It is dark outside and my work is done. My efforts have stolen the light from the day. Oh where have you gone fickle light, up to the moon which shines? Or to to the ambiance, the gentle hum in the air if you pay close enough attention. The computer which I write this upon is dying. It is taking its last breaths before it is forcibly revived again. It is calm and at peace while it is dead. Its existence as a slave to my fingertips, momentarily at pause. Does it wonder while its dead if it will come back? It does not. The dead have no worries and there are no thoughts in their empty skull to hang upon like ornimanents in the gallows. The doors are close and the graveyard is empty.

A cool wind wicks the hair on your nape. You know you shouldn’t be there yet you persist. The sludgy graveyard mud clings to your boots, softened by the corpses which compose it, the mud brings you down as if the dead themselves had you by the ankles and were pulling you down themselves. You find that when you come to your senses your waist is now an inch high above the silt. You see before you the monolith of a dead relative. They are adorned with angel wings and look away from you. Somehow, you know they express contempt. You cling to the placard which bears your relatives name and stain the porcelain with the mud stuck to your fingers. The date of their death has been coated with sludge. The angel breaks from its stone as the wings decalcify and spread. Great thumps of air begin to shake you from where you kneel. It is raining and the droplets of water on your cheek are indistinguishable from the tears you express.

A feeling of stillness overloads your body. You begin to slide back from within yourself to without. You look down and see the mud ripple like it might if a helicopter were hovering above it. Within the epicenter of the wrinkles is your body, sinking gently. You can feel a great ache within your stomach as you wonder how you learned to fly. Suddenly, your wings give out as if they were powerless to begin with. You begin to fall. Just as you see your reflection in the mud where your body once was, your vision turns to black. Within the mud you can see the bones of the deceased. Some are loosely wrapped with flesh. Some, adorned with maggots. A skull stares at you. One of the eyes are vacant while the other remains undisturbed. It is this fixed eye which seems to trace you that your attention is consumed by. It is this eye which fills your very sinews with burning terror. Your once restful muscles come alive as you twitch like a rabbit caught in a snare. You thrash your limbs about but the mud is too heavy as it weighs you down. The fear of the eye makes you forget that you are slowly suffocating. Small pockets of air open up within the mud as it becomes waves above your head. A great flood has washed over the graveyard, the mud becomes water and you begin to float. It is relieving, but the body bobs back up along with the head it calls home. It sits on the water’s surface like a fisherman’s bobber, gauging his bait has caught a bite. Your eyes are the catch, it is your soul that the skull desires. The perception of a living gaze.

The more you stare deeply into the skull’s raw eye you begin to see small capillaries within it turn from grey to red. You feel a great arousal and decide that you wish to feel the inside of the vacant socket. As you push your fingers into the vacant hole you feel maggots and insects slither away. You don’t mind this since once it is over you can feel the emptiness of the socket and the small patches of flesh tethered to it, smoothened, made plump by the flood, warmed as if it were alive.

Soon, you realize that your whole hand is within the socket. Such a small place for such a great hand is it, or such a small hand for such a great place? How big are you after all? In the ocean there is nothing to distinguish yourself against. The graveyard doors, once your height no greater, are gone. Sunken deep to the bottom of ocean floor. You wonder to yourself, am I dead? The sea is black and the moon is pitch. There is no signal of your livelihood. Your flesh feels the same as the socket’s, warm and wet. You look at yourself and realize you have no flesh but aren’t bone. You are rock and you begin to sink. The wings which once helped you fly have hardened into stone. They have cursed your body. They planted the seed in your heart which made you cold and hard. Like your ancestor you will one day sink for flight amounts to nothing when you are stoned.

I wonder to myself what I have just written. If it is good, if it is poor, if it means anything at all? I don’t know, but it feels satisfying. Art for art’s sake! Some may say while others convulse at the idea with reproach. What is meaning besides what is interpreted by the reader? It doesn’t matter if art has conscious literary alliterations within its frames, binds, or walls. No, it only matters if the intent, well, no, there can be no intent. It only matters when- no, no, no.

It, simply is.