Sky Saw

by Butler, Blake

  Outside the house it roared a dry white lather. It rained down rubber horizons, wide floors of paper, bags of cold. A wider section of the air glowed in small eruptions, mirrored leanings, half-hung burn. The earth went beat with hammers in the lungs. Liquid forms coating the lengths of what had been where hours uttered, covered over in the shaking of themselves. I mean the day inverted, as it could not have. Every inch filled with itself. Dirt rubbed its holes and called for filling in where it had been filled in already and filled again until the sound enslaved its sound. Rocks expulsed some human wish, as if in them, in their dark flat flesh, there was someone who once had held a tongue inside another. For certain lengths that house would fade. Prismatic mechanisms lurched on through the long dark, made of sleek metal, no lights, no pilots, scanning the nothing for the same. The rip of sky went on unfolding, the sky’s clipped segments made to lisp. On the air behind there’d stay a residue of the sound and dust the house had held all naming nothing.

  The sun beat the spit out of all else, bare. The scored face of the weird land around the house now in the light was scored, nattered with insects of pixels scratched from their encasements, shook off the foundation’s creaming seams. In blue hordes the sound of the enmassed men crawled upon the long smear of the folding ground where the house disappeared and reappeared, rotating through the order all surrounded with what bodies full of sick sound noise and vomit, aching blistered, bumpy, long. The sludge was full of men and they were full of sludge. For each word we’d ever spoke the tone came on and on again around where we had been or never been.

  BLINK

  The sound of glass bowing and swimming up in shapes conditioned moments stretched by hands and putty. Sound of splinter and of long light and of the walls becoming throttled, bending in—the resin sledding off the ceiling, where for years their breath and speech in layers had collected in cold cells.

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  The sound shook the son and father in the same room, inches apart in different air, folded over face to face in variation. Each turned their heads as if to see and seeing nothing, they continued turning, their bodies corkscrewed with their flattened heads. As they turned back together, at the same time, they could not see there where the other had just been—some softened walls where the house’s split clear between them, though the rooms seemed the same size. The son could hear the way the house was ripping, its room rubbed against one another in quick friction, birthing bolts of brown steam up from the carpet, tiny knobs. Through matching holes burst in the several ceilings up above him, he could see outside an upward awning spreading open over all—some off, charcoaled color. He felt the awning also rushing in him, pushing at his organs, on his teeth. He could feel his arms all stretched and draping as his colors fled to change.

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  A revolving architecture, wallowed in wallows, guns erupting in the night, legs of cloth and paper money powdered a dense fog through surfaces of silt for your foundation of the day.

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  On the air beyond the house and in the house surrounding the men adhered around a single point—where light and air and sound had been before them the men’s men knitted—the mother’s flesh no longer crushed between. The bodies filled in around the house, warm pressure born in their want of light and knives and ice and ages and raw power and reform and trees and windows in dark summer in all our rising cities and the night above their heads and the night inside their colons and their past and future eggs and semen and their nipples and their cocks and wombs and private infestations and consolations—all they had and had not had held in the light there, contained in liquid, wrapped in skin.

  The men burst men each from their seams, leaking others of them from the holes they carried. They caked their way upon the air. The woodwork around the house bowed and smoke, rutted with flesh from where they all wanted in at once. The splinters wedged into several skins, lifting their skin up, showing the coal black brunt of their disguising.

  In the men’s eyes were other eyes. In the eyes behind their eyes there were more eyes, fountains bursting liquid whips of water. The men were made of water that had once made up other men. Person 141 or Person 511 or Person 700,012 or Person 0, those before and those who’d never been. People of numbers without numbers or syllables in the bent strobe of their lungs, where as they struck upon the air they seemed no longer to remember they were there or ever had been or before already pressed forever in this moment in all hours pressed in the pages as the days’ language changed around it.

  Soon inside the house the force was so great that you could drop a thought and it would hover. You could speak your name and it would catch inside your throat and choke you as with rope and it still felt as waking up in a clean, familiar room. Every present instant stacked in calm uncolored prisms fused for miles en masse compressed in wordless urgeless milky moan.

  The photographs of air the air was made of melted. The day gave darkness, a rind of black fitting the world.

