There was always something about blood. Some people hate the sight of it. But I picked at every scab and opened every cut, squeezing it out in drops and blotting it with my socks, and by the time most girls were getting their periods, frightened by this trick now played on them by the crack between their legs, I was so ready for my fertility that I spent the whole afternoon in my bedroom dragging clots and drips from what had secretly become my glorious cunt.
Let me tell you about my room.
Well. How are we gonna do this?
Start at the top, that’s what kings advise.
I have painted the ceiling white, the walls red and carpeted it with scraps from Daddy’s store—do you think it’s pretentious and girly to call him Daddy? I think you’ll find things go easier if you let me do this my way—with my words, my images, and my particular description if you have a problem with that turn to page 70 and be done with me ’cause I am done with you.
The ceiling’s white, the walls are red, I have adorned every surface with candle wax daggers blades syringes and paintings of my perils drawn in period blood this would be 1) snakes 2) death by fire 3) my first kiss 4) my first failed attempt at sex and 5) many other cameos like paintings on a cave wall depicting my short-lived downfall into adulthood.
Oh: also: I’m a journal writer. Write with a stylus garnered from the network, a site of old-century fountain pens that make me cum. You read that right. When I hold the stylus, I cum. Try to keep up.
From the floor up, it’s barely walkable. I keep my comics there. One called Johnny the Homicidal Maniac—you probably never heard of it do you think this mole is visible it looks like a heart I call it my heart-shaped mole and I hope that when we fall in love, you will cuddle me and touch the mole on my chest it’s not black or brown it’s red and filled with blood how could it not be when it comes to me!
In one corner is a stuck pile—stiff!—boy’s briefs I like to wear when I bleed pads period pieces crotch swabs string peens you know Obi-Wan Kenobi ’cause you’re my only hope. Those are cardboard stiff blood brown I just can’t bear to throw them away they’re part of my human history.
Buried in vaults, every part of me severed at the joints.
Terrifying mores.
When I wake up my dreams are so good that it makes my real life horror. That’s my dream: to wake up someday to a life that welcomes me instead of terrifies me. For now, though, it looks like my lot is for each day to ride downhill from the point that I open my eyes.
The skwunch of my comforters, down white dripped with red wax, me covered my nakedness only for me under a thick nest, ducks would be jealous, scrolling around and then I’m tangled by the legs in my treetops, wrapping me hot hot hot over eggs with the lovely lovely object of my book: the Fetus Room.
I rock them and roll them.
They grow inside me.
They mature come out squeezing through my bat cave, my love taco, baby box, cooch twat, taco. Snake hole. Whatever. The point is when I squat over that scrap of carpet and squeeze!—the creature from Alien comes out of me flailing with its pincers screaming high-pitched wails that grow up to be a full-size raptor it’s kind of like buying a snake as a baby it’s so cute! and then it grows up to suffocate your child and you have to take him back to the store.
Same thing with chimpanzees.
Motherfuckers.
So I squat over carpet scraps, bend at the knee, push down my girl shorts expose the camel, toes spread for balance, and I do the deed.
I give birth to an alien, half-formed child, unready to breathe, heart barely formed, needs an incubator, and I keep my baby boy in a terrarium on the dresser, six total there with a seventh below—one I’m working on, conditioning a new apartment for my baby—hopefully a girl!—and bang bang time with these boys—a cum-guzzling cunt—funnel it into my puss spilt on the hairs which you’ll eat it’s my glazed donut!
Now plug me up! I keep cum in my sperm locker for use any time I please going on 14 babies born in this room.
I try not to anthropomorphize them therefore naming them with numbers like 2ea and 14b.
We are together only for a short time.
But.
In that time.
We benefit from each other.
We learn.
The experience is brutal.
The men in my life are temporary.
I can get fucked anytime I want.
But that’s not what interests me.
I’m on a biology tip.
And I think you’ll see, if you follow me into this room, that you and I have more in common than you might expect at this time. Do you like to get pregnant and kill your babies before they’re due? Do you enjoy placing living tissue inside a microwave? Have you always wanted to torture someone but hesitated because they might fight back? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might be damaged enough to continue. Please find yourself a comfortable place to sit—or preferably, to lie down. Cover yourself with your favorite blanket. Choose a stuffed animal to keep you safe. Skwunch your pussy muscles—squeeze that box. Think of yourself as a wittie-bittie baby, just a few months old, not ready to come from the oven, and you’re sweetness beyond any full-term infant, covered with slime and slipping between my legs dropping on the floor of the fetus room.
Let me tell you how I destroyed the world in six days.
Day one. In my vision there are no guys, no girls, just cunts. Cunts go this direction and cunts go that direction and at this stage in my life I am five years old—the best age—hiding in a treetop nailed in boards from the neighbor down the street. There are cunts selling lemonade and cunts buying it—and this will remain the dominant paradigm throughout my life, and here it is at five years old. Somehow a flea has made its way into my drink, floating on white milk—as we always say, he died happy. I drink him down like I will later drink down hairs and fingernails of lovers and of my kids. Making them part of me, assimilating them. And I guess that’s it for day one.
Day two. Ambassador. At six, I take a kitten in my room and reverse birth it, tiny claws resisting passage up my cunt and I snuggle him inside my womb, petting my belly and feeling him wriggle to a stop.
Day three. Irruption. Irruption of matter, emotion, and style. I become an unstoppable force. Rid myself of guilt. Read all of Heinlein. Stole notes from other girls and studied them—learned how to be a real girl, for when the Pinocchio affect is born. It can take me a whole day to cross over a single sidewalk square. So much to see, to capture, to scare. So many delightful dresses to wear. So much hair. Flip it and flop’n’ it. Flippy flop flippy flop. I’ll be on top. Bunny, horse, you name it—I’m the bounce pussy come to spill your cum. Flippity flop now stop.
Day four—if you can take it. Imagine a Disney character with devil horns—that’s me. My voice like Kristen Bell ass like Beyoncé. Keep a spreadsheet of possible seed. See boys in a carousel of translucence, one and then the other never more than three on the same day I have a breeding program. You’re nothing more than a cum factory to me—and delivery device. Day four is that smoothest, hottest, textural procedure feeling you lump yourself inside my c and rub it until you let go, pushing yourself over the hump of the rollercoaster, first hill. Then you fucking squirt! and don’t cum for a few days before you see me, boys. I want the pressure of the pump, firehose volume, not a trickle—see! Every day I dress for the Oscars—even got an app for that. It’s see-through short shorts and SnorgTees hallway is a runway pooper is a dressing room. Filtration. Through, and through. Catch my cunt dripping with a fetus—boom! Girl snot bleeding me a concentration (or a catch) of thickness that could be a baby baby monkey seaside brine shrimp novelty packs. I could place it on my finger, carry it to my dresser, set it down, and watch it dry. The life within enters a cryptobiotic state therefore proving that the only true way to a girl’s heart is through her panties.
Day five. Regenesis. Each and every baby I kill gets its own plaque and commemorative SnorgTee usually they just say RAWR! I’m a dangerous tiger! but sometimes they get a variation. I guess it’s a question of significance—what makes you feel like you matter to the world—and for me it’s all about fetuses.
Day six. I keep a jar over the door containing genetic material from my uncle so if he ever tries anything again I can register his sex offender ass.
Day seven. This is the important one so pay attention motherfucker. Promise when we meet in the playground in dreams you won’t push me to the dirt, kick it in my face and drop your dusty fingers below my shorts. Elastic. Bands. I’ll be there with my nylon Cannons slipping up showing my lacy lacy cotton whites gusset in your face packing me in tight and cool. I can see your face mixed with mine, four amino acids swirling in my belly like a cow—nervousness. Butter begins to fly and I’ll let you pump me on the playground just keep your dusty fingers out my cunt! With you excavating oil I see one more monkey in my jars—or maybe I’ll let this one get to the aquarium stage. Put him in a basket of fluoride and rubbing alcohol, tiny bit of a foam mattress. I’ll watch you under violet plant lighting keeping your skin warm and protected from leeches (which I add). I see your power draining into me so thrust away thruster! I’ll sneak in a couple of mild ones before you head to the grand illusion. Be my snake pit, darling—I am your snake hole. Lubricate me with love—or whatever you call it. I shall forever be ashamed at my love of the experiment—it’s all science to me, cold (as they’d called me). All the Method. Control, experiment, group. Hypothesis. Conclusions. And we’re done! My purpose was to become a real real girl, sticks of wood up my ass panting in the dust making something of my disparate parts which seemed when I looked down from above the clouds that I was nothing more than a baby-making apparatus, every love every hate every thirst hunger ability piece of knowledge all designed to make me make more of me as nature seems to be searching for something. Something that is using a bunch of human containers to go through and all it cared is that I allowed the occasional fetus to come to term—all my other abilities, my thoughts, experiences were overmatch. They served the goal of keeping me pregnant fed watered and at enough leisure to engage daily in the dirty deed. If I drink a lemonade, it is because mother nature desired me to.
