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But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man's-land, over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood's red bugles. To be alone and evil! To be a god at bay. What was more absolute?
Gormenghast , Mervyn Peake, 1950
[Day 1: axial symmetry]
Your voice pulls us out.
Of what manner of sleep we do not know, but it is the first thing we hear, dull blue, darker than our eyes, ringing in the blanks between colours and breaths. We wake slumped in a chair, heavy-headed, shackled— not anymore; chains turn into a crust of rust and they loop round themselves, ouroboros-shaped, their holes as eyes to mimic umbilical cords. They look at us when we turn our gaze away, squirm deep into our skull, staring starry-eyed, filling voids with dreams as if trying to deafen us, but we hear you, Choir-loud—
We should not hear you, Vicar.
Though our mind is scattered round in shards of glass, we recollect enough to know that you are burning alive and your voice is robbed from you, given to a beast that wears your face no longer. The antlers that pierce your skull, do they hurt still? We see them in a mirror, half past us as we walk on. They are growing in cycles. Your agony repeats itself for our eyes alone, countless and ever watching, and we relish in the taste it leaves upon our tongue.
Yet the mirrors come only with [in]sight. We should not hear you as only the salt of Her voice reaches us. We should not hear you, for you are— see that ripple where glass morphs into quicksilver, two months past:
You die October last. I write to you.
It is too late when the Cathedral’s bells ring so far from me. I hear [of] them; night falls in tatters round the village, and you are here no more as ink on paper in my drawers, so that I mourn the space between your words. We have not spoken in years that stretch on like decades. Still I hear your voice in reflections, windows and puddles and bathroom mirrors when it’s barely bright enough to see by. It’s in my eyes, haunting, and I nearly slit my throat as you talk to me with the accent of memories made history. I grin grimaces, watch you eat at my face, your features bleeding into mine, and you say:
“It’s time, Scholar.”
Your voice scrapes blue razor-sharp against my bones. It’s the day of the Ritual [Dream] and it beckons for a Sunday best you never see me wear at mass. My shadow hangs too thin in dark frock coats, hiding behind colonnades and narrow-brimmed hats. You speak on, oblivious. Your words carry like incense. You think me content to avoid every part of you I disagree with and I fail to deny. It’s the day of the Ritual— I make efforts for so many eyes that are not yours. Even the Cord plucked straight from the womb of the cosmos looks at me; I seek its approval outwards and inwards when finally I let it writhe down my throat as the Augur does a few eternities before.
Here it leads us, and we have no fear.
All around are so many mirrors; so many presents to be lived. You speak in a past tense to which we are blind. We know not where you are, nor do we breathe you in motes of dust that embrace us as an old friend. Dust is made comfort in particles when it settles on spines without bones, on pages and shelves too high to be touched. It is home to us. But you dwell within ashes, and so we cannot mingle.
“What did it taste like? The Cord.”
“Thunder.” We whisper slow, wistful in tone. “It rolls thunder in our gut— the wrath of the heavens as you’ve never known it. When it spirals into love, lightning mellows and makes itself a lake, cold and welcoming, tender like the memory of a bruise on our brains.”
“Did it sing?” the question hangs almost greedy from your mouth yet unseen.
It makes us smile that you ask. You are always so keen to understand. Still, you do so with avid hands rather than open eyes, and it bears no fruit.
“It does. Each eye shows its own voice, and while the whole is dissonant, it sings in waves too vague to be grasped.” The air crackles with spiderwebs and shifts in a scuttle of legs. “You ask the same of me when we are there on the coast, d’you remember?”
“Yes.”
Silence, short as it is, strangles and suffocates. It lasts a breath or two, and yet takes ours away.
“We will never be what we were.”
“No— why would we wish to?”
Once, you hold all the answers in the palm of your hand. You think you do, for you sit atop a clocktower, leather-backed and gloved in silk, and wheat crowns your head as a field and your eye sockets spit emeralds too polished to be real. You grin at the blood on my shirt; you spill it with my hands. My back bends under the weight of your expectations when I draw, cut open, prod and anatomise. The grime of a butchered fishing folk stains me still— as I rummage through infected insides it is their brains I touch, turned viscous egg yolk by the mouth of a parasite. Patience wears itself thin on your sleeve with each gesture; a flick of the wrist, an elbow bent in annoyance, a subtle vein in your neck.
