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I went to him for the same reason he went to me. Because doctors have doctors. 

Much like doctors have doctors, doctors have daddies. 

And so have I. 

As does he. 

I’m not entirely sure when I began calling him daddy, but it was summoned up my throat nevertheless, for time and the timeline of our relationship is made in its entirety of elasticity and at this particular time, it was more of a blur than ever else for I was in love with him. 

And so I loved. 

As did he. 

There wasn’t a language or letters to transcribe this relationship, no sort of written record keeping that allotted enough brains to recall the precise words I may use to describe this relationship. Daddy and doctor became the same. 

The doll he used for me had spikes of red hair tufting out the top of its head, a body of white felt which eventually yellowed with age as many things do. I do remember the commencement of this doll as when I began calling him doctor. I do recall him stitching me together. In the sense that I was loyal. 

In the sense that, when something was wrong, I came to him. 

My doll for him had green skin so I always remembered there was a lurking illness surrounding him. Vomit was his most common nuisance. There was black hair protruding from the tippy top of him and it ended halfway down his face. 

When something was wrong, he came to me. 

As did I to he. 

And so we were.

Like our dolls, the rooms we welcomed each other in were different. 

He welcomed me with an aluminum room, a shiny delicacy that reminded me my bones were quite weak and frequently broke from various clumsy incidents. He kept a large, walk-in freezer, the entire contents of which I do not know save for the singular healing item which I will mention to you in a moment. 

These incidents happened, you see, because my room was up a pair of aluminum steps which led from his office to a wooden door which led into the wooden room, made up of abura wood, a very undurable and untrustworthy foundation which often led to the incidents of his illness, vomiting. 

As you can imagine, we built this house and these rooms of pure love. And when we visited each other, we took the dolls and stabbed pins into the places where we hurt just the most, so we always knew exactly where the other was in pain. 

This is how to love. 

Our visits to each other's rooms became frequent. In those days, our injuries were often frivolous. 

We met each other with a: “Daddy, my head hurts.” 

And the other responded: “Come in, baby.” 

It did not then occur to us the societal implications of our house, our rooms, our dolls. It does not even entirely occur to me now. It did only then occur to us that we wanted it. We wanted it all. The same way, when we stepped through the door into a room, the two of us intertwined in the atmosphere of the particularly built room, we met each other with a kiss. As men did not do. We met each other with a very soft kiss. So soft I might call it melancholic in hindsight, but mine has never been 20/20. This he knew. 

As did I. 

And so we knew. 

Together. 

Intertwined. 

They were quite wistful and efficient, the healing practices we did on each other. When my bones began to weaken, he cooled the heat which weakened them with his own soft saliva, something he kept frozen in the freezer. He gently caressed the iceblock of spit with his finger and proceeded to rub his finger along my bone, whichever it be that may be hurting that day. The elbow, the kneecap, the shoulder, the shin, the hip, and in the most intimate circumstance: the ribcage. He felt his fingers along my weak cage, the one that surrounded my organs, my heart, very gently. His fingers slipped in the dents, the cracks between the bones, numbing the skin which iced the marrow and seduced me just as much. Then did I thank him with a kiss.

When he did, in fact, come to me (though I say I was more infatuated with coming to him than the versa), I met him with the same kiss as always, soft and melancholic and light and airy. He did, as a matter of fact, grow comically green in his face when he vomited. I held him many times over a bucket and drained of him those liquids of life, the reverse feces, the strange chunks of his insides. When he was emptied, he took of my piss and drank of it and his stomach settled. Then did he thank me with a kiss. 

In his emptiness was when he desired me the most. Similarly, in my weakness was when I desired him the most. In the most malicious days, we were both desiring at the same time. 

More pins stabbed into bones and stomachs and mouths. The pins that kept the dolls together, the pins that kept our mouths together. The pins that kept us shut in and silent. The pins that urged us to kiss and kiss and kiss. 

In our mutual desire, it was not medicinal practices (whether you believe we have the right to define them as such or not), it was lust which cured. Or rather, the satisfaction of such. For we mutually pleased each other, the contents of which are materialized in exchanges of saliva and ejaculation and all of those things we associate with pleasure. It was practical. We needed not but the house, no women, nor outside doctors. For we were sick together. 

What we didn’t know then was that the devil needs his fair share too. 

