Day 01.
She said, sorrie, without the why, the why meant too much deep inside of her chest; where it grew heavy the plant flesh covered with decay, its dead leaves smelled of dust left in empty rooms that go on for miles in abandoned buildings that were loved once, now forgotten. Her lips move to speak, a soft steady column motion, it trembles under her tongue, vibration in black and white melodrama. There is glass over her eyes where the water built up, its shield shiny; the sun rises where dreamers sleep and she lies awake plucking eye brows just to hear the pin pricks, the resistance of her skin. Pain wedges inside, underneath a burning sensation of hate and love.
She wants to feel the grievances of the world between her hands, the pools don't stop forming, the shield begins to break. Cracks in the mold that made everything, everywhere feel human, once.
She doesn't have answers, all she can feel is the pain of being present. Smoke is in the flavor of burnt rubber, its ribbons sew cancer. That's what vape is: a one way ticket to hell, faster. It pretends to love you when no one else does, you can't stop it. You love how it withers and leaves sandpaper bumps over your tongue. It connects you with the here and now.
They say the same words, as if love can be letters without meaning without motion. It moves in center gravity in stasis and swells before it bursts. Leaving behind nothing more than remnants of what once was. You lick up its essence pretending it can fill your glass. Cups already broken, shattered, barely intact. They say the same words, just one more hour. Tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. You'll die before you ever get the real answer.
A bullet wedges into the thigh.
High velocity rips and tears.
Standing over the mirror plucking without a concept. A vision. A breath. Life.
Day 13
Her lips taste like dark fruit, pungent and bitter. You spit the pits out between each breath, your lungs are weak wobbled contractions. Underneath the tongue a roll, of tobacco earth and skin musk, dewy skin kissed from the moon. The garter around your throat chokes, its gargle hums a growl of excess disease in your throat. Sludge, never tasted better, never knew best.
Your head rests in the sand, wet skin where it climbs to the mask the body, different. You feel nothing, you wish you were dead. Galaxies extend and compress inside her voice, mouth wet with hunger, and not the type that fills. In your peripheral you can see black cherry hair in heavy flux wave to the motion of the sky. Hairs thicker than a horsetail painter brush. She wants you to lose yourself here; you don't know where here is, your mind it split sideways on the sidewalk, busted from behind, a ghost in the shell collecting pieces missing and found.
You suck on her skin, it tastes like sea salt and lavender. Her heart is cheese underneath the wax, and if the stars aligned they'd melt until they burned. She knows it, because she is Witch.
Your voice is thoughts billowed out protected by thick clouds that stream pixelated dreams of compliance. You already gave in, the world didn't want you right now, it was always next year. A convenient pile of letters stuffed in a desk drawer. Her long nail fingers the open wounds and the threads of your muscle ligaments chime harps of memory, it haunts you without forgiveness.
Tongues transfer language, it meshes with words never made. They've only jump started on creation. My loins burn, as The Witch commands.
I want this catastrophe to be over.
I want to to stop the resistance.
She doesn't care how many times I have to die until I find it.
Whatever it is.
The cities are burning, a great war between species unable to take up all the space. Its hourglass full. A perfect calamity, her nihilistic soft dream.
My brain peaks at the sound of her voice.
"The poison is in your vessel."
Day 33
I listen to the rain as the world drowns. The sun doesn't burn with chariots in the sky any longer. It's what they have wanted, they, the ones with the buttons, and the levers, the lights, the sound, the foundation of what we may never own. Voices merge between floors, others of whispers, I hear it channel through the walls. Newspaper clippings of words that don't belong to each other. This string line effect.
New words commanded from the Witch.
My dreams are louder, vivid bright jewels of The Witch, her skin curved at her hips down to her knobs. Not human, never real. A word that hasn't been made for a deity, or a spectre of my life. Every couloir of her flesh has made itself mine to taste. In every life. Her eyes forebode the future. I feed her with my voice box in my throat, I whisper her nothings as if tubes descended from my belly into her life cavity. We're connected whether we want it or not.
