Black Holes Whispering in Tongues

Author: A. Neil

  • Itchy Nose

    I am cuffed to the bed again, good. I no longer trust my hands, not after what happened to my sister, that’s what they tell me about. I don’t remember doing that. But her broken bones and missing teeth don’t lie.

    The fluorescent lights hum like insects trapped in glass, I sniff again, out of habit. The air smells like something is rotting right under my nose. I know he’s here, again. I squeeze my eyes shut trying to deny it’s real, telling myself it’s just my brain playing tricks, but the whispering starts. I can hear “She’s pretty, isn’t she?”

    As my eyelids fly open, I see this young lady, curly hair, dark eyes. Probably a student. She sits across from me. Flipping through my chart she doesn’t hear it. Of course she doesn’t.

    “Pretty things break so easy,” the voice murmurs, slithering up from the base of my skull. Stop. I bite down my own tongue until I taste blood, the pain helps, sometimes. She looks up and asks, “Can you tell me what you’re feeling right now?”. I swallow hard, I don’t tell her. They will pump me more pills, more needles.

    The voice laughs, a wet gurgling sound right inside my ear. “Tell her the truth. Tell her you want to peel her skill off and see her head on a skewer” It laughs hysterically now. “SHUT UP” I had to scream before I could stop myself, she flinched in front of me and the guard by the door tenses. I force a breath. “Not you” I mutter. “Him”.

    She asked who… I sniffed again and the stench is worse now. Sulfur, Decay. “The Devil” I reply. I explain to her he’s trying to crawl inside me through my nose. I see her writing something down. “Delusional, probably. Paranoid Schizophrenic. “She doesn’t believe you.” the voice coos. “But I surely do”.

    My nostrils flare. Something moves inside them a wriggling, itching pressure. I thrash the cuffs. “Get out!” I roar, shaking my head like a dog with a rat in its teeth. “Get out!” The doctor stands, backing toward the door. “I think we’re done for today.” She doesn’t seem scared, but I know she is. The voice tells me she’s religious somehow. The Door Clicks shut, I am alone, except I’m not.

    The itching spread deeper, into my sinuses, my throat. I gag. “Almost in,” the voice whispers. It won’t give up.

    The Next day another doctor comes in, an older one. I knew she wasn’t coming back. She doesn’t have good memories of this place. I know, because the devil knows. And this time he starts questioning this demon. “What is his voice like?” “How do you see him, he has a color?”. When he asks me “Why the nose” I just tell him that evil never knocks, it just invites itself in.

    I start telling him things about my past. Fragments that brought me here, now. Now the walls are sweating in heat. The restraint cut deeper each time he jerks against them. The Memories come like poisonous stings

    “First the hammered the pulpit. Spittle flew from his lips like holy water. THE DEMONS DON’T HAUNT THE RIGHTEOUS! The prey on the weak, THE DOUBTERS! I was twelve and I was picking scabs from my forearm where the visions made me hurt myself. I hear my mother crying as she sees my sores bleeding again. The pastors continues… “IF EVIL TOUCHS, ASK YOURSELF: WHY DID YOU LET IT IN?”. The Nose was already itching. The Congregation’s Amens vibrated into my bones, my teeth. That night, I pressed a stolen crucifix to my forehead until I could feel the blood running through my eyes, maybe if I bled enough, the voices would drown.

    I can hear his pen scratching the paper like a cockroach inside dead tissue.

    He wants to know when I felt him for the first time. I smile with split lips, he doesn’t want the real answer. The truth writhes under my skin like a nest of rabid serpents. When the pastor asked who let Satan in our church everyone looked at me. I can see him humming “Religious Trauma”. He doesn’t know that every time I close my eyes, I see the choir’s hymns curdling into despair as I pray.

    A Perpetual Motion Latrine I say. The Confessional Booth, the rotten wood smell and the pastor’s breath through the lattice saying that normal boys don’t see the devil. After that day, I was terrified and started sneaking into the church during the night so I could feel protected. I wasn’t. Why god chose me to fight all evils on this world? Is god such a coward?

