Axiom addict, I annotate anguish in ash on the glass

Backlit by blizzards of data, my brain in a blackout collapse

Catalyst packed in the capsules, I crackle, then capture the craft

Dread in the draft of my notebook, where dead little diagrams laugh

Every event got a vector, I measure the pressure and pull

Feral but clinical, filling the flasks while the cemetery’s full

Gravitic habits, I drag every fact through a hazardous sieve

Helixes hiss in the dish, I’m convinced that the cells wanna live

Ivy of ink on my fingers, I linger where lunatics learn

Joules in a jar on the shelf by the jawbones and journals I burn

Keen with a needle, but numb to the people that kneel when I pass

Lithium thoughts in a locked little box with a mote in the glass

My mind is a maze with a map and a match and a mathematical scar

Negative space in my pupils, I parse what you pray to and are

Oscillate, populate, orbit, the morbid report from the dark

Pallid as parchment, I partition a person apart by the mark

Quantum quandaries in queues in the quiet, I question the queue

Radical ratios rattle: if one plus the void equals two, who are you?

I’m losing touch—my touch don’t feel like mine

The room still hums, but the sound won’t stay in line

Static in synapses, sulfur and smoke in the sink by the stairs

Telescope tilted to tremors in time, I got theories in layers

Under the tongue is a universe, ultraviolet phantoms appear

Vacuum in veins, I can vary the value of panic and peer

When I was young, I was warned every war starts with words and a wound

Now I use homophones there in the air where their errors are tuned

Xyloid taps in the walls, like a xylophone played by decay

Yellowed equations on ceilings say yield and keep yearning that way

Zirconium sparks in the beaker go zipping like zeal in a storm

I was born to deform what is normal, then force the abnormal to form

There’s a theorem in terror: the bigger the vision, the less you can sleep

There’s a limit approaching when memory doubles then buries you deep

I split an atom of blame and it came back attached to my name

Then split my name into aliases, all of ‘em answer the same

Their stare says “there he goes,” they’re scared of the share of my stare

I tear through the layer of prayer till the bare little dare is just air

I don’t do mercy, I do measurements, mercury, nerve and design

I can turn grief to a graph, then invert it and read every line

Pi in the pipe smoke spirals, precise as a predator’s grin

I write with my right while the left side keeps whispering, “Let us begin.”

Losing touch with the taste in my mouth, with the face in the pane

My senses trade places; I’m seeing the sound of the rain

No fear, I got marrow like metal and methods that multiply fast

Bone-white notes by the bed where the bodies of hypotheses passed

So if I seem cold, it’s ‘cause contact converted to calculus first

Every affection got sectioned and stretched till the tenderness burst

I challenge the clergy, the courts, the consensus, the chemists, the cops

Anybody with answers I audit, then atomize all of their props

I’m stoned and astonishing, calm in the palm of a possible end

A prophet of particles, plotting improbable ways to ascend

Got jars of gardenia and gasoline, both got a use in the room

One for the rot in the air, one to accelerate bloom into doom

I know how a nebula nurses destruction and births it anew

Know how a cell can divide like a lie, then disguise what it grew

Know how imagination, when fed with enough isolation and spite

Can build a cathedral of knives in the night from a pinprick of light

My conscience got cauterized long ago, all I got left is the drive

If I must bleed for the formula, fine—I’ll be first to arrive

I’m losing touch with myself

Same skin, strange pulse, somebody else on the shelf

You call me psychotic, I call it precision with ash on its breath

I watched decomposition explain how devotion and hope drift to death

Count it: one body, two motives, three syringes, four walls and a lock

Five fingers steady, six senses unsteady, seven knocks in the clock

Eight phases waxing in glass, nine lives in a cat scan dream

Ten steps from the tank to the table; the tale ain’t as tame as it seems

I mix what I think with what ink couldn’t pin to a primitive phrase

Then blaze through the haze till the maze makes a face and it stares for days

Not for a title, not idols, not medals, not petty applause from a pit

Just for the instant the infinite flinches and finally admits I exist

If Earth is a laboratory, people are patterns, not permanent saints

History’s written in acids and accidents, treaties and tremors and taints

So when I say danger, I mean it in decimals, DNA, dust and demand

I mean a mad hand with a plan and a pad and no faith in the hand of command

The mirror gets nearer; my features look foreign, familiar, then gone

I’m losing the voice I was born with, but gaining a language beyond

Still losing skin