There is the price of the birth canal, which is poppy poppy spike spike and when you say it feels so good to you you have to know that it feels good to me, too! Poppy poppy snazzy snazzy hoo haa. It’s my tether for you, boy you got endless fascination for the mole between my legs. They say crazy girls fuck the best well come to momma. I be warming up the butter, lather your roll. Have ourselves a regular Italian restaurant how do you think kids in the jungle figured out to do it they got that movie Blue Lagoon I guess it’s like magic—magnetism—some biothermal force given to us in the formative moments. Sperm. Egg. Millions of cell doublings within the first seconds. Gastrulation. The most important event in your life. That’s what my AP Bio teacher taught, and I upped and took that one piece of knowledge and started my workshop at home, in my bedroom, in the fetus room. Plied myself some red-velvet throws, fat-ass pillows, and a white teddy bear to increase cuteness. If you want a boy to cum quickly you must give him the proper imaginings. The teddy bear gets him in touch with little-girl helplessness feelings and fear—I am afraid, he must comfort me as he scares me at the same time, or as the act scares me. It helps to be in your parents’ house—boys like to fuck girls in their childhood bedroom, it increases their sense of conquest. Yes, I did a survey. Other than that if you make a lot of sounds and just lie there they’ll cum pretty quick. That’s when I jump up like Aha! and whip out my funnel and my sperm-collecting jar and they be like What the! and I be like shut up I’m trying to collect your sperm. I be havin’ my mouth pressed together and my lip squirming out my lips gettin’ that funnel right up in my hoo haa and he be like What the fuck! That’s when you look at him with comforting eyes and inform him he’s now part of your breeding program. What did you think—that this was all fun and games? No, Dude. I need your motherfucking sperm! Sit him on the couch. Say Look. I’m not here to ruin your life with alimony and all that bourgeois jazz. And we’re not going to fuck again—unless I need another sample. And he be like Whatever, bitch, I just got my jim off. I roll my eyes. They’re willing to give up all manner of independence for that thing. It’s like their mission in life to drop a load every minute and hour of the goddamn clock. Someone has to be the simpler half of the species. But I do love his punch punch muscles! That’ll make me squirm. So you show him the jar and tell him that this is the last time he will see his baby alive—though post-mortem pictures of the fetus will be provided to every donor. Then I do the kicky kick and exit the donor from my room. Put his seedlings in a mylar balloon, tie off the hole. Add shreds of denim cut from pre-distressed jeans. Add jelly beans. Throw up in my mouth a little—add that. Pinch some carbon, helium, oxygen from the fluffiest cloud in the sky—scrape along its edges with a surgery knife. This next part is critical: create a small mountain of magnesium shavings. Steal magnesium from the chem lab at school or use one of those magnesium fire starters from the camping section at Walmart. You’ll want a mountain about two knuckles tall. Be very careful not to get any fingernail clippings or skin cells in this pile. Magnesium will increase the intelligence of the fetum exponential style. Especially due to the short lifespan of my fetum, I prefer to accelerate their intelligence. That way we can have conversations as old man and old woman before we all die at 12. There is a madness to this method, I assure you. My kids be remote controlling drones by eight weeks, flying them shits over Illinois and Indiana blowing up pig farms and shit—it’s awesome. I had one kid wanted to be a hair dresser—we set him up a mini studio between the bed and the dresser and he built a client base of eight and invented new hairstyles by the time—a week later—he croaked when I held his head under water too long on purpose—oops! You win some you lose some. Well, technically, you lose it all—we all do—but this ain’t no lesson in philosophy. Let me ask you something: did anyone teach you how to play? No. A mother can say, Kid, go play! and the kid will know exactly what to do. It’s like fucking in The Blue Lagoon—I mean people just figure it out. I’m not going to tell you about my parents or anything because, let’s face it, that would be giving them too much credit. But I will say that my mother was a preacher instilling in me every value she ever projected—except the opposite—and my father was a panty-dropping freak who used to walk around the house in man panties even—or especially—when my mom’s sisters came to visit. He never raped me or anything. He did make me shower with him till the age of 12 and wash his junk till it was squeaky squeaky clean. Which did affect me, I suppose—but not as much as when my brother peed on me. I feel we’re getting into territory too personal, and I want to maintain my dignity so that you will be able to consider me the good guy in a story shamelessly telling the adventures of a girl—that’s me!—who breeds human fetuses in her bedroom for the sole purpose of their examination and murder.
Emptiness becomes me. Connected with a tube, plastic pipes draw me lower and lower on the silky red, and I slip below the pool. A timer measures out 20 minutes exactly and then switches from drainage to fill. And in 20 more minutes, I am full of blood.
When I go under, I am close to death.
I remember my life like a dream.
There was a time when I was 14 and a boy of 18 made me want to really, fully be with someone for the first time. I pulled down purple panties and he let the tip of his dick come from the top of his shorts.
“Lick me,” I said.
And he put his mouth all around the bottom of my cunt.
I was like rubber, never stretched apart.
And he put the tip of his dick in me but he would only ever put the tip.
The next day I found him and asked him why.
He said he thought about in the moment that I was 14. “I can’t put it all the way in you and even my saliva, on you, contains DNA. If they catch me, I’ll go to jail.”
I told him, “How is anybody ever gonna know to check my pussy for your codes? It’s a secret I keep between my pants and my bones, and I would never tell on you ’cause I want you to put it all the way in.”
I’m thinking of this as the blood drains.
He’s like: “I want to put it all the way in, but I’m afraid I’ll hurt you.”
“But it’ll be nice and snug,” I say.
“I think it’ll be too tight.”
And after that we had a couple of bunkbed conversations but he would never be my counsellor again, he was so afraid we’d fuck.
When the blood gets low, the colors follow.
I see red as deep sanguine, white highlights pulse each time my heart beats. It struggles to keep going. And I am on the verge of perpetual moonrise, sunset, tides and eclipse. This is how I wake from dreams, every minute checking my pressure and pulse—and it’s always one-third less than I expect it to be. Even if I can maintain. It’s got a hole in the bottom of the bag. Bones. My head can only take too much tragedy upon waking: my room was painted, my womb is dry, the old cats that we had to get rid of are doing much better in their new place, baby dogs born with sharp claws dripping out of me onto the carpet. Oxygen levels falling, nuclear war—doesn’t anyone have any respect that I’m finishing my experiments, that I won’t be able to finish if the world turns to dust? When I look at my tanks the water is climbing, babies stuck between the surface of their lake and the top of the cage, losing ground each second, clawing at the screens with their tiny fingernails.
This is the tide of time, emptying out its sand on a shrinking beach, each season less room for travelers to pass, under each footstep a needle, a gun, a piece of the Tangram, and a brown wig. The needle is to show that 99.999% of the drugs I have taken are pharmaceuticals. The gun is the only symbol of power simplistic Americans understand. The Tangram fragment represents each fetus I have brought up to be a kernel of loving genius before I cut them out of my hole. And the brown wig represents Prince—I don’t know why but I thought that Prince would have something to say about this.
Changing purple to red, insisting the older boy put his penis inside me—I had to find new ways to convince them to plop their wads in my trick, mostly it would be employing the wavering willingness of people closer to my age.
Unfolding the scythe.
Removing excess skin from my vulva—paring it down.
Using tongs to go up my blood chute—boom booms in my head—heavy hands pull tight against the handles, and soon I have that silent screaming suffocater in my hands, untangling wires for arms, noticing the teeth—gums barely formed—the thing can hardly cry, only gasp for oxygen in the fetus room.
I put him down on my sheets before crossed legs.
Set the tongs down.
Take a picture. Place it in an album called, “2017-08-09.”
Take another picture. He cringes to the flash.
