My arm has broken out in a rash. I don't think it's a normal rash, or not like one I've had before. I feel a mangle of caterpillars beneath the red mark, squirming and sulking like they're hunting for something stuck beneath my chest.

Fleshy beats with samples of gasping blood vessels, all laced with hints of caterpillars hurtling, churning over each other in fingerpaint-like crescent streaks. At odd arhythmic times their movement stops and in their absence I almost hear whispers secreting up through the pores in my skin. So many small movements now take the place of running thoughts. Writhing, blissful caterpillars wash over the space where once was a consuming blue that made my vision bleed.

Caterpillars with stray hypodermic hairs flourishing in growing numbers taking turns to reach up and rub against the underside of my skin, their touches almost drift into a melody, but just before I could place the song one will disrupt it with another flick of their hairs. I try my hardest not to imagine what it’d feel like just to carve in to my arm to greet them.

Beneath my skin are waves of hundreds of caterpillars interweaving like quilts or aerosol paint strokes on tagged and crumbling walls. Foaming out from any orifice near, swells of caterpillars building and expanding in circular chuckles and breaths, like the anxious movement of lungs. Cutting through the numbness, my rib cage melts into a pool of runny clay clotted with even more caterpillars, and opens in the shape of something cusping, softly fluttering, and moving upward in still purple swells. And then I'm smiling with my face upside down buried in runny clay hands. It's like I am young, raised by caterpillars, alone in the woods, not quite dreaming, simply squirming through dirt.

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