Routine Crucifixion

Illustration by Brendan McCarthy 

Shoved out of bed into the blinding light, 
I rushed to piece myself together.
The sweaty bed sheets were all crumpled from my twisting and turning.  
I made one into a noose
and hung it from the broken spring of my neck.
I screwed the metal black box of my head on top,
Inflated my lungs,
spit water into them until they gurgled just right,
and stuffed them into my ribcage.
I hooked up the tubes to my heart,
And listened to its murmur
As it pumped rusty exhaustion.
Knotting my intestines around my lower vertebrae.
I watched a lump of food crawl through --
anxiety meds and noodle soup.
I chained my trousers to my bony waist,
And glued flaps of skin here and there.

Shreds of dreams flashed in the back of my mind:
Running across a weed-choked field to catch the train,
Smoke covered the bruised morning sky.
Was my town on fire? Where else would I go?

Hunched back, on the way to work
I counted the pebbles and crumbs on the cracked sidewalk.
Black pairs of dress shoes slapped the asphalt,
and I noticed I was limping,
one of my scuffed shoes forgotten in the morning chaos.

At the office, I was nailed to the chair,
my head shoved back against the wall,
and the rope around my neck tied to a hook.

Dressed in their gimp suits,
my tormentors ripped handfuls of wilted weeds
growing from the flesh of my arms.
Ashen blood oozed over torn muscle and rusty nails.
They chewed with yellow buck teeth,
Reeking, lumpy milk dripping from their mouths like saliva,
Their eyes, pools of brackish water at the bottom of deep wells.

Stained, leathery fingers turned my eyeballs like safe tumblers
until my black box popped open
and snatched my battered brain,
severing my sluggish train of thought.
Everything became blurred, distant,
Like my mind had left behind its phantom.
They sat down on the dingy couch,
and used my brain as a keyboard.
The crevices of my cortex were flattened, worn down,
under their urgent, stained fingers.
I was a mother in a fentanyl trance.
glimpsing her baby raped and smothered for the thousandth time,
on a loop.
The baby turning into an eyeless doll,
melting into a yellow sludge.

 

On a large monitor on the wall to my left.
pies charts, spreadsheets, graphs,
began their hypnotic march to nowhere.
The gimps passed my brain around like a deflated soccer ball.
Now and again, I heard their grunts and screams,
muffled, underwater.
At times, they’d start making out
Regurgitating and sucking sour milk
From each other’s mouths.

My eyes followed the clock on the wall,
Their gears turning,
Click-Click-Click
Tik-Tok-Tik-Tok
Click-Tic-Click-Tok
Flattened in a crevice between sleep and wakefulness
My heart pumped exhaustion
As I feebly waited for something long-erased
Like a demented person trying to ignite a flash of recognition
By rubbing an old picture.
A sticky, stubborn film of consciousness held me
from ascending from comatose boredom into mineral nirvana.

A memory formed in the dense fog:
The train passed by hills of trash with sinking houses on top.
A raggedy girl with skin peeling like curled sticky notes,
Pushpin eyes, hair entangled with rubber bands,
grabbed blank pages floating in a lake of sludge
and punched holes in them with her protruding incisors.
A group of boys in dirty underwear,
faces covered in black leather masks,
fingers like broken pens,
smashed old printers against a sinking, rusted bulldozer
their feral laughter scratching the edges of sanity.

The memory was a single page from a lost binder,
and reading it only killed a few minutes.
My eyes went back to counting the seconds
and following the endless maze of patterns in the gray, dingy carpet.

At 5, I made my way back home,
Too tired to count the pebbles and crumbs stuck in the cracks of the sidewalk,
But awake enough to notice my other shoe went missing.
My used-up brain was back in the box,
A comatose fetus.
I mummified myself in the bed-sheets
and waited for the wave of darkness
to wash me down the drain.

I was in the vast field again, the train horn blared in the distance,
But between me and the tracks were large black pyramids,
Moving toward me, blocking my way
They were gimps on top of one another
Hundreds of them,
The ones at the bottom grazed on the grass
while the others chattered their protruding teeth, hungry, urgent
Froth like spoiled milk bubbling from their mouths.
I stood there rooted in place,
Knowing I’d never get home,
trying to pray to the bruised sky
but finding my arms nailed.
I was a weed-choked scarecrow,
Stuffed with shredded advertisements,
About to be devoured
and then tossed in the landfill.