When the sickness wants you, it takes the shape of your teeth and whittles them sharper. You call it rot and it means death between your lips.
Yet we remember telling you when we are young:
“Rot is a living thing.”
And it tastes sickly sweet.
[Day 2: irrational numbers]
You keep your back to us as we walk.
The dream loops around itself, twisting arches and staircases. As far removed as it is from our School, it does not surprise us. No quirk of its architecture is enough to tug at our gut, unlike the Upper Ward and what its looming spires mean to a man of thirty so keen to rip the cosmos in half. We are here amidst dust and dirt and mould, and you, stark white and holy cloth, are the stain we ought to wipe. All your questions taste of this same self-assured tone you reserve for me when I am still a Choirman; soft on the surface, but beneath, a cold steel too grey that sharpens your edges. We provide no answer, for we are newborn here and have none to give.
“I want your voice”, you say.
You want our voice— hummingbird-light upon your tongue, a glint too high when I’m young and mock you for what you are; or dark, lined with the smell of borrowed smoke once I leave you behind? The lilt we know you like is gone.
“This is not right”, you add. “You wear silence like a coat that never fits. You are not what you were, that much I know, but I should recognise you if only by face. This is not right— this is not yours anymore.”
“We are only what we make of ourselves, Vicar; half-truths for faces half made up.”
Courtesy would have us looking you in the eye, but you keep walking on, the rest of you unbothered, disgustingly detached from your voice. We are compelled to quip:
“You would know about that.”
You smile— it’s the same smile you give me, ironic and copper-hued, the last time we speak. You have no more wit to spare that night. You have no weathered guardian cooped up in a shack; you feed him to the moon. You have no one but me.
“Yes. But on your face cut from bones and dreams, it looks a shade too wrong.”
We do not argue.
You’re slick as a whalesong in green with vices for claws. We follow you half-blind, and still your shine remains to light our dream [heaven] when we are hungry for night. In that brisk pace you wear lies a thirst you never know how to quench; be it for knowledge or power, you seek to pluck the fruits of the cosmos, and bite at them, and taste a juice you take for an ichor. Your boots eat up stairs and let us drag behind. In shades of blue, you mouth that my domain does not equal yours: too sunless, dark and drab, more uncut stone than polished marbles with cobwebs for ornaments.
And the mirrors, they disquiet you. You’re quick to cover the hum of mercury with your voice, droning on about architecture and tombs of old. You’re the head of the Church then, commanding contractors at a flick of a wrist, ignoring workers and scaffoldings for you are no man to be looked down upon. We are no fat purse to be convinced, but we don’t have the heart to stop you. Through corridors and libraries we march on, you waging your war on our theories, and we— listening until we trip on a shoelace.
You walk too fast to catch on a new sound. We have to stop you.
“Can you hear it?” we ask.
A piano shrieks yellow, like your screams when you burn. It’s a pickaxe digging at your pain made ore. But you smile, younger than ever, catching notes in the palm of your hand, and trade the white of your garb for a cloak of midnight blue.
“You’ve always been good at this”, comes a memory.
I am; near twenty, once ivy leaves eat at college bricks in spring and the air is too alive not to sting. Flowers and grass bring brightness to my lungs, so quick to turn it sickness in specks. Then I’m half-blind too, teary-eyed as the buzz of the earth catches my ear and dies too fast to be penned. Sun filters through thick trees when we tread forest grounds and let leather soles swallow mud, and you tell me: You look unwell. Beyond pale, surely; all plaster against your marbles, dragging sweat and the shade of your smiles at my heels.
You’re the colour of wheat too loud in a room tailored for solitude. You find me here and I pretend not to see, unbothered by everything but teeth that sing from ivory. What I allow you to hear stays inconsequential— sickly smooth in rhythm when my hands yearn for irrational numbers made sound. I can offer you none but dishonesty in the hope it might fuel a debate. Yet you say nothing. You listen still, your silence ill-shaped bile in my throat.
Your smile is an arc of bitterness, foul in taste as much as in sight. You want our voice.
“Ask and we shall play for you”, we offer.
“Would you?”
Doubt laces your tongue. We are used to it— I am, come thirty-five in your shadow, hands dirtied and bloodied at your command. And you doubt and call me a heathen. Still; I do not leave yet.
“If you wish us to.”
You ask [order]. We play.
