Come and strip the paint from where I love ‘cause I don’t like the colour. The smell of bleach is purifying as I inhale deeply and collapse on the floor. I don’t care where I’m going because I know that the ending is the same. Burn the layers off like marking lines on my brain. Creating new paths for synapses to travel and fire off into space. The karmic gaps between consciousness and the subterranean where I await buried alive, with my eyes open. Chemical fumes make them water and the erosion is bringing those gaps closer, floods of reactionary tears washing away brain cells filled with cancer I don’t need. They end up at my cerebellum and the pressure on my spinal cord is paralytic. Climb up my legs using knives as hand grips because you know I can’t feel it. Release the pressure so I can bleed the way I am supposed to. So I can feel each non-tactical insertion of steel. Let me watch it as my consciousness collides into closed eyelids. They open slowly, and I find myself soaked in petrol and there are faces flicking matches at me.