Blake Butler: Sky Saw

And the dawns are even worse

I do not want to go on making more of me in my own mind

I have not in some time eaten dinner or laughed a little

Hang on, there’s someone else that wants to talk

Hi

I am the child inside the child

I have another child inside me

That child has another child inside that child with another child inside it also

I also am the mother and the father also and I also am the child around my child and etc.

I’m exactly like the Cone but very different

Like you but different

So

So inside one of all these children, in their lining, the lining of the lining, there is a cyst

The cyst is made of cells of skins of other bodies in other years before my mind before I died

Before all of anyone forever

Inside the cyst there is a tumor & inside the tumor there is a clasp

The clasp will scream and rattle when you touch it— it is yours too —it speaks a voice of many men

The men are hungry, as you are hungry

Do not be afraid

Undo the clasp

The fold will open

Blood will be singing in the tone

The sun inside the sun will bow

Fold your arms into a gesture you remember

Move into the fold

The manner of your movement once in the there again depends on several factors I don’t have the compassion to explain

Regardless, you will enter, and you will see the day

You will begin

Inside the fold locate the fold again

This other fold can open also

Move into this fold, too, when you find it

If you find it

And I believe you will

Though you are relatively young

And this might go on for many hours, or even winters

Ages of dead sun

By now you will feel a great exhaustion

Something screaming in your wads for our life

Inside the fold inside the fold you will see someone is waiting

Many of us

Endless people without their face

People you held known once, all of them stuttered

Soon there will be more

Person 811 had gone so far into the fold of other air now he could see no way going back. He remembered the mirrored room and all the buzzing. He remembered putting his head one certain way against one mirror, in which his face there reddened, and then grew — the distance between him and himself there coming closer— what was this looming —and how as he came to touch his head against the mirror, he’d moved his eyes straight through his eyes. He even remembered the hot compressed feeling like something punched to tattoo flesh that seemed to metastasize all through his body each time while inside his eyes he blinked him through.

What he did not remember was how he’d lost his way. From the mirrored room he’d come into a color: unprismatic, globbing, old. As he’d moved forward, sideways or simply down, the color seemed to change. When the room went hyper-red the air was liquid and he had to swim to save his breath. He’d slashed his thin arms through the lukewarm potion. He’d kicked until he found a wall — a flat clear wall that spread in all directions.

Through the wall he saw a child — someone standing just outside the plastic skewed with eyes large as fifty fathers — eyes that grew into other space — rooms where he could see people he knew and had known, growing, eating, making fuck. He felt his body try to shout out through the pane to make it open, to thread himself into this once familiar air, but then the holes making the child’s eyes had blinked and fleshed in and moved away. In the place his voice had been inside him, then the water moved to fill his skin. The father felt caverns crumple in him. He felt his lungs expand. As he gasped the slipping liquid he found himself lodged in creamy whir — the blue of blues set ringed in more eyes — he felt them itch. The eyes were looking at a fire. A horrid burning, miles and miles, clot and cinder sticking to his wetness. He felt some massive eyelash cragged at his slits, his him in he here. The eye flipped shut and again open.

BLINK

The sound the blinking made inside him came like someone sawing on the air, like metal melting into metal — though on the outside of his body, had someone been there who could hear it, it sounded like no sound.

The color changed again — his person with it. He spun around. There were all these versions of him crowded around, as far as he could see, some slouched, some sick or burning. They were all looking straight on into his mind, teeming hard for clear transparence in the ways he had seen himself become, ways in.

He put his hands over his face and screamed for someone to come swimming up into himself and make him move, to fill his body with fresh flesh.

BLINK

He appeared inside a barking dog— this was the dog he’d heard out his house for every year he lived, every year, no matter which house, the same barking, the same evenings. In the dog he moved through its body as its barking, moved out of himself to hover over the dog’s skin, where he could see through saw not far-off window his own body sitting there inside the light, and just as his body began turning to look at him, his twin eyes spinning, He (in the barking) turned back to air and became inhaled into the same dog body once again.

BLINK

He burned inside the cracking meat on the black pan hot as some summer —a summer made of sound, in which the whole world had took to spinning faster, throwing bodies off it into no light —in the meat his body began releasing liquids he had had once imagined gone forever — sweat and shit and spittle, semen, tears — and with these his flesh was basted, charring his flesh into new flesh, into flesh he could not recognize himself in, though he could smell the frying of his panic, and he could sense the searing down into him of what he had been, and what he’d wanted to be, what he’d done. The blackened body was then eaten, administered into another body, flooded through a bloodstream, through certain organs, which transferred his person into heat — as heat he vibrated in vocal cords of the voice the body carried, which sounded like his own fully, he heard himself saying his name—

BLINK

He appeared in the background flat of a famous painting on a wall in room inside a mall somewhere now mostly buried under earth, buried and still there, the blood of all the past and future shoppers holding him in its pigments waiting to be painted in or painted over there again.

BLINK

Nothing.

He was so soft.

BLINK

Hundreds of thousands of bodies copulating in piles of flour, candy, cash, grinding rinds and stumps of self against the next couple in the series splayed unwinding on a mask of sand and dirt spread wider than his eye could manage, there at their center, bellies bulging, and above them all at once, the shrieking field.

BLINK

He appeared in a billion forms of glass — in mason jars slick with men’s spit, standing over the father’s childhood bed as he lay sleeping — in the carved décor of some crushed carousel, its cracked crank music dead and waiting — in compacted eons of old light — glass in telescopic rifle lenses used to kill — glass in someone’s window flat and breathing, through which the person on the other side could not see. Each inch of glass refracted other of him into fifty and into each of those again, splitting hard down through his centers, and his centers’ centers, and the mink of days becoming something held. A hard rub in the teething. Him growing young

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

In the blinking between blinking there was so much he could not count — so many small minutes, hours, he had taken in unknown, collared through his meat. Cold hours came on rolling.

BLINK

He washed up on a white sea where years before he’d taken his wife to dine in a high restaurant where the food was mostly grease. He’d spent so much money that evening so that they might remember one another in this way. They said into each other’s faces reams of quite specific words. They’d held their fingers into signing poses. There were other people in the room. The mouths made sounds of spasms. The skin of sky above their heads was bending down. Then upon the sea again, without color, he fell out of himself to no remains. Instead, there on the black shore, was another dog, the same dog, though this dog now had no legs. The beach seemed turning unhorizontal. The dog rolled and grunted at him, tried to find a way to grunt himself along the sand. He watched the dog inch away from him, the water washing in over their heads.