Pound by pound ninety-nine stones found their place. Pound by pound they took the flesh off the bones and climbed those who had come before them. Sterling sunlight flashes. Iridescent butterfly wing tanned on bronze Egyptian skin. Sweat on their backs cold in the furious heat, spines stretch equatorial across the systems of bone and tissue.
A small portion of it stands here. Half-finished. For them, the cube is finished:
MAGNUM OPUS
said the foreman, shortly after he shot himself in the head and with that he fell down down down below the black line meeting the sky. Name was Michel, heard his bald bronze head swimming through the darkness somewhere past the mapped lines. Birds of magnesium are vivisected along the horizontal plains in the rivers of air speaking in ninety-nine currents.
There are a million miles within that cube but a man in there can only really take one step to his right or left and maybe one step ahead and retreat is out of the question if question there be; the walls have ears and listen but are tongueless to that suicide of muted mutiny against the world. Stoked they those grey bricks through the fire, ash spitting up with lickety limbs from the darkness itching the prisms they poked through light. The cube is one bathroom. He flushes wearily the toilet with his manky hand bending and with demilunar skin dust-laden in salt and smoke yet still glittering somehow in the shadows alongside eternities blinking their hopeless dreams. He takes a mop which leans against the wall. It wasn’t there before but it is now. He moves with the grace of a ninety-nine year old thing still not learned in walking. Each lunge is indifferent and uncalculated. The feet slide through the tiles of the floor. He does not see this, he is blind, a sublime negotiate within the bricks of his left hand’s lodging.
The mop drips white ectoplasm to the floor conjuring nothing through the atrocity of sterile worlds. A lightbulb swings overhead and from it crackles the crisp underbelly of the moon. Darkness that flows over itself, bodies in the black beating with wings through celestial salt. The wheel that rolls through time inevitably crosses through this shadow and this same shadow is bisected by the wheel at some turning point through time and a woman gouged out her eyes with golden scissors there. Her blood flowed through the rivers, where the tall cedars with pyramid hats bowed to the dust of all that cannot be. A gemini of golden pillars watch the tree strip itself of leaves. Behind them the citadel swallows all the children plagued with muscular dystrophy.
Scalped and mumbling, the long cedar stood in the afterglow of its maternity, neutered by shock therapies that charred the instinct of the Greater Bear to protect its he-cub from the ink besplatted skies.
She was seeing all that the hands of Man could build. Then the foreman came to the edge of the cliff again, adjusting his spectacles. Heat fogged his glasses. He spat and let the sun globe his head not in halo but in horn. Then he took the sun around his thighs and got to straining, moving, towing, rowing the yellow steel wrestling with iron first binding it into horseshoe stasis then into ringwormed ouroboros fought from fire, then at last, the high sun in his lap, he bent it back into salty equilibrium.
The soul is the prison of the body.
Dusk claims him, the dark outline of squirming fever in his bed is a chalk outline inverted.
Or maybe there is no lightbulb at all in the bathroom. Maybe ninety-nine children did not go into the citadel; he is blind. The mop sloshes about like a jellyfish bled of its constellations, it fans a bubbling veil of dirty water. If there is a floor, then define the floor. A thin black cord hangs from the ceiling and it moves ghostly back and forth without anything at the end of it. Still, the weight of the entire world is upon its end and the dark globe which is the terrestrial masonry loses all form and face in its imprisonment and the door behind him is locked, not that he has tried to open it before.
The blind man gathers himself into the shower though he cannot know it for sure that he is standing in a shower, for he has felt the frames and has licked before the showerhead’s metallic corpus for water. Certainly, this must be a showerhead. Define the showerhead. Four walls with an infinity of consciousness. A dark cave lit by half light is a cave without light so in either complete darkness or in fertile, soapy light, the blind man gets to work on the shower. He sniffs the air but is nose blind, feels his beard scrape against his sternum. Thorns of a black bough hold the blood of winter, some green leaves from summer are caught tangled in the canted dark. Hair follicles dyed by chemotherapy gush down the sink streaking a smell of burning gas. An apple hung from there yonder; the cedars shed limbs.
So his fingers roam over the floor of the shower, looking without eyes for specks of dirt, the mop in his hand becomes a bottle of industrial bleach. He is bleaching in the dark and knows not where the tides spill or fall. Corrosive, and a million possibilities of life from the black stains upon the impure totality disappear. Bleach is the only smell he knows. But he is nose blind. He knows of himself but has no mirror to regale with this information. He knows neither of bleach’s colour nor of the absence of its colour, yet he unleashes it upon the dark chaos of an unformed world. The bleach settles on the floor, whether there be darkness of filth or light of creation upon his grounds is of no matter. Because there is no matter within the ninety nine bricks in the wall. Grand consistories remain like the last vestiges of neo-darkness, the amputated nothingness like a stained mirror yearns to gulp into itself and take the cleaning man with him. The bleach by now has become one with the Earth. Titan castrated again. The man sits. Above him, the ceiling changes to the floor of his shower and it drips awkwardly. Sterility moves through him in waves, the pictograms of Egypt, where the face with only one true eye in two dimensional existence looks both into its own bloody Nile and into the beholder. The cleaning Man sits by the toilet, and feels the thistles of needless labour. The showerhead hangs in its socket, limp and impotent. He learns of the world around him groping and toothless gnawing at the windless suns looming sounds and furies like monstrous windmills. By the sweat of his brow he feels his arms’ duplicity. He sits, with one thigh tucked to his breast, the kneecap bearing his tricep, and the left arm cocked, the wrist balancing the chin. He sits there and stares in all directions without ever looking around himself.
