Demon-Limbs. The Anatomy of Death

During the morning of June 6th, I dreamt. Within my dream, an American friend of mine came to visit and wished to be put up in my room. It was 10am (the very clock-time of my dream) and I was still sleepy and told him I wished to go back to sleep. He said he was tired as well.

Before we slept, I told him the tale of an earlier dream I'd had an hour or two ago - a dream itself broken by waking up in my very room for real at 9:30am before falling back asleep and continuing to dream about meeting this guest.

I made my guest a bed and he lay down very tired. As he reclined, I noticed he had an extra set of arms with claws. The arms moved involuntarily and were attached thinly like insect legs to a thorax. The two appendages were bloody, like flesh and muscle without skin, and the muscles were hard and ripply, but emaciated.

"Would you like me to take these off you?" I asked him, welling up with horror and pity. "Yeah", he feebly answered, and seemed on the verge of weeping, but he was too tired and doped - like one beset with a parasite - to cry at all. He fell fast asleep.

I looked around and saw an open pocket knife with a sharp edge. It lay folded open. I picked it up, took a deep breath, and with all my will I cut through the right demon-arm. "This is my room, this is my body, this is god's temple, this is holy ground, this is sacred created humanity in my care. You will have no house here." I hewed at the second limb and saw with relief how the knife cut through the shoulder joint like bread. I was nearly in tears in my desire to set him free, to see him rid of these ghastly, parasitic limbs.

There they lay wriggling and dying beside him - his Morbid Anatomy amputated. His very identity surged back into his bloodstream, feeding his own arms and legs, feet and hands.

I drew the covers off him to staunch the blood and make sure he was alright. He slept like a kitten, breathing deep, barely stirring. Then I saw in fear and terror that his lower body lay amputated beneath him, severed from his top half by the hip. His hip came narrow and wasplike together, not at all the sound Son of Adam my friend had one time been.

I saw that both his feet lay severed from his body - fragmented, isolated, soul-less, alone . . . 'specialised'. His Morbid Anatomy would not sustain his very life. I looked on him, afraid he would awake, terrified he would not wake. He lay dying.

He lay there, made up of no more than head and trunk. All limbs had fallen off. It was as if a Sex-Insect had transposed itself on his body like a succubus and bitten through his life-limbs. I recalled that above the bed of one of my female friends hung such an Insect: merciless, identity-less, hard, cruel, and with heaving muscles like that of man in sad and desperate sexual intercourse. But the figure was nothing more than a nervous system, lost to love, lost to romance, lost to emotion, lost to the bliss of created purpose.

I looked upon the friend I'd tried to save. My heart beat faster and faster. I knew I would now be regarded as a criminal for my hospital house venture. I'd failed. I'd hewn off the cancer, but killed the cancer addict with its removal. I'd sought to heal him, heal anyone, of the evil that stole away their power to love. He didn't know what ailed him. He'd needed and wanted help but was too weak to even ask for it. He'd enjoyed those limbs for a while, until he realised they were not a part of his own body.

As I woke up I knew what he was. He was a corrupted American in a crumbling Babylon - and he stood for every prey American in large and looming symbolism. If the cancer, if the predator Demon-Limbs were removed from such an infected soul, the person would die! I knew I'd doctored and loved and tried to save them, but they had not Will left to want to be healed of an advanced disease - so advanced it felt like nourishment and stimulation itself. Those people I most had loved had become dependent upon something that was sucking their life away. To sever that connexion was to kill the person. Such a salvation was as sad as the rosewood stake through an incipient Vampire's heart. But even a staked Vampire finds joy beyond the Grave, release from pain and lust - from the need to fill his gap with the souls of others.

He was a Vampire.

She was a Vampire too.

How I loved him. How I loved her. If only she would find her face. Then she could face me, feel love, keep love, feed love, jump in jubilance.

Her Anatomy had no wholeness.

Soul-less limbs wriggled, clutched, multiplied.

The people, hypnotised, magnetically fascinated, stare upon their extra writhing limbs.