[Picture #12]
it is unrolled before me.
a Persian rug with countless stories and legends and people woven inside of it. it is alive. it breathes. i have my eyes pressed to the base of its jaw like two cold fingers of a hand checking for a pulse, a hand that's gone to medical school and returned with a degree, framed and iced, like pheasant under glass, like some kind of paper bacteria pinched between an electron microscope slide.
wrap yourself up in this,
this radiation gown, ma'am, that has a split down the back (a fancy evening dress that shows a lot of thigh), but we're not looking. you've got your privacy. close your blinds, shut them tight, block out all the light so that my eyes can't check to make sure you're still alive.
of course, i feel myself getting a little sick too. i sniffle, like a drug dog nuzzling the trenchcoat pockets of dealers and i feel as if someone has clamped down one of those big beehive perming helmets that you see in rows at the salon, eating the heads of a bunch of women with crossed legs and magazines in their hands. my ears ring (cash registers opening in the store owned by that Korean couple; make a wish) and if you put a stethoscope up to my chest you can hear – if you listen close enough – people whispering in my basements. i know exactly what kind of virus i've got, because it's all over the mouthpieces of my pay phones and wadded up in my trashcans.
strange, i have pictures of myself from fifty, sixty years ago and my cheeks look so full and happy and bright, like greeting card cherubs and there is hardly a trace of soot behind my ears. now,
now, though.
i've got so much grit in my pores that if someone took me outside and clapped my hands together, all this chalk dust would float up from my skin and obscure the sun. and i don't want that to happen, because the sun is my only source of protein these days.
i'm an old biology skeleton in a supply closet, grinning because that's all i know how to do. crouching, because my spine is so rigid when it gets dark out. can you hear that? can you? it's what used to be my insides, all busy and active, zipping and yawing like robot arms inside a car factory, robot arms coaxing purple flesh out from between angry legs, but are now broken and stiff: a watch submerged in water.
people.
people wipe their feet on me and they ignore all the richness in my threads.
they only see the smog in the sky.
