1.
First, robe yourself in funerals.
Fill children’s balloons with the last breaths of loved ones. Construct a soundtrack from the bottom thoughts of all lost. Set the thermometer to nothing. And strap yourself in line for the next black hole.
Okay then.
Now turn, and tip your cap to the flood. Habit yourself to the rising waters. Watch your highest markers be eclipsed from under. Acclimate to the slow waver, to the endless quiet plains.
And sit awhile, just beneath the shallows of what once was you.
Look around. Take stock of your sunken city.
Your drowned Sunday post coitus bagel joint. The small square of grass that framed the unleashed sun and the chatter of birds and cars and old men. Mourn the drifting bodies and knick knacks and street signs that once held a place. That once had a say.
You might find some comfort in the fact that there are no survivors. You might not.
But be sure. It’s only all of everything that’s gone.
2.
Okay now.
Find yourself a great, great fucking mountain. There’s always one somewhere. Imperial, imposing, self assured. Steep as up can be.
Climb it without even thinking about it. Do not prepare.
If there comes no limb or cleft or cranny to purchase the next pull, learn to make do. Weave a ladder from the gutted intestines of your defunct endeavors. Make a rope from your now abandoned sense of fashion. Scale the husks of your once confident hair product hair.
And climb like some bloated, carbon puffed ape. With no world other than the next thing.
Stretch yourself. Let your skin tear from it’s hold. Let yourself spill from your former form.
Until you reach a spot in the sky where the shapes of other things are no longer a shape. Where the cold makes you forget the subtle pucker of words. Makes you forget the reason for names or fingers.
And when you reach this requisite height, where all is small. Pause. Drink in the threadthin air. And delicately reach down and scratch your little name off the face of every damn thing.
3.
At this point you will feel the breath of a companion rage.
Turn toward it. Give it your belly. Befriend it.
Borrow it’s muscle.
To bring a hamfisted end to your squirrel vaults and harbors.
To sing the song of your garden in the better care of another lover.
To heave every solemn granite word you’ve ever muttered into the empty. For the clouds to kick and play.
To release yourself from the work of the earth.
And then to climb.
To climb until your tendons and joints caw like crabby faultlines. To climb until your limbs partition, and there is no thing but pain.
4.
When you reach the topmost tip. Where nothing lives except everything lives that is not us.
Take your fury by its charbroiled hand. Together, discover the proper temperature to boil down mountain. And tamp out a flat from the jags with your fat broken paws.
Snap your bones and stuff your puffer flesh and bent stick veins into the crags and crevices. Make yourself a level plain. A standable thing.
Let yourself be fallen upon. Gorge yourself on everything. Accept all solicitations. Take all comers.
Allow meteors an easy landing, and snack on their crumbles. Swallow unsuspecting flocks of passing wings. Goblin the off- spring of smokestacks and atmospheric tempers. Fatten on the fermented moon.
Goad wind giants into slapping you about from in. Swell a gastric cathedral up and out to the contour of no folds.
Take it all in.
Until your traintrack forcasts a buckle and sway. Until the world has no other path but to crack. To the undeniable weight of you.
5.
You’ll be amazed at how quickly it all caverns. When you give yourself to a proper fall.
The ghosts of periphery will give sermons. On how all things blend together when abandoned.
But as you drift below, don’t be passive in your own down.
Make sure to accept any and all viral or parasitic invitations.
Anchor yourself to the bits of broken altars that punch-line alone.
Tuck in, and draft behind a thousand prayers unanswered.
Kick and punch for no reason. Throw yourself into the dissolve of your curled digits against harder things. Don’t take offense at their ineffectiveness.
Take pride in the fact that we are all made in the unimaginable distance between broken things.
And then hit the bottom of all this. Like you want to wedge your black soul to make the whole of everything two.
Then, and only then, give yourself to darkness.
Sleep a sleep from which you have no assumption of surfaces.
6.
If you wake. Wake to the fire in all things.
Let it take heart and bone. Let it take your slappy skin and broken.
Let the pieces of you billow and plume, and rise far above.
Where they will not dance or satellite. Where they will not shine. Where they will cluster in dull hoards. Will be immobile, and heavy, as though pure ash in a midnight ice.
Say to the sky that it can have it all.
And, again, sleep.
7.
If next you wake. What is left of you will be a single thread.
Then. Find yourself a magnificent tit.
Or dick. Or whatever is your bag. Because sometimes a soul needs a simple reason to rise.
Bend your string limbs to staircases. To fire escapes. Wiggle through the gaps of your subterranean caverns and caves.
And finally come to sun as the floppiest of things.
8.
Promptly steal the skin from rivers. From the sky. From the sinewed immortality of youth.
And roll yourself. Roll yourself over everything that sings. Roll over children at play. Roll over what the old know. Roll over what they don’t.
Roll over carcasses. Roll over eggs. Roll over those that never got the chance to roll.
And when you finally gain a substantial girth. And feel like a creature of proportioned weight. That can poke and stand and speak out loud strings of different words with different meanings.
It’s okay to admire your reflection in puddles and passing streams. It is not vanity, but wonder.
Because you are now a patchwork of others.
Because you are a beautifully dented cluster of psalms.
9.
So spin. So dance. Make your heart beat till it blows.
But. But. Motherfucking but.
If by some faint chance you should once again hear the distant howl of that ravage dog.
Turn to it. Run to it.
Open every suture.
And offer that beast every bone.
fattened paradise. 