A Truth Buried in Steel

A truth buried in steel,

the shining prongs,

in the places no one eats.

Where waves of ideas and spaghetti,

there—

Ready to slither into your soul,

In the hidden heart of the universe…

William thought this, and then suffered a sort of hallucinatory paralysis.

He simply couldn’t move.

He was in his apartment. Alone.

A fork in his hand, his gaze fixed upon it.

He felt a coldness gnawing at his flesh—and his mind.

He felt naked. Naked before something he could not conceal with any distraction or thought.

It was like… like staring directly into the abyss, the infinite reflection of something that—

That hurt, even though he hadn’t truly swallowed it.

The spongy, hot bolus of revelation.

It swelled in his throat and stole his breath.

He felt blood dripping from his tear ducts.

Or rather, he felt the iron tang of it, somehow fused with the hard and unbearable reality radiating from the fork.

The cold, fucking fork of the apocalypse,

or something like that, he thought.

Time seemed to have twisted, maybe around his neck like a scarf of lead, or crystallized into razor-sharp tips slicing his trachea.

He imagined screaming with all his strength and saw a kind of echo or radiation bloom and ripple outward in luminous waves from his mouth.

A futile flow of ego particles, of words and memories.

Of all the fluff they had crammed into him, the fluff he had followed with the dull ferocity of a criminal programmed for slow self-destruction.

Clownfish began to rise from the table where his other waxen hand rested, and swam before his eyes.

Some hovered, watching him without pity; others fed on the particulate stream—nonsense and raw terror—that spilled from his mind like a beatific current, a feast for them.

As they refreshed themselves and even massaged their scales, through the gleam of those defiantly smug scales, he glimpsed a code.

He recognized it immediately, partly through some ancestral memory predating language.

They were fragments of the formula for freeing oneself from the virus of the word.

Because every sensation or thought expressed through language was like a painful, electric, colossal hook jammed into his brain.

Something he felt the urgent need to reject.

The plate was no longer there, he believed.

The plate—or whatever had been meant to hold it.

Or perhaps it had been empty; empty in the void, collapsed along with the room.

Maybe it had never existed.

He tortured himself with the thought: had he placed it on the table or not?

Only the spaghetti remained—mashed together like worms along his spine;

those he could still perceive with his fading senses, or perhaps as remnants of the message,

the truth he had failed to decode.

He wished he could twist inside himself to see them, to understand,

but there was nothing to be done;

to match their slimy and infamous advance toward knowledge was impossible.

Spurred by rage and frustration, a horde of letters exploded from his chest

and locked into place all around, forming a dense, milky-white web.

Then they became a blinding light.

They became a blinding light.

There was no order, not even in the narrating voice—

deprived of omniscience—that observed and described his experience.

Because there was no order.

Because every word and thought were like giant hooks, like deranged cells.

A cold and unstoppable torture.

He screamed again, blood watering his cheeks, erupting in further mute waves of radiodesperation.

In a cosmos deaf to his pain.

Tac! Tac! Tac! Tac! Tac! Tac! Tac! Tac!...

The soft typewriter machine hammered more letters—hooks and nail-concepts—into his mind.

Letters that wanted no part in that light,

that wanted to remain sadistically distinct from its grace,

while the demons at the bottom of the abyss urged him to reject and be free.

Because there was no order.

And every word and thought were like gigantic hooks, like the harpoon chains of a cenobite that dragged and held him.

“What is your meal or first step, today?” the abyss shouted.

A lake of blood speckled with dark whirlpools.

The Antichrist was a ladybug.

Yes—mocking him through other cells of that cancer made of letters, overlaps, and nonsense.

And every attempt to group, to tie, to order and define...

The first love.

A Truth Buried in Steel  by Fabio Cavagliano (2025)

Dedicated to William Burroughs