There was a man and he is almost gone. What’s left of him is colourless and weary. Carved and pierced and covered with soot. He stands tall, too tall. Calm and bewildered. The eye of a beast examines his fractured flesh. There is a gate I believe to be a passage way to hell, or a garden, perhaps. There are other symbols, but their meaning is indecipherable.

The man is turning to dust. His hands and feet and his head are vanishing. There is something growing out of his foot. A child is hiding behind his burnt leg. His penis is a bright red jewel and his scrotum is a jumbled black mess. His heart is exposed. A little demon is pulling him by strings. A beast is materializing. A mythical figure with a human expression.

I feel sick looking at this work. Even in a calm moment, while drinking tea, I see it out of the corner of my eye and I feel uneasy. It’s hideous. Frankly, I can’t stand to look at it. When I do, I only look at small sections. The whole is too much to bear.

I am this man. Crumbling to bits. Broken and tormented. Sick and bewildered. Endangered by his ideas and impulses. I’m a coward. Holding on to things that don’t exist. Dreams. Broken dreams. Pathetic ideas. Cock bruised, bleeding heart and muddled head.

Twenty years I’ve been touching this thing, scraping and burning and pressing my fingers into paper that was already falling apart. I kept going. I kept making marks on something that was dying. What kind of person does that.

There’s a child. I painted that hand so small. A tiny grip on a vine. I can’t explain it. I don’t know whose child it is. Mine, maybe. The one I was. The one I’ll never be. The hand just appeared one day and I left it because it made my stomach turn.

The yellow beast showed up the same way. I was painting water and sky and suddenly there was this enormous animal. A horse that isn’t a horse. It has a human look in its eye, something knowing, something old. I put a stone in its skull. The beast is arriving as the man disappears. One thing fills the space when the other is gone. I think that’s how it works. I think that’s how everything works.

His arm is gone, replaced with a crystal with a blue ring around it. I remember doing this and feeling relieved. The flesh was a mess. The crystal was solid. Hard. It would survive. Some part of him would remain after the rest turned to powder. I wanted that for him. I want that for me.

The devil playing the strings is a puppeteer. A force yanking upward while gravity pulls down. I feel this every day. The pull in two directions. The sense that I’m being operated. That my hands move but something else is steering.

The paper smells like smoke and mushrooms and damp wood. When I lean close I can see the decay. I can hear the despair. I’ve been working on this piece longer than some people stay alive. Longer than most friendships. Longer than I’ve lived in any room. This object has outlasted everything in my life except my own body. And my body is losing.

I don’t know what this work is about. I know what it does to me. It makes me feel invisible.