Haibun 4 by Michael Leong

When it’s my word against yours, they blur together: they mingle and fuse to form a monstrous hieroglyph which we sketch with delirious pens and carefully file into our registries of calamity. “Those semaphores are wrong,” you said when I mentioned the depth of the rain water. I suggested we overlay our asymptotes. You told me to use my tonsils as a writing utensil. You said: “look.” I said: “listen.” We simultaneously threatened to go introvertical. To avoid an all-out anaphylaxis, we managed to devise a short-list of solutions which a third-party ratified sight unseen: to call forth the froth from the cauldron of meaning; to trace the dream’s slippery bas-relief; to recover lost treatises on embalming and mummification and make papier-mâché effigies with their pages; to suspend the effigies upside down, to set fire to their faces, to make a three-handed shadow puppet dance by their light.  
  
…

within memory’s maze:
skewered hearts
transformed into anime