Treatise on Asphyxia

I do not implore.

I prostrate myself through a sepulchral automatism,
as though the skeleton—indoctrinated in abolished rites—
persisted in declining itself
before a numen already extinct.

It is the fifth hour
and the silence, far from inert,
suppurates—
a surreptitious respiration,
an organic vapor clinging to the walls,
spectral sweat.

Something unseen, uninvoked
leans behind me.

Its vigil encircles me
like an inverted prayer.

Blind,
not through absence of light
but through excess of imposed faith,
I reiterate in murmurs the formulas you demand,
while you,
officiant of a degenerate cult,
consecrate—with corrupted tenderness—
this slow anthropophagy of the soul
beneath the sacrilegious name of love.

You assure my protection
and yet,
your hands—liturgical, violent—
proclaim the unspeakable.

Articulate.
Tear the veil from your reticence.

What entity am I
within your architecture of dominion?

Ductile matter,
docile beneath the torsion of your whim,
or an ominous axiom
your consciousness refuses to integrate
without fracturing?

You keep me in penumbra,
as though I had requested
this abjection.

But beneath your voice,
within its interstices,
another shriek palpitates—
more abyssal than my own.

Do not seal my mouth.

Even within the ritual asphyxiation of your hands
I shall erect my clamor,
though I must splinter my teeth
against the splint of your power.

You are no deity.
Not even human.

You name as love
the invisible garrote constricting my breath,
as though subjugation
were the grammar of affection.

What do you demand of me?
Why do you not flee?

You observe me
as one observes a vestige already deceased,
yet when the night coagulates within your pupils
and silence entombs you
in its mineral density,
answer—

what specter do you incubate
within the crypt of your intention?

I walk upon vitreous fragments
to verify my own persistence.

My tongue—
I pierce it, immobilize it
within its prison of flesh,
lest it pronounce your name
with reverence.

And still, you persist:
intrusive, incisive,
more glacial, more veridical
than any form you assumed.

You erected me as a clandestine relic,
as a polished error,
as an artifice of your imposture.

You invested me with guilt
and named it obedience.

But now
I am the caries hollowing your structure,
the larva within the heart of your marble.

Why does your spirit not tremble now?

I have learned you:
every fissure,
every mechanism,
every violence
with which you disarticulated me.

You longed for the meager,
the meek,
the inaudible—
yet within the most abyssal region of the imposed
there germinated
a dentition.

Everything collapses.
Do you perceive it?

Every fabricated perfection you erected
shudders,
prey to its own ruin.

You buried one form of me
beneath the certainty of its non-return
and yet,
it returns.

With your voice
embedded in its trachea,
and your name
suppurating upon its lips.

I do not long for my extinction.

I long for the annihilation of the system that names me:

every mandate,
every invisible hematoma,
every silence
inoculated into my throat.

Do not touch me,
for even beneath your occlusion
my exclamation shall persist.

You were never god,
only a feverish parody of the absolute.

Your love:
delayed, hollow, inviable,
for I have been reconfigured
from each of your devastations.

And when you finally succumb to sleep,
when silence acquires funerary density,
there I shall be.

Not as memory,
nor as guilt,
but as the irrevocable materialization
of that
which you shall never
bury.