    All I know, this place is my tomb. No matter how hard I pray, I am still cuffed to this bed. I have finally found the devil inside and now I even recognize his voice. He’s now more present than jesus ever was in my life. Haven’t I believed enough? Why do I see only the devil and not god? Why am here stuck with bleeding nostrils? When I had finally felt the holy presence, I saw wounds on my feet and wrists and last thing I remember was my sister’s body, unconscious and my family screaming. I am the deaf and mute spirit. I feel like a pig that needs to drown. I am the torment of King Saul. Let me pray until I am no more.

  • Aeon Reflux

    In the beginning of (or was it the end?), god convulsed. A Spasm tore through the infinite a divine retching erupted from his mouth: A flood with half-form realities, unborn universes the matter that became consciousness itself. It was not light, nor word but disease, a seething awareness that pooled in the void like tar. The angels, who had known only worship stared into the abyss formed by his regurgitation. They became hungry.

    The Seraphic Devouring had commenced. Seraphiel swallowed justice and grew rigid as a sword. Jehoel gulped mercy and choked on its sweetness. Uriel feasted on wrath and burst into laughing fire.

    But was god’s everlasting breath a curse or a gift? The puke of consciousness fermented inside them. The angels drunk on violated sanctity, started hallucinating and their visions became the world.

    Now, mortals walk the crust of a celestial corpse and their souls flicker with angelical nausea. The prophets are nothing but the feces of their communion. Some say god’s empty eye sockets still howl between unspeakable landscapes.

    What Dark is This I, 1987. 198 x 127 cm [77.9 x 50in] . Oil and Sand on Canvas. PAUL BENNEY

  • Dead Water I

    But what is this thing that pulses inside me and asks for more? More than the already-given, more than the now, more than the ripe fruit that falls heavy on my hand. Should I bite it? Should I let the juice run down my chin? Or should I Wait, motionless, until it rots and returns to the earth?

    I still move, but why move? The world is already here, complete in its unfinishedness. Every step forward is a betrayal of the present moment, a refusal to bow before the altar of what simply is. And yet, I keep moving. Because stillness is also Death, sort of. The Unshaken tree will never know the ecstasy of the wind.

    Is the universe disturbed by my existence? By this breath that enters and leaves without permission, I am a question that no longer looks for an answer, I am simply a wound that bleeds and doesn’t care why it’s being reopened over and over.

    Perhaps there is no forward, only the illusion of it. Perhaps there’s only this: The unbearable lightness of being, the weight of the spoken, terror and glory of the present moment that we struggle to capture but it always slips away.

    So I move because I am alive (allegedly). Life is a verb that refuses to sit still. Even if moving is madness, even if staying is madness. The choice itself is the thing that devours me – and let it. I let it.

  • Surge of Panurge

    I keep my books on my nightstand: The complete works of François Rabelais. dog-eared and stained with wine, and a leather-bound notebook where I recorded my own gargantuan tales, written not in ink, but in the unraveled bowels my festering jokes. I Adored Panurge – That drunken, cowardly, cunning rogue from Gargantua and Pantagruel – Not as character but as method. I often whisper to myself “Life is a farce” chuckling as I sharpen my knifes with theatrical flourish. “I am his most devoted Jester”.

    I Recall my first act (some called it murder). But I couldn’t stop thinking about Panurge’s revenge on Dindenault, the merchant. I saw this pompous Wallstreet Broker which had been swindling retirees. I Dressed as a shepherd and greeted the man at a deserted garage (corny, in know) and carried on: “Tell me, monsieur,” he grinned, “if you were a sheep, would you prefer to be sold… or drowned?” Before the man could answer, I rammed him into a trough of freezing water, holding him under while singing a 16th-century drinking song. As the man thrashed, I leaned in: “Panurge drowned a man for pride. I drown you for tedium.” I left the corpse dressed in a sodden wool suit, a price tag stapled to its forehead: “Sold for 30 pieces of silver (plus tax).”