[Day 3: differential equations]
In the dark you are only half of yourself [me].
We tread lightly and remember how liquid you find our gait. In each mirror we pass, we try to catch a slice of your face; the angles are wrong, or you are, for a cheekbone is always obscured by a lock of hair. The holy shawl you wear sits flat against your back when there’s no wind to give it the dignity of a warrior’s cape. You bear the weight of battles fought and lost. In your eyes, we wonder— do the walls of the Old Town still crumble, do the faces of its dwellers still burn and melt before they can morph into snouts and snarls? You are there, boots bloodied, too small and frail, the hint of a pistol sleek at your waist. You watch.
You smell of charred remains, then. Your gloves are clean, your shoulders barely bothered by a coat of ash. Orders are issued from the back of your throat; hoarse, half-choked into sobs you cannot afford. When you speak to me hours later, I can taste the blaze in your voice.
It has not changed.
We breathe your smoke in cigarettes. You are soot and dirt, a third of bone that scrapes like a Knight’s beard along your cheek. The rest is arrogance still burning at the stake. You walk on. You don’t look at the mirrors where your fate is made spectacle. You don’t look at us.
Your face, we remember it only in threads of blonde arrogance. It catches candle-light as fireflies and glows a golden sheen; when the illusion breaks, you are ash and gone grey with the wind. It flees us, even in mirrors through which we ought to see everything. The rigorous alignment of your features is remembered [missed] by only part of us— eyes buried too deep where flesh feeds on symmetry. Something akin to grief tugs at our heart, or what is left of it. We wish to ask you to turn. The threat of refusal holds our tongue.
With your back to us, you are no man but the city you claim to own. You are a narrow street, pebbled with dirt, you are the tang of sweat and beer that ripens fantasies in madmen’s minds, you are the crowd and its torches when the moon is high and predators prowl. You’ve the old blood in your veins, parasites fish-like in your belly torn open on a coast, a hundred eyes sticking out from spires and churches. You are everything but a face.
“Look into our eyes”, we plead. It wears the glint of a prayer on our teeth.
Our hand comes clumsy at your shoulder. You stop walking. There is grace in the curve of your neck; not the tendons of a becoming beast, too thick and taut.
When we see you; you’re spider-webbed, loudly so. The threads are in your hair. They are in hers too— long ago, at a time before the lake. She is copper no more, save for the cracks between her thoughts. Then the moon takes her too. This time you are not the hand that feeds, for it is old, pock-marked and rotten. It happens before you become the city. You are still a man; you are still a face. There is a youth about you that never wanes. That night, you find me at dawn. See madness in my eyes but do not recoil. I weave dreams full of vowels when you reach out, ungloved for a cheek unshaven. We mourn the Spider, and though your grief is half-truth it is sweet, not sour.
A lamp spits a flicker; guts the angles of your face a diseased yellow that reeks of oil. You wear grief beneath your eyes, for those you leave behind when your body burns: the Guardian and the Knight and an Acolyte turned Vicar. She takes your mantle and lets it consume the frailty of her youth. She prays alone in the oratory, shoulders sagged and neck bent in penitence. She remembers your face engraved forevermore behind her eyes. She is not half the Vicar you are. She cannot save you.
You look at us, your smile a slanted roof.
“There is a hole in your tooth, where rot and sugar taste the same.”
Yes; at times your voice comes from there, when your lips cannot bother to shape the words. It might be the rot in your own teeth [fangs], the one you call death, the guilt on your face not yours but that of gods whose blood you spill city-wide. This is no panacea but sewage in your veins. Is it not blissful— to share the disease with the whole of your flock, and to know their suffering becomes yours too when a full moon is up? They waste away as you do, and still they have not the luxury of your silks and candles to cradle antlers born from bone; they have the gutter for a deathbed when yours is a cathedral.
You turn around. You have no face— you are no man but the city.
[Day 4: axiomatic system]
“Is this your last dream?”
A speck of red slides along the glass [throat].
The air turns chemical, lab-scented, the same colour that lines the hem of my cloak when I’m young, wearing an arrogance bone-deep, scrimshawed in my spine. I turn my face away and we look at yours— indifferent in the way of stars. A sadness veils you, its flavour artificial.
We tilt our head on its axis.
“Quite so; a dream of dreams, if you will, where all blurs but the weight of our names. You are who you are.”