I catch my breath—my heart does this thing where it stops my mind everything goes blank and I die for 1/23rd of a second—it does this now.
I know that someday it will stop forever, and I recreate with the thought of it as a way to calm myself. There will be a moment where I am alive for a few more seconds, I feel my heart stop, and then that’s me. Some weird moment where you know you’re going to die. And I hope when they find my room they will catalogue and label and reference and analyze every corpse I have created, from their tiny tongues to their tiny vaginas and dicks, DNA analyze those fucks and track down all their boys and ask each one of them: “Were you in this room? Did you know what she was doing with your kids?” And if my boys are true they’ll just say there’s no way they could ever earn enough money to be the fathers.
And I’ll be swirling—swirling down—into a well of blood.
And I’ll breathe it, excrete it, clot it, eat it.
Nothing healthier than a breakfast of blood.
Manufacture bodies for this purpose.
Collect them.
Gratify them.
Never let them leave the room.
And if you start to wonder whether this all stands for something, I would like to help you but I can’t. They say you make it but that doesn’t mean you understand it.
What I can tell you is about my sperm trap (cunt), boys who have been there as part of my breeding program, also the birthing/extraction process, and finally, subdivision of the fetus by means of a Classic Edition Victorinox.
I have a box. She is square on all sides. Each plate is marked with the tears of a thousand suns, etchings made by the feet of monarchs. Hellraiser buttons fit my fingers sliding ’round like a Mensa kid who can solve Rubix with one hand and her eyes closed.
I am that kid.
My mind encodes in blockchain.
Everything I eat deteriorates into blood.
When I stick my fingers in the holes, I unlock an oven—Pandora. I never know what’s in the box. When I open it, it is always a surprise, always new, always coming at me. I know how to regulate the hose, flowing in Morse, retrograding a beer bong/vomit carrier up one nose and out the other, cycling the day’s first piss in a Solo cup I keep beside the bed.
This is my process:
When dusk falls, I slather my vagina with anti-tick cream, Deep Woods OFF! and patchouli oil. I can’t cum without creamy Jif, coconut oil, and a fine layer of dismembered cricket legs. Of course it helps to have a green apple Four Loko on hand for aiding with the cramps. In the future every tall girl will come complete with her own wood clamps to tie off her marbled wooden vagina. Until then I use my daddy’s power tools.
Cutting, gliding, lasers, it shoots such light that when my neighbors look at my window they say “What’s she building in there?” and imagine me a terror suspect.
In my dreams I’m a corporate star. Sitting at a conference table with four other geniuses, each expert in our own art, each humbled by the presence of the capable—all of us under constant surveillance, every expression captured and reviewed by an even nicer conference table in another room, that one seated with 20 people—and when it comes my turn to demonstrate capabilities to the group I lift my skirt unzip my jeans roll down my socks part my hair and insert myself between Jennifer Lawrence and Darren Aronofsky’s sex.
I am film. I am the film between the sky. Sun is a picture. Earth is a camera. The galaxy is projecting on us, remote viewing shows this beyond a shadow of the stars.
My box. Hellraiser box. Skinny kitties mewing their way ’round, slick fetus of a cat, the grease tying their hair backward and strapping on Sopwith goggles Peanuts crunching under my feet the wall is filled with gators, all sizes, plucked from the rivers of the world, my room smells like Cajuns and mangroves and Dog the Bounty Hunter is there and Bear Grylls and Lucy Liu all leaning in with forceps and head lights looking into my puss and chattering conferring even the CIA can pick up their talk and has a live feed of my pussy with Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey Circus monkeys crawling in and out like a South African mining operation—I tell you, it gets pretty busy down there when I forget the plug.
And Lucy Liu sweeps me up with an archaeological brush, taking sweet care not to dislodge any raptor fossils—we all know that T. rex can’t run, so that scene in Jurassic Park never could have happened with the Jeep. Sux anyway for Lucy Liu ’cause I eat Stuyvesant grads with dino claws and lizard eggs.
Lucy Liu retracts her scalpel hand.
Jeff Goldblum and Stephen Hawking attack me with a series of equations. Little is known about their function.
I send lockstep fetus to the FBI via drone and ask for help eliminating the kitty hairballs from its precious trunk.
Bear Grylls goes in with his hand deep deep inside my throaty cunt pulls out a fetus and says “This is the most dangerous snake in the world” and eats it. Dog vomits out the window.
And I’m cumming, dicing out slugs onto the comforter, Lucy Liu arranging them in columns and rows, my VJ pumping and pumping slug after slug after slug the wormy natal product everything good about my empty box, empty bank account, empty life. Trent Reznor would shit his Hello Kitty drawers if he saw my face. Split Atticus Ross in two and feed him into a Mac. Lucy sliding her hands along the outer lips of my pussy stimulating the machine to produce as large a litter as possible. Each time she picks up the newborn slug, she spreads the slug’s vagina with tweezers from the Victorinox, opens them wide, and ushers in the next dimension of slug-begat-slug wonderfulness, now the bed is a fractal of smaller and smaller interconnected slugs curling around to touch their original momma (ME) in ways I never thought I’d be touched by my babies. They are the most sexually exciting thing to me, copies of copies of me, lobster arms—the arms of the galaxy—turpentine, octopus, eggs falling forever, tossing me in a girl dream of death and softness from above. You never came at me till you came at me in love. Watch it. A killer whale is still a killer even if it’s your mom. I sliced popcorn and buttered ovaries in my first job—which was really just a swan trap in the bathroom of an IMAX theater. If you worked there I had you. Had you up inside me projected with forks and focus, fingernails scraping my tunnel on the way up and the way down, leaving cartouche on the walls your pyramid is a birthing chamber life is death and death is life hence burial is birth, birth burial, mummification gastrulation, ability the disabled, vice, and plopping on that conference table is the employee you have never known.
When I was born, I plopped out onto the dirt and my bad uncle stood there kicking me while my good uncle and my mother looked on making faces like they were shocked but they didn’t stop it and the kicking went on like the Olympics.
I have a teddy bear. I call him Buster Brown. Because he is brown and when I was little I needed a protector to get me through the night—that’s why his name is Buster. He was there to help me survive the lights I saw on the wall—which I now know were just reflections off the light fixture, but at the time I knew they were spirits and I knew they could come off the ceiling any time they wanted and suck my breath out stick to my face like a bag and make the little girl holding the bear tight to her chest disappear into Tesla’s sixth dimension which I believe, upon study, is hell.
That was Buster Bear. I held him so tight every single night that his front side flattened out to fit my chest perfectly and during the day he could no longer sit up like a normal teddy bear so he had to spend his whole life lying down and that’s what he looks like now: round on his back, flat on his front, and his nose flattened and the fur around his eyes flattened so you cannot even see them.
He sleeps with me like a good bear, never tries to fuck me when I’m not looking (like the good boys do), he always stays through the night instead of sticking it in and rubbing it off and going through the window into dewdrop grass and a neighborhood full of other girls, sleeping in their beds, ready for night fucking and to take away my sperm suppliers for their own varied uses.
Buster Bear is a model citizen. He never carries torches and he always uses his power of speech for good.
When I felt him rumbling, buzzing, back at the beginning, he was rolling and bleeding black smoke rising up on his front paws (which were flat) and I put my hand over his belly and felt it rumble rumble with a mighty breakdancer’s roar and I knew I had to operate.
Sad, sad face bear.
Multiple sclerosis bear.
Bear with a cross to bear.
I took my Victorinox and sliced the motherfucker.
Dashing, slashing at his black flat belly under matted fur and the make-believe of this puppet animal who had been with me since before I bled before I started my factory before I spliced rocks together to make vaginal beads inside him was a brevity of fleas, bottomless pit, springing out at space-shuttle velocity, faster than a gun and they covered me. Sensing my heat from the bed pan jumping and clutching my ankles, my wrists, my face, my breasts, my back. Picking them off squeezing them between my fingers stomping them with my head forearms turning black with the covering of them, the plague of them, and venture by venture, bone by bone, intersection by intersection, the fleas covered me like paint and after a few minutes I stopped picking them off, stopped brushing my skin where another wave would instantly land back on me and cover me again. Lying. On top of the covers. Every pit and hook of me crawling with fleas, and I knew I didn’t have enough blood in me to feed them in a few minutes I would be gone nothing left but bones and tendons and hair and my next donor would come in through the window seeing this mess of girl I had been reduced to and he would fuck it anyway, fuck the tangle of pubes and flea mounds where my tunnel used to be. Riding me, bugs eating his penis and sucking blood from his one huge giant vein. He’ll cum in my ghost, fleas still taking the shape of me, where I had been, fleas climbing up his urethra down into his balls and mixing with sperm, starting a colony in his balls.
