You are a crawling
Hunch-backed,
Dried up thing.
With ripe blue veins
Threatening though translucent paper skin.
And highway nails that stretch to some place I do not know.
With blood, and skin, and sweet sticky residue
Underneath.
You are
Cold to the touch.
But you were once a person
You were once a person
With a taste for fruit juice.
You lived with your mother
On a small farm in rural Canada.
With an apple tree in your yard.
As a child, your mom picked two dozen on Sundays
And fed the rotten ones to the soil.
You’d grab two before school.
One to eat as you rode on your bike
One you left on your teacher’s desk.
And she’d pat your head
And tell you that you were her favourite.
But you sat alone on the picnic bench
And watch how the other kids would play,
Unless you brought your mother’s baked apple,
Kept warm in a Thermos.
And the kids would swarm it like flies
And dig at it with their forks.
As it warmed their hands and stomachs,
They loved you with that childlike ephemeral passion,
Until the cold wind blew them away again.
Your stomach turned
And you buried the core under a pile of autumn leaves.
As a man you moved to New York
To make something of yourself
Though you weren’t sure yet what ‘something’
Would be.
You were sure you would trip onto it.
Like a bump under the carpet hiding your keys.
As long as you just kept your head straight
And kept moving.
You surrounded yourself by the top of the food chain
So you could either climb or be eaten.
You kept a pitcher of cool fruit juice
On your dining room table
And brought it to work in a Tumbler.
You’d wince when you took a sip
So the other men would think it was coffee.
Even though they never noticed you,
Never mind what you were drinking.
Your head up to their shoulders;
A lowly intern on Wall Street,
With a picture of a farm
On your corner cubicle.
In meetings your mind slipped in and out of conversations
Of practicality.
As your eyes focused and unfocused
On marble grain.
Co-workers smirked and checked off an easy defeat.
Thinking you’d be handing out coffee the rest
Of your career.
But they didn’t know it,
Did they?
You didn’t even notice it happening.
Until one day,
Accidentally,
You slipped into a blurry world
That teased your finger tips
Your mind steadied like a surgeon
And caught onto the string of a vision:
A world so radical
And colourful
It would hurt any common worker’s eyes.
With no reprieve from sweetness.
No busywork, no sitting, no graphs or charts;
Just neon.
You clung onto the sides of your desk
You clung so hard that you stayed there
While somewhere else something grew
Entirely without you.
You were formless but craving
And no honey nor lady nor granny would satisfy you.
And you sweat out all of your dopamine until you were devoid.
While the nightmares grew intense, grew into daydreams and fantasies.
You followed them into the blurred dark night.
And then there is now.
Now, I find myself sitting across the table from you
Dressed in your suit
Fine Italian Leather
That your skin sticks to.
Onto which you drool.
Your milky blue irises dissipating
While black pupils dilate,
Fixing onto your prey.
And bursting like ink coating your whites.
“Hi, sweetheart”
You look me over now like I owe you something.
My fingers and hair and arms and legs.
Well, I retire,
They haven’t been of much use lately anyways.
They say never to make deals with your type.
The lonely boy who eats with the teacher,
The Wall Street wannabe kid
Who looks up to businessmen,
The antichrist
Craving something sweet.
But I am sitting across this table from you
Because I’m willing to give and you want to take.
I believe you may be able to help me with my head
The blood will smooth your wrinkles
And there’s
So
So
Much.
These headaches may finally go away
From when my head was struck that day
The sound of blood swooshing across the brain
Remains.
When I turn in my bed
When I look up or down to the ones I loved.
And oh, how I miss looking at beautiful things.
So I go to hand you the drill
But
You leap over the table
And I can’t move now.
The pain is gone but so am I.
Totally and completely.
Simply the air you expel.
God, what have I become an accomplice to?
Maybe I should have hid under the piles of rubble
With the others
When we first heard rumblings of you.
But
I feared these things that make up my human form
Like my fingers and hair and arms and legs
Only conceal a devilish, neanderthal system of cravings
Like yours.
And while the CN Tower is being devoured,
And hot
steel
rivers
Run through all of the places I knew,
While my friends and family are getting trampled in the race to Boston,
In this basement
I will give myself to you.
Because you are hungry
And if they don’t make it,
They will surely want to give themselves too.
