How To Undo My Metamorphosis

I am the exoskeleton on the couch, the shell with six stick legs that kick with random ticks of subterranean neural sparks. The cushions here are comfortable. I can’t remember what I’ve been watching on the TV. The TV seems to be off.

There are beer bottles brown vessels empty on the coffee table glued to the finish with the stick of my ejaculate. The blankets on the couch are warm. It might be close to sunset. The real chore is counting the hours from the moment I ran out of gas.

Gas sputtered in my thorax choking sounds within the shell before the release valve (mid-point between my second set of legs) burst, and the gas burst sticky and yellow out like old motor oil. The sputtering oil ruined my carpeting.

There are insects grotesque that can survive while they’re headless, exoskeletal husks lumbering on with oil sputtering from the thorax. But the subterranean neural kicks subsist on basic instinct – it all gets very subconscious.

As the exoskeleton on the couch, bloated with self-serving pleasure I’m quite the debauch. And while I’m in this couch-pit funk something in the head continues to tink, tink, tinker away like a clock with hands that don’t move even though you can hear the ticks.

The ticks are in the bookshelf. I can hear the ticks and it isn’t the TV this is for damn sure. The ticking is in the bookshelf. My six legs spasm and kick and I am walking quickly across the couch, over the end-table, sideways on the wall around the room to the bookshelf.

There is something here I am hanging upside-down from the bookshelf’s top shelf and my mandibles pull every volume from the shelves, looking for the tick, searching for the ticks. It is here.

When the spark-plugs die the gas backs up and blows the valve. This is simple insectoid mechanics. The spark dies and the gas gets stale and that’s called motivation leaking from my abdomen. The motivation leaks liquefied intestines turn to carrion on my ruined carpeting. This is me, hollowed exoskeleton on my couch.

But the spark is there where the ticks in the bookshelf hide. It is a matter of remembering where I put the spare spark. This is me rediscovering religion in a novel I haven’t read in years and it doesn’t have a title and it doesn’t have a single chapter and the message on each page is the same as the last: It Doesn’t Matter. Be Excited Because It Doesn’t Matter Be Excited Be Excited You’re Alive.