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Rats Alice Trujillo
Treacherous
My glasses are broken again
I don't take care of them
It's hard to remember
Everything degrades at different speeds
My hands are sticky and torn
I wash them three times over
I touch my eyes
I cut off all of my hair
It's a war to be alive
I don't want anyone to recognize me
I'm going to die in a street somewhere
The lens cracked and I put it back together
I step on my glasses and bend the wire back
Every couple of weeks
The effort of protecting them seems misplaced
It'll happen to me eventually just the same
I forget to eat or I can't stop eating
Every few minutes something small
As drop by drop a rain fills the street with darkness
I can't focus on much
Covered with sweat with a ruptured eardrum and inertia
Drop a glass of water and it lands on the floor
Safe as a rubber ball
The water starts to boil
I wake again every few minutes
Awake into another dream room
Standing around in the world
Folding pieces of paper for hours
My hands are breaking apart
Something is wrong but I can't remember
It's hard to read with my empty blood like this
A scrap of blackberry briar under my skin
Taken root in my hollow wrists and knees and behind my nose
Buying wine and cat litter with a tangle of vines filling me
Bubbles in the painted wall
Concrete that is broken by flowers growing
A little blood when I cough
I keep stealing little things that I don't want
Because I'm angry and it makes sense
Crumbs of crumbs of retaliatory violence
[If I could realize my full potential
I might be able to get myself killed]
I've been vegetarian for so long but I don't think it matters anymore
There's no mathematics to suffering
It's only infinitely wide and deep
I may be anemic if I could remember to see a doctor
If I could remember anything about myself
I shaved my head after forever and walk in spirals on the street
Tearing pages from a dictionary
A perfect replica of insurrection with too many hours to each minute
I am not who I am now
Crashing against a duplicated earth
The rumor of a duplicated earth
Everything I see is new when I see it
And treacherous as open water
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The Instantaneous
I close my eyes and close my eyes this doesn't change
If I go out to walk tonight I'll need to prepare myself
I'll get motion sickness looking in the mirror of a busy street
Automatic processes faster than I can breathe
Chemical reactions and mechanical that invalidate weeks and months from life
Nothing patient in the real
The instantaneous
It's past time for an organized theory
It's past time for making sense of this
The opportunity tried and failed
Sixty years ago
Ninety years before I could speak or see
I need to sleep before my ligaments wear loose
Open-hearted, alive and with windows nailed shut to maelstrom
It's nothing particular but I've been wearing thin
The friction of inconsolable seconds like sand on the wind
My clothes are all dirty because I can't stand the hassle
It doesn't make sense to participate in these rituals
I know they don't mean anything
They mean the same little as anything else
And I need some hope on this fucking earth
Twisting my fingers and knuckles until they ache
The evening sky flashes like a cut wire
Premonitions and my rotten stomach while caught staring through the drywall
There's a curse about this time that I don't know how to rationalize
The uncanny fashion that objects in my fingers bend and break apart
I can't remember to go outside
Or the outside when I see it is too unreal and sudden
We're not both alive but I can't tell which of us is lying
Or it changes place when I consider myself
A piece of small machinery fed on salt and oil
I'm over-saturated with terror
It doesn't mean anything when I can never fall asleep
I won't recognize the difference when we're dying
When it finally happens I'll need a second voice to tell me
It's really happening now and we need to leave
Winter stale and the gag of smoke
The night air black as a festering wound
This body is still alive but it's collapsing itself stagnant
Alive As A Collapsing Lung
It's not so much as everything
A pain that divorced its context
The thousand eyes of oxidized nails and staples in a pole
Decades
My hand will turn stiff and fold over itself
A poisoned vermin becoming small
Pigeons crawl under the train cars for quiet
I'm only another person who will die
And the air is like broken glass
Shivering in crumbs, the taste and its detonated voice-shadow
Every surface of the world is too slick with water
Too much of intersecting bodies, confusion
Trying to walk home but I find myself again
Again tonight at a rain shelter coughing out fragments of smoke
I don't care if I crumble to pieces if I forget the beginning
If my blood pours down the sink just like a tepid cup of coffee
Staring at the wintry lights, the stars so empty as television
I put a fumigated building in my pocket
The millions of lives there annihilated by disgust
They embarrass me with an experience of love
A whistling inside my ear
I masturbate for sixteen hours until I'm bleeding in my hands
And the carbon monoxide alarm is whining its doldrum
I'm so hungry that I've forgotten
Desire like a severed lip
A mutilated remnant wrapped in tissue
My stomach splashed to concrete through a six inch gash
A person that was pushed through machinery
