Holy Moses

You don't know what it cost me. On the seaside, as children, where the seaweed was our skin, sloughed off of some unknowable shuddering form, all-knowing, all-consuming. The eyes would collapse, sightless, leak out their seeing-fluid, deflate like balloons.

The living have such plump eyes.

Underneath the skin is sawdust, blood ringing as it flows. The eyes would leak, and we would replace the form of them with pebbles from the ditch and from underneath the briar, pebbles underneath the lids, closed, seeing as the earth sees, smelling far stronger, like the rain.

We would claw in with our teeth, and gnash, and mash, rend and tear. A spoon is enough to cut into the flesh, when the body has been deflating long enough. One could almost dip into it like serbet.

The air itself was of some great significance, 

and the children would always act like grown-ups, and the grown-ups wouldn't know children, blank uncomprehending like a dog left to ripen in the sun. We would meet only strangers, just as ancient as we were, just as corrupted. We could blame something, at least.

Pebbles in the eyes, sand in the teeth, sawdust in their bottoms, overflowing, leaking the putrid black smell.

He looked at me, surprised perhaps, 

his hands long, like a clock's.

There isn't enough time to say what I wish, 

always HURRY UP LEASE IT'S TIME. Hollow in voice, like our chest cavities were full of holes, more spacious than could fit, larger on the in that on the out, and peering right through, like the crawling sawdust was sun-yellowed maggots. He smiled, and his teeth slid past one another, an infinite row on an endless tread, hidden behind the lips.

Leave anything still long enough and it stagnates. Water, blood, bile, childhood.

Reaching out to it, on an endless beach, but the fog clings to the air, clings to the borders of consciousness and reality, and the beach isn't endless after all, can't be endless, the fog is too thick, too definite, definite of borders, if you can't see it then it's not real, and on this beach you can see nothing; the borders define the shape of your universe, though you reach out to it, reach to your childhood.

And I remember a song:

Holy Moses. Holy Moses.

I'm the handsomest, cleverest, smartest.
My hair is perfectly coiffed.
At my birthday, how the other children leer and wish to be me!
The grown-ups, too, are jealous of me
of my perfect teeth and skin and hair and fingernails and lips and eyeballs and clothing and sawdust and fat and lymph and blood.
There is none more powerful than I.
Look at me! Look at me and marvel, and covet!
Look at me and despair.
Moses on a pogo stick.