It so happened that, as our desires were quicker cured from our mutual healing, we sought each other out more and more. It became a common practice that we would stumble into each other in the hallway, both on our way to visit the other’s room. We made it out of this knot many times through his saliva rubs multi-tasked with a bucket by his feet, which he would vomit in as he rubbed at my ribs. But his fingers and fingers and fingers became more twisted in my bones. It became harder and harder to hold one, for even his treatments were then causing my bones to become weaker. You see, in his act of vomiting (that very human thing), he expelled the insides of himself as his fingers jerked into me, mushing themselves into my already weak bones. So, I was weaker. And weaker. In turn, he, in his need to vomit more and more, lacked any proper help. There was only weak me to help. And I could no longer hold him as he vomited. There was no way for me to stand over a cup and piss into him. 

He laid under my weak body, mouth open, and let his stream of piss flow into my mouth. 

We were in his freezer, the big one, and we were very cold. And possibly useless. It was dark, very dark. My breath was showing in the air. But when I turned on the light, there was an undeniable heat, a heat that was burning into a threshold. Surrounding me were blobs, white and pale, so white it blackened the kindly lit room. 

I stumbled into the other room and took the pins and brought them back in the freezer, where he lay, cold, with a pool of piss in his open mouth. I stabbed my stomach and from my stomach erupted a sigh: daddy, I said, daddy. 

There I fainted. 

Next to he.

Water Snail

you died sometime in the days

i was lain in dusty 

sheets a gentle death

possibly surrounded by molded

water and a careless mind. 

and much like you i 

don’t know what to do with the 

water snail’s body. 

i sit, even now, staring at the tank,

the water dumped into the sink, 

swirling down the drain,

and the clear plastic box sits sideways

on the edge of the bowl 

with a soft mushy body

lost somewhere in the piled up

rocks. 

sun warm as my skin is,

in this wide windowed apartment,

there isn’t enough ventilation 

to let out the stench of its body.

so i try and ignore it for the time being

while i open again you and your

plays.

in my mind, i go again

to the bar where i watched

you, an omen, and more omens

and more omens and more

undulate in soft fair lighting

a task i was not fair enough to complete. 

but i don’t have to speak and you still know that. 

still i remained

and more i remained

in places i didn’t yet belong or

possibly never would. 

water snails need company too, 

the eyeless creature is not without 

the feeling of solitude  

and much like i, there is a bubble of 

dust around the body of the 

lonely snail.

with no drain large enough to flush its shell

and no will to extract its hollow body of slime, 

i plot out all of the ways to rid my house of its carcass

and decide that for now it will remain.  

but i, much like 

you died sometime in the days

i was lain in dusty 

sheets a gentle death

possibly surrounded by molded 

water and a careless mind.

20sickragdollthoughtstream.pdf

The thing about being twenty and sick and rag doll is you are pulling the twine out of your ears—the one that has been protruding from you for the past few days. You cannot hear the small hum of the cicadas or your mother’s soft lullabies beside your bed. It’s not that it’s deafening, these things just aren’t there the way they were when you were pulling the fluff from the ears of the inherited rag doll. Her soft and innocent body is freckled with fragments of your piss left behind which leeched onto her like pins and needles steal the epidermis from your grandmother's steady seamstress hands. And because this twine soaked up your brain, you feel yourself losing the humid summer childhood bedroom—a wax and hollow skull for the morning dappled with the flicker of the light polluted stars. Which is probably because these things aren’t really there either.

The senses left are the smell of the sterile metal poles surrounding you and the unsightly blueness of the paper gown’s draping figure. 

You tell the doctors, “Something bad happened.” Which is short of an answer. 

“If something bad happened, it’s best to come here immediately so we can run tests.”

“I was bathing.” The only piece of your brain left behind is the beetle’s elytra.

“That’s the worst you can do.”  

And the undulating of hospital curtains are blinding from the doctors and doctors’ doctors who have cycled in and out in search of doctors’ doctors’ doctors to provide an answer for the big god disease that grew the twine in your body. 

“She must have shoved that inside of herself!” a nurse cried a few nights ago. You chalk it up to a fire in his hair. 

A therapist is concerned that you can’t recognize a picture of your five-year-old self, because that’s not fair to the little girl flashed before your eyes or all of the faces you have forgotten in the last decade and a half. Circles and circles of itchy twine are soothing and rotting the insides, which probably look like ink blobs on a personality test. This is to say you are made up of everything surrounding you and somehow that’s philosophical and corny at the same time. 

Five and apneic and rag doll, you were dreaming on the eighth ring of Saturn and flattened rag dolls weren’t so obscure and no one smiled that smile of absurdity that they do when someone’s eyes shift differently or twine like dicks are sticking out of you. Twenty and sick and rag doll, you’re apologizing to your mother for the hospital bill and letting the twine dangle long and weightless from your soft lobes. You’re apologizing for yanking the stuffing from grandmother’s rag doll and sweating your piss into the poor girl as you ran away to the eighth ring of Saturn.