To reset-oblivion this persistence in time
Quiet
A slaughter in public and to quiet
My two hands have been replaced with silence
I can't find the difference between legitimate and counterfeit bills
Like I can't differentiate my future lost and past selves
They stink the same bitter of fear-desperation and mass death
I could eat an aluminum can to feel whole
I could eat my own skin from my arms
We are all logic reduced to dementia
Sensible as any morning remaining alive
As frog eggs clustered in a pond's scum, made iridescent and futile with gasoline
Individual moments left convulsing against harm
My body remembers a punctured lung, a reflected image that infects the original
My skin is like spoiled milk
My eyes are two rinsed out incisions
I shit out gravel I shit out little ounces of salt
Little afternoons forgetting evisceration
Everyone I love and myself is a psychotic hopeless maelstrom
Born alive cathartic against the landscape and wasted
We mean the same to live as when planes fall out of the air
This finger was cut off in the window this
Rejection is a method to quiet so
It doesn't mean anything to me
Murder-Suicide
I'm feeling electrocuted with life
As a boiled tooth in Pepsi dissolved
I'm aware of my tinnitus like I remember this murder-suicide
I wake up with a steel nail pierced in my head
There isn't a value to belief, it only clings to me
I run the faucet so I can have some water
I want to do something and there is nothing to do
This machine runs just as well with meat between its gears
My hands are bloody, my hands are full of blood
The bones fall out of my body while I walk and I keep walking
Nowhere to go and there's nowhere to stay
No value to my flesh and gristle except its mineral content
Except its potential energy to buy and sell
I broke my finger in a dream like I hammered a nail through a cockroach
Fictions of life pretending to be
I know absolute pandemonium is the long breath out
This nausea of stasis and descent
A Shepard tone downward always the same and always lower
I eat this rice and beans and water and pretend I'm alive
And I'm not alone
My lover cooked for me tonight because I was paralyzed
It happens where the blood is let out of my body
The system becomes depressurized so no signal can move the limbs
I need to be violent but my intestines are shriveled to tangles of yarn
You speak and I can't hear your meaning
I sold my memory before into dead-end mornings
I didn't sleep for years
Three hours, four hours
I owned six alarm clocks set on cabinets and under things
Gallons of coffee turned to caffeine pills and to pretending alive
I was never there in my body and watched as my threads became stripped
I don't fit together in myself now
Except there's no causality
These two things are true like any other two things are true
I heard a helicopter today and there's a rat on the pavement with its skull crushed in
Two things are true
And there are more than two things true and sometimes they contradict
The logic of this plane is dissonance
I wake up in the morning to the dead of night and somebody was killed inside of me
And I am being killed on the inside of another person
I need to escape except there's no outside
I'm alive as I've been sewn inside a corpse
My anarchism is the smell of death that I can't escape
Because my body is a rotten source so far as the world is a moving truth
Two things are true and the voice of tearing steel in midnight
This murder suicide like a black mold on continuum
It appeared suddenly so far as its potential was old and latent
The end of this world is alive and it is not alive
Not alive not meaning dead but inanimate
Anti-life
I look in the mirror and try to take the nail out of my skull
It is above my left eye
There is also an exit wound beneath my armpit that is unrelated
Exit wound with no entry
I take the head of the nail with two hands
Really with five fingers from those two hands I take the head of the nail and pull
I smell like something is burning
Smoke comes out of my mouth, I see in the mirror
The nail is still inside of me
I forget to remove it or I'm not able to and can't acknowledge that
A cockroach inside the mirror between the silver and glass
The water comes out of the faucet as a sound with no substance
I wash my hands with the evidence of the murder-suicide
I wash off the blood from my hands with different blood
I drink alcohol until I crumble like ashes and also this morning is perfectly still as ivory
Two things of substance whose accumulation is less than they were
My spine and my knees are going to fail in the next few years
And I can never slow down until I shatter
It's like counting the seconds to a minute as it happens
Already losing as you search for the answer
By nature of the way truth self-destroys when in contact with moving systems
A tumor like hardened tree sap between my stomach and my liver
The murder of civilians before dawn near wherever you may read this
Two untruths that should as well be
As so many realities are closer to lies
Rats Alice Trujillo is a poet and sound artist rumored to exist in Seattle Washington. Their research and recent developments have been toward methods of chaos hyperstition, cruelty theater in sound and letters, and apocalyptic ruminations as viewed through anti-dimensional physiology. Their most recent project in development is a poetry book, soon to be, titled "Insurrectionary Auto-Vivisection."