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skein

i did the only proper thing for a madman to do, i got lobotomized. i walked into a white room and signed my name to a white sheet. i had giant scars on my face from fighting, my orbit was mashed and my face misshapen, scarred, and self inflicted scars all along the left side of my body, and i was having constant spasms, i was sick, ready to kill someone, scars still bleeding. they lead me trembling and chainsmoking down a long hallway for scat scans and urine samples and i tested positive for alcohol and marijuana. i had been using both constantly. they put me to sleep and i woke up with a small hole sewn shut in the back of my head. my blond curls had been shaven off. my face was dead. they loaded me up on pills whenever i showed signs of life. i had forgotten many things that i once knew. i had once thought myself a poet but after that no more. i walked through the trees chainsmoking with the wind and filthy rain splashing onto my balled head and blowing past, where they were taking men on stretchers with tin masks on their faces, i was nervous and drunk, sick and missing vital pieces, i shivered in the setting dew and drank sips of wine out of a small heart shaped flask. i had been asleep on my pillow clutching a blanket in the thick humid night sinking in dreams when heard the sounds and saw stretchers being toted into the woods with the sleeping curled there on blankets might have been drugged. i followed them out into the night, blanket wrapped around me, to a factory where i huddled under a tin roof and drank impugning myself and spitting cigarette smoke. pushed open the door and looked inside, where the sleepers were loaded onto a conveyor belt and pulled along past a small guillotine that would amputate their right ear into a small basket. form huddled over the basket sewing the ears together into a blanket. the sleepers were then bandaged up and dumped back onto stretchers where they were ran groggy in the rising sun back to their beds where they were to awake the next morning and discover their new wound. i knelt over water flowing over black sand clear and listened to the ears grunting through the smoky window.

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