These are the things I think.
I am a hypochondriac.
When I’m lying in bed after a deposit, I reach between my legs and dig in the crack, running fingernails on the side of my red muscle and bringing out more animals from the zoo program—a program all its own—and aphids are my danger, they litter my crotch in fast motion, giving birth to live young without even mating, zoom zoom zoom! We lie together, me and Buster Bear—his damage is fleas, zooming out of him for a nature show and my vulva has become something no sensible boy would like to fuck it is teeming like with fish from the sea, aphis wave, I am their plant, delicious girl waiting to be turned into a wave of blackness, no sight of me, me and my protector eaten alive by our specific death mates, competition of who had it worse, who died more painfully, who earned complaining rights, who is the biggest martyr, whose killer was more proficient, whose end more terrible, worth remembering, historic, epic, validating. ’Cause everyone wants to be validated, and for some, the way we come to have meaning is by our oppression: we are the least tolerated, the least accepted, the more outcast, the more ruined, the most forgotten, never understood, fringe, alternate, marginalized, tiny, stinky, small. No one will have sex with us. No one will hire us. No one likes us. No one will publish our books. No one accepts our bodies, identities, selves. I curse the wave of tyranny—aphids, fleas—that swept into my room and ate me to my death, even though they are squishable with my hands they kill me like a torrent of negative breath, the opposite of a thousand Crest Whitestrips, crawling in and out of every hole, from mouth to ass, chomping on my lady bits, going back inside me, pinching my red red muscle like every fetus I once delivered is finally coming home.
Actors in floppy hats Broadway side to side, rolling canes side to side, side to side. Clicking heels of ruby slippers close to home wrap you in the same plastic cheese comes in, we have a three-piece show to rival the donuts of the ancients.
This is act one. In act one we receive explanatory remarks from those who stick their head in the door for one second and try to impress the world with their anger and lack of precision. If there’s one thing I have learned in my years as a fetus wrangler it’s that I can’t finish this sentence.
I broke with tradition, unzipped my skin from scalp to toe and inside was a poison lizard I bite you and you die 10 years later. My room is ahead of its time but 10 years for now everyone will have a fetus room, one per house, with a surgeon inside. Plans, techniques, tools—all available online. Starter kits worth five dollars. Orchestra plays in the stadium of a boxing match. Can you assume that George Clooney is a surgeon because he plays one on TV? My mind is mush, much enchained by character snippets didn’t mind when my mind was stretched the first time it got fucked—that’s mind fucked to you—cards on the table, an open-faced hand of seven-card stupidity going to Harvard didn’t make you any smarter just more confident in your flatness dull the knife reach into my puss pull out a cat a lawnmower a vice wrench two flying ladies from the circus of the sun we already sell our feti on message boards fresh young codewords for—I don’t know—people who like to fuck babies or something. There is a marketplace, an auction house, right alongside pork futures and cloud nines, men in suits set feti in the incubator, upright in urinals—aiming practice—get it in the eye that’s an extra hand job from the boss before conference proceedings but ladies we play a part too how many of those suits skinheads and billionaires went home to some nookie after they took off their hoods.
Femur battleship.
I put my name on my product.
Sign every girl and boy part that comes from the factory.
It’s like when you learned I was operating in your country it wasn’t just Dubai—it’s the kid sitting next to you in the third grade. He/she loves to deep dick partially formed fetus genitals is it my fault they are the demand I’m just the supply if people weren’t sick I’d produce something else—right? I deep dick a bottle of creamy JIF with my pinkie take off my rings when extracting product from my Slinky muscle plop them out on a bed of rice and eat them shits like sushi chopsticks grabbing eyes out that screaming face gripping them little fingers with choppy chop in one hand a pair of Gerber pliers in the other dissect ’em better than barbecue chicken I add a pinch of red pepper too.
Wacky WallWalker brains sliding down the red—you can tell the fetus ready when it sticks to the wall.
You can eat the prefrontal cortex—that’s the part that allows us to evaluate complex situations so most people won’t miss that. Standing on the corner with elephant tentacles drooling out their pussies—these bitches need a production assembly line, startup capital, and the will to live. Just because you have a heartbeat doesn’t mean you’re alive. Lift your lid and see if it’s just a bowl of Top Ramen you might want to shoot some feces into your eye see if you can jump start your Elvis groove before you die.
I laid my big fat clitoris over the railroad, got drunk, and waited for a train.
That is my level of commitment.
I don’t have sex for my amusement.
I am here for the engineering heat death of the universe.
You can birth fetuses for years, in a coordinated effort that measures the number of vowels in a man’s first name and uses it to decide between his fingers or his toes. I cut a dick off rough—chainsaw!—jiggle it on the way down suck cum up my pussy before that jim hits the ground. Use everything even the fingernails blend it solid at the foot of my bed droplets on the comforter each bubble contains the face of a seven dwarf.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
When in bed, then—what?
When I lie here bleeding after the birth of a pet, I think of all the muffins who’ve come through me—anonymous—who may have had feelings and may have had the thoughts that would save the world—but who I never named, who will never get credit or give voice and I know that they are not alone. Some film tech in California sitting in a California Pizza Kitchen in California it’s like when you see a Frederick’s of Hollywood in Hollywood if you’ve only ever eaten cheesesteaks outside of Philadelphia why do they even have cheesesteaks outside of Philadelphia I bat a thousand when I reach down spread my lips and draw you into a carnivorous plant let’s call him Seymour Audrey Audrey Jr—nobody knows.
I have disdain for everyone who isn’t birthing fetuses. Who doesn’t have a fetus room. That is why I never leave—I can’t stand the ones who bark at the outline of a fetus on the sidewalk without tasting the blood. Drag your fingers on the asphalt. Cross the police line. Scrape up all those tiny little pieces of bone. Brush your lips in the concrete and dirt and find us all buried in the backyard of one whose only way to enjoy is to possess—and that’s you.
How I lost my sense of self.
First, I saw me as the mother of the world, with everything that came to be, coming through me, forming in my belly, germinating in my mouth, spinning like cotton candy, gastrulating cell by cell, moment by moment, and I was in my room and I know not how I got there.
Then I saw myself from the ceiling, as likened to an angel, drapes made of beads, channeling some Big Easy fortune teller more like a witch, with bottles of baby heads stacked around the room.
I told my own fortune—which is kind of like going back in time and thwarting your own parents. And when I told my own fortune, the dark and the light swirled together and I could no longer tell the difference between them. I am convinced, even now, that there is no difference, that the conscience is a mistake of evolution, unneeded, something like hair—I mean, we have hats. Or the pinky toe—you can balance without it—eat it, cut it off. And when the cards began to shine upward through the mattress, I saw dogs and gods playing together like in Ghostbusters. Flatlining sipping my own blood, pinecones from some relative childhood in Louisiana, where alligators play. I had my moment of Shining, now able to speak with my mind, directly, lips thrown in a vat of oil, fried down to mix with rice. There is a direct correlation between how long I stare at the cards and the growth of the shine job on the inside of my eyeballs. I see inside—I can no longer see outside. There was a giant bunny who has never said a word. Filled with gnats. A teacher using a ladder to reach the top of the whiteboard. A man with a rotating head has his finger on a button. Attack dogs shy away, fearing my smell. Dreams where I touch a thing with love and everything I touch turns to dust, bones broken, annihilation. I am unable to closeness—I think they call me Rogue.
And then there come the waves. Lapping at the bottom of my bed. I am in Ireland, or somewhere that grows red flowers. Purple to the touch, biotech Hypercolor—I’ll show you the chemical structure of love.
I am grown into my bed, saying “yes” to every boy that asks me, yes to every note, suggestion, path, soggy cardboard is the only treatment covered by my plan. I stop conversing, just to please, just to mimic and to mask, given up on forwarding my pawn—I just sacrifice and sacrifice and sacrifice and when nothing is left I call that “win.”
But deep within me is an ocean. And it is strong, and it doesn’t care who it kills, and it is bigger than everyone and everything combined—including me.