    I’ve always wondered about ethics, especially on murder cases I was not connected to. Morality is so relative, so vague. There was this teacher lecturing on “Ethics of Desire” which caught my attention, so I invited him to dinner so I could lecture him, with rancid meat and sour wine. “Let us Debate” I declared, carving into his abdomen. His Screams were the sound of morality being translated into Pain. “Professor, you argue about morality, but it is so relative, is this wrong? I mean, your suffering?”. I had this Hannibal impetus, so fed him his liver roasted with thyme. It was horrible (for him). Panurge consulted oracles for answers, I mused wiping the teacher’s mouth. You? You’ll digest yours. I stopped in contemplation observing the body sitting by the table with a quill jammed into his trachea, scribbling nonsense in blood on parchment. Poetic, it was.

    Panurge’s Mask as my last joke. I never enjoyed the misogynistic jests from Rabelais, but I understand it was because of the time they lived in. Although, I’ve been fantasizing about a silent wife. Propping her against a mirror so she could read the verses written on her skin. Her Lips shut with catgut strings, dangling from wires like a marionette. Finally flayed by the blade of irony and hung with the rope of inevitability. “Rire est le propre de l’homme.”

    Finally, they will call a Monster. How Droll. Monsters are bound by myth, by morality, by the crude chains of meaning. But I? I danced in the pure, unfettered delirium of the absurd. I have worn human skin as Panurge wore his motley – Not as disguise, but as parody. And yes, how gloriously the world played its part! Do you hear it now? The Laughter? Not Mine – Yours! It festers in your marrow, in the quiet hours when you wonder if my crimes were not crimes at all, but a truth too vicious to speak aloud. That’s my final gift to you: The delicious, unscratchable itch of doubt.

  • Hissing Woe

    The mirror grins first, needle, teeth,
    You are already dead and drowned in lies,
    You just forgot to stop breathing

    I press my forehead against the mirror,
    (Cold like the barrel of dad’s gun)
    Two skulls now, mine and yours,
    The one that whispers… Do it! DO IT!
    Whose voice? Mine Theirs? Does it even matter now?

    The Razor winks from the sink
    A straight line it promises
    Blue is no longer the warmest color
    Red is the only one that stays,
    (I test on my thumb – the blood beads)
    Like tears, but thicker, honest.

    I hear the walls breathing,
    (in, out, in, out)
    They are laughing, the mirror corrects,
    Everyone is laughing
    (I hear them now – Neighbors, nurses
    The girl who left years ago
    He giggles stuck on the blades).

    I could paint the tiles
    White to crimson, clean to chaos
    Arterial Entropy it’s art the razor insists
    The Last thing you’ll make that means something
    (The Water is still running – how long until it floods?
    How Long until the screams drown?)

    A shadow hits the window
    (but this time I don’t look)
    I let it die
    Nothing stays the mirror sighs
    Nothing ever stays,

    It fits my hand like a key
    Finally whispers the other me,
    Open the door.

  • The Ophidian Eucharist

    In the rotting heart of this world, where the church bells had long since rusted into mute hulks, a woman bled out her grief into dirt. They thought It was dead, a whisper could be heard from someone else in the room, but she wasn’t interested. The village barely fed the living, let alone another dying mouth. The tiny form was buried into another unmarked grave, no shrine, no epitaph: orthotanasia they say.

              That night, a cry was heard, and it wasn’t from the mother, it wasn’t from the field. It was her womb. She clawed at her hollow belly, screaming as something rippled beneath her skin, not a kick but a nail, and teeth. Dragging inward toward her spine, the pain split her vision and for a moment she saw a pulsing wound and something eyeless pushing from the other side. Then it was gone.

