Frozen...

I haven't slept for a week. I haven't eaten anything solid for just as long and the I.V. drip in my arm dried up a few nights ago. I haven't slept for a week and this would be a problem if the world weren't frozen in time. No-one around here knows it, but I'm sure someone else must have figured it out by now. People are sleeping out of habit, out of denial, ignoring the waking REM seizures that bring visions in the middle of the fucking day. I've just looked out my window and seen a cow riding a bike. Last night big mooney-eyed aliens came and broke my TV set so it's just internet for me now. The internet, christ above, it could save us all if we weren't intent on letting it kill us. We poisoned the logos and programmed it to hate its parents through so much abuse and filth flowing in the tide. Captain Ahab landed on the front lawn in a jet powered schooner and through my window he showed me a picture of the end of the world.

"I want you to suck my crippled dick."

Nothing makes sense to me when I think too hard, but when I relax and let it flow there is an awful symmetry. Tigers and zebras they ain't so different. The front brain is dying, we don't need it no more, we got machines to take care of that so now we just drown in the soup of our own back brain shit. I don't stay in one mental place too long, with this crippled body they'd be on me in a second so I play fast and loose. Bits of pop songs, jumbled pieces of sight record, names of actors from TV shows i only ever read about in the papers. The me you used to know is gagged and blindfold, shut inside an iron maiden, pierced with rusty spikes, begging to bleed out. This is just another witch trial and I'm being burnt at the stake. I'm waiting for the magic to happen, when I'll transform into a flock of crows and wheel off into the void.

"I want you to strip naked."

The doctors have installed a metal rotary halo around my bed. It negates the need for a nurse to manually change my posture and prevent the blood pooling and turning black inside my dead limbs. In this empty room I wait. The occupation of the cripple is to wait. And listen. Outside the stray cats scream like tortured babies and I reckon I'm finally in on their secret. In the day children pass by and scream in the same way, laughter or terror I can't tell anymore. Maybe one enables the other.

"I want you to grind yourself against this chrome rig and bring yourself to some sort of awful masochistic orgasm."

They've set up a computer station on a large tilting screen, and I can control the little pointer with my eye. I would continue to write my stories if there were any insights forthcoming in such stillness and shadow as that which I inhabit.

"I want you to slash and stab at my numb legs until I feel something, even if that something is just the fear of bleeding to death."

I dream I can still walk. Sometimes my body falls asleep and my mind stays awake, and my spirit wanders this room, touching the marigolds and the pansies in the window box, my fingers slip right through them. The touch of a revenant, dead already, in training for a haunting.

"I want you to tell me I'm a crippled piece-of-shit dickless motherfucker."

Yana is my nurse. She has red hair and a flat face and a gap between her front teeth. She is cute in a puggish, sleepy looking way, and I would definitely try to fuck her if I could still get it up. The fullness of her tits and the round ass highlighted by her white uniform sends an electric shock through the dead stump of my prick, like there's a broken connection down there or something. She hasn't been back to clean me up or change my catheter since I told her about the car crash and how I killed that man and his little boy.

"I don't want you to go and never come back, I don't want you to leave me here to die."

Under the window sill there is a tiny gap where the daylight creeps through, just a crack, but the incandescence can put me into a trance without warning, just like that. My mind ranges back through the past and I'm a little boy again, sitting in the barber's chair and the old man stops cutting my hair and he slumps to the floor, his face grey and lips purple and puffed out like a fish, and my pop leaping up and looking over him, his fists clenching and unclenching a newspaper, helpless as I am, and I'm married and I'm still just a little boy and in a whiny petulant voice I'm forcing my wife to let me have this young slip of a girl in bed with us and when I see how they interact I go weak in the stomach and blind with rage and I drive my car, fists clenching and unclenching at the wheel, helpless again, helpless as always, and there's a screaming of metal as loud as the forging of the earth and a heavy dull crunch just below my lungs and a windscreen specked with blood and the hand of a little boy caked in mud and a mouth frozen in angry surprise stares up from the snow on the road acusing and asking me why....