  BLINK

  The men in light and men inside him in the room of the coil inside the house filled in around the space they called the child. They shot their bodies singing, and opened his mouth and looked between his teeth and gums for what was softest, for where they could feed on into the last. They searched the lids and lips and skin to show his hole after giving in his body or someone might hide something sweet. They shot his teeth and looked in along mites seeing moored in his craw. The son was gagging sounds. The walls of the gorge with ropes of saliva fragmented with hands covered every inch of him and through him all his family. His chest and shoulders blackened. With his eyes could see men. He could see everyone at once. In each man saw himself and many fathers—the injured father or father’s eyes with broken glass and flowing pleated white beyond recognition—his father, the father remains under the other men in other years. The father had a lot of him, one for each mother hid in the mud around the house.

  His hands were eddies in which men repeated, in which lines went where he began to bend—through the elongated body and through the many fathers. Numbers on their eyelids and his eyelids. His body leaned across the room into the room. The walls of the house began to loose convulsions. When all of him was empty, men filled his body with their old throes.

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  The father felt his flooding body. The presence stuttered through him and turned hard, baking veins flexed chalky soft. The sound of the men he could not see but was breathing in and out all through him made him stutter. He could not make his arms cease flailing. They no longer felt like his arms. He held the arms out before him and saw the meat sucking up in pills, becoming bulbous and rectangled. He turned the arms upended, elbows clicking where they touched. On the underarms he pushed his flab up—slick skin brushed with gravity and sound. Hid in his skin there was a blade there—a long metal gleaming ash. This was his mind. He licked his finger and slicked the blade to glisten, felt flashbulbs going off between his teeth and up his trachea. He turned to face the glowing.

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  If meat was not meat it was the word. Spirit of mold growth in heating wet spots in the form of working age and rising mist. Plates were illuminated walls inside the house, took a glowing refraction, and the legs and went and went. When anybody touched a body, where he crashed his older hum, rising slightly felt it slip into the rhythm of the lungs, the ring finger itching flesh, a blank page. It bled all through the holes in us, called veins. It was more serious than light. It knew the names of people. Think of them.

  Between the lips, the lips were smiling, and then another, larger leaves, thick and shining down the shaft of day the house was. It had always been like this and would. The hour held the body around the neck of it and stretched it thicker in a glowing from the crevice of the gathered body of the hair, th
e chests, nipples and lacrimal glands, fingers, elbows, dimples and anus, navel—each through a hole in where the home was built there were leaves from the beginning—older bones. The bodies continued the cycle of low friction, lobes on each blade from the hot meat as the long hall of any being was forced to continue in his body in the flinch—in a strong and lustrous prismatic shape, adorned with every inhalation—the camera flashing, baked in size—begging for every minute.

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  So, now late the father laughed. He felt as a force peeling, the cream that smelled every hour of your life. From the outside he looked like the same person as always, even less hair on his head, despite some version of the house of memory houses were all crammed in this decrepit body, where the sky founded its mend. What wormed itself upon the space and those among it was dry like paper and wide as light. In unpacked floods of fat beams old air moored upon each inch of the space from wall to wall. Though the endless glass setting the hall’s size from the outside kept all itch of real glow from coming in—whatever outside glow could be said to now remain—the hum of fluorescent drafts set in the overhead bled reams of multi-plaid and blood red in long coils slit rapt shadow on the lengths and widths. The light, though white, or whatever other called can be called clear, the very air, had set compressed now with many colors: the color splinted through the rubber and came split—black as triple bruises, as unslept skin, as the inside of the body when the eyes are closed, making sentences that ran on and on, that both collapsed upon themselves and vast exploded in the midst of their creation, as a sentence should. Each time a body breathed in again what came into him there was less of him around him left to be, while beyond the disappearing something wider held him in.

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  The child and then the father in the mother’s house turned and found where where he’d felt the room there there were ten rooms, then there there were fifty, then then then fifty-thousand. Then came the colors, in reverse.

