The capacity to kill is universal
Feel it pulsate:
Pumping bloodswells from Hell
In the heart’s infernal forge
A single source
For the metamorphic ores of Love
Synaptic forests
Doused in sunbeams
From celestial wellsprings
The urge to kill
Travels congruent ventricles
Guzzles the good blood
Like a leech
Engorges mortal wounds & affirms
The universe’s fatal instruments
In the past, we would flee
From ourselves
Into wild woods & wilderness
To escape decay & madness
Now the world conceives itself
In pixelated projections
A slot machine nervous system:
Wasteland of mirrors, twisted tongues,
Desiccated vampires
The portions beyond conceiving—
The force behind the forces
That beat our hearts and breathe
That mysterious surplus something
Converting flailing to commitment
Absence to stomach churning
Flitting eyes to flirting
Piss & shit & death to comedy—
It quivers in your lips before a kiss
It smells like cold stone
A second before the thunder
A mesh of meanings in the clouds
It cracks the sunset to a liquid jewel
To a prism of haloes
Inhaled by the moon
Ignites my loins with the need to breed
Like a screwdriver stabbing valleys
Through my brain
What contains the cosmos
Hidden in the open
Evergiving & engulfing
— Logan Berry is the author of several books, including Ultratheatre: Volume 1 (11:11 Press) and Doom is the House Without a Door (Inside the Castle). He’s a playwright and theatre director. He lives in Chicago.
header image from Ariadne, by Jacky Connolly