Accursed Personae [excerpt]

Accursed Persona 1

Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

Yes, I deserve to be a specimen preserved here,

without need of formaldehyde,

because everything in here is me,

unevenly distributed though I might be—

here a clot thick enough to ache,

there a medium stretched thin enough

for it to float in—never to know

how I was shaped before I was cylindrical,

because I was Isaac’s mother, and told him

not to touch anything in the antique shop (since

he was excrement, having been inside my body

and then existing outside it, his hands were sticky)

yet I still bought him that tacky doorknob of purple

glass he held up to his eye like a kaleidoscope

to enchant the dull sights available there and incubated

his sickly need to see from inside cheap illusions.

Accursed Persona 5

Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

Yes, I deserve this unceasing chitter,

the noise not of insects but of an infestation,

ambient, omnipresent, that resounds

against my eyes and dazzles my ears,

more real than my senses, like a screen

is more real than its image of a red maple, like

the boards are more real than the floors of Elsinore—

a bare bodkin through my brainstem would not silence it,

because I manufactured the table where Isaac did homework

by coercing a mutilated spider to grip a pencil

with its five remaining legs and press so hard

the infantile babble of scrawled letters

lingered in the woodgrain below the paper,

and now any surface with visible texture

hurts him with its intricacy, such

that he would prefer retreating to a world of sheer glass.

Accursed Persona 6

Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

Yes, I deserve to be a haunted factory

as opposed to something with limbs

that might notionally be haunting one;

I am not suspended from the hooks

that lurk on iron chains above its empty floor;

I am why that emptiness aches, palpable

as the precise volume of a starved stomach

is from inside the skull now looming through the skin,

because I, Dmitri Ivanovsky, discovered viruses

(many-legged tops that spin on their own

when nobody else is in the nursery

and fill the yellow wardrobe with machinery

for making copies of themselves, not alive,

but mere moving crystals, comprised by acids as letters

comprise words) and taught Isaac to remember

the hazy lines that fever scrawled on childhood walls.