@ Cyril Costilhes
The insect in my mind breathes in and it wheezes out. I remember who I was when I walked across the same floor so many years ago to grab a different glass of water, which has since shattered.
By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, February 2015
I walk across the room and grab a glass of cloudy water; the air is humid and thick. My hand is trembling and the dissolution of my thoughts become patterned memories of my childhood in the same house under happily unknowing circumstances, so many years ago. The glaring sonic buzz of fruit flies and mosquitos pierce my skull and I can hear my laughter from my childhood reverberating off the wooden floorboards under my feet. Outside, the hazy and dissipating sun shines through a torn curtain made from netting which sponsors an absolute failure in its decrepitude. The insect in my mind breathes in and it wheezes out. I remember who I was when I walked across the same floor so many years ago to grab a different glass of water, which has since shattered.
The sun sets and the true character of my being consumes me in a world under which ash, blood, and sweaty cement line the soles of my shoes… I stumble through brambling looking for the idiot child and his idiot father who now assumes a vegetative decay in a state of flattened consciousness. I look at him in his hospital bed, his muscle withering away from disuse and I step outside. The smoke from the cigarette traverses my face and dries out my eyes. I wade into the darkness, mentally letting go of his hand and the obnoxious memory of that little boy grown into a man filled with need, desire, and armed with the war spoils of a chemical being who grinds his own teeth down to gum. I sweat through halls of palpitating flesh, my hand scraping across more sweaty concrete and scan the horizon for some idea of what I used to be and what that man withering away means to me. I am seed grown barren and angry, I am a laughing little boy grown calloused and used, I am a reckless connoisseur of the feats that tragedy will provide me with and I am all of these things by birthright and maturation. I stand knee deep in viscera looking into the eyes of men half-blinded and deformed by the weight of this existence. Here there is a seemingly endless parade of flesh and unreason.
@ Cyril Costilhes
And into that ominous world I continually wade… sucking on the withered tit of life… bearing the futile seed of my father’s decaying loins, sheltering fools and tears.
Rarely do I I return to the incongruent and circuitous folly of my life here. When I do, I walk through bramble and underbrush, visit other inhabitants now grown older and scarred by the present dialogue with a collapsing and promised infinity never delivered. Yet, I am still at home and yet, I am still that little boy with a father turning into human jerky from the confines of a hospital bed, those same mosquitos screaming at him, feasting on what withered and plasma-induced supper they can find along the pores of his skin. Leaving his body shallow and then floating away fat with his blood, my blood… the seed cast in a constant state of unborn connections in this paradise of the malformed.
Graffiti, iron rich blood, and death. The symbols of decay and life woven to my hand, stitched like some sort of conjoined twin of desperation and narrative I can’t seem to fathom. I wander on into the miasma of my own thought erasing each memory I find, commanding the presence of hazy ghosts, prescribing an atonement for the obliteration of self and the necrotic itch of what it means to be familiar. And into that ominous world I continually wade… sucking on the withered tit of life… bearing the futile seed of my father’s decaying loins, sheltering fools and tears.
Grand Circle Diego
Cyril Costilhes
Akina Books
(All rights reserved. Text @ Brad Feuerhelm. Images @ Cyril Costilhes.)