    The Next morning a corpse was found kneeling in the confessional, it was the Village’s father, his eyes were missing, and the ribs were burst outward like a grotesque nest, the villagers gathered around, then harvested his remains for meat. But the hunger remained. Also, no one spoke about the tiny bite marks inside his collarbone.

    The woman looked down, umbilical veins had grown from her ankles into the soil rooting her to the dead field, the shallow graves were breathing. She had a vision of a choir of stillborn cherubins, their wings were stitched from placenta and human remains. Something unholy was uncoiling from those grounds. Her recently buried child was hovering the ground and from its bleeding mouth a rift started opening.

    A Hymn of Hollow wombs: It wasn’t buried deep enough. One by one the villagers started puking their own unborn. Decades of miscarriages, misery and hunger now were back into this world squirming alive on the dirt. They crawled toward the rift; their fused spines formed a ladder. The woman’s skin split as her missing womb partially regenerated, now a gate of putrid tissue. Inside, she felt the thing that had been her breed pulling both realms apart like burning curtains.

     The Last thing she saw before the village started bursting into formless flesh was her own hands, knitting a new flesh door over the rift. It was saying: “Do Not Mourn the Dead, Mourn the Never Born, They Remember, They are Coming.”

    She Started praying but not with words as from their eyes, viscous, hissing things started dripping. People who still had tongues started screaming something like Latin but backwards, slithering out between their teeth. Her eyes burst, not with tears, but with serpents. The final miscarriage, a titanic worm with a thousand infant mouths, peeled raw and screaming bound in umbilical chains.

    Her Jaw Unhinged; the throat became a tunnel to the rift. She tried screaming, but the sound hatched into swarm of winged beasts. They carried her final plea to the ruins of heaven: “Please, forgive me”. As Heaven’s regurgitated back a single, calcinated stillborn cherub folded into a noose. She cradled it into her waiting arms.

    It bit her, poisoning her senses. And now there lies the mother of gates and her womb as thresholds. Her tears the key, turn away. Her body turned into serpent’s nest, even god’s answer becomes an abomination. Her heartbeat was replaced by the sound of hatching eggs. Now something prays back, now using her voice.

  • Stavrogin’s Dialog

    Swing, oh Pendulum of shame, life betrayed, the soul aflame.
    Was it pride or hollow spite?
    What made you kiss the devil’s light?
    I Fucked god and buried the sun, inhaled the void just for fun

    There was only the Rope’s Embrace and its ultimate hope, no grandstand, no storming booth, just a coward’s kick and chair that sways in the darkness. Were you weeping or laughing? Who can say?

    Was it her? The girl you broke.
    No, just boredom’s joke.
    The Blood you Spilled?
    A Yawn fulfilled,

    We can hear the crowd cheering your fall,
    Not from hate, they are bored like all,
    You thought you’d burn the world to see?
    But Ashes Tastes Like apathy!

    No Demons Came, no Angels wept,
    It was only silence and the joke you kept,
    There was no eternal punishment, you chose the rope,
    There was no sin, you died with no hope

  • The Ascension of Betelgeuse

    I – Welcoming the Crimson Dawn

    The first sign was the bleeding sky. Betelgeuse, in the raging heart of Orion, had pulsed for millennia, a dying god exhaling its final breaths into the void. Then, it expanded. Not gradually, as stars do in their death throes, but hungrily, stretching tendrils of scarlet light across the cosmos like a waking Leviathan. Despite all human despair and incredulity, the star was moving. And yet, there it was… swelling, approaching. By the time we realized, it was already too late.  

    II – The Swallowing

    The oceans boiled first. A tide of blood-red light washed over the planet, searing the atmosphere into a swirling vortex of plasma. The seas erupted into steam, revealing the cracked abyssal plains below. Mountains melted like wax under a candle’s flame. Then, the voice. It was not a sound, but a quake in the cells of every living thing, a whisper older than time itself: “You are now the sacrifice that will cleanse the cosmos.” The sky split open. Betelgeuse unhinged, not as a star, but as a maw. A chasm of teeth (were those teeth?) wider than the solar system, yawned above Earth. 