When people say, “I’m dead inside,” I want to kill them just to see.
Brittle brittle pinecone, brittle brittle nails.
Trimming my fingernails under the bed. I have salt piles for the burial of a queen.
In dreams, I am a goddess. Upon waking, I am frail, frailty. When I clasp my fingers they feel thin and dry—the opposite of youth. Everything creaks—I may have undone my pelvis with the carriage of miniature snakes. Fathom this: a dirty bomb injected like collagen making your lips nice and fat but how do you walk with a stick of chewing gum between your legs? I shave the chute straight as the English Channel, slippery like a slide, but somewhere around five I shut down with a distinct feeling that that’s as deep as it goes with most of these people. And even though I live in their house—and will be always related to them—my door never opens and I never go out. And no one ever comes in. I am a landlocked country, completely surrounded by my enemy, but I hold my position, unbenefitted by the potential economic advantages of such. (I ain’t no Switzerland if you catch me.)
But there is a bones, and bones hurt in my stiffness, not even cumming brings my ship around. Wind blows through solid walls, necrophiliac wonderings if you have them the answer is yes. Rubbing fetal carcasses inside my girly pouch. Stroking out, every TED talk and brain trauma documentary now on my watch list. Living the life of the girl who used to be a fucking movie director now she got married lives a silent life getting fucked by a man who truly loves her and also loves to fuck women with brain damage.
Irrecoverable: that’s what I’mm’a call the first kid that I keep, bring to term and beyond—maybe learn to choke out kids in the sleeping cradle. How far can a Gerber go toward removing the heart and spine of a three year old?—The world may never now.
You can mow down my pussy hair and underneath you’ll find a turtle. We’re born a naked mole rat, we die a crocodile. I press hard on my clit so I can wait to pee. Before I relieve myself I must tell you that in the pictures when I see my old skin I see the toes of an elephant, all the wrinkles in the world telling geologic time buries my stack of accomplishments, me forgetting, me dying, everyone I know forgetting, everyone I know dying pushing down on their guts sitting on the toilet having heart attacks talking like the spacey old woman at the end of the street, stopping caring how you look and dressing purely for comfort, lowering our watching standards from Kubrick to ANTM to Drew Carey, morphing panties with a single touch and I’ll make your whole rainbow turn colors. That’s when I couldn’t pick the yellow ones from the purple ones and every color! Every color! So I went with red roses crushed velvet chenille cashmere carpenter’s nails a goat head and supremely wanting to die.
Now I gotta go to the bathroom.
And when I go, I flush away the tears of everything that came before my room.
Before my room, I was a cosmic camper unprotected.
Wake up sometimes thinking of my uncle’s face. And in my dreams he’s nice, that same face and unintended beard, but this uncle isn’t convincing my mom to kick me out of the house—that I’m a toxic person and I’ll never make a change, never be safe to be around, that I’ll use drugs forever and my mother tells me this, tells me she considers taking me from my room, putting me out of the house, finding me a good home.
In my dreams his is a countenance of gold, looking down benevolently, and when I wake I know that he wants to be like that—even sees himself like that, offering to be my mentor from his Christian perch where he drinks teaches his son to hate women writes evil shit on Facebook makes my mom cry and misquotes Abraham Lincoln. I mean how hard is it to check your quotes before you post—you’ve got the internet, right?
And in my dreams I know how Russel feels: he sees me toxic and him as God, when the best thing that happened to all of us is we stopped talking to each other. You think when you’re a kid that your parents are supposed to love you, shit like that. By 14 I knew that would never happen for me—that’s when I locked myself inside my room.
Placed a protective barrier of flea powder ’round the baseboards and ceiling molding. Deleted numbers out my phone and told the device not to bother me with anyone I know. Do you have those people in your life who treat you worse than strangers? That’s the worst—getting close to someone just so you can hate them. Get a fucking punching bag, garh. What is it?—familiarity breeds contempt? No shit. It’s like they insinuate themselves just enough to switch modes to full suck—vacuum cleaner mode, carving out your insides, chest cavity sanitized of air. Thanks a lot, empathy!—my friend, my enemy, my strength, my weakness—you are the reason I get played.
And on the windows I put mylar and velvet black—no one’s seeing in that shit, ever.
A layer of rat poison, molly, and rain water in vats, all blessed with the reversal of a priest, molecular copies of donor sperm in laboratory vials—chalky plastic with screw-top lids—etchings of medieval corpses people who died at Pompeii answers to Latin vocabulary test questions copies of my grades from kindergarten a bucket of flypaper rolls copies of every David Fincher film handheld projectors walking my walls with death scenes from the internet—people getting their heads cut off in football stadiums, stuff like that—and a life-size statue of Buddha don’t worry it’s not very heavy it’s particle-mold cardboard the whole thing weighs as much as my brain.
I like to think I have made a deal with aliens, that they are funding my breeding program and I have been abducted without my knowledge, instructed to breed feti for my friends from the stars—but that ain’t the case.
When I was young I never saw myself getting married—I saw this room. Every detail, the cracks in the drywall, the murder I had to commit, and if there are aliens they are inside my brain, pushing me forward, parts of me creating requirements other parts fulfilling them and are there little souls coming into existence and going away just as fast? Am I just a fast-forward mechanism to represent the genealogy of the Earth? Coming and going, coming and going? What do we do here?—Not much. Some people pervert the physics and say consciousness cannot be created or destroyed—but come on. I came into conscious being and my consciousness comes and goes while I live and ultimately it will go away. Russel sitting in church pews will never change that—he’s going there to cool his fears, his fears of becoming nothing. But that fear is the fear that arises when one is nothing. Do you think my babies are afraid? They don’t have time. They are too busy living and dying to wonder what they are. It’s only those in stagnant pools breeding flies mosquitos and Death Nile who think about death in worried eyes. When I slice open my fetus—8 weeks—I go in with the Gerber slice slice slice slip open the chest remove the heart and lungs for my collage (organ-drying station) take the bowels for a spicy treat eat the penis or puss and save the brain for my under-the-cover snack, a sort of night cheese and that whole time there’s not a drop of worry in my room.
While you pray for me, I am rising.
The prayer comes back around and kicks you in the ass.
If there was a god, do you think he’d worry about me—or you?
We had to sing those songs as children, too—but my ova screamed at the top of their lungs and swore their kids would never have to. Since I cut their throats out with a piece of string and dry them like jerky, I’m sure their promises will keep. And somewhere, in some town in middle America, one of your close relatives is putting on horse blinders and singing themselves to sleep. That’s all it is—your music, weak sermons, your attempts to save me when you yourself are lost. So much easier that way, isn’t it?—You praise your white baby put her in a calico crib and make sure she grows up to be terrifically, horribly terrible. And I’ll keep the fire pit going, praying to surgery (not even the stars) and my aborted children will have more power against this world—thin as paper and nonexistent—than your plump brainless fatty-fat fatsters.
Method.
By which children learn to hate themselves.
Learn to hate their states.
Learn to perform. For you. You dog. Put us all on show in the living room, play the counting game where I count to a hundred and you tell me if I missed any numbers but you always lie. You say I missed 13 when I know I said 13! You say I missed 27 but I always check double that I said 27! And every time I miss a number according to you I have to start over. Standing on a block with electrical wires attached to my wrists and a cone head I’m the black KKK member who dies of fright. Cut me some eye holes, log in at the restaurant a readout says 1:08:13.27 the time it takes for us to get a table do you want me to sign in at every restaurant in the mall? Race them. I turn inward every time you speak, every piece of advice you give it’s all there to help me walk into your lion’s mouth and now that I’m a few years older still sparring with your psycho ass you’re also a few years older and I’m not fighting you virile young you have the gray of ages, lines in your face for all the times you never cried. But the tracks are there anyway, showing everything you didn’t do but should. I can’t cut you down so close to death the men who sliced me at the ankles are now in hospice smoking Laffy Taffy but you can’t get the jokes your pirate heart won’t allow you and even the bird has left your shoulder.