People scream without sound. Drones of bodies, hallow on the inside without connection move in a cordial fashion. Puppets without strings, the timeless that wait to die in a doctor's office, your pet rotting underneath the patio. Are you number 3 or number 10? The papers flicker against the skin raw. Avoid the papercuts. A shipwreck light flares numbers distorted before they disappear. Are you ready to be next?
Everyone's skin immolates strange emblems of aura seeming abalone from the televised screens. Singed the fringes. Cool white pixelated royal purple undertones, moving pictures. An unrelated code.
The masters have the same faces, the same little beady eyes. Lips plump of fat, gluttonous without filter.
The world is drowning, it's been days now. You hear cars on the highways that no longer exist. You hear laughter tilted skyward from the grass. Yogis stand on their mats in a prayer pose, while bullets fly past their bodies, unfettered, detached from their brains.
You wish for the dark to end, you want to wake up in the Witches world. The one where you only felt the pain of your emotions. It was better that way.
Rain pounds, my brains broken plumbing split middle open, it drains historic of memories never happened. All gone. I've collected the trinkets, galleries of treasures that never move. Displays for the ages, with new names, the old ones wiped. Memory clean with long tubes pulling out of my head. The world is drowning, in this new industrial age.
Your taxidermied cat meows at you for the first time since Tuesday.
You dream of cigarettes on the beach.
Day 43
You have no eyebrows now, trichotillomania. Doctors said it was trauma from watching your mother pick holes in her skin sober. Normalized it. Made a whole new fashion outta it. People don't see you, they look past you and touch you with their fancy words. Masters in subterfuge.
When the world isn't watching, The Witch stands parallel of you, as if she could be an extended version of yourself. She's your friend, your only friend. She tells you everything you don't want to hear. You don't care for it, and you like the rain. Not this rain.
At the corner store there's quarters for sex, there's no longer toys that live in plastic containers clumsily made with drooping eyes. Instead it's a person, a they, a he, a her. Down the hallway, lights glow red. In an immediate turn to the left down the stairs, out the door. They stand like a waiting room. You let them stroke your naked eyebrows as if it's erotic. They fuck without feeling. Nymphomaniacs rounded up. Sometimes if you have extra quarters, they all join in. You never catch their names, only the direct breath on your skin.
Inside the hallway you can pay the conductor a dollar for a shower or a bath. You sit in the bath juice jizz with all natural flavors, and look out that hotel window shaft. No one's outside, anymore. The corner store is a three story building, you're somewhere between the second and the third. People are starting to build canoes and makeshift boats for higher ground. Will mountains be valleys now?
Love letters become poetry memorized in the tub. The plumbing down there, doesn't work no more. You like it that way. This laundry mat for sex. It's one way to clean your clothes.
Day 43.5
If air can become mist, what is an ocean?
I woke up in the tub, half in, half out as if I tried to drown. The Witch wouldn't let me die in this place. There's mirrors on the ceiling, mosaics with faces watching you, peepholes for creeps. Your face shifts, and you stare at them, as if they exist, as if they aren't already dead. Something venomous within you, not quite anger points your eyes at the nearest peephole and you touch yourself in soggy bathwater. The act of protest is the act of self love with sprinkled self loathing. Fuck, being bankrupt of emotions.
Cities are collapsing all around us, all doe-eyed with a fistful of drugs. The grime isn't the only stench that unlocks memories. You want to consume with them as you burn as if it could ever be a sense of comradery. I'm restless, hands gliding on the velvet walls of this makeshift sex motel. Love you cannot keep, only in your dreams.
The Witches mouth grins, a purse opens and its filled with coins. You hear them fall from your left side. All the pennies that fall and wedge into the broken tile. It makes tiny statutes of places you used to be. Trees that twist from the ground, they taste like iron and soot past your nose hairs and through the holes in your body. Pennies are worthless now, they call out your name.
You come here every Friday, or the imagined one. Calendars don't exist anymore. Now time is forever uncounted. My degrees sit behind me like medals for somebody who used to be. Fast forward 3X speed multi-instrumental music plays in the background, it gets louder at certain shifts in your brain when the world starts to spin.