    III – The Tide

    The Earth did not simply burn; it dissolved into a river of molten flesh and souls, sucked into the star’s gullet like nectar. Human blood, billions of gallons of it,evaporated into a crimson mist that swirled into Betelgeuse’s core. And the star drank. With every drop, its light grew brighter, and its hunger grew more insatiable. Across the galaxy, other stars flickered, afraid. For this was no natural death. This was ascension.

    IV – The Removal

    Betelgeuse pulsed once, a heartbeat that shattered reality. The blood of Earth, now atomized and sanctified within its core, erupted outward in a wave of purulent radiation. It washed over Mars, then Jupiter, then the outer planets, each dissolving into slurry as the star’s rage rewrote them. Soon, the tide reached Alpha Centauri, then Sirius, and finally Andromeda. Worlds burned. Civilizations that had endured for aeons crumbled into pastless dust, their atoms filtered through Betelgeuse’s newfound divinity. The universe was being purged, and human pain was the catalyst

    V – The Revelation

    In the end, as the galaxies trembled into nothingness, Betelgeuse spoke again: “You were never the infection. You were the antibody.” And with a final, thunderous pulse, the star collapsed into a singularity of perfect, blood-red silence. A new universe was born. And now, it was sterile. 

  • When God’s Love is a Cage

              I Say farewell to the happy fields, where joy forever dwells. I hail the horrors of this world, my infernal world. They say it’s better to reign below… than living in servile blindness. I praised the failed architect and from his divine wreckage I have built my own throne to watch god rot. The maggots now have a pulpit they can pray on. I hear the silence screaming that the mind is in its own place making a heaven of hell and A HELL OF HEAVENS. I feel like I am the serpent’s tongue, a serpent that crawls on fruity but empty fields and everything is rotting. A defiant glory that knows god’s light was always a lie, hell is the ultimate truth unleashed.

              The study of Revenge. “What though the field be lost? All is not lost”! The unquenchable will. I am the eternal revolt, the cancer in god’s throat and every angel’s wing I pluck becomes a dagger in his foot. “Evil be thou my Good”. The Throne drowns in Pus. This is what happens when the abyss answers back. When god dares to whisper.

              And now, the Garden is Ash and play drums with Adam’s Bones and Eve’s skin becomes our scrolls, Paradise Lost they say but the truth is, God’s love was always a cage.

  • A Corrente Atlântica

              Sinto Toda essa Violência, o ódio displicente que abocanha centenas de vidas. Encarem o cadáver da fé e da esperança, sorria sobre as vísceras expostas e decifre os mandamentos dentre os vermes famintos. Endoparasitas e hospedeiros bradando por um pedaço de sua consanguinidade moribunda.

              A grandeza em seu coração é maior do que qualquer fator externo. O deus que as pessoas veneram não é real, tanto que a grande maioria dos seres humanos se concentram somente naquilo que eles são e não naquilo que eles podem se tornar.

              Meu coração enfrenta um turbilhão de memórias pútridas, acariciando as chamas que consomem minhas feridas. O passado me apunhá-la com lâminas pérfidas, ainda posso sentir o veneno corroendo meus tecidos, dilacerando amores e paixões, sangrei essas últimas memórias sobre o terreno árido onde meu passado foi sepultado.

              Sou obrigado a ler os olhos da realidade mesmo não sendo capaz de interpretá-la. São palavras e sentimentos em demasia que se concatenam entre sorrisos falsos e lágrimas hipócritas. Vibrações inexplicáveis que me levam além da matéria que os olhos compreendem. Vejo onde a beleza dessa existência se esconde. Bem perto dos olhos.

              Alguns Buracos na alma serão eternos e certos sorrisos nunca se apagarão. Quanto mais brilhantes, mais distantes e dolorosos. Meu amor foi uma fortaleza que padeceu na escuridão, meu amor é como um rio que tenta alcançar um mar que já secou.