Jagged Skin Garden

The pincers come onto flesh and leave tracks and red scratches behind. You sit in the grass, amongst the weeds and bees and contemplate the disaster of frozen criss-crossed pathways that have led you to where you are. It is lovely, yet it hurts, the deprivation is palpable like ice cubes in clammy warm hands. The ice melts and drips onto your stained pants. You are thinking of marauders coming, Mongolian raiders to obliterate your town and rape your women. Just over the hill, the faintest rumbling of horses and then, before you know it, a full on invasion, life as you know it blasted and bashed. This seems fine, breath blowing out and sucking in, fetid breezes accruing on sweat-damp dermis, sweetish smells of death underfoot, under the flowers, leaving the living to amble and preen above ground. I make no sense. Sense drains out with salty eye goo. Plenty of rabid bland tantrums are coming tomorrow and the next day. I am heavy, like the circus fat lady, cross-eyed and goose-pimpled. I smack flies with my bare hands, turning infinity times around in dizzy nauseous circles. I don't know which life to have, I want to burrow deeply into the waspy nest in the dirts. Perhaps me and the ones I love can have matching holes of burrow to disappear head first into, a shared avoidance.