.

The elevator button is covered by layers of coarse black tape. I tear it away and find plaster beneath. I drive my keys in. The plaster crumbles between my fingers, revealing the bent end of a naked wire. I scream and scream and scream. I am utterly alone, suspended above the earth on a carcass of withered cellulose. The tips of my flesh quiver and the irregular geometric forms of my keys fall to the ground. They are hugged by the synthetic strands of millennia dead creatures. It is carpet, a small voice whispers beneath my skull. What does that even mean? I fall to my knees. I hear gurgling static above. Someone has turned a faucet, fully expecting water to flow out of it, as if it is perfectly ******* normal for water to flow two hundred metres into the air. There is a rasping sound and I realise it is my own throat opening for air.

I don’t want to exist in this reality, anymore.

Two weeks pass. I have collected enough dregs. I will soak them in mouth wash tonight.

The smoke fills my lungs. I hold it until my chest caves, my vision blurs. Grey streams rise from my lips, sinking into the ceiling. A siren screams in the hallway. I hear the lawman at my door. His head smashes against it, screaming, screaming, until it shatters into shell and yolk. I cannot wait to meet my child.

it is a womb alive twisting free empty stupid vessels floating blood in our casings waiting on the carcass spitting my lungs bring me my child bright death bright life

We shift bones to shift words to shift bones. Nobody died but there are twenty six corpses; his flesh fell through his frame, her bones shattered like shrapnel like atomic starlight, his head burst into prismatic decay. I watch their flesh pulled into the womb below. The hallways are umbilical cords pulsing nutrient streams gaping softly breathing burning. I know now. This intersection between life and death. It has always been. It takes in the lacuna. The space between spaces. Human shaped vessels with ill-fitted souls. You cannot tell them apart, you know. Strip the skin away they are revealed formless. They sink into bodies but never form identities. It is this place between places, where transience precipitates like breath on glass, dewdrops spun. I know I know I know the lawman rolls his head side to side blood and brains across the floor shut up.

There, in the hollow of my skull, I am dead, a fleeting absence. I hug the womb beneath me. I drag the rotting parts of myself down. I leave my head beside the lawman. I am going to be with my child. I am going to kiss my bright death into its soul, an indelible beacon to blemish the emptiness of existence.

City came underwater
Circling itself
Fumbling through wet cloth
Rain soaked, rain soaked

Flooded all the mean streets
Dead ends
Singing like the cold stream
Running through our summer sweat

That moment ten years ago
Swore we’d die, but not like this
Broken like the old oak
Salt on your lips

We made nests in clocks
that Summer the electricity died.
Stars rose out of the ether for the first time in centuries.

Autumn rolled in
but it only grew hotter.
We climbed on rooftops to escape the heat of our homes
and saw the silhouettes of strangers follow.

Winter choked the freeways, the subways, the old ways.
Rust fell on us like rain.
We danced in the belly of an abandoned ship
cheeks burning with mirth.

By Spring
the plants had withered
and the animals had slept until their bodies devoured their souls.
We sat on the town hall as the sun engulfed the sky
Thankful for such a beautiful life.

There’s nothing there anymore
Empty space
A neck without a head

I remember how you taught me to tie my tongue
Or maybe I taught myself
Doesn’t matter

I just wanted to fill the space
So we made nooses on our deathbed
I caught your breath and framed it
‘Holly blooming’
Before asphyxiating

Never did pick up my head from your apartment
You’ve probably moved away
Shifted flesh and become someone else

Doesn’t matter
Never did

There is blood beneath my tips
Nothing escapes it

This city exists
Atop a backbone
Splitting its own flesh

We are all guilty
We are all ******* guilty

The city was hungry. A mewing came from an alley. A hollow exchange.
The innards of the district had been gutted by libertine sons.
We were scared of the silence, so we filled it with shootings, and lynchings, and stabbings, and rapes.
You came an empty reflection. It was the night before the bombs fell. I remember the way my atoms shifted. You lying there in the morning.
We fell into one another, like rabid dogs at corpses.

Limbs lined the streets.
You were distant that day. I broke ******* climbing over a fence, and lined them with the rest.
The radio tower looked abandoned.
You told me three years later you didn’t care either way. I walked you to the bridge and watched you swim the Styx.
I’d never cared from the start.

The world ended soon after.
The moon’s belly cracked, guts spilling onto the earth.
Children pelted one another with flesh. Parents stood in doorways, smiling.
The swell stretched infinitely, reaching neither peak nor fall.
I fell asleep on your grave, nestled in the cold of yesterday’s ache.

Split bone
Sick beneath my skin
Dosed with death

Nobody ******* cared
Doctor came with a casket
And sold me my own bed

I slept til my tongue rotted through my teeth
And all names became foreign streets