“What of you?” You quirk an eyebrow too thin to bear the weight of your sins.
Seeping through the cracks is the man of power you still are: Old Yharnam bleeds through your eyes, flails like a beast waiting for the whip, and in its last breath watches you hung from soon-to-rot rafters.
You are hungry [curious].
“We are full of eyes— for an eye is more everything than a face.”
A scoff; a man of power no more, but a student, well-to-do and catching stares like flies.
“An eye, singular. Yet you do refer to yourself as multitudes”, you mouth honey-tongued.
“An eye for an I.”
We hold a fingertip skyward. Such a display of professorship steals from you a smile.
“Our eyes turn the I inconsequential. A thing from a past out of reach.”
“To the past I will turn, then. Do indulge me, Scholar.”
You are a man of the stage; a man of wants and wishes, and so we shall grant yours.
The mirrors are all it takes for you to see. You peer into them as they do into you with liquid eyes keen to swallow.
A speck of red slides along the glass.
[Day 5: positive integer]
I admire you, once.
When you are a man of science more than holiness. A boy who prods at bones and artefacts— your hands are too pristine for your trade, but you’ve the heart for a work well done. We are kindred spirits, then, young enough to hold the cosmos in our hands. After hours, our debates turn arguments. You bring bread and wine as though to make them a game. I never partake, both in distaste and defiance. A coterie of students younger and older gather round and imbibe, and then speech melts into laugh or shout; the moon hurts my eyes.
I admire you when you are a man of power in the guise of a priest. You wield the spoken word above heads higher than yours, catching ears at the flick of a hand, effortless and soaked in liquid grace [blood]. You beg of me to commune.
I feel your bones, teeth white-washed, sinking into mine. And your mouth a coat of iron hot-blooded with the taste of desires unsaid. You always ask for a drop, if not with your voice then with your eyes. And you hate to see me refuse; you hate me and your eyes grow red at the edges. You think— he will not notice, and yet I do and I see you for everything you are and it is raw and dripping like a cut-off limb. It is steel on my tongue when you look at me thus. I drink it in, it tastes of wine turned sour, grapes sitting in the sun too long, loosely peeled and drooping down the cheeks of a blind old man.
Yet you are never old. You never take the time to be. Near forty the face of twenty, fearless and beardless and so young we think it is a youth thick and red running through your veins.
You swallow blood moons aplenty. And I seek to follow you down the drain, and look, look; where it leads us, you dead and I— high, eyed, ascended, far above your pyres and chalices and bone-built cathedrals crumbled at your feet. I know what happens to you. I see a casket too empty where your bones should be. It tastes nothing like your pitiful perfumes, or your incense so stale, nothing like your eyes of moss too green after a fire. Wood rings like wood, oak or cherry I care not to know. The smell of it is numb on my tongue. And I, grinning, looming over the void you leave. You’ve always been small; yours are such large shoes to fill.
I think—
“You do think a lot still.”
The sneer teeters at the edge of your lip and its curve [locus] draws a warmth unwelcome.
“Oh, do be quiet.”
Our brains are as the bellies of whales, bloated, full of oil only knives may harvest. We dream of slicing through yours once, pondering how alive you are.
Consider a hypothesis— if what is to be found in the hollows of your skull is thick and red like what you so gleefully absorb, might you smell it a victory? I would in our Choir days argue that you are not drinking holiness but letting holiness drink of you. A drop in your teacup like a cordial, a half-moon of a smile at your lips, a quip too quiet; you are a man of old wearing a boy’s face to deal in godhood. In that you have inherited the tongue of the barrister and drowned in the guile of a hundred sailors, wearing well-placed jabs like second skin and otherwise wielding your literacy with the sharpness of a sword. You are a clockmaker’s marvel. When I look at you my hands have no urge but to cut you open.
Those fingers of yours, gloved still and so keen to burrow— they curl against your thighs, claws awaiting birth.
“Indulge me”, you say again, sheepskin-soft round the teeth of a wolf.
We lead, this time.
If you are the city, then we are the dream; architecture feeding on itself with doors and windows for mouths, with mirrors for eyes. We are everything that shifts, the pulse of stones under your boots, the sigh of dust in your collar, slate beneath the flesh, a monument to minds shattered and reassembled, and we know where every staircase leads, and the name of every half-life a whisper in our ear— you are here a trespasser, chiselled, marble-veined arrogance, and you cannot force-feed us the gutter anymore.
