[WHERE DREAMS DIE]

From the top of radiant peaks, I fell back into my pit of perdition surrounded by walls, my wings in ashes spread around me. I saw the last light of day swallowed by a horizon of cinders, and I forgot everything, up to my name. The night air sticks its needles in my skin, my hand is cold but my heart is on fire with vertiginous visions.

 

Trapped in my cell with no door nor windows, drowned in the memory of absent skies, I trace imaginary constellations on the ground. Here, in this ditch where dreams die, where we barely live. Here, in the enclosed hole of howling and bleating beasts, the hell of hunger and hate. I scrape the walls till my fingers bleed but I never dig my way out.

 

Nine are the walls that encircle the centre. Me, locked inside myself, my frail bones badly laid out in a heap of flesh wrapped in white shreds of sinew, blood that rolls and does not stop, and everything disintegrating into a dust of scattered skin. Nine are the thresholds of the psychic body and nine are the wheels of the somatic body. I cut the threads one by one, and nothing ever stops. Somewhere inside, the last wheel has set in motion and is turning like a black sun in a sky of entrails.

 

Black the skies, black the earth, black the eternal hours that separate me from dawn. Up there I was submersed in an ocean of indistinguishable light, down here I am but an emaciated, sick wreck. My substance combines with the substance of the air, I blend in with the walls, I blend in with the dust. With each step I collapse under the weight of passing time, with each step I tear from the pale-skinned rags of what I was a second before. I hit my shapeless face with both fists, my throat scorched with leaden air, my guts in a shrivelled-up heap, my rotten blood in a coagulated mud.

 

Hours and hours, and nights and nights spent imploring all the saints in all the heavens to grace me with a name, and only my voice to answer me in echoes. I can only be what I am: an envelope of pale flesh and a skein of entrails conjoined with burning memories of indescribable light. A blind man, a faceless fool in my prison among all the other faceless fools in their prisons. All the flames suddenly go out and all the wounds close and heal, the world around me begins to breathe and its booming voice can be heard over everything.

 

I ate the black bread and drank the black wine, with my insides heaving in disgust and my soul radiant with joy, I ate and drank until there was nothing left. Finally, I reached the shores of night and fell asleep.

 

There is no flesh but mine and no blood but mine, and all, all, all of you will share it. There is no other voice but mine and you will hear it, once and only once, before you awaken. The fruit has split open and decayed. You are the throng, the echoes of my materialized dream made flesh, the cells of my scattered being. I am one and innumerable, the world exists only through me. The fruit has opened and decayed, three times, three times, three times decayed.