I’m the fetus you’re the cadaver and you never had any power over me it took my whole life to know that you were always just a house of cards and guess what you’re deck is missing four aces I’ve had them in my backbone propping me up all this time and when I take them out I’m a slumper just like you neither of us had the will to stand yet we did battle anyway needing a monster on the outside to stand the monster on the in—born with gaping holes and gnashing teeth I am a regular wild thing causing mischief in my wolf suit wool rubbing between my legs and I need to get back to bed to reset an erotic grandfather clock chimes at midnight to let me know I’m home when you eat my cake I make up names for future children we might have if you slice me in two panty icing and rip and run, brother, rip and run it’s meant to keep you there just long enough to open your eyes and see a mirror in my eyes. Saturday comes. Sunday comes. Every night I watch ANTM look at the ceiling and conquer the world. A single text and I don’t even respond you’ll be coming over tout suite I read Camus while you hack away at my jungle it’s hot it’s wet it sticks to your skin furnacing rain forest tracks somewhere in the middle Werner gives his monologue about killing, all the knotted tops and bottoms conquering each other exchanging oxygen and carbon a man gets shot in the neck with an arrow and I think I’ll bring it home to my kids. Crossing the mountain with a cruise ship, all the while our five-toed kind exhibitions skin in three pools and one hot tub everywhere you look is something too old too young and one big soufflé ice cream dandy some Catholic brother telling me he likes to mix a little heat in with his air conditioning thank you mansplain and get your hand off my knee—this is the sort of thing I had to put up with in parochial school. There’s always someone pretending to accidentally open the stall door except brother Rob stands there taking it all in some deep memory of sleeping in a tent a river of rain flowing between my legs and bugs so weird it takes me a minute to realize I’m in a dream.
Dream big, kid—so maybe you’ll quench your thirst created in childhood to give you reason to run, to ride, to travel until you fall on your knees too thirsty to take another breath. I’m on the bus, going home, all my fetuses decorating the window frames and then it’s my stop—always!—I have only certain seconds to collect all of you—my friends, my enemies, my parents, my children—and I’m picking them up putting them in my pack but the doors are closing and I have to choose between leaving you so I can get home or staying with my babies and missing my station.
Every kid on the bus is looking at me.
The grown-ups never do.
All my feti spread out on the floor.
Picking Angela—she’s one with a Band-Aid X on her forehead.
Picking Braxton—he’s half black so the real black people call him fake.
Picking Bert and Ernie—conjoined feti.
I get the ones I can and I’m stepping off the bus and hating myself as a mother ’cause I left you—some of you—behind.
Then the great light within opens up and says:
“Say you were a mother.”
Check.
“And you had two kids, a bad kid and a good kid.”
I think I’m both.
“Which one would you love more?”
Right. I get this one—I understand. You mean if I had a racist KKK David Duke motherfucker with an 80 IQ—like my uncle—and I had some kind of saint sage brill mother—say Maya Angelou—which one would I love more? Would I have sympathy for the bad one? And this is where I have to leave you—as I have never been a mother to even a full-term child. But as you find yourself gravitating to one of these poles—to love equally or to love one more—please cling to your answer with humility, because even though I am a child, I know enough to know there’s no single answer to this question, no absolute, no solidity to comfort you.
I’m not so good at being a girl sometimes. Each day I wake, the first 10 seconds my mind tells me if I’m going to be a boy or a girl. On girl days I call boys and say, “Come over and do me like I wanna be done,” yes I’m partial to Prince on boy days I set up a mirror flat on the floor and kneel on top of it playing with my dick until about noon. On girl days I wear cutie cute cutesters adorned avec Hello Kitty. Boy days I wear Batman briefs blue and black elastic and it lets me stick my hand down my front anytime watching myself from above from below and I cum on the glass squirting like a boy drip drip drip. Some kids see themselves getting hitched at an early age I saw myself with child pregnant giving birth and now I’d have the ultimate pet, the ultimate friend, who would love me and me only the very best tagalong in the uni. Tiny alien baby put her on a keychain and jump from bed to desktop, desk to dresser, dress to window sill, keep it going until I shake her to a frenzy, star globe, rub us both to ignition, all the other flowers will see me in my terrible cage, ceiling hung with spikes, torn of gentle skin between my legs, frontage road shaved to a strip, landing planes on my furry mountain thing one and thing two popping up and down, carousel of broken dreams—everything outside my room is Hopper, everything in is Bacon.
I’ve built up an eternity of my impressions.
Flashlights on a window, sprite on a wall. Brightness photo pops blowing sparks like the olden days. Howard Hughes in the spotlight—douchebag freak like me, keep everything clean, visit 12 rooms a night to reassure me of my momma’s song, the one I sing to a wall of jars, every night, in a girl’s voice on girl days, a boy’s voice on boys’. Splash!
Splash iodine from a dropper in my petri dish—imagination’s microscope, suck my own dick with a rubber duck squeezing as I push in and out a clitoris innie or outie either way suction is your friend and don’t worry who sees it. You are my fetal toy, born of blood deoxyribo puss cum human bone fragments red bikini straps hard cocks cum drips giant veins sticking out I want to pop them cut them open suck the blood right out of your thickie. Cum in my ear, nappy man, slice the tip of your finger and make cave paintings inside of me.
Mark me for a thousand years.
Spit something that will never go away.
Sign your name on my muscle.
I’ll squeeze you.
Bleed you.
Drop your paint on my floor.
We don’t use a tarpaulin to catch the mess. I finally learned to eat chicken wings with my fingers feel good about sticky greasy fucking nut now! you hammerhead, cock smith, tonight’s lucky winner.
Finger-licking good.
Hotness and ranch dressing. Undress you with my fingers. Remix you load the latest upgrade. Watching the eclipse on selfie mode and you can even take a picture! Breath—exhale. Sweat—telltale. Influenced by wrapping paper, side wheel to the gods, leprosy-positive sprinkles on my pussy drag—that’s a dragon to you beware the macrowave timer behind you when it beeps I’ll fry your dick extracting semen with a turkey baster your insides blown apart like Black Hawk Down there’s another bird down in the city that’s how we plan it in war ok to kill better to wound then you wound everyone who comes to help no army in the world could survive without “Leave no man behind” but in the fetus room we employ a similar rule: Always leave them wanting more. That’s the magician’s rule, the performer’s—better to serve a small meal impeccable than for any dish to pool unwanted. Listen, sweets, you don’t want equal rights—think it through—it would undo everything the most feminine of us use as power. We wouldn’t even be female anymore. As the goners say: equal but not same. Boys in my neighborhood know that this is the room where they can copulate with a blood witch who will never come back on them with a baby—I gots my own uses for the babyfiend and it don’t involve you sending me money you got to keep your mouth shut and never let anyone know of my collection—kid protos slid under the bed with my Domino’s boxes rats fungi and an empty bottle of Hennessy Paradis. A fruit fly comes from under the bed crosses stage left lands on my lips rubs his fingers together in prayer collecting pheromones from labia crossing right rising through glass pane like David Blane crossed with Criss Angel on a stage show flying up to purple clouds retouched every angle then down, down down finding a street fiend jumping through hoops with the local ho—a girl named Faith ’proximately 12 years old—the bee sting pulls him over jailbait down asphalt past a gladiolus just now blooming orange buds past that to my house through the door (David Blane and Mindfreak) over the stairs floating like that little bitch from The Exorcist walking back on hands and feet head spinning like I am stabbing my hole with a crucifix popping a pimple excavating a splinter picking my nose I deep dick myself with the Constitution (articles three through five) then I cum straddling a clit vibe reading as much of the I Have a Dream speech warbling my voice see how far I can get ’fore my hands drop the tablet on the bed I stabilize the buzzy bee on my radical button sweat breaks out on my upper lip the bee stings I touch my nips dripping on the bedspread 12 Monkeys slipping out of me—silverfish—writhing in their new life granting me fortunes from a teller.
My pretty pussy learned to cum. She flowered—a gladiolus—nightmared me cuddled a rocker to soundstage awkwardness legs together and that drip drip drip straddled over the toilet like a cat learning to go without her litter box paws strangling the space and plop plop plop a clump trailing trails of dye wisps of redness in the poopy water and at the end we flush it down down drown spinning perspective of the room seen from within the pipes.
Bowl catalog when I was younger we had a cat his name was Henry then we discovered he was a she and she became Henrietta. I rubbed my face in her face so hard she was so soft but the camel’s back was when I threw her across the room pounced against the rim I was Kobe and we had to get rid of the cat.
