Bruise
Taut and beaten like a drum, I find myself worrying about this wall of flesh stretched in its printing to a borderless excess.
I worry that in its regular repetition on these pages some careless machine, who knows nothing of flesh, will run out of its maternal colour and all that will remain is a white expanse marked by the denuded face of a blue-black stain.
At some point it is surely inevitable that all of the pink ink will have been consumed, as all flesh is, and nothing will be left anywhere of all that consumed flesh but the faint smudge of an unlocatable bruise flown from its surface. No, not only a bruise, but a bruise itself marked by the undulations of a regular field of dents that dot an asteroid’s vast landscape. A lone little birthmark asserting itself like the X of a treasure map, holding out a false hope that its lost skin could still be found, that the consumption was not absolute.
Yet that field that bruises the bruise, still personal, perhaps the only personal that remains for us now, would be a mere cover for the ultimate geometry of a finer meshwork: all those triangles, squares and pentagons crammed unbearably together.
As if it were true that everything that is was once built from regular Platonic solids, now pulverised and flattened to uselessness by the push, ever present from behind the page, of the absent yet suffocating too much of the flesh.
Timothy Secret, 2015
