Friday

I was look­ing at my elbows. One too many skids along the floor. Skin con­di­tion and hard impact equals a dis­tinct resemb­lance to sides of rare-cooked meat, badly sliced with a blun­ted knife, gath­er­ing dried blood along their many ragged ridges. Now eaten away. Now eaten. The nat­ives were clearly starving and grabbed for any rot­ten morsel going.

No one eats my heart, though. Not yet. The heart is just a piece of flesh and it’s bur­ied too far down for grubby hands to reach.

No, I won’t sub­scribe to the pop­u­lar poetic notion of the heart being the seat of all emo­tion, of all feel­ing, of love. It isn’t. No poems or lyr­ics about the heart here. No words about love. A lump of rub­bery meat, a love of rub­bery meat. If it was put on your plate, you’d heave.

The rest of me is another mat­ter. There are cer­tainly wasps lay­ing eggs in my mind, of that I’m cer­tain. Any day now, I expect them to hatch from my cra­nium and swamp my face.

I’ve marked this as an ‘internal dia­logue’. It’s an entirely arbit­rary clas­si­fic­a­tion fois­ted upon me by the dusty archives of this bloody yet bleached place. Because everything is an internal dia­logue now, except when a thought treads too deep a cir­cu­lar path and the ground becomes treach­er­ous under­foot. Then I throw it. Any­where, some­where, there, here or elsewhere.

Land. Land­ing. Landed.