A selection from the prelude of FAILURE TO COMPLY

the long necked axe struck clean out of me my most beloved memories. Had my beloved been here with me, they could not have helped. There are things, I learn, that they cannot do. As for me, there was never hope for correction, as all my impurities have long known love. There comes a time when the bad is loved so much it can neither be corrected nor lived without. Love is like a binding seal, a wax to keep the imperfection in, thick enough for water to skim yet never penetrate. Without the love, we become easy to replace.

What is to be replaced when the eyes are shut. When the eyes are on

other things

An axe turned me from a loved into a a silence. This was final cut, the thing to separate me from all I loved. Here I was at the brink of everything

real. Nothingness wrung cool and sure in its wake, but I would not know, because by then I was long gone.

Slated for replacement, I was naked: an uncitizen. Eventually I would receive a gown, light as air, translucent and white, all white, so white it hurt my eyes even when the lids were shut. The opacity of a citizen’s clothes turned when I wore them to a jokelike gauze, transparent as

but I ahead myself. Know I was wrapped in a gauze that served no purpose but shame.

With the swing of an axe, one makes a citizens' arrest.

a process by which the one swinging reasserted hisorher status as citizen by stripping an impure body of its own

And what does that make me? I was a person

soon ago. Then RSCH saw me hide, brought me back into the fold to be cast out once more. I am trying to be clear with you but I can only speak in riddles. I've lost all the meaning that lived in my memories. I don’t know which tense I'm living in. But this is not the future. I've lost the words to say what I have to say. I used to have a name. I used to have a place. I have a face I shouldn't see. I have a body I shouldn't hold the way I do.

I know this. In life, there are the directives. there are those who obey, those who are obeyed, and the non-existent in between. there is no love, I learned; there is only power. Love is a means of pushing power down easy, of opening the throat. It is said

i do this because i love you.

why do you do this there

are people who love you.

So it is said:

love becomes the direction and force and frequency of power. transmuted. one body to the next. Love is the soft touch of power. Love is the RSCH to its citizen, love is the perverse, love is the you're sick please better for me sickbetter for all of us sickandgetbetter let us be whole and love again –– let love be the blade.

And it is said I am a person been held captive for all these long years, for none of which she had a clock. She is i. She is me. She is in a holding cell. She is somewhere else. She could not mark the time. She has no proof. She has no body to speak of and no-place. So she is many at once.

And lacuna requisites the whole

The beverage was blue, glowing quiet power. Microchips failed in the face of whatever was inside. Magnets dulled. Minds cracked. Metal turned to hot pain and only flesh and blood and bone were spared. It was an addition of dead-weight. Dragged, dragged, drugged down. Immobilized as a means of torture and correction, and also of detection. When a subject who passed outwardly as pure was brought in for questioning, they were first measured all over to determine their adjacency to the correct size, which changed each year. Their blood was cross-referenced with their birth data. The constant backlog of subjects for assessment produced yearly chaos at the containment centers as RSCH determined who was to be let go, who was to stay, and who was to be let go but chipped

(chipping by a RSCH was not chipping, definitionally speaking, because chipping was a violent crime against the once-pure body and RSCH was invested in the maintenance of purity.

(so it was instead called maintenance)

because they would likely need to be contained once more in a coming year. In the year whose end RSCH alone declared with pageantry, and all whose ages did not increase and whose lives did not progress were the first of that coming year to be gone, to be axed away into elsewhere.

(do you understand the words

belong to them).