Oct 8, 2025
Oct 8, 2025 at 9:05 PM UTC
You are a crawling
Hunch-backed,
Dried up thing.
With ripe blue veins
Threatening though translucent paper skin.
And highway nails that stretch to some place I do not know.
With blood, and skin, and sweet sticky residue
Underneath.
You are
Cold to the touch.
But you were once a person
You were once a person
With a taste for fruit juice.
You lived with your mother
On a small farm in rural Canada.
With an apple tree in your yard.
As a child, your mom picked two dozen on Sundays
And fed the rotten ones to the soil.
You’d grab two before school.
One to eat as you rode on your bike
One you left on your teacher’s desk.
And she’d pat your head
And tell you that you were her favourite.
But you sat alone on the picnic bench
And watch how the other kids would play,
Unless you brought your mother’s baked apple,
Kept warm in a Thermos.
And the kids would swarm it like flies
And dig at it with their forks.
As it warmed their hands and stomachs,
They loved you with that childlike ephemeral passion,
Until the cold wind blew them away again.
Your stomach turned
And you buried the core under a pile of autumn leaves.
As a man you moved to New York
To make something of yourself
Though you weren’t sure yet what ‘something’
Would be.
You were sure you would trip onto it.
Like a bump under the carpet hiding your keys.
As long as you just kept your head straight
And kept moving.
You surrounded yourself by the top of the food chain
So you could either climb or be eaten.
You kept a pitcher of cool fruit juice
On your dining room table
And brought it to work in a Tumbler.
You’d wince when you took a sip
So the other men would think it was coffee.
Even though they never noticed you,
Never mind what you were drinking.
Your head up to their shoulders;
A lowly intern on Wall Street,
With a picture of a farm
On your corner cubicle.
In meetings your mind slipped in and out of conversations
Of practicality.
As your eyes focused and unfocused
On marble grain.
Co-workers smirked and checked off an easy defeat.
Thinking you’d be handing out coffee the rest
Of your career.
But they didn’t know it,
Did they?
You didn’t even notice it happening.
Until one day,
Accidentally,
You slipped into a blurry world
That teased your finger tips
Your mind steadied like a surgeon
And caught onto the string of a vision:
A world so radical
And colourful
It would hurt any common worker’s eyes.
With no reprieve from sweetness.
No busywork, no sitting, no graphs or charts;
Just neon.
You clung onto the sides of your desk
You clung so hard that you stayed there
While somewhere else something grew
Entirely without you.
You were formless but craving
And no honey nor lady nor granny would satisfy you.
And you sweat out all of your dopamine until you were devoid.
While the nightmares grew intense, grew into daydreams and fantasies.
You followed them into the blurred dark night.
And then there is now.
Now, I find myself sitting across the table from you
Dressed in your suit
Fine Italian Leather
That your skin sticks to.
Onto which you drool.
Your milky blue irises dissipating
While black pupils dilate,
Fixing onto your prey.
And bursting like ink coating your whites.
“Hi, sweetheart”
You look me over now like I owe you something.
My fingers and hair and arms and legs.
Well, I retire,
They haven’t been of much use lately anyways.
They say never to make deals with your type.
The lonely boy who eats with the teacher,
The Wall Street wannabe kid
Who looks up to businessmen,
The antichrist
Craving something sweet.
But I am sitting across this table from you
Because I’m willing to give and you want to take.
I believe you may be able to help me with my head
The blood will smooth your wrinkles
And there’s
So
So
Much.
These headaches may finally go away
From when my head was struck that day
The sound of blood swooshing across the brain
Remains.
When I turn in my bed
When I look up or down to the ones I loved.
And oh, how I miss looking at beautiful things.
So I go to hand you the drill
But
You leap over the table
And I can’t move now.
The pain is gone but so am I.
Totally and completely.
Simply the air you expel.
God, what have I become an accomplice to?
Maybe I should have hid under the piles of rubble
With the others
When we first heard rumblings of you.
But
I feared these things that make up my human form
Like my fingers and hair and arms and legs
Only conceal a devilish, neanderthal system of cravings
Like yours.
And while the CN Tower is being devoured,
And hot
steel
rivers
Run through all of the places I knew,
While my friends and family are getting trampled in the race to Boston,
In this basement
I will give myself to you.
Because you are hungry
And if they don’t make it,
They will surely want to give themselves too.