My surgical gown is green,
the room lit in grey gothic gradients.
The anesthetic is strictly local, you don’t want me to feel it,
but you want me to know you’re making the changes, taking titanium instruments and probing my skull, leading scopes and needles on an excavation of my inner ears
because you’re a tourist. Science is just how you build your frequent flier miles, and
I’m your trip around the world.
I’ve been damselled, holed up in a stoney rook.
The master plan: induce a blue screen of death, and create a new architecture on the reboot. Take my kidneys, put them in the new guy! I’ll be Igor-52
All twenty seven of your personalities agree, I am the deformed iron clad heart of Victor Von Doom, in need of shock therapy.
The palpitations send my eyes rolling like bowling balls down the alley. I gag and gurgle with the thunder. From the inside toasted brains smell like lemon drops. It’s all good, you say, I’m just acting, the cake is a lie, the cake is a lie, the cake is a lie. I don’t know what that means!
It’s my fault you tell me, if only I wasn’t so beautiful, if only I gave you more
attention, love is action not words.
The acid bath bubbles, the electric eels spin, and Igor 17 slips his hand under your dress and you smile, lips sharp as scalpels. Lips like a wicked boomerang, your words always come back to haunt me no matter how many times I ignore them.
You want me to do the laundry and hand wash the beakers,
stare stupidly when you make out with the henchmen.
Igor-2 is picking his nose with a dust buster.
There’s a frat boy swagger hidden in his
broken sway. Above him, Geiger conjured
dreams, not quite sexual machines coiled
like gray dreadlocks.
“The internet is a series of tubes!” He guzzles.
I cannot die fast enough.
Wait. Stop. , I’ll say you’re beautiful ten times a day even when you return from a sweat soaked night of grave robbing and say I’m lying because you’re a flithy disgusting fat cow, and I promise not to argue the point anymore and never say you’re beautiful and just nod my head like all the other Igors “yeah, you’re a fat cow” a bovine freak of recombinant DNA with a gaping hole in its third stomach.
My sarcasm does not amuse.
A black rubber glove reaches
to pull the lever one more time.
Bound by steel bars on a cold white slab like a giant tic-tac, I do not break eye contact.
You can’t hold me forever, nothing holds Boris Karloff forever. I won’t see you in hell, but I’ll see you in the sequel.
David Arroyo earned an M.A. from Florida State University, but this is the least interesting thing about him. He is days away from solving the anti-life equation. Upon doing so, he will smuggle the code subliminally through his yet to be published chapbook, Secret Identities.
