Tattoo Catalyst

Needles drill me
Like burrowing hornets etching venom through my flesh
And yet
I am mellow.
Not necessarily beautiful, but mutated.

I reroute pain from my skin
through my bones to the wind
and pass breathlessly into quaking infinities
Twisting mobius mandlebrots
I find seamless unity
from massive to minute
and am struck by the scale and complexity.
I exist to exist.

Time is just a stop on an elevator.
I poke. I prod.
Asking for answers grounds me in the pain.
Echoes recur and only assure that fate has me in its arms
I am rubber banded back to the lower echelons
But instead of fighting hornets, i go smaller.
Deeper.
Infinitesmal inside my own existence.
I am among the pain that shoots out into the air
I am only a point in a series of dying moments.
But this is not my station.
I am out of place and outside time.
A point shaken loose from the line.

I race toward the end of my trip
Well aware of where it ends and why I went
Well aware of far more than that
Instants perish in a tsunami of concentrated reality
like dead ends of processed code.

But my time is not now, though now is all there is.
88 to 33
45
Make the most of it.
I have my mission.
I have my intel.
I have my painful reminder.

Time to start anew.

Freshly awoken
My pulsing wound is a masterpiece.
Pay the piper and ask to come again.
Fate awaits outside his neon door...