ribs or support beams crack and collapse. apathy stabs indignantly at the foundation, causing the chest or church to decay. swiftly, softly, her contorted face pulls into itself, and like stone hitting a tarp she dangles down and meets the tile softly, warmly, angrily. her breath the dust that erupts from the wreckage, her voice the sound of twisting snapping metal; her eyes gleam like flies, irradescent on feces. i pull my pencil down her spine drawing a line to bisect her bruised brittle form. she stands as sand to compose my hourglass, she floats like phlegm on a rainpuddle's surface. i feel the stabbing sensation of photons on rods, my eyes perceive this empty room to be empty of even myself. my feet pound in a rhythm on the ground, composing a sound to bring paint from canisters balanced precariously on the razor-wall's edge. callously, carelessly, i carve my creation ruthlessly into her flesh-woven, concrete back. what soon will come is the realization that this paint this pain this pen is hallucination, and the stars are fragments of chipped glass cast like sparks from a pickaxe's pounding. the moon is a cumstain on the oil-soiled sky. the earth is a pimple soon to pop her pus. we are bacteria trying to sustain our relevance in irrelevance, our empathy in this apathy, her hair covers our face and suffocates us. life bled new or life scaled down, life craves newness but scales itself down to a pattern of repetitive, redundant events, to a sting on the lips in a sliced-mouth kiss. but all of this is irrelevant, all of this is arrogant, all of this is ignorantly asking to be celebrated. all of this is shell to bind the liquid that is soon to find its way out through a fissure, ruptured tissue, bleeding blemish.