Chat. My French word dummy. Pussy for Dummies. Let’s encode the rollercoaster-sewn gauntlet 12 layers of inner lips to inner lips to lips inward rambling rumbling wood and steel-framed elegances there is a ballerina spinning atop the first hill—do you think you can make it?
I touch the pad from tongue to ass, tongue to ass—this is the OCD ritual of a girl on the porcelain throne in my kingdom I am queen of all that goes on outside this room but between my scissors is a no-go zone over which even I have no jurisdiction.
Loose screw on the track—could bring down the entire superstructure.
When you hear me in your youth I’ll sound this way my whole life—as if trachea had no shelf life compared to—say—a face.
And what if I wrote poetry in the shade of great writers—do you think anyone would notice? That’s what my mentor said and we are like Benjamin Button—at this point I’m a thousand years older than her and she is a comfort baby I rock and wipe her ass.
You cannot control it. You cannot start it flowing and you cannot stop it but you can shape its flow. Therefore I am a river and a river goddess painting time red with the most healing cells in the universe. They’re all between my legs: armies, populations, future Martin Luther Kings. Heinous criminals, hardened battle drones, molecules in training, doves.
Videodrome: characterless television static with a background noise of wind chimes, vanilla butter cream, battle-torn icing they said my cousin was easier to talk to than me but that makes sense since she isn’t saying anything. They said my essay was nonsensical but that makes sense since I wrote my manifesto.
You couldn’t follow my stitching?
Is it a problem with the stitching—
—or the follower? When I ducked into a Jo-Ann fabrics in my 14 zone the sky was rims of cotton blinding fluor-essence tracks in six-fold directions highways in the foam ceiling kidnapping my small pussy toilet plunger I spent one minute too long in the bathroom and everyone was waiting outside the door when I emerged—like—looking me up and down and shit and I put my fingers in my pockets pushed down denim Jockey jeans tripped over dragon heels lamented the timepiece hanging in the wind popped cherry bubble gum and shifted my hips to say: Where were you when I gained my adulthood? Where were you when I became a woman pincing my thighs together containing blood oceans and waves to be parted by future orators standing on beaches practicing their projection? Participle in the lame style. Series of sequences like one month one month one day one day minute minute hour and the alley of power Seinfeld that’s my thigh gap slightly Kubrick elevators powering blood from basements to ceilings rooftop doll parties bring your own blood! When I pass away minions will crawl from me swimming down towers, rings, the cadence of bubbles, kings, and a soirée fit for a breed.
That’s a clot for my less educated.
I operate within a structure of the moon, lied down and gave up everything else, running the narrow track between gadfly and Gatsby, tickling the pupa of a monarch butterfly—they look like yarn, heavens to Betsy, tear me like that. One minute we’re in the psych hospice lunchroom the next you disappear I get the news your belly got caught up in a coke syringe which makes me want to cum, too—’stead I’m locked up (as is typical) in a prison of my own creation red room stacked one wall with terrariums for the fetuses I own.
One tack, two tack, three tack, four.
I checked my own shoe size and it was one-hundred.
My IQ came back as an irrational number.
Took every test in watercolor and the Scantron couldn’t read it.
Blew my pussy up with Trident and C-4—that’s when I knew it was real, son. Blistering through a midwest winter imagine all the blood flushed to oblivion by innocent maggots like me swallowing bitter fingernails fertile squares of parquet kitchens we made it to the murder channel 24/7 killing if innocent beings. Did you ever notice how important it is for people to think that all those victims were innocent? We don’t even think it’s wrong to kill—we only pity the innocent. Well, when my neck gets wrung by the grim reaper I hope you’ll know I didn’t go without sin. I wasn’t one of the innocent ones—I’m a victim and I’m guilty of every crime that’s listed in the codex.
There is however this small matter of the codex.
It was the baby book—a book of names. A diary of sorts, listing all the births and deaths and half-births in a 12-mile scope. I was responsible for 14. Plus or minus one. If you think about going from here to there and back again you will note that during this trip you go up/down/left/right all the same amount—you would have to or you would end up somewhere else. It is the same with births and deaths, it seems—according to the book. For every in, there is an out. For every hot there is a cold. And on and on—and that’s the matter of the codex.
Name after name.
And I would have named my 14—or 15, whichever—and I did name them, but not with names like Betty and Bertrand and Bob. I named mine Yellow No 2 and Red No 5 and things like that. Purple No 12 depending on the age, bruising, other organic factors. Color of the tongue, color of the lungs. Days in fetu. Results from send-away genetic tests. Place in the genealogy of the father. Tolerance to pain. And also fortune as determined by this see-through plastic fish I got from a girl on the internet. (Not really fair to mention her name but she takes pictures in the shower and sends them to me.) So they’d be like Red Baby and Blue Baby and Gold. As their skin changes so do their names: you might start out as Red Baby and turn into Blue Baby then to Black Baby Charcoal Baby or Skeleton Baby. Broken-arms baby. Severed-tongue Baby. Chainsaw Baby. Licorice Baby. Ted Bundy Baby if you looked like an American serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, burglar, and necrophile—phew! Seven-armed Baby. Potty baby who was born in the potty. Window Baby who I almost threw out the window. Ant-eye Baby I put ants in her eyes and watched her scream. Fluid Baby I put lighter fluid in her diaper and when I pulled away the plastic her cunt came with it. Gag Baby I taped her closed to stop her breathing. Lincoln Logs baby got a Lincoln Log stuck in her throat while trying to make her straight—she had horrible posture. Also Bubble Baby I drowned her in a bubble bath—I use Mr. Bubble Bubbletini Bath Bombs (proudly). Necrophilia Baby—you can guess what I did to him. And all sorts of names—shoot me for not allowing them the grace of being a Bob or a Janice or a Justine, but their participation in the world is minimal and their names were mostly a convenience for me.
I cum-crush the busboys they have come for work but find only freedom in my cunt they enter triumphantly and on their way out flat as tape. Worming their way into the vagina (insert Wikipedia photo here) fear of every moment while they’re focused on rhythming their way to orgasm that someone will run the back door housing glitch it poke holes release Gollum in a viral package that’ll cut off your nuts.
Elegantly screaming.
The pop-hot! of colliding between the bubble gum chewing lips nut in me baby nut nut nut. Slap you with a fine for droplets that fall out of me each one wasted I take dermis off your fucking epi slide it over Hunter S. Thompson drag a lake pinhole photograph my ass it’s only elite if I say it is. As your attorney I advise you to get on your back and take it up the everything starting now and continuing one day after forever.
I coat my tunnel with sandpaper and Tabasco constructed for his pleasure her productivity and the office suite of every other chief in this country is burning to the carpet everything left behind networks keyboards wireless fish tanks burning tires to let the militia know who’s cumming you’re addicted to my squirt don’t pretend you don’t think that makes you the most proficient lover from here to the state line. I light my cum on fire latent fracking renders one lip dry the other lip wet come get your dick wet paint it on Cookie Monster’s face he could be an amoeba but I don’t think Muppets even have sex.
Warning warning warning!
A piece of your lobotomy broke off inside my cunt.
It is staring up at you from the walnut between my legs.
Chewing gum with my labia.
Mostly shaven.
Car wreck.
Train wreck.
Reach inside me (use these chopsticks). Break off a piece of the leather interior limo driven by my kids.
Their names are Bonobo 1 and Bonobo 2.
Your name is Harry. I’ll call you Vitchel.
You are my spiky spiky other mother from another bother.
I have a rainforest inside me.
My ass is a ticketed sideshow. You put in a ring and my mechanism turns. It is a forest, a circus. It is a rotary, rosary, a retrograde wheel. It turns by crank and when the clockwork spins a golden door at the end of my ass regenerates baby taxis dipped in Clive Barker’s underness, cloaked in red leaves, veined like a shrimp, fathoms below the cockroach an invincible being carrying two massive claws and a forgotten wedding ring. Thus generated twice a second, thrice per annum, derelict reefs left to their own devices sprout a clitoris—shaped like an h—which drives me post-confrontationally into an unavoidable clash.
Fingers on my hips.
You’re not allowed to cum until you stop.
Grind it out—no rubbing here.
Massive seafaring clobbery—just stick it in.
Stick it in me.
This is a reverse rape.
I purchased tickets
for a show
Waited
my whole life
to see the band
But
they never came.
And that is when—in the first few minutes of my life?—in the last?—I decided to make my own.
