Amoxicillin

I sleep while nature squeezes under my door. A dream of the swamp blooms like a water-born disease in my polluted senses flooding my throat, nose and lungs. Breath rattles heavily through damp fabric and pushes tears through infected lids. Salt cracks and crumbles from my eyes in brittle flakes. Nature is in this house. From within the walls, soaking wet tendrils transmit intricate messages. Tapping. Smearing. Mud at the water’s edge swallows my legs in muscular contractions that grip me hard and hold me sucked into the slime. There is comfort in my restful sludge as I slowly become a celebration of waste. A new smell is in this house. I fumble, prod, rip, and slash at the dirt-smeared welts in the hope of exposing bone through paper-thin skin. Insects have burrowed beneath bleeding fingernails and laid their sodden eggs inside tear duct, nostril, and mouth. Swollen and stretched, the engorged tissues begin to rupture as they rhythmically pump soupy discharge onto saturated sheets. I hear my laughter in another room. From the banks of the swamp, I watch amber lilies drift away on dark, green ripples that shimmer with an oily gloss. Their moist, heavy perfume clings to my tongue like a sugary membrane. I slowly lift my head towards the clean blue sky and open my mouth wide. I hope God can see me, feel my restructuring. One by one, black, twitching mosquitos swarm down to feed from my gaping mouth. They bite and suck the blood from my blistered lips and force their way down into my lungs and stomach, filling me to bursting with their fluttering wings and delicate stings. I cramp, bruise, tumefy. Cells divide. Segments fall away. New organs grow. This is my fresh suit, my next phase. I do hope God can see me.