Unnamed Saint Text

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Three layers of time, four brains, eight eyes, six histories, two futures, four here and now

Eight arms, ten legs, four pharynxes, four larynxes, six tongues, two pointed, four curling, thirty three fingers with a tip missing from one,
eight thumbs, closed in eight fists, nine stomachs, three of which are empty, fourteen bladders – filling, nine lungs – exchanging,
fifteen hearts – different rhythms, one hundred and twenty-one litres of blood - pumping, twelve knees bent, two crossed, five straight, eighteen feet, ten clenched, three breaths, in and out and in and out and in and out and eyes, eight eyes, six watching, two moving, side to side, to side to side, to side to side right to left to right to left, right to left, fast, very fast...

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What is this speechless horror?

 

To return to earth to find your body – 

Dismembered

Disembowelled 

Decapitated

Scattered

Fragmented

Copied

Cloned

Torn

Apart

Spread so thin 

Untraceable

 

It is lucky that all horror is preverbal because my lips are elsewhere

 

As for my mouth

My pharynx

Lanryx

 

Who knows

 

I am a brain, without its substance

 

A chemical imbalance

 

Norepinephrine

Serotonin 

Dopamine

Oxytocin

Endorphin

Adrenalin

 

FLASHBACK

 

“Your stomach is in a knot”

“Your tongue is tied” 

“Or has the cat got it?”

 

But really

My tooth is set in gold in gilded glass

The corpus drained of fluid

I am dry

 

Crackling 

 

Scraped bones 

Splintering 

 

Fingers pinch them into pockets

Carried away

To…

 

My body travels in all directions 

Will it be like the big bang?

Will I eventually contract?

Implode

Till I swallow myself back in through a mouth that is 

 

Where…

 

The voice is still somewhere nearby 

A ribbon unfurling holds my words 

 

Written, recorded, devoured in minds that live on as whole

 

In the end we are detritus 

We wear away

 

To live beyond time, restless

in passages filled with dirt turning to dust until they dig down and tear us apart from ourselves to make room for the new 

 

We are everywhere but are reduced to no one

 

And then I find out I am pickled

 

A finger in a jar

Labelled in curling scroll 

Spiralling DNA coded in computers

 

I am walking from bone to bone

Organ to organ

 

But the organs made for me don’t fit

Their terracotta grinds against my flesh till finally the hands that push them in abate

 

I can’t believe how many legs I had as I hold ten relics. Four in Italy, three in France, two in Spain and one in England. 

 

Others whisper there are more elsewhere

 

Or at least some replicas

 

Though I am certain I only had two legs

 

Illumination – illumination –  illumination

 

If I say it enough, will it be true

 

Will I be named

Whole?