VIVISECTOR

:)

painting I made

He was skinless and so was everything else. Everything hurt. Everything fell apart.

Did he ever have skin? Was he ever whole, and everything else, ideal and real? Time itself would answer his sigh with a shrug; each moment had no skin, each moment cried out. Exposed organs, bleeding all the time, scabs ripped open at any movement and movement itself, skinless, was unyielding, merciless, a rictus smile assembled in the blind spot of his ocular nerves, teeth gnashing endlessly, moving in the breeze and itself the breeze, no skin on the air blanketing every moment with gore.

Blood ran down his face and into his eyes, red smeared across every moment and the moment assured him that he saw him as he truly was through his own filter of bleeding: the truth was bleeding and so was he and so was everything.

It was over as soon as the skin flaked. The moment that blood touched the air and anything beneath the skin was under his gaze, it was over. (He and every one else was born covered in blood.)

The skin fell off so easily, he wondered why it was there at all. A protective organ on nearly every living creature: the armor separating him from his environment, it was held up by nothing and he never saw it except discarded and rotting on the floor. The world rained blood. He never saw something that was not drowning.

He wondered if the skin was an illusion. If nothing was actually bleeding and the blood was actually water: baptismal, every single moment fraught with revelation, blinding light between cracks, a fabric not weaved with pain but warmth, if only he would accept it upon his exposed fascia. And he would become so overwhelmed by this that his eyes would well with tears, natural water, which upon further inspection would leave trails of blood across his face.

The blood was not staunched. The world flooded with blood but there were flashes, fragments of a dream remembered in a dark dawn, when the blood became water and it was more terrifying and paralyzing than the blood. Because if he saw water and not blood: what then? He remained a vivisector, a holy scientist, a pervert. He would say: “we are drowning in blood” or “we are swimming through water” and the bleeders nodded in agreement and pain and the swimmers swam laughing, unfazed.