When I come home, my shoes are covered in a chalky snakeskin residue
I run a bath of salt and blood and everything alive
My feet are pale, white and shriveled, these days that’s all they’ll ever do
My toes peer in the well like eager children and dive
Too limp to have a sex drive

And when I have the money to move to a greasy plate
Then I’ll swell like a ripe scrap of fruit
I’ll lick off the remains of what other men already ate
And I’ll lay there limp and wait for the boot
Oh, and then I’ll have no commute

You and I will commune in our rattling tin can
While every word that I speak makes me feel nauseous
God is a fluorescent beam that distracts me from that man
Until I wash off rodenticide in my small tiled hospice
But you still tell me to be cautious

I ride, hunched, on the back of the steel monster
It wants me off, it can feel me pluck at it’s matted hair
Is it piss, or rust, dripping off your honor?
Your predator’s beak makes me hyperaware
But I know it would be rude to stare

One day when my body becomes a sack
I want a titan like you to pick me up between your teeth
And let my neurons fizzle and burst into new little animals
It’ll feel like pop rocks on your tongue

And then unhinge your jaw
Leaving your dents in my back
And drop me somewhere quiet
Where my organs can undress themselves in private

Once you’re out of earshot I’ll press my face into the ground
And I’ll tell it my secret
So that it can begin to swallow me in its depths
And roll me into its marble

When you discover this affair
Reach your colossal hands into the earth and pull me out
Squeeze and let my fluids scorch your nice floorboards
and devour whatever remains

There is nothing particularly important about this kitchen. We push and push upon this great big mound of dough, it always seems to be expanding.

We are not sure where it came from, perhaps one day it arrived in the mail, we took it in like a good mother should and nursed it up, cradled it, washed it in a tub of milk.

Boundless little child, stretching upward. Perhaps if we reach in far enough we feel a little spine, growing upwards as a great spire, peeking up to see over the trees. We tell it to keep good posture.

She smacks her hands against her apron: one, two, three; A white cloud of flour hovering by her waist. It settles on the thick oak floorboards below, which are scuffed up as a result of many years of laborers coming in and out of the little room.

We make pamphlets that we toss up into the sky; Every once in a while one of them lands in the vicinity of a pedestrian, and they pick it up with a puzzled expression. These people are now our bakers.

Soon the dough will be too large to fit inside such a little room. Our colossus tells us tales.
It leans over and says in her ear:

“Outside the train station comes a whirring, wheezing sound. Pipes clatter inside this ancient machinery. Reach out, mother, and touch its centipede belly, it will scorch your hand. Can you hear the ticks climbing under its flesh? Do you know that this station is made of leeches? Can you feel your feet, on the ground, shriveling and going pale with each step you take?”

Other times it only omits a faint, melodic, murmuring sound, and we all become silent like death and listen.

Until then we knead: She beats eggs in a bowl, sometimes a little creature springs forth from the egg, which she clasps by the leg and puts in her apron pocket. I do not know what she does with them.
I take a paint brush with bristles from the hide of a boar, and I use it to coat our colossus in egg wash. We do this every few hours, as with each coat it absorbs the wash up and wails until another is received.

I would not have gone into the baked goods industry if I knew it involved such depravity.