Paint and Pathogens

I’m standing at your gravestone.

Yes, reader.

You.

Would you like to know how?

You’re confused, but don’t worry.

I know exactly how I killed you.

I fed you bitter worthlessness on a silver spoon and told you to smile.

I whispered in your ear, I instructed you to hide the foam from your poisoned mouth in a

napkin under the table, brushing aside your hair gently so that you learned to admire my

touch

I closed your hand around the bundle of nuance you ripped out from your chest and

dabbed at your gaping wounds with that poisoned-foam napkin.

You bore my handiwork like pigment,

I drew it on you like confetti

I did that for you.

You’re welcome, you cold silhouette.

So tell me, reader. What use is a ghostly spectator?

A soulless murmur that can’t raise its gaze to me,

A painted human plastered in painted carcinogens,

An accumulation of fractals of Consciousness sanded and smoothed over to be

swallowed,

Lest they puncture the collection of hyperanalytic brushstrokes I tucked between layers

of your dwindling soul?

…

Nobody noticed when I killed you.

When you ripped off my paint bridging the cracks in your skin

And suffocated on the hoard of rationalizations I had sewn inside you

Nobody looked.

An echo of a human painted in pathogens is invisible to the eye.

(At least, to the human one).

And now, allow me to take my bows.

But there’s no need to wait at all for me, because my spindly fingers are looking for

someone else to paint.