' I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers. . . I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants- a body- after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is, only the colorless no smell of death. . . Nobody can breathe and smell it through pink convolutions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh.'

           He stood there in elongated court room shadow, his face torn like a broken film by lusts and hungers of larval organs stirring in the tentative extoplasmic flesh of junk kick (ten days on ice at time of the First Hearing), flesh that fades at the first silent touch of junk.

           I saw it happe. Ten pounds lost in ten minutes standing with the syringe in one hand holding his pants up with the other, his abdicated flesh burning in a cold yellow halo, there in the New York hotel room. . . night table litter of candy boxes, cigarette butts cascading out of three ashtrays, mosaic of sleepless nights and sudden food needs of the kicking addict nursing his baby flesh. . .

           The Vigilante is prosecuted in Federal Court under a lynch bill and winds up in a Federal Nut House specially designed for the containment of ghosts: precise, prosaic impact of objects. . . washstand. . . door. . . toilet. . . bars. . . there they are. . . this is it. . . all lines cut. . . nothing beyond. . . Dead End. . . And the Dead End in every face. . .

           The physical changes were slow at first, then jumped forward in black klunks falling through his slack tissue, washing away the human lines. . . In his place of total darkness mouth and eyes are one organ that leaps forward to snap with transparent teeth. . . but no organ is constant as regards either functions or position. . . sex organs sprout everywhere. . . rectums open, defecate and close. . . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments. . ."

 

-William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch. 1959.