You turn to the conductor who has collected your dollar. You'll never see him again. There will be a new one next week.
There are hundreds of toy monkeys with symbols at your feet they all clap in unison. You turn to the conductor who doesn't notice them. Head whiplashed to stare at their monkey bodies. Toys wobble closer, and closer to you. Do you have something they want? It's not fear. It's The Witch trying to spawn my emotions again. Barefoot, you walk over their bodies in a tattered slip and feel the weight of their souls push against the wet velvet carpet.
Symbols cut the bottom of your heels.
A bagpipe laughs long winded out of control.
A piano wire snaps somewhere close by.
Somebody died.
A horn distorts with a violin handle shredded on a guitar.
It plays your blue ruin.
Your undoing.
Day 53
Face is bruised, it takes my breath away. Dark in my furrows, I yield. I stand with my wet application, at the corners store for application into the cult of nymphomaniacs. The doctors told me I have two weeks to live. Death of the lung. You wrote its history in diary entries as a small child. A ritual painted with your blood. Red stains on the paper, the color of love.
Conductors with faceless heads move your body, you stand on an elevator that has robot arms washing soap on your body. They never gave you a real answer. You're already 40,000 miles undersea. Wolves tear themselves apart just to feel a sliver of hope. They'll replace your heart with metal parts, just to heat it up. Make something out of nothing.
The loofa scrubs your skin raw until pin holes live on every part of your body. It makes you feel alive to let go. You don't have to think, you just have to stand there and let them make you. The Witch is screaming in your ear. You ignore the volumes until you weep, wet with relief. Who am I? Who is she? Who will I be, when I say good-bye?
You look at the cult of nymphomaniacs, theys, shes, hes touching themselves on un-glorified concrete, you look at their faces full of meaningless loss and still they've found something you haven't gotten. Through the mix of light and darkness, mocha, pale moons, the world of skins, a shape captures your eye.
A car-boat. Shipwreck with wheels. Wheels invert, sleeping from the world. It is shaped like the size of a 20 footer in the middle of the parking lot. Its shrunken sea container stacked six figures tall. It appears as though half of the deck was cut down the middle with a machete. You can't tell what the car used to be because it's covered by wooden planks. A woman is wielding the outside in cargo pants and a wife beater. You push past the crowd to get a better picture of her.
Moses is my burden is written on her cigarette.
Turning your head, the cult of nymphomaniacs are rubbing one out for a yogi, her hands together in prayer pose, plastic pearls wedged in her mouth. It suddenly feels uninteresting. They cannot touch the frailest part of the body, because they lack the melody. The yogi spills out her guts as if her body is a bottle and it's the only liquor left in the universe.
The welder stops, pulls up her protective visor. "I don't fuck strangers."
"I am barely here." I weep because it's the first voice I've heard in six months. It was driving me crazy. Full batshit, werewolf to the moon, eat out your heart. She drops her equipment and tries to say hey, hey, hey, to me as my eyes roll backwards, where I see The Witch.
The Witch has the tightest grip on my cranium. She drags us both in the portal, where we're both broken, our voice boxes are jammed up cars without starters, without batteries. I bite my lip until it bleeds, I feel the suction tentacle pulling up my brain meat juices looking for any memory I might have acquired up until now. I fill her storage with stories she'll never feel. I can't even trust myself when I am hers.
"I am dying. One dream and another."
"In seven minutes?"
"It's the end of the world. The Witch said so."
"My names James. It's a complicated reason."
"The reason doesn't matter anymore. You got anything to drink? I forgot my name. I could be Julie or Max. It depends on the day."
"What about Maxy. With the y and not the I."
Day 56
I found myself on her toilet, felt the walls closing in. Wished to quietly slip away, a world where no one knew my name. I felt like a pet to two people in the universe. One that destroys. One that appears to protect. They'll love you when you're dead. Hairs all wispy frail, hours pass, and hunger is my freedom. I feel so designed to be made unknown. Salts never left my body, found on the ocean, not even sure if this is real. Times in a backwards-flow.
