The skin attempts to contain the overflow of anger, but it is conquered from within, tattooed in swirls of green and navy blue seeping up from the lower dermis. There are pale blue highlighter streaks forming skies and lines connecting fish, arms, feet, and peacocks – all angular and flowing. The explosion, will it ever occur? Or seep quietly from the veins like this. Disposable fountain pens for arteries. Why the color? I thought the Furies turned the world to gray and black. Perhaps some scarlet blood, but not a wild profusion of colors, not a rainbow, or a psychedelic vision brought on by the needle.
The faces are gross blobs of pinkish flesh drifting, and I hate them all. The arms and the knees are also pinkish blobs, but that is what people are. Blobs of flesh. Flesh with bones underneath. Nerve endings everywhere for strumming. I, however, am fading away so that my movements are more and more often perceived as a trick of the light. I don’t eat much anymore. My head is becoming the air. Continuing this way, I cannot hope to live. I cannot – I cannot – I cannot live I cannot live I cannot live I cannot live. No; I cannot live. Vital surroundings of mercurial youth.
The greens are changing, and the purples, and the pale blues as the mighty ocean tosses its head and rumples its hair. The algae-like colonies drift on the waves by night, with crabs scuttling about on top. As I floated on my back, I didn’t notice the shrinking of the coast. Now it is night, and what I thought a land-borne city is merely a microscopic community of seabugs mimicking, in their own limited capacity, the city lights. No matter my efforts, there is no handhold upon the flashing amoeba as it bobs up and down. While the swarming sea creatures wend their ways, mingling, mating, spawning, I swim silently down into the ocean. In the layer below the stars, the bio-luminescent school bustles about its business, and the moon becomes a pale and shivering circle, floating far away.
Where did I come from? Where will I go? The sea holds all the answers, but who can know? So may the moon take me to sandy land on the tide, far from these colonies. There is more to be known than the scribblings of my own convoluted thoughts, but there is also a tattoo on this skin that cannot be erased.