The mirrors swallow us and spit us back and swallow us again and we swim through the cosmos with no water and lungs and time to stop us from becoming mercury. We’ve never been so welcome in lake-seas as we are here turning fast and sleek and liquid ourselves. We hold the universe and it holds back —a breath— pulls us by the waist, rib-coasted oceans, flesh, bone arched towards suns and skies infinite and tilted downwards. Go down and plunge, dive, dig deep into earth-skin and crust and teeth and ascend. The edges of your voice come wrong yellowed sands where it rasps along the glass though it should be razor-blue. We drink of what blue remains and choke on the rest. We run we fly and forget.
Then we walk on solid ground anew and the swirl of the universe echoes a music in our eyes.
“Have you lost your head, master?”
The spiral in your voice is ill-shaped. You blink at us with eyes at the corner of your mouth, not green enough; the colour’s all wrong and it bleeds, sinks between our thoughts. You look past us, heavenward— where spiders hang from webs rope-like, huge and grotesque lumps of pregnant silk bursting at the seams. A hand searching for a mirror behind your back finds only a wall. There is fear aflutter in the folds of your garb.
“You despised them, spiders. You saw her in the lake, and afterwards— you talked of how their eyes would shatter under the weight of an inkwell.”
Yes; yes.
Spiders come with no faces, you see, their eyes only shards of glass to reflect themselves over and over and over, and through them we hear ourselves split bone-like, too many-limbed, distorted such as the taste of your voice half-coloured in our gut.
“Talk to me.”
The spider watches you through a belly bulging with eyes and it smiles with no mouth but the smell of vinegar in your throat. We watch you choke on it. You spell our name in the twitch of your fingers and we;
laugh [cry].
[Day 6: rational numbers]
You let gods of flesh enter your body.
We hear you still droning on about the blood of the ancients with reverence honeyed in your eyes. And though you speak of holiness I think— how can one consume what is by right never theirs? You laugh, smile toothless, the curve of your lip a rib of rosy flesh, and say: only by holiness shall we become holy ourselves. A Vicar is too high-seated to hear a heathen, yes, you tell me once, and still. What you drink is too earth and not water enough. You cannot settle for mud, not even when you drag your heels down the guts of the world with me, and we take tombs for granted together and dust is a kiss on our robes and cobwebs garlands in our hair and we— I feel the pulse of the universe and leave you behind—
“We were trapped.”
Are we?
Yes, yes;
Remember, we are stuck at the mouth of a tunnel. It spits rocks at us, slabs of walls, marbles and low-reliefs crude like vomit in our throats. And we are alone. But you are here and you have the guile of a hundred on your back, and though it weighs nothing against the contempt of centuries past, you hold onto it. I can see your cloak so clear, a jacket of dust on your shoulders. When you shrug it off it seems to dissolve. You say: I’m cold. Night will fall shortly. I utter a prayer without tongue for you. Those are my robes draped around you now, too large but cleaner. You take them, your wary fingers clutching and holding onto midnight blue, and you say: I’m cold still. The palms of your hands slide together begging for warmth. I keep mine to myself, tensed spider-like around knees too stiff, wishing— hold mine, won’t you?
Why do you flinch, Vicar?
But I cannot give them to you and let you see what your skin does when it comes under mine. My dilemmas are buried too deep anyhow; and you; you never notice, don’t you, when things sit too far from you— but you say: you bleed. I see, yes, my waistcoat is torn and the silver chain hangs limp on my lap and finally there is a feeling foreign from cold, silvery, high-pitched, I recognise it but cannot name it—
“Pain?” you suggest.
— pain, right, vowels with which to stitch scars. You are cold no longer or stop your pretence. Suddenly you come too close without standing. Your trousers catch dirt in creases, obscuring pinstripes in shades of grey, and I feel sorry. I ruin all of you. More fabric than flesh, you are a disguise walking, a face worn skin-tight. It fits you when it is clean and hair does not fall in your eyes.
“Then I touched you and you flinched. I said my hands were for giving, not stealing.”
