Sky Saw

by Butler, Blake

  Colors not of how the skin had been in living, but the current state of their decay

  Some of the bodies’ globes glistened picked apart by gobs of sight and gnats grow fat off of the black-blistered ankles charred apart and caking pink

  Among them, he who’d lived inside me for such stinging time and time regardless

  Who’d therein eaten of my body and swaddled up a body of his own

  Years in rooms where I could not see what he was doing, what he would make of what he had made of parts of us

  Knowing without knowing

  How I could hardly therein stand

  The ages speaking loud inside my mind and bending over in my body

  Ash of ash and ashes’ ashes

  The skin around my scalp and shoulders curling a crown out

  Endless foreheads

  Each punched in through warm and of no hold

  You were one of those among it

  Slathering in packets, skulls surrounding in the hour of my way

  Sucking all my weight up through my body to my ideas

  My heat, my limbs, my lust pulled into dust, days

  All the scramming shit and mounds forever wedged in here now

  In such strobing robes of light of we

  And overhead the sky increasing, already having sucked its surface spotless

  And underneath, the light-horizon, torched with tunnels of new smoke

  Soft bodies blurting out a scrim of black so long and wide it could not be measured

  Shit burst in replicate commotion spreading through and through the gone

  Though my new eyes inside the eyes inside me

  Older than water

  Wider than all air

  Opening the floor you’d carried in you hid forever

  Floors into the day

  In the room again I turned again to see what I had become

  Inside the turning soon I tried to stop as I had started and could not stop

  The day was spinning, so I was spinning

  I found the room controlled by light

  Spools were bursting from some center no longer included in the room’s shape

  The screen had quadrupled in its size

  The film was blacker than my fever

  The shape had disappeared

  Or it had moved to some point in the room around me

  The room just shook and shook

  My spinning in the shaking at once made the other seem like calm

  Like any day at all forever

  I threw up gray

  I threw up gold

  Each time I said or thought or felt inside me the want for it to stop it went on twice as fast and twice as hard

  I threw up all the colors I remembered

  All the colors of the Cone

  I felt the colors all surround me

  I got down on my knees

  I went to squeeze the day against me in a warm way and found it no longer at all there

  No fold but just my arms now

  I felt the air turn inside out again around me though in a different way than just before

  And in my acknowledgement of knowing it had done that it did exactly that again

  And then again then and then again then

  Increasing in its pace until I could no longer tell when it had happened

  What was becoming

  Under great sun, without number

  We were so large now in the house now

  The houses there surrounding all surrendered and made cold

  We were liquid, snug with vision, so much of all that someone stitching into me, stitched

  We in the day had such dimension

  The rooms drawn cold and clinging to my face

  In each room there was and would be someone

  The man, the men, the child, me, you

  Each of us a body

  Each in skin

  All of it thinning by the hour, in the house, our whole

  Each room around our mush went on for our whole lives each

  The mold grew quickly, barking color, prism panes

  There were gardens

  I was young then, I had a burnt mind and clean lungs, I had a body

  All of we did

  All of we never have

  There was wire

  The weeks controlled themselves and passed in ash

  The years were greasing

  The house all bloated and the choirs in our eyes

  The girth of burnt flesh in the hardened ocean

  The liquidated sun

  The way the ground had lurched to smack the sky

  To mash against our groaning bodies, squeeze us leaking out the sides

  All bent in black above our format

  Billions

  Edges

  Ages

  Around each sound the world went on

  This had happened many times before and would and would and would again

  Floors and floors of doors for years held up above us and below with our skin folding into cities, waiting

  Unto no threshold

  I’d asked you not to come this far

  I asked you suncloaked in the blanking

  Those turned up backwards in the smear

  Those who I would recognize even dismantled, bring them to me

  Bring me those who I would not

  Each of us another day for us beginning

  Please, as this light is too much light for any hour with our name writ in the crease

  You there folding under no night, or laying silent, or walking low on along a longer wall

