Active Imagination Notes 01

Seeing people fills me with some kind of wretched anxiety—
no, terror—
and I get dizzy,
and my breathing becomes sharp,
and I watch the woman engulfed in blubber
sitting on the bench with her five children,
playing paddy-cake or
bitching.

The fat disgusts me; why?
The swollen neck,
and the stomach that falls over the thighs
like a sack,
like a fanny-pack:
it makes me vomit.
I think about the fact that humans shit,
and I vomit twice.

I see an old man walking not two feet in front of me,
and my heart races,
and my muscle stiffen.
I blink five times and my eyes start to roll back into my head.
He has a hole in his back pocket,
and I think of all the things that may have fallen out.
He turns around,
and I think that he is going to speak to me,
but he simply bends down to pick up a half-smoked cigarette;
he finishes it.

The couple holds hands and a baby.
The man has a mullet.
The woman has a butterfly tattoo.
The baby is naked, save a diaper.
I want to murder them.
I want to drown them in a river.
I want to carve out the woman's tattoo.
I want to drag the man by his hair and
scrape his face across the asphalt.

I know what is going to happen.
It's only a matter of time.