You were, prior to that first breath, slashed and rifled, as gravity had been permitted by some agency to draw your pages to earth. You were always remote from earth but all the same still as connected to it as breath, for example, is to earth. That was you then, that emerged the night of the death’s heads ritual games. Those cuts in the skin widened themselves somehow, with a steady crackling like a fire smouldering, the fibers popping apart one by one, and then you sluiced out with a motion that would require many pages to describe; you were quiring up papers as they tumbled down, all to your white body runnelled with creases. A ragged, ribbony body dripping with thick water, you abided there under the hood of ruptured leather like a saint in a wall sconce. Your angular head was slipcovered with thin and drooping white locks, and you were all over just as white and wrinkled as the head of a molar, except for the black ribbons beneath your fingernails. Your eyes were running pits of ink, black and sparkling, and glue trickled from your nostrils and filled the pleats to either side of your lipless mouth, fringed with hairline wrinkles.