  Now you are in here

  Now you must watch our shape revolve

  You cannot see the shape but you can be it

  It is your body in your sleep

  It is the blood in your cerebrum

  It has been always

  Nights now this house is very still

  The walls are walls and air is walls and you are walls and I am walls

  There are the birds

  Their eggs lain in our folding

  When I move my mouth I hear them hulk

  I hear the words they must surrender

  I hear them spit up in their babies’ mouths, into yours

  The words

  They cream and cream inside my mind for hours

  This long evening

  Any evening

  A song comes out but there’s no sound

  What hold had come for us again, what years of frying nothing in clasp of corridors encombed, the blue long buildings in a prism captured and ingested and choked upon and bent and shat into the light to writhe again among the manner of a person, a brimming body with out lungs and load of veins milked without waking, it would not bend, it would not cease, inside the mounds I walked for hours even unnamed and was still right there with all the towers underground in tones all ending and beginning in such succession I could no longer recall having heard any single one of them alone at all and had always been only on in endless drift of furor, there had never been a wall, no edge of leg of lymph between me and my mind or child or range of age, the Cone had pulled us all apart again only for pleasure, a ream of bees flexed from our squat, the machines we had imagined in depression to have beings to have bodies to have glow, a tired light that filled the houses while all through all air the words went on and books turned open and emphatic spraying ink into the ink, any word forever having changed unnumbered times up till the instant of our seeing and looking down and framing in, syllables in their eternal damage milked and quilted through what linings any hour could contain while through the halls our skins changed textures and changed tone and did not move and the digits flashed all through our eyes where we were hungry or were horny or were blown, the child inside the child again all screaming disease eating money humping torrents watching serpents controlling nothing in the tone’s light in the Cone’s name come down again to clasp against the blank we’d always aimed and build edges and build rooms there and resound while fo
r each inch there were a thousand faces and for each face a thousand eyes and in each eye a thousand colors and in each color every sound and in each sound all of the words already named and unremembered where in each memory a lock, locks laid in doors and doors unending through the milk there into corridors we called our flesh of lard so large we could not shave it in the hour of the sun and so again must split again and live it and begin it and need more and never have enough in any instance to be silent and eat the magnet and live where we had already been before

  I knew my child needed to need me, I knew I needed it to need and to know I knew that it had though would not always, this was the vast unending thread, this was the cord that killed my lungs each hour pressed against the houses that I knew and walked me through the beaches and the armies as I had lived them in my mind for what I’d been, there was no color I could not look in and see me stammered in there ripped apart beaten already by the machines where before I rose an arm or eye inside this light, I knew and knew and yet at no point could I be stopped, not at any aim of waver in the going I would go through would I be ended till I did, this was the vast condition of my organism, beyond the dreamspeech and the pill, beyond the black collaboration forced upon me until I was stopped I could not be stopped, I would go forward in the meld and make of this beyond all surface before the surface tore me up, each hour held me in it and was the hour and was passed, come what way would kill in any coming minute there had already been such prior light, the cities could be crushed by any of us every of us every way again began and yet in the seam the singe was written all requiring no words, no book that could be erased or cold or fonted, no gold script on sanded leaf, black castles in a flat mirror, purple fortunes, and so must be for any rind, any eye stitched in the smallest lungs from the beginning, beyond the verb, and so among the prisms there was no fortress and nothing clawing beyond length and no moon above laughed for whoever to come reigning night in us again, say what you will but I was opened, had been conditioned, knew the stone, could kiss the stone inside my mind without permission and what beyond it I could turn to anything again my own, stuffed beyond however many of me held and wondered, every private inch to have again, to rub again and not remember if I did not wish

  And so where the Cone had owned me I was ancient and I was anybody’s guess, what colors crashed could crash forever and both begin and end my face, though on beyond the face there was the field there and the field was spinning and the water shook inside my lungs and sound adhered to nothing and did not speak and all directions were the same and all names laughed thick hard ceilings bent beneath us and the fire and the mass, we burned through film and gear and mechanism, though idea and charm and make, the buttons pressed themselves and cursed themselves where they were wanted and the ash rained from the night and the dark turned over and showed where forever it’d been rubbed, bright knives of catalogs and barking pillared in silence spent for something old to do, walls erected and dismantled and erected and dismantled and erected along the lines barfed in the seas the hour flung against the walls inside the Cone to petrify us, and so it did, and in our linings even unlined the colors burnt themselves and rose again, caulking in each bright uprising brutal prisms where the colors in their hue had always hid, beaten dark upon the day now where no day was to skull along the edges of what anyone had been, the pixels rising, the seas inside them punctured, rolled raw like axes in a snarl, the older sound of someone waking up beside you in the darkness gifted again where no light had ever been to call the urge, crashed where crashing could not happen, grown new cold ovens in a rip where for every instant the day was rising and now could open up its sizeless mouth and breathe us in, another throat inside the skin there, light vibrating, chords hammered under chords, an egg for every apple, a summer sprawling in a domed hole, where by this now we could climb

