Blake Butler - Sky Saw

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.

BLINK

The film was blinking.

BLINK

BLINK

The space was blinking.

BLINK

There was the sound.

There was the face.

The eye behind the face came open.

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

BLINK

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 could 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

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