Naked Lunch

Junk sickness in the capillaries. The Interzone: flea-market logic, rancid air. Boys, thieves, doctors, agents—names slipping off the page. I can feel the heat closing in. Muggy nerves, cut with static. The word as virus. The body listening. A frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork! Naked lunch! No refuge, no clean edge! Naked lunch! The feed is the cut! Naked lunch! The only thing served! Typewriter spasm, control gone feral. Report after report, then the report eats its own hand. Open the door to a room and there are doors. The junk lines the brain with white sand. Bug-eyed light, terminal talk, a clerkly nightmare. We all come back through the same hot corridor. Language is a virus from outer space. That is the charge, the chant, the wound. Not salvation—intervention. Not story—control. Cut the feed! A frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork! Naked lunch! No refuge, no clean edge! Naked lunch! The feed is the cut! Naked lunch! The only thing served! Naked lunch. Word-virus, junk-heat, Interzone. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.