a poem I wrote following a conversation with my partner about my taste in art:

Build Me This

Fresh from the gleaming modern slavepits lodged in the back of my skull,
a schematic. Spidery handwritten title "art I like".

Will you build me a machine so elegant and sorrowful (for what else could
something so beautiful feel, except apocalyptic sadness?), pristine in its
manipulators, clamps, scalpels, and promise that—

as it lifts me off my feet, tearing clothes while tiny metal jaws bite into skin,
while probes at the end of fibreoptics invade my nose, mouth, eyes,
incisions from the first few cuts,

while it cradles me like a mother, scalpels work to an inhuman and swift rhythm, undressing the bone and sinew, delicately clasping the flesh it peels back, working towards its prize

[the target: whatever the fuck is wrong with me]

as it seizes it, radiant of mask a face betraying none of the abyssal misery that sings through its circuits,
as it tears it free, strangles it and beats it to death, obliterating the misaligned pieces
with the motions of a dancer
— you won't say anything?