Shove it. Cut. Harder. Force it in deeper. Gouge and twist as you do. Like a kitten licking honey from a knife, the searing has a taste. A definitive, certain taste. Past the cranberry, on into the sickly sweet blackcurrant and on and on until you touch tar – the rotten syrup lying beneath the bland and the pink sugar. Pouring out, spooling like a slick. Sick. Poison. Stab it. Cut it out. The death, the devil, the sloth. The rot. The sickly skin that clings cancerous to bone, wrapped around the marrow like a slug’s kiss. Sickly death, sticky on bare white ivory, clotting thought like phlegm. Stick it in and keep digging. Don’t stop digging till the polluted stream runs clean, until it runs dry. Until everything long-tainted inside is drained, cleansed and emptied. Until you can see that gaping hole beneath the bland, beyond the sugar, behind the stench. The purity of something empty inside seen stripped bare. For what it really is.