Blue Pages — RRRAINNN Special 10 — James Knight

. . .

Subject/Object: Wristwatch

We all carry skulls on our wrists. Their clicking teeth tell us things we don’t want to hear. But we love their faces, kissing them whenever no one’s looking. The shadows are deepest at the bottom of the sea. An urgent need to swim or piss. Fireflies infest the buildings’ bones: that’s how Guy Fawkes makes nuclear fission. An orange caress sweeps across California and we’re all tweet tweet tweet. If you stop and listen, you should be able to hear the poem announcing your death, just behind the windows and sparrows and daydreams. The lightest splash makes me sneeze. We inoculated ourselves against grains of sand and, as a consequence, our immune systems are in revolt. My back looks like Paris in the rain. My feet are stuck together. My hands are noxious liquids imported from Russia. The search continues. I don’t know what you’re talking about; your words have turned inside-out or perhaps upside-down. You might as well stop trying to teach me the seasons, the months, the planets. Pizza makes a good face. You’re best off breathing in cinemas, where the air is purer and there’s no such thing as day and it’s always night.








Belief

A belief is 1.4 - 1.9 metres long, slightly larger than a wish. The head and arms are dull grey, the scalp grows long white hair and the abdomen is cobalt blue with black markings, often in the form of Cyrillic script. Its body and legs are covered with nerve wires. The eyes are red and the wings are transparent. The chest is bright purple and bristles with spikes to protect itself from other entities.

A belief typically lays its eggs where it feeds, usually in decaying meat, books, or feces. Pale fingers soon hatch from the eggs and immediately begin feeding on stone carcasses and on the decomposing matter where they were hatched. After a few days of feeding, they are murderous and despairing. At that time they will crawl away to a metallic place where they can burrow into rust or similar matter to pupate into leathery sacks. After two or three centuries, the adults emerge (in the form of horses, thunder or agony) to mate, beginning the cycle again.

James Knight

* These two prose poems are from a recently-completed long cycle entitled Red Clock

James Knight is an experimental poet and digital artist. Void Voices was published by Hesterglock Press in 2018. Website: thebirdking.com. Twitter: @badbadpoet