The toilet paper opens its mouth, and begs me to use it. It begs so it can leave pieces on my insides to propagate and be used. Black widow eggs. Milky white.
There's a window you can look out when you sit down, but no one can look inside. The parking lot is a wasteland, the end stages of capitalism. You can still hear the fucking somewhere close by. Thousands of eyes of the dead still watch them. Porn on demand. Our little world made of glass.
You rip small parts of the toilet paper, its smooth, not like the cheap see through shit in gas stations. It doesn't talk anymore, it's just a bathroom. A porcelain bowl sink with brass faucets and handles. You have a memory where you plunged your head right against a sink like this one. Fainted. Low blood pressure. Barely alive. Barely dead. Blood wetness imaginary, you still touch yourself on the temple. Starlight’s touch twinkles in your eyes. You stopped weeping, face pufferfish swollen. This my busted future, and this is The Witch's dream.
You're in someone else's jacket it's long enough to cover your tits and your ass. Some boxer briefs, long woolen blue socks and gauze lazily wrapped around the chest. The loofa bruised the outside of your skin. You couldn't give a fuck. Pain reminds you that you're still here. Wait your time, it'll come sure enough.
Hands slipp't on the bathroom slider. My dumbass forgets how to slide. Left to right. Right to left. Its knob is meant to be broken. Better make it a hole one day. Four fingers curled, so it can hold onto something tangible.
James clenches a cup of Joe with affliction in her voice. Her eyes have different colors, one is grey and one is blue. She said she's got dog genetics. It made her weird that way. We pass a large tube filled of sludge preservatives. The ones anatomy classes put baby pig fetuses in. It's a man, James says it's her husband Ceilia. He will wake up when the sky burns. They traded names 'cause she wanted to see the journey to the end. He's naked like a ken-doll, his eyes open and he winks at me, but she doesn't see him shutter. James moves to crescent shaped couch with a table chest height and stirs the ground coffee.
"The way I got it set up, I could live in here until my body gives out and then I'll release Ceilia. He thinks he will wake up, but he's been dead since the Apocalypse came. I've grieved, I still talk to him as though he can hear me. You do that too?"
"My taxidermied cat meowed every Tuesday."
"It's the battle of the ages, we will be the last. No one can procreate. Just have to make the most of it. Rains six inches now, but soon this baby is going to float us to the highest peak."
"As soon as the two weeks is up, you'll need to release me. There's a thing called The Witch, she follows me. You don't want her with you."
James flexed her fingers, "Is it a curse? Someone hex you when you weren't paying attention?"
I rolled my tongue, "Does anyone believe in that shit anymore? You know what? Forget it. It's probably not real."
The sounds of fucking stopped, and the eerie silence came soon after. We were completely alone aboard this ship. Her face relaxed, it must've been an annoyance hearing the cult of nymphomaniacs everyday. Technically, I was their property of troubled cells. I was made without a cure, that I can't unmake.
The Witch sits across us watching James as if she's an appetizer.
"Paradise is a fable, without you by my side." The Witch murmurs in my ear.
Forced my hand, made me sign it in blood. She knew she could steal parts of me just 'cause I was lonely. Sign that NDA stamped to my eyes, 'cause I am lonely. Make sure you watch The Witch. All the promises have left, except the one who will try again.
The Witch licks the nape of my neck and towers all seven ft of her body over us. I feel the tremors of my skin begin to raise.
You're the most spiteful person I've ever known Witch.
And she knows.
Violets drop my stomach to the ground.
It's this perfect thing when you can't breathe at all.
And she knows.
Fading without you.
Fading with you.
Up next:
[Diary Entries Vol 2: Vol 2 ]
I could quotestack like every line in this. Christ. What a ride.
This fucks! It gives me cyberpunk vibes, but infused with the hallucinatory words of Revelations, and I can't think of a better way to tell our apocalypse. Loved it