  The ice of higher folds was brighter and held us closer and chewed our shapes, it bent around us and began us and ripped through the seam of any page and any inch of what a house was or how many and the linings of the word crapped and tottered in our centers already growing, it licked the bubbles from the ash, it turned the keyboard over and typed the flat side until the frame broke and in the center there was flesh, it kissed the flesh and all its wires in splitting systems while we held inside it still and watched, each old letter lapped into us as centuries of rain and rolling planets, we closed what eyes we had remaining, we closed behind those eyes and eyes behind those until there was no visible retort and at last the field now could be centered and in the colors we could see no phrase of blinking or bright desire beyond the instant of us would now begin, no menu in the choir, no shrieking digit, where in the frame each inch of film had prior passed the wanting left to lay and lurk over one another in blessed dementia so that all the black was all the way, there knew no gesture to the definition now required, there were no hallways and no floors, no box to open or cells to splinter in our body to persist, we did not have to wait to be restarted, we did not have to wonder to be washed, who and who the who was held no question and the ice of all our ice was not in pain

  No layer here was destined nor not destined, no layer here had not been lost, the cold worked inside the cold and flayed it outwards though not extending as there was no space beyond the way, no phrase beyond the softing though in the water of it we could walk and could go on in any way we wanted and have been so, any day could seem the next, I might look down and find my arms there typing language and believe the language and know it was or I would look down and find the words there in my body written always, I could hold my body as a book, I could put the book down and walk into the next room and see the walls there and touch the walls and hold their sound, the sun above the fields would rise and fall like any way of us had ever, I could touch and be touched, hold and be held, could speak and be spoke into, could spread the word all through my blood, where any shape here appeared it always listened and when I turned it turned around, each line inside the field forever shifting in my vision as I needed without knowing that I did, each old color in the presence of its colors, waking, slaying, being, in the warm name of any coming memory of skin

  Each new fold became again folded newly as they folded where each shape coursed for my veins and eyes and wandered fat, it shook around it what was mentioned, it gave me children and gave cities, it gave me diseases and great panic, it gave me a soil in which to lie, the same such soil in which could be placed any other of me that I needed to be held there beyond my body while shape and sound would work it down, you would call it years but it had been years already and already once again, it is okay, where we would walk the days would let us, the walls would not fold beyond our time, though what our time was in this feeling could not seem endless until it had ended and we were taken by the hand, this was the gift and the decision, it had always been agreed, our name in the white books in the white ink arousing fires for the purpose of a dark, a shape of any shape suspended in a glowing before around the edges it must burn and become ours

  Yes we were loved, no there was no specific reason or body who could love us, yes the days surrounded us beyond our need though they were not days, yes we might have liked to stay inside the house inside the hour aching spindled in a rash, the persons in persons piling in us until there seemed so many the color came upon us on our own, yes the light would size around us like all the clothes we’d ever breathed inside of or against, each sound funneled through and through the sound surrounding aboveground, like all the humming through the beings, for every inch where we’d been brushed and every instant we’d been flooded, every wallow of the ash, we could can hold the word inside our shape inside the evening for as long as we would like unwound, and the light will hold us and the shape will hold us up

  The time between the tone goes on the prayer goes on the flesh goes on the day goes on the want goes on in all this folding the milk goes on the soil goes on the thrush goes on the bark goes on the gold goes on the tone goes on, there is the day, it is any day for all o
f us again where we have folded and must fold and so again, you don’t have to raise a flesh you don’t have to turn a page and yet you will or you will not and for all of this I become you and we become you and the word is in your lungs, you cannot breathe the word

  The rooms in here where we have centered and the hue around our having, the split of skin where all have entered and the crush of sound commands a sound split from which there has never been a silence and never would be, itch for itch and light for eye, node for pink inside the insect of what incoming as it exits from its sleeve in dreamless meat where no one sleeps, a cream inside a cord, a lung inside a slowing, each day shaved beyond its prior phrasing’s aping woke

  Where what had been forgiven is what must be forgiven, what had been forgotten must be lost, cold long char of brain meat crushed between two words until the field is flatter than the rind inside a floe burst from bursting uncommanded before the mouth could open wide enough to give the body air, the cells aflutter, the dust aflutter, where to flutter is to want

  The grain in the game of the soft of the nape of the wet of the gray of the back of the scape of the showering conundrum pricking open and surrounded and surrounding all absorbed all cracked agate in the earthless furnace tongued with expectation