Then he lies down and spreads his arms about within his self-imposed square, pencilled there on blue paper by the chief foreman, the Patriarch Grand Installer who with his head bent so many times in the work, wiped the fields of thistle from his scalp, and saw the edges of infinity be brought prostrating to the volcanic current so that all the limbs of a green grand king were hacked away and spilled forlorn into the sands that begot them. Feeling his arms move, he feels the same feeling after a missing limb is brought back by bandages, when the gone hand is brought back into sight by the wrapping of its stump. When they knew mobility, as if each tendon and each sinew was the third eye in the pyramid. Consciousness within each inch of muscle. Vetruvian, he lies across the limp floor, arms and legs spread. His circumference is a sigil within the square. Over time, the bleach casts clouds over his head again and often, when he reckons with dawn, it becomes clear that the dust streaking off the grand gold bull’s hooves is indeed sour.
Ninety nine bricks in the wall. Thinks of the men that entered the citadel, blindfolded and came out headless so many years later, and how each brick they ran through the fire and then pulled out came slithering from the heavy witness like mathematical blasphemies. In its many hacked limbs across the desert, they saw the sun glimmer serpent silhouettes through their depth and breadth, and picking them up, sought the fire to know itself. All day and night they sought all the limbs of that green king so wrapped and so vile in re-animation. Generations of the best of men bowed first their brains forward for the sacrifice then kneeled into the brick to then prostrate on the bricks they laid. Then they became the brick, and so it is that the artisan becomes the polygonal consciousness and the next artisan climbs the body that becomes the brick in the wall, the square with a circle within it forever to mill and grain men down.
Ninety nine of the best of men, headless, into the abyss brought back from the psychosurgery of the campfire. He sits again against the walls of his hand made tomb. Buried alive, for the customs that came before him keeled over into the evil masonry. Somewhere, Golgotha’s rains passed over the dark country and from those ill-starred droplets, there grew green between the black tar. And even once the asphalt settled, and the rubber psychosis of tyres burned through the tarmac, the green was still there, crucified through the ground, born to feel the black blood around it billow and wave before it could settle cooly.
Sometime in the infinitude of the bathroom, he picks up the bleach and thinks to drink from it. The strangest thing of all happens. From the fan above him in the bathroom, the lazy vertical slaloming air shoots down like plumed lightning. First, he almost doesn’t feel it. His mouth opens into a wide guttural O around the bleach bottle’s headless lid. A different mouth forms into a sleek O and another wave of air passes down into this cube of dry bones.
Pale hair given motion.
Ninety nine bricks falsely laid come undone.
This is a ferocious and uncompromising piece of writing: dense, but in the most rewarding sense. It reads less like a conventional narrative and more like an immersive myth, one you don’t simply follow with your eyes but seem to step into and experience. The imagery builds with a kind of ritualistic insistence, layering symbols of masonry, blindness, labor, sterility, and sacrifice until the effect becomes almost liturgical.
There is a sense that the story exists outside of time: both ancient and industrial, Biblical and post-apocalyptic, suggesting that creation and annihilation might occur simultaneously, in the same breath.
What struck me most deeply was the way the prose resists any form of relief. There are no clear exits, no gentle metaphors or comforting resolutions. Instead, the piece leans into repetition and pressure, forcing a kind of transformation through sheer endurance. The confined space of the bathroom-cube evolves into an entire cosmology, and the repetitive act of cleaning becomes something almost metaphysical, a ritual act layered with meaning. By the time bleach is introduced, it no longer feels like a mere object within the story. Still, it has become an idea in itself: purification without clarity, order imposed without comprehension.
This is not a story that offers easy answers or explains itself in tidy terms, and that refusal is precisely what gives it such power. It places trust in the reader’s willingness to stay with it, to be worn down and reshaped by its force. The result is something brutal, unflinching, and visionary: a piece that leaves you altered by the time you reach the end.
This is a ferocious and uncompromising piece of writing: dense, but in the most rewarding sense. It reads less like a conventional narrative and more like an immersive myth, one you don’t simply follow with your eyes but seem to step into and experience. The imagery builds with a kind of ritualistic insistence, layering symbols of masonry, blindness, labor, sterility, and sacrifice until the effect becomes almost liturgical.
There is a sense that the story exists outside of time: both ancient and industrial, Biblical and post-apocalyptic, suggesting that creation and annihilation might occur simultaneously, in the same breath.
What struck me most deeply was the way the prose resists any form of relief. There are no clear exits, no gentle metaphors or comforting resolutions. Instead, the piece leans into repetition and pressure, forcing a kind of transformation through sheer endurance. The confined space of the bathroom-cube evolves into an entire cosmology, and the repetitive act of cleaning becomes something almost metaphysical, a ritual act layered with meaning. By the time bleach is introduced, it no longer feels like a mere object within the story. Still, it has become an idea in itself: purification without clarity, order imposed without comprehension.
This is not a story that offers easy answers or explains itself in tidy terms, and that refusal is precisely what gives it such power. It places trust in the reader’s willingness to stay with it, to be worn down and reshaped by its force. The result is something brutal, unflinching, and visionary: a piece that leaves you altered by the time you reach the end.
Prose poem? I had to slow way down