Trigger Flesh

A close friend. She has no name. Clothing she has in wardrobes stocked, multitudes of configuration and pattern. Hair in all varieties of style. Color, cut, curl. Looks for every season, whims with every reason painted on an opaque visage in rouge and shimmer. Pieces carefully charted and measured in some always-shifting optimal pursuit like the meticulous work of engineers revising their mass marketed product for annual release. It never ends, the tinkering and deliberation. The meters that are ticked and the dials turned. The thought the engine that drives existence, a memetic virus burrowing comfortably in your conscious. Once the door is opened, there her home will always be. A live-in house guest custom made to serve. Her body. Contorting, distending. The face a mosaic of parts stolen from a catalog in constant update. A billboard, a commercial, a person picked out from a crowd. The puzzle pieces move as oil stirs in water, quick to morph and disseminate after holding form for an instant. But the instant is all that is required. An immediate and hollow and futile gratification that is without consequence or effort by which it is obtained. Seconds pass from the light she fades to abide in weightless ether for the next go-around as the pang of something better, purer gnaws at you. A reminder, only a reminder, that this is not what was intended. That something has been squandered. Precious time, energy, life given up before a thirst that cannot be quenched. You might feel compelled to recite a trivial vow or reset the clock hands right back to midnight but you never forget. Her bitter caress there whenever the appetite proves insatiable again. To that crawlspace where kept are secrets saved just for you, those that no one can take. Your prayer that they would. Knelt by the porcelain rim, red skin irritated and empty. Shame for the warping of imagination for such a thing debaucherous and low, the worst trespass against the greatest gift. The power of creation, branded, reflecting the face of divinity. The depth and the breadth of the imagined life setting apart the man higher than the animal that is his malignance. Capable of anything. Its aim is turned inward and the brood of its cauldron holds the mind subject under a reptilian spirit who endeavors to oblige every desire completely, whose precept is freedom absolute and unchallenged. Freedom at any cost, at any degradation, at each interval sinking lower matched with the rising tides. Isolation, frailty, petty boredom. Addiction. So incendiary a word, so conclusive. How great its deception that thoughts are without substance. But the thought is the seed that travels up from its growth into the act, into choice. The thought is first and its heaviness cements the choice long before it's made visible there in the caldera of the psyche and elaborate are the profanities that can metastasize, the encompassing penchants of the cannibal and the lecher. Each instance is declared the last, but when it hits it invades like the only thing you want to feel. The only thing that can make you feel the blood pumping through your veins, to make you feel alive. The strength of its grip as though your weakness were its nourishment. You could gouge out your eyes and the image would burn still, cut off your hands and your body would writhe autonomous. Compulsion. The eager saboteur. Your sweetest companion. She has no name and with it no personhood attached that could obstruct or remind. A mouth, a stomach, a vacancy draining out what gets poured in. So stop pouring. Kill the thought. Pull it up by the root and salt and curse the dirt it grew from. Open the wound beneath the scabrous bandaid that has festered in your neglect. That black pit whose filling you've placated and shunned. That loneliness, that despair. Swallow it. Fear it no longer. A civil war's raging. Bring armistice. Bring honesty, for once. It's not normal or acceptable or expected. It's the adulterer's venom and you know it. You are sick with it, with yourself, spreading contagious in a saturated biosphere. Kill the thought. Kill, starve. Smother it in your heart that you may shuck the corpse from your back and live again. Live above the counterfeit flame you've known dimly lighting the impulse of your consumption. The dank listless room of the taker, the self-absorbed. What life can there be in a house corrupted but a base, numb resignation. No life but a death called pitiful waste. The wages are set before you just as they were from the beginning. But you know them already, as you know already what you'll choose. You'll cut yourself again. You'll hate. Hate your mind, hate your own skin. Hate the earth and the sum of its evil manifest in these vessels of wrath. You cannot tear yourself away. Its residue somehow tainting every memory, every idle moment. This slow erosion of sanctity and innocence since the day of your birth. A drooling, abject march to the grave, its final punctuation the grieved whisper from the God of mercy. I never knew you.


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