A woman was sent by the school board and when she sat she said:
“Are there any questions you want to ask me?”
I said: “No.”
She said: “This is the last time you’ll get to ask me questions directly so if there’s something you want to know, this is the time.”
“I don’t want to know anything about you.”
“Then let’s begin.”
I stare at her. She has frizzy hair and a badge that just says: 23456.
She looks around my room: the red walls splattered with blood and stuck with tiny fingernails. The white ceiling. The window. My terrariums, stacked on the dresser, keeping feti in various stages of development.
“A fetus room,” she says.
“You’ve been in them before?”
“Once or twice.”
“Were they as good as this one?”
“It depends,” says 23456. “You’d have to show me your breeding plan.”
So I show her. A gene analysis app on my phone. Samples from the terrariums. Uterine wall swabs.
“Do you have their taxpayer identification numbers?”
“Each one is registered as an LLC.”
“Smart. Do you know why I’m here?”
“To psychoanalyze me?”
“No—” (and here she said my name) “I’m here because the commonwealth now requires homeschoolers to submit their students to mental health evaluations six times a month—”
“But my students are dead.”
“That is so often the case,” she says. “So rare to capture one alive. The technology exists to perform these evaluations postmortem and I guess that’s what we’ll have to do here.”
“My fetuses, though—except the one in my oven—are dry and scaly like seaweed on sushi. Their brains, when possible, were removed with Krazy Straws and set outside the window on a rack much akin to the way one dries fish for feeding to the dogs.”
“How did you learn to do that?”
“Internet.”
“Isn’t that the place where you watch videos of men spitting on a woman’s pussy?”
“Well, look,” I say. “If you need to spit on a pussy you’re doing something wrong.”
“Respectfully.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“No. The time for questions is over.”
“Where did you get your degree?”
“The time for questions has elapsed.”
“Do you even have a degree?”
“Get up on the bed young lady.”
“Why?”
“Get up on those pillows. Spread your legs.”
“And what if I said no?”
“You can’t. It’s a state-sponsored initiative. If you don’t comply a shark will be assigned to your room phantom helicopters media hacking mandatory narcotics mobile clogging drug-induced medical conditions unknown types of cancer and if we have to we’ll drag you to a hole in the ground in Baghdad next to the guy who invented antigravity he’s a genius and no one will ever hear from him again.”
“Why not keep him around and see if he invents something else? Imagine if Einstein had been disappeared.”
“You’re a little late to the party, fetus girl. His discovery is worth more than his life. What’s important is to make sure these ideas end up in the right hands.”
“Do you still need me to get up on the bed?”
“Unless you want to go to jail in Baghdad.”
“Ok.”
So I pull my pants off and jump up spread eagle so this bitch can see my vajayjay.
“Where’s your vagina?”
“It’s right there.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Do you see this?”
“I see a salt and vinegar potato chip.”
“Well take it out of there!”
23456 removes the chip and places it on her tongue.
“The damning thing,” she says, “is this industry prohibition on Mexican Catholics pumping babies out their ass. Anti-birth conditioners on the mind. Nut sack labias in the width. Secretaries of Secretariat. Aberdeen Düsseldorfs. A trip I took to New England, where they let you in the front and whisked you out the back, processing under an internal power plant, and every doctor was a serf.”
23456 stripped off her licenses and smoked a bone.
I reached inside the red club pants and massaged by box.
“I understand this fair need,” continued 23456, “to genocide the star of your womb. It is born of blackness and chemistry, built inside the selfsame category of groups of groups and genres of categories of naught.”
Puff puff puff, pass the bone.
Puff puff, pass, puff puff, pass. Stone.
“This is why you keep a journal,” 23456 told me. “You need it like a knight needs a shield. If you’re on Brokeback Mountain you write a lotta poetry to a goat. If you’re in your fetus room, you record everything you see, all you do, all you know, so that someday south of here in time and the space of face you will show it to the one who survived and hopefully all the little sisters and all the little brothers who survived the guilt will have themselves a halfway playmate for life. It’s one thing to light the menorah in your pee panties it’s quite another to drink the oil rub it up and down your kitty paw slick licking your fingers sitting out back of a rancher’s barbecue standup comedy from the girl with the Wet-Nap stuck in her front butt crack that was me in my first day on the farm. But you want to catch those silver moments with balloons and guns. A gun is power—a suitcase full of money, that’s freedom. No other symbols are needed ’cause nothing else matters. It’s going out in a hail of bullets—that’s been the dream all along and if you can’t face it you can’t make it and if you can’t make if you can’t face it that’s the cord that ties you from tip to toe riding my bike sock footed and you barge in and say sweet girl ain’t you a baby factory ain’t your momma had three of you six of you 12 of you can’t peel an apple any faster than any single one.”
We paint wild roses red. Solid bloc of imagination, keener puppies extolled a ruder dildo proposition, kinetic resonance in drops of dew pointing north north north north north north east. I googled Jennifer Connelly, came away with a spring of handprints in my RED DNA bullet couch this was the story—this was the story—of the girl who took a trip upside down through speckled toadstools sprinkled barbed-wire bullets I have a record-skipping timeout that kills you on the platform and underwater owls give me the knowledge needed to operate on myself under anesthesia rude awakenings upon severing the quasar zip too low Hollywood Squares couldn’t even handle my infants—just in volume alone. But in that period known as silence, before the gems came together to produce a Final Fantasy SparkNote! worth examining, I had been around the genome in my red Corvette—girl!—loving the wind in my hair and I came to a sudden stop! Let the top down. Rollin’ with my homies. Did you think I would abuse my kids? Is it better for them to be Schwarzeneggered at eight weeks for that they might continue along this rail until the tracks hit the toad. Is your rubber in my road? Sailing, tonight, with drip drips my Bloody Valentine to the inner bathroom door they look like wax at first, but then you realize they’re my monthly nut, looking like a candle dripped when carrying but the power didn’t go off that was when we talked most, when it rained, winded or stormed more than usual and the lights cut out—we sat in the kitchen reading the backs of cereal boxes like reading a caterpillar’s user guide. Safety tips for dealing with a chainsaw I mean aren’t we beyond splashing it all into a bag?—You’re gonna cum in that little flap of boy/girl Sandusky In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida doesn’t care if you’re a mouse or a mole have trouble relating to serial rapists but I’ll draw them in with bear spit, honey boxes and California dreams but in the end I’m always the girl doing coke and splitting up my own stomach while sitting at the top of the bell tower. Holla! Church. Lickety-split. Fantabulousness. Jiggitymonster! Brisbane! Lola. Tremblyfuck. You start in the outfield, wade through the mist, and someday you’re in a storm that can never be gotten out of. I accidentally kissed the girl with the pink glasses but forgot her name was Tori and inside Tori’s room was a bathroom in the shape of a telephone booth—one word different would change the planet’s axis—prone to stellar accidents raining piecemeal in the junkyard, dogs running with their tails on fire! terrible, terrible gnashing and wailing I would say someday I want that celebrity hideout but the truth is the whole damn thing is Gone in 60 Seconds for to try the wind is to ply your aim against the stars and sons of matter eliminate their fortunes thus, here, whether or not your name was molly. I am in the well of cow bell hell to anyone with an ethereal heart blaming the server of the dish the undertones of the boys downstairs they have a camera plied upon me—see? A Scanner Darkly outside of my door the hands on my wood wolves beaconing to a story of my parents—friends who finally fucked. Didn’t have any interest in each other but drunk in a friend’s apartment she asked if he had a condom and he said what does it matter? They only did it once and I begat me, I and I, a terrible noise at the eaves. My true dad—the one she should have fucked—became 20 times the man of my dad. My mom became an abuser with a smile on her face. Called her “professional”—the name for subtlety, brine, hairy faces, and the witch is in the wood. Once they closed me in for cleaning and I couldn’t stand the taste of the bombs—put ’em in every room except mine and mine was going to be next but I never opened the door. I welcome the fleas. Can paint them in a corner, use them as texture, spin fast, fast spin spin spin spark, dulcimer tones in a washboard abs. Never send in your information—it’s all a scam. Every number who calls, every little girl in pinafore greeting you in the aisles, whether organ or urn, is working for THEM. They. They talk in a hush, so quiet evading the radius of an ant, coffin measures the end of so-called stability. Be careful little girl, there is a pinprick in the bottom of the pool. It will wish you away toