(pay me no mind)

cpac isn't real company, can't rub my back, kiss my forehead, keep me calm. i am willing peter mansbridge to whisper plesantries and make promises through the television, but he's playing hard to get. they asked me about it once in an office without windows, put a checkmark on a page and wrote me a script. dialogue. i can hear the sound of cars and footsteps on the street below my window but no one is stopping. the apartment seems to be getting warmer, the ceiling seems to be sinking. seems, seems, seems. there are fruit flies interfering with my oranges. do they have teeth? my mother is too busy marking to speak to me about the budget. i can't figure out the cost of a gun, forget things. colander. i've had to start chewing on an olive pit, to spare what's left of my yellowed fingers. i am sculpting sentences like carboard cubes. subject-verb-object original. as the applause fade, i turn to my mirrored wall only to discover that there is blood running from my ears, picasso. i can feel it flirting with my skin. the living room is beginning to flood, liquid crawling up the doorframes like the pencilmark prints of a growing child to the sound of bach's sixth suite for unaccompanied cello. the blood is thickening like an exotic pan sauce, heated by the building which has begun burn. every hurtful word i've ever heard is swimming toward me at breakneck speed with hungry teeth. i am pale and quickly becoming paler. my hair is falling into the soup. the dark circles under my eyes are eating away at my skin and ambition. in the corner of the room, my dead hamster is singing me a twisted birthday tune. i miss him and his woodchip smell. i miss the sleep, the tired beat of a proper life drum. shhhhhhhhhhh, child. drown me in a river that remembers the taste of winter, please. leave me peaceful against the watersmoothed rocks.