Hotel Fragments

What they call “worms” as the intestinal lining is shed by the drugs, shorn off in long thin strips of flesh, fleshy like bright red leather, flaking to sink, slowly dissolving in the toilet water, into that black void at the bottom of the porcelain bowl. I’m laying on my back and falling as that red overtakes my vision, crawling in from the sides, red strands like angry grass stretching over the receding white light and enveloping darkness as I fall into the pit. “Where am I?” I’m laying on a cold ground and look about me to nowhere, to nothing. “Where am I?” “You know who I am?” He asks. I’ve seen him - no, it. That sigil floating about the spectrezone at the corner of my peripheral always. I draw his face onto the paper and burn it, still doesn’t purge, elusive. It’s laughing and always there. It can’t speak or laugh, has no face but the geometry of its body. It knows me better than anything. “You’re in Hell. What did you expect?” “Where am I?” “You’re in Hell. What did you expect?”

Water flows down clogged gutters to pool in that half of the lawn left to putrefy in stagnant breeding ponds, sidewalk to the door slick in the bellyfat of toads hopping across to the deepgrass on the other side, an ecosystem already birthed in the first views of the lawn where insects feed on the corpse of a stomped-under “this is disgusting!” as the neighbor lashed against the blight. A couch rots to soil substratum growing in the carpet culturing mycelium while he takes another hit off the joint and shuts his eyes into the moss and moldstained wallpaper melting to birdfeed and ratchew. “Spread it, spread it” offal and cereal byproducts spread on the ground for the mouths of the earth. I’ve seen spontaneous generation firsthand in this house - carbon upon carbon was yoked to dead matter and he took it as his mission to return it, to turn dead matter transformed into putrid matter, composting the impossible one by one. There’s a careful balance to be kept, to manage pestilence without