New Dead Families

Like he’d been breathing liquid plastic, they said, jet black patina from its hands going in or something going in or through, because it was in there in the room with him for three days, I guess, but he was perfect when I found him, a sculpture, and breathing too, the air black around him, I think when he exhaled, and I got out quick, not a friend just another body behind another door to me, thought maybe he had a trace too much of the cunt he came from, but that’s not to single him out, and so the mornings always felt old, as if there’d been no night and no sleep, and nobody heard the birds sing, and that footage from Nigeria had everyone clinging to their skins and watching their hair, and it was everywhere, people playing it over and over, her scalp dancing with them coming out her eyes mouth turning to liquid as she screamed Pidgin none of us could make, but then our rooms seemed safe for a while, so different from there, from sun and dust and empty red horizons, so when those on fifth shot their kids and jumped we felt betrayed like they’d let it in, effected some communal sacrifice, Heroded the whole fucking block, and we felt the walls burn, sensed its silence behind us, its breathing inside us softening everything around it, cartilage dissolving, noses and ears grotesque flaps of skin, seizures in the windows opposite like watching some multi-screen TV, her up on ten syncopic squealing this not my face this not my face, and I felt my organs hardening, the joints in my arms and legs fusing, godheads apologizing to a withered sky coating themselves in dog waste to keep it away, eating the same waste to get it out to retain their few gentle objects, their spun looks like stabs sweetened with tempests, and all love and high measure decomposing in its own rancid perfumes while propped men, invested in the abyss, used their corkscrewed fingers to divine hell in the street’s recessed brains, and the dead resuscitated with vermicular oils made veins in the air, in objects dim and gushing, in men recoiling from a consumed sleep of black breathing, its ontic shirk perforating lungs and grating throats, and to stay beyond it we swallowed the foam of its voids and ripened in the dark to ejaculations of diseased worms groping in heads, bodies wrapped in tin foil, already partly cataleptic in anticipation of it, reading the new spots on our skin as coded instructions for our disposal,  and when we hid nobody knew from what, could tell their children what it was that’d eat them or be eaten by them, that’d find them just as easily in the basement, that’d lay waste to their tiny faces and leave them a spewed paradox of meat like that poor sweet dead girl in Africa.