Content warnings:

Blood, violence

“Alternate Rooms” was inspired by the duality of the perception of my being. At the tail end of my struggle begins a parallel eventide of my escape which is mostly a surrealistic beauty that springs out from my ruins.

—NCS

Snap:

I blank into a blood plunged room
& script a horror movie of the
tech age. Every hour, I upgrade
the villain into a generous
cloned man whose mouth is a
coven of bats. Every

minute, he spits a bat as a preying
angel of the dark. I watch it,
every moment, I pull my eyes across
the cemetery that makes a
jumble beneath my skin, until
my right pupil becomes

the only permeable pore for the light
that seeks to smear my core.
What I am made into: a gallery with
metal doors that cave into
a mouthless tomb. I view the ruthless space
as a throat with talons; no air

can wash it into a slippery face of frames.
I need not this sort of heavy grace
a knife offers to a wounded skin. To protect
me from the gory beast who moons
my world with a bulb that threatens to chew
light into my flesh, I gather myself into

heaps of opaque bones. On dragging my
cold systems, I peck my filthy
core. My eyes roll towards the siren-blue
of the night sky, the iron wall
swallows the light. I drop into the darkness
& the light escapes me.

Snap:

A new room opens, I walk into it
bright & alive.