  In the house around the mother the lights in the rooms blew open, each single bulb in slow procession split. With each the mother felt the light spreading on into her, wholly absorbed, her body rung with radiance and heat light. Inside her shape the mother found that she could both breathe and eat off of the liquid spurting there inside her and blurting from her body in the wash—she gave it off in bubbled grunts—liquid from her eyes and ears and nostrils, from her womb doors, from the condensed mesh of the many shrieking months she’d spent feeding food into herself to make more of her. Inside the liquid, further reams of film frames spooled in congregation. Her flesh had spread all through the room. It had no number. As well, the room had spread into the house, into the other rooms compacting, goggled with the eggs and all such what. As each room popped in convention with the tone, the mother felt the rooms appending to her—the house smeared and went on smearing, color for color in the wake of something warbling her body. The mother could not feel her systems. She could not feel her second self—the other presence having spread so wide and bulbous through and through her, it was now no longer there—it filled her lungs and slicked her back—it seeped among the walls into the house’s air vents, its air and piping, the countless knobs and halls and wet—it laced among the house’s wires, cracked the dust—it spread outside the house through hidden windows, coagulating in a cold wave over the ground—it washed thick over the spinning buildings, over the globulating earth, encombing trees hung gross with columned nits and colored sores bursting in the suspension with fat flowers and smeared up in the silver-gleaming jelly paste—over the crooked solar curtains and highest flight zones, annexed in field marks held in see-through lesions—among the weird glint of where the sun had sunk to lick the papered edge of the ex-sky burned and rubbled with stretchmarked brined designs of stuttered language—the waist on the skyhead pulling and panting, bored. In scream of beef and mutter pooling, the mother’s liquid lapped the sun with her whole mind, and changed its color with vibrating, packed to black and neon burst in white, and in the color, too, the tone surrounding and surrounded, the sound of every door opened and then closed and clicking locked—then reopened to blue bodies—barfing nodules—to the sound of people sleeping in their threads, and side by side to other bodies beyond numbers, sweating off their names—the sound of one word spoken all together creamed with beeping along hallways with no walls and walls with nowhere in between them—the sound of white rinds stretching, rings on fingers sinking in—the sound of all things burst humming, all notes and nothing—the sound of all things folded over when. The sound was in the liquid and the liquid in the sound—the brim so fat it seemed any instant when the bath would wake in rupture, rise to squash upon the frying night.

  BLINK

  There was a massive clap then. There was the gonging. The house walls ran with juicing fluid, blooming bulbs as they rained down. The room was all around the mother bulging color. Her hips and lips and eyes had spread so wide she seemed a portal or filled with blank. There was a stink there swaddled on her washing. It called the birds into her brain. They burst from bejeweled cocooning patterns encrusted on the walls, the air, her flesh. Their wings were metal. No one. What. Their language flew in all at once together in one chirping endless chain head-on into her. When now. They stuffed their way on down inside her face, through her throat and belly and her ass, and from each point thereon outward, while at her cusp the air around the mother’s liquid shone. Somewhere in the leak the leak was speaking. Its words weren’t words but numbers, coiled in wads. Curds of syntax made in old names. The speech made the house’s liquid cloudy. In the liquid there were eggs: one from each bird incubated and there laid into the mother’s open bruises and her blood, such swelling bite marks of the laying written on her massive lungs and tongue and gums and glands and hair and gait and back and lard.

  The colors screwed across the sky.

  They screwed into the sky and through the sky and there before it.

  The flesh from all holes fell.

  It fell into the holes and through holes and held them.

  Where there were no holes, more holes were made.

  The holes were made until where all before there had been no holes there were the holes now, so that all holes forever were surrounded, like a feeling.

  There were then no other words.

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  The film was blinking.

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  The space was blinking.

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  There was the sound.

  There was the face.

  The eye behind the face came open.

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  Now it was everything, the eye.

  Inside the house, the floor was inclined

  The entry room was very long

  Against the far wall, just slight out of reach, a small oblong shape sat cold

  It was seated on a cube marked with a white plaque with white letters I could not read

  The floors around the cube were very slick

  They seemed to need to pull me to the center

  A scrim of paper-colored water poured from beneath me where I touched the ground

  I came near and touched the shape

  I rubbed against the shape and rubbed it

  The shape was any shape but here had one specific of which I cannot name the name

  Where the shape touched on my skin its face made new over the new

  Layers laying over old holes, bruises, smooth

  I felt the air turn inside-out

  All I wanted was for this to stop

  I did not want to change again already

  I could not sit the shape back down

  In chrysalis the rooms made lotion

  I threw up white

  For many days I lived forever

  I felt the door under my face

  I co
uld see many thousand other shapes inside the shape’s face

  Any shape at all

  Inside the shapes someone was bleating my old language

  I was not the child and not the father or the mother or the dark

  I held the shape against my sternum

  The celebration lights were gray

  So much time passed and I’d done nothing

  I hadn’t even moved my arms

  Through all the lives I’d felt cruise through me I was nowhere

  It was snowing

  Here the air was made of such light that it made the light already trundled on the air go curved

  Slowing flexed out around the edges of my vision so that in this light here I saw the sky under the sky

  It with our old names imprinted on it peeling

  The sky wide with bodies hung from it in troves, fat pock-marked purses of slopping people