Spring 2021. I’ve come to learn that the experience of parents that are dead before they are lead to their graves, is common among many kids as myself who have to watch them daily die slowly in their living rooms.
Rationed sleep
Eyes half closed in commute
Snap awake spotting a reflection
In pulsating window glass
Conjuring the origins of this gesture
A fathers assumed position of auto-digestion
Cancerous alcoholic corpse on couch cushions
Head in neck
Mouth wide open
Between unhealthy teeth
A widened gap
Where souls could crawl through
Breath heaving weighted
Organic stinking air
Making its escape from
That pneumatic lung
On clawing spider legs
Leaving where they touch his lips
A tapestry of dried out cracks
A corpse burnt out by double shifts
Lying prematurely dead and sprawled
Jaw ajar
Defanged by empty glasses
Carrying echoes of wine
That tried to swallow
The life that had swallowed it
Coarse and broken bodied skin
Has been cast aside
Reincarnated as reek frosting the glass-ceiling
From bowels that have started to rot with the shit they had bottled up.
After decades wasting his hours the reproduction of his own capacities remained an unsolved mystery
Has become machinic appendage as late adolescent the only output to be expected
Was a quantity of abstracted time eating away at the rest of his life
Alternately starving it out and filling it with toxic waste
Always just enough to upkeep the caloric potential for yet another working day
Ultimately cultivating a paranoia on relieving ones own metabolic waste on the job
In fear of being caught
At an act for which one is not technically paid at the factory floor
Walking junkyard of the employment market
Has quite literally become more proficient in producing external surplus than in replenishing selfhood
To a point where doctors have to cut out parts of digestive tract incapable of properly dissembling the wreckage he continues to swallow
He haunts the warehouse storage with a bag attached to his stomach
The only output he remains capable of is machine mediated
Even his own sewage sucks his soul through a catheter
Can be packaged in carton and sent as replacement part for automobile manufacturing
His children, we, were made an acid bath for dreams
A proxywar battlefield of failure to sterilise himself from his past
Yet simultaneously deny the accidental sterilisation performed by doctors when they tore him open
He keeps pointing and shouting
„I made you“
So to hide in it the scream
silent truths of omitted side sentences
„…From my wreckage“
They say
And
„…Miserable“
„…broken“
As to prove to himself
In an absolution of unequivocal acquittal
Which will never come
That he had not ever been unalienated from potency
The fastest sugar cane cutters they say have entered into mephistophelian bargain making more profit but rendering whatever comes from their hands barren.
My workday half over I haven’t eaten but the barest minimum my eyes are heavy my life is oneiric I feel my bowels rumbling and know I have not yet escaped the corpse in the living room morgue that has fathered me.