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The heat soaked day drags on: each daisy sweltering every buttercup melting into the dry ground, a golden oozing of petals. I watch them through the window knowing that I could not be ready, this I that’s still unknown plucked before the first blossom. The hum of the sun repeats like an assembly line, robotic, in essence, clawing its way into the conscience and residing in the mind like a panther. I, too, am reclaimed by the ground. It seems to pulse, reaching and breathing me in dragging my limbs into its dark depths. I let it go on from the white bed, sterile- so I’m told. Even the sky dulls me with its aqua face staring vacant and shallow, its vague features too-sea-blue for me. The seed that’s cracked inside disintegrates, the doctors say, “it is no threat”. But I feel the leaking egg rise in the heat trying to engorge itself like a cat eating its tail. I want to grasp a handful of the straw-grass covering the ground like a yellow wound, to watch it infect the air and bleed into the wind. My hand reaches for the stomach, cupping the heat that steams from my skin, unstretched- as far as I can tell. I know when it happens, I knew when it fell, feeling the red spots, all the blotches of myself costume my insides like a cracked cauldron, the unhatching complete. A sea of suicides, as the dark lump rises to the throat. If water is life, I gargle and spit its corpse from my mouth like a cactus. I imagine the tumour deflowering, its thorns still jagged like teeth or as black as a squatting toad. Before the window, out of captivity, the flowers’ faces all resemble death, each seed trembling with my pulse, afraid to look into the eyes of the lifeless that forsakes being. Dead trees with ringless bones, boughs bent into unnatural contortions like deformed ballerinas performing offensive dances I watch with blindness. I rise and leave withered shell remains, the parasite shrivelled and discarded like old skin. In the window view, the snow rises once more as the sun turns to bone whilst the wind passes through me. I am a mine, full of black on black atrocities, that has dead birthed the unknown.