Nine Wishes - Atrox

Deep down in a smiling bucket swimming clouds

If it was up to me this house would be almost seven hundred years old and more

than thirteen kilometres tall

I would sit in a rocking chair, creaking along with an out-of-tune piano and an

orchestrion that always tricks me with ever-changing tempo

I’d be able to walk in the ceiling.

I would eat nebula for supper.

I would wear a necklace made of strung hailstones

The well outside would be an eye that stares itself blind at the moon.

The water would sob.

There would be two winds moaning

The shadows would converge when the clock struck twenty-five

Oh how I wish I could walk about on the walls.

And how I wish there were more

hours in a night:

When I can’t wish for more — the vision of scarabees crackling mandrake roots

in soil breathing ghosts of worms and scolopendras

Haunting you with their fumes of horror till your soul tears your body apart

and escapes