Trespassers from Fool Season by Jacob Nico

Nothing induces anxiety like focusing on the breath
The way it shortens and catches in the throat
The way it hides when seen
Finding the ways that bodies move so unnerving, so disgusting
So terrifying, total meatpunk forever
Hands beneath hot water, running until it scalds
Skin slowly picked at, so just the top layer comes off
Beer in open wounds, begrudgingly licked away
A pair of scissors hidden, scrawny shoulders covered
The most common grounding technique is to try to focus enough to find:
Five things you can see;
Four things you can hear;
Three things you can touch;
Two things you can smell;
And one thing you can taste
Imagine making it through all of that
Without being filled with dread at the way everything interconnects
So out of joint, so overwhelming and intensified
A trespass in a territory we have no way of navigating
A move out of a haze, a quiescent cloud
Falling off of the branch
And into the waiting and compliant brambles

There’s a hole in your leg, I taste the rain on my tongue
These days I keep saying let’s go to the beach
A dissolving cube, a devil in the kitchen
Put my headphones on and walk straight off the path
To a point just behind the treeline
Out of sight and hopefully out of mind
Where I can’t see or hear anything
Something like sensory deprivation
Deterritorial
Away from the rest of the world
I don’t think I want
I don’t want to have a body at all

When I think about you
I don’t feel much of anything
I remember your shoulder
Feeling so uncomfortable
The back of your neck
And your ribs through your side
Like the thing in my bathroom
Both real and not real
If I leave enough spaces
Leave enough holes in my head
They will be inked in
By confusion and otherwise
A stray cat’s corpse, the centre of a football pitch
Absent friends, moments changed and misremembered
Absent friends, moments changed
Moments changed and misremembered

• Alternative
• farce
• indie
• mediocrity
• sadness
• Cambridge