It takes your fingers a while to stop twitching. You’re slow, too slow, barely medical in your care, but my buttons yield and you peel my shirt off and now I am cold. It comes in copper through my nose, the colour of wet coins. You burrow between my ribs to ground me, yourself, the both of us, and with claws yet unborn tame the slackened jaws of the wound. You say: I’ve no thread, I’ll take your shirt. Your breath spits urgency. I nod and doze off. You pester me to keep my eyes wide open when I long for a slumber made chemical. My head is heavy on your shoulder. Pain falters sharp yellow at the corner of my eye. I hum, sing, a long-lost drunken song in shades of green, wishing you to bandage in cadence. You don’t, no, not you; you always make such a fine work of things. Should you own a needle I would be filigreed and barely feel sorry for it.
Under your breath, buried as we are, you mutter; the words dull blue and familiar snake through my ears with barely sense enough to be grasped. My weight is upon you, Vicar — no not yet — and you find no strength left to push me off your shoulder. I hope my blood stains your hands. Is it still safe for me to wish, or do you have it already, that desire to consume? Your fingers are red when they thread in your hair; your blonde arrogance grows violence the shade of roses; an octave too low.
“You smiled.”
We smile, present tense. When I’m in the tombs with you, face buried in your cloak, my cloak, I do not smile. You cannot see my face, the paleness of tears waiting to be shed carving itself in shades of rheum.
“You smiled.”
Déjà vu; red, rancid.
“Inwards, because you were right about the map. I dragged you down there and it was a mistake. Saved your life, yes. But was it not a stroke of luck? I dealt in bones, not blood.”
“How things change”, chimes our mercurial voice.
“Quite.”
Your smile is tight-lipped, reminiscent of things forgotten, of orders issued to minds greater than yours and yet so quick to bend under your boot. A clever man you are, when you smile prey more than predator— man more than beast.
You are young [gone].
[Day 7: axial asymmetry]
“Open your eyes.”
We hear you;
“Wake up.”
we should not hear you.
“Wake up.”
O, but how could we wake up! We find everything, become everything, the brain and the eye, and we shall learn the names of many eternities; while you bleed your dreams dry we will drink ours at the breast. You are mistaken, you know. You bring the skies down and burn them. We do not repeat your error; we seek to join the seas and drown.
Now the tilt of your brow comes a fury etched too skin-deep. Already you are the neighbour of the beast, ready to raze whichever comes in your shadow. The streets are yours and you are them. Yet they fail to dig themselves out of the muck. A citizen equals a cobblestone; one of your steps, a pistol shot— you take algebra like a punishment, so eager to bury yourself underground between lichens and pilasters, and so there is no risk worth calculating. Anger strangles and enslaves, strips you wallpaper-thin until nothing remains but bone.
The seam of your glove is tight; hand curled into fist. A tooth too sharp glints at the edge of a lip, a threat if not yet a massacre.
“You’ve won, haven’t you? This is what you wished for— knowledge and eternity enough to consume it.” Your smile stretches fox-like and digs creases around your eyes, blooming spring in wintertime. You burn and blind. “Have you any regrets?”
We laugh cold and quicksilver and measure the sum of your parts. A face is not a face, we argue, when it serves only as mask. You wear yours well; or perhaps it wears you as does beasthood in leather gloves, remember, when nails morph into claws, bones into antlers and knees pop out of their sockets to glance the other way. You seek a grass that might be greener to make up for eyes turned red, but you know. Buying time does not equal owning it.
Ask yourself.
“Regrets have no use in a dream. You shall find that renouncing yours might prove blissful.”
“Every dream has an end”, you argue; the line has no need to be rehearsed.
You hold yourself with the poise of a thespian, and still it is uncertainty lacing your tongue.
“Perhaps so.” We smile, indulgent. “Yet you fail to acknowledge the rules that bind us to the dreamlands. Rules that refuse to be rules and bend themselves at a flicker of our thoughts; do you know why we remember our dreams?”
How not knowing makes your blood boil. Your eyes green turned red swallow light with the greed of a leviathan. Mirth, academic in nature, takes us by the throat. We laugh.
“No dream is ever a full phrase, Vicar— and no true conclusion befalls that which ends on a semicolon.”
What little remains of your smile falters.
Already another face creeps behind yours, barely younger, with glasses for eyes and the shreds of a clean-cut arrogance to mark him as your envoy. He looks the same as you at the edges— we know his game as we know yours, and still find bitterness in how you bleed into each other. A mouth with rows of teeth doubled, it opens wide and sings Choir-loud. The colour that screams is neither his nor yours but—
mine.
We come to our senses and open our eyes;