It’s curious,
shitting out a fog you ate at conception.
Vapor you’re marinated and cooked in
until the smoke hardens, coagulates, and takes its form.
It’s one ghost of men, women, Shreks, you, and ghouls in gowns
until the digestive tract of time degrades the only sustenance.

Carbohydrates break down the fastest.

Amylase gets to work in the mouth.

, on the brink of twenty-one.

Next slide.
//

Somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-three, the stomach mixes in its gastric juices with
the ghost, breaking down the bolus until bulimia’s walked back through the front door,
takes her coat off, and puts her boots on your fucking coffee table.

These juices, acids really, break down proteins into smaller paternal and pastoral
peptides, proteases eventually break them down further into amino acids, and
your name doesn’t sound like language anymore.

Lipases rip apart lipids into forlorn fatty acids, and bile helps her do it until
everything and everyone either disgusts you or makes you fear for your
life for seemingly no reason at all.

Nucleases destroy nucleic acids to pick them up again into their own
destructive arms and make them new as nucleotides, each as
special and singular as the grooves in your skin as you spend hours
peeling it from your body until you see blood.

Next slide.
//

Whatever’s left of the valuables gets absorbed through the small intestine, and like stepping in
front of the fireplace after a long day of playing in the snow with your cousins, you feel the
heated poison ripple through your body, like you can see the monosaccharides and
monoglycerides catching a wave in the middle of the Caribbean Sea and the sea settles into River
Bloodstream or River Lymph to spread through the rest of your body and rest in the lakes of
your lungs, but the last bits, the afterthoughts, get absorbed with any remaining water in the
large intestine, a frothy tide over your feet and with time to spare, the fog clears for a moment
and next to the rocks and broken shells and sea glass, you catch a glimpse in the sand of yourself
lying in bed staring up at the glow in the dark stickers on the ceiling while they fondle your
small body, but there’s rumbling and the gas calls the fog back before you can remember what
it’s shown you and the wait for relief is long and the pain is sobering but whatever’s left of you’s
gotta come out eventually, so you push and push and the music of your breath sounds like Nick
Cave and the Bad Seeds and maybe if you scream it’ll help, but the ghost can scream louder
making its way through the veins behind your eyes and ears and she tells you to shut. the fuck.
up. and watch the damn screen as a father carries the eldest of his daughters back to his room in
the middle of the night, bitch, keep watching as he and only he kisses hello his youngest on the
lips when he picks her up for the weekend, in the dark, through the window, where probably no
one can see her wipe the spit off her mouth, and Jesus Christ, shut up and listen to an uncle
privately but not privately ask his young niece if she has any friends that would be willing to fuck
him and his wife, and anyway you bare down harder and something pops and you think you
might die but you’re still here, so you shut your eyes hard and push but the ghost controls the
volume still so you can look away all the fuck you want but you can still hear great-grandmother,
babies crying in the background, as she tells herself and anyone who can hear her whispers that
the worst thing you can be on God’s green Earth is not a pedophile, but a lesbian, so you push and
push until in the stars behind the thinnest barricade of flesh you see great-grandfather in black
and white with his gun on his waist give great-grandmother a rose outside of her catholic school
house in front of all the other kids, hovering like the Pixar lamp does the specs of dust against
the sky blue and you give it all you’ve got, goddamnit, you scream until your vocal chords shut
hard on their own volition, the ghost demanding you shut the fuck up, dude, and now you really
can’t breathe, so you panic, so you push harder and the tendons in your hip snap like
the exhausted rubber they are and you can’t see, you can only hear ringing, so you reach for
anything you can and break the towel hook off the wall beside you and you pull the tulle yellow
shower curtain down with the rod that hits you square on the bridge of your nose, and in your
rage and frustration, in your fear and fatigue, with the last bit of oxygen you’ve got stored before
your eyes roll to the back of your head, you rip up the shower curtain into strips and you rip
and rip and rip and you’re still ripping until there’s nothing.

Next slide.
//

Nothing stops, there’s nothing to stop, it’s just nothing.
No black or white or light or air.

You wake up and wonder, that must be what it’s like to die.
You wake up and wonder, that wasn’t so bad.

Dizzy, you look down at the shower curtain at your feet.

He loves you, he loves you not.

You look down at the fog in the water.
You look down at everything.

Between your legs,
you stare and wonder if the water coming out of your eyes is already the same water that
the ghost saw fit to leave behind.

Between your legs,
you stare and wonder if you’re hungry and tired enough to eat your own shit out of the
toilet.

Next slide.
//

It’s a taste scary without the fog.

Bit paralyzing without the ghost.

You can’t look up to check and check again if you’ve locked the door.

The only escape is to die or sit in it until your eyes acclimate to color.

And sit in it long.

Next slide.

//

People have shit shoved in their mouths and down their throats all the time and live to let
the ghost swim out to pasture.

Their tales only make the fog taste better.

Go ahead, reach right on in there.

Smoke the shit, drink the shit, snort the shit, until it’s all back blood in you.

Your metabolism speeds up every time, more and more
refined with every pass, and you reach back in every time to eat the
shit, smoke the shit, drink the shit, snort the shit until she lets you
think you have the power now.

Shut up and stay the fuck where you are, you scold the fog.
You point down between your legs,
don’t you fucking move,
and she stays.

But carbohydrates break down the fastest.

Amylase gets to work in the mouth.