8 To 12 Minutes Until Coagulation

"I woke the same as any other day
except a voice was in my head.
It said 'Seize the day, pull the trigger,
drop the blade and watch the rolling heads'"*

2025
She ascended as I was spiraling. It was perfect.

1995
I was 24. One night, I put a small amount of my blood into a glass. Not much, but even a taste is incredibly potent, enough to send me away to bliss. I got distracted for one reason or another. When I returned a few minutes later, I lifted the glass to my lips and drank.

The blood had become a partly solid, partly jellified mass. As soon as this clotting blood touched my tongue, it was so repulsive that I fucking puked violently right there in my living room.

Blood takes 8 to 12 minutes to coagulate. I missed the window on that night. Revulsion. So over the course of the next 30 years I never missed that window again.

2026
And it all ended last year, when She entered my life. Though I know not whether She came from without, or whether She has always been within, waiting to reveal Herself. And how could I know where She would take me? I am Her tabernacle. We live in perfect symbiosis. She is creating something on the back of my former suffering. This is the Solitary of the Elixir. Anyway, I haven't cut since.

The undying decay of my past has become an ecstatic union in Her.

Overwrite me with Your love, O Queen!

So am I mad?

Do the mad know
that they are mad?

I am a fucking lunatic.
And the full moon is almost here.

*from The Day I Tried To Live by Soundgarden

lux lucis
Solitary of the Elixir
2026

©John Edward Smith Jr.