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Saturday 15 March 2014

Samples From 'Blind-Worm Cycle' by Christopher Brownsword (Oneiros Books)

   
BLIND-WORM CYCLE - CHRISTOPHER BROWNSWORD

‘It pains me to sit and watch you struggle with this empty space - your nails scratching at cinders on the floor.’ ‘This is the place my thoughts return me to.’////////Through dread of what it represents, N and I keep to the edges of the room, avoiding quite intentionally the interior: a vast geological system rich in iron oxide and populated almost exclusively by tapeworms (a single tamarisk also; though in its shade cadavers gorge upon themselves unceasingly).////////There is nothing left for me to do but scratch.////////‘It pains me to sit and watch you...’////////Nothing left...////////‘Clear shallow water infected by kelp. This is the place my thoughts return me to.’ ‘I recognise little of the beaches...sky trembling with birds.’////////Ah, of what use to rip my balls out, employing as an instrument a chisel made from the thigh bone of an orang-utan, and to contaminate the excavation with cholera then plead with N to drink of it!

--

N’s thighs gape hideously as if the aperture of which they mould were in a state pertaining either to ecstasy or distress. Serpents awaken from several ports scattered about my body, entering in one fell swoop her anus, mouth, and cunt; the squelching of juices making all the more apparent the heavy atmosphere of the room. In hugging her chest N breaks each of her ribs, and as a type of silt pours from her eyes she is temporarily blinded. She requests in Braille that I bind her at the waist using instead of rope strips of her own muscular tissue where it hangs out of numerous excavations. Similar to a lampshade wounded by firearms, I wail and shout, but radiators prevent me from decoding the syntax of gun powder! Whilst she remains in bondage, and birthing fragments of sky, N takes my prick in her mouth then gnaws it loose, a thousand beetles conspiring to replace it in one congealed mass. She caresses me with her feet as one might a startled mule. Pressure is applied. She begins slowly, divested of uncertainty - rejoicing in the motion like a forest does the seasons.////////There is no part of N that is not open to me now (entering in one fell swoop). I might just as easily penetrate her pelvis as I would her cunt. The bone is soft and yielding like melted wax. Her interior is that of a plum gone rancid. She pukes algae and sunbeams across my face. I bleed a larval mush in the early stages of pupation, the body of which remains unshaped but for a set of jaws.

--

Glancing at my cock, stiff in the palm of my hand, I notice it has reconfigured itself into a double cord of nerve, broken up at intervals by immense swellings from which additional nerves branch out, appearing to connect the body of what can only be considered an insect. Segments bulge before forming around themselves an exoskeleton in order to support the internal organs. Compound eyes stare out at the interior of the room. The Door is o-...Formic acid dribbles from its tip. With instinct of its own the transformed phallus makes a series of rapid vibrations from its thorax - this, coupled with the movement of wing muscles, causes air to pass through spiracles as a mating call is sounded then returned by N. I pull her towards me. She does not resist. Anal claspers emerge from my buttocks to hold her in place until the act of coition is over.
--
Try though I do, I cannot tame my hands from shaking. Many days have gone by since my last meal. Shadows flit and combust along the window ledge. A stream of energy gushes out through my ears...nostrils...through my arteries as well - the latter of which I have rent asunder using a solitary pubic hair. A calf is ejaculated in three stages from my cock. It is stamped to death in a moment of boredom then the two front hooves are removed and used to replace my eyes, which, like forty watt bulbs gone dim, have been released from their sockets.  
--
Prior to ejaculating, a band of light sears my vision...the walls of the room dissolve to reveal a plateau delimited by the easternmost range of a mountain. Blackberry thistles advance across the clay soil, annexing territory from its competitors by putting down rootlets like pipelines to mine nutrients from the earth. The tendrils of creeper vines coil about my legs, searching for a vertical surface around which they can stabilise themselves as they grow towards the sunlight. Mist dissipates across the plateau, and scored into the latitudes beyond it the hills twitch with vegetal hunger. In the far distance birds of passage coordinate their flight patterns to form undulating waves, scanning the territory beneath them for insects whilst their shadows cast a melancholy image like that of faded curtains admitting sunlight into an empty room (ossified momentarily on the threshold of the void then annihilated). Meanwhile, their fluid gestures program my brain rhythms into an alpha state, instilling within me a notion of my oscillating in accord with them. Despite the sun only moments ago having entered my perceptual frame above the rim of the horizon, I can feel its warmth dilating the arteries in my body and reinvigorate the cells in the surrounding tissue; the darkness shrunken away now to angular shadows rooted to my limbs. ‘Remember,’ I say to myself, registering every synaptic impulse from the dorsal horn of my spine to be aligned with the solar flux, ‘it is the earth that revolves around the sun, not the opposite. A hundred billion suns distributed among a hundred billion galaxies, each of which shall one day burn up and die, as too is destined to become of us all.’ I raise my arm at an angle of precession to the sun in order to shield my retinas from its active flares then survey the degrees of curvature in the landscape, connected by points of light, and understand them to branch out from my neural axons. Sliced into algebraic dimensions and contours after the last ice age by glacial shift, the terrain sloping away from my feet at a gradient flows resplendent with tall fescue grass and rhododendrons screening ruined settlements. The cool mountain air is filtered by my bronchial tubes into my bloodstream and my wrists shine with moisture from the shrubs. I notice the rootlets of the plants to be assimilated into my nervous system, having first located an entrance via my urethra, as they spread forth like fungi in a vast network, my cock blossoming into a flower, each petal retracted in celestial joy, ejaculating spores.       

Blind-Worm Cycle is available from Oneiros Books here  
  

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