Umbilical Specter

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The strandentwining cable of all flesh.  Omphalon.  Childhood memory.  Negative ionic pulsing gentle, virgin, dandruff.  Each delicate, lacy hexagram containing a chant of exorcism: inscribed transformation into the library hours.  A bubble of time, contained, complete, perfect. Ekstasis. The tip of every tongue breathes life into each embedded incantation, an alchemical metamorphosis:  heavenly host, now water.  The land covered in a soft white blanket, under the burning glow of street lamps, clear night’s stars as witness, just for me. An unknown sun rises, stretching its arms through a seeming adiaphane, the grey sky obscuring the horizon, grinding itself into the grey ground.  A bubble of time. 

Sleep would come like a struggle.  Some nights more than others.  Forcing my eyelids open made them close.  In the dark hypnogogia the bright figure in the corner turns to sinister shadow, approaching.  Pull the covers over my head.  Hot breath on my face.  Like a crack, floor boards forced open.  The sinister messenger grasping with both hands, pulling me down down down.  Never exploring too deeply, always keeping the exit in sight, silver cord dangling in the wind.  Omphalon.  Fear in my youth.

This messenger would visit when it pleased, leaving a burning mark, indelible wernicke.  Only pulling me as far as the cord grew taught, plucking a low vibration, then a high note, far enough: turn back.  The brand in my brain diffusing heat, pushing blood down my arm, to my hand.  The hand moves itself, the paper fills itself.  Like opening an artery, it must bleed out, then what?  Wait, he’ll come back one of these days.  Not so scary any more.  Dependant.

The click-clack-gnosis of the train underneath, projected into the exhaustion of a travel’s terminus.  After the bricks stacked and set, who can say what hands touched them?  40 days and 40 nights in the desert without food or water.  A severe privation stretching thin the diaphane.  What do I build?  With these hands, these eyes, this blood?  What comes of it?  Half dead on a hospital bed.  That smell.  A crimson swatch cutting a doorway to somewhere else, traced with my finger.   11 years later, I find myself walking through into unknown territory the cord finally cut. 

A new country.  New gods, new devils, new good, new evil?  The urge to create linked closely to pain.  My age betrayed through swollen joints, through gritted teeth.  If only I…started earlier…have so much done by now….want to finish…before I die…this story.  Exploring this place.  Before I die, I want to finish exploring this place.  My own little world, intricately detailed, a place to run in misery.  Everything in its place, where I put it.  As a child, my revery.  As an adult, my message.