Je n'en connais pas la fin

There is a light at the end of the street partially obscured by garden growth, twisted lines layered over each other, diffusing into darkness.

The yellow window quivers in my view as my knees stutter under me, somewhere deep in my bones there are rings growing, etched around my marrow, bark crackling out of the calcium and I become twitchy. Twitchy, as if flesh and blood have taken flight, have reeled back and retreated yellowbellied into the night, taking with them my softness, the give in my body, the rubberyelastic stretch of skin and blood cells break apart from their plasmic suspension, chickering off like startled geese.

My rainstick throat takes a reluctant breath. My pulse is the dry flap of wings against chest.

I am the devil in this transmutation. I was the butcher who sold myself off in parts. I was the liar who turned my face into a prism of multiple angles and matterless reflections for which there is increasingly less of a true source.

Among the dry and dying, I am afraid of fire. How it would wipe me out, how it would scatter me so thinly I would make no sense. I would be chemically irreparable and my remnants, though substantial when gathered, would be nothing to anyone in their isolated corners of the universe.

My legs stop in their roots. One leg goes back obeying the orders of a separate mind. Ahead of me the light is unshaken. It has no doubts.

What is the price of bravery? What is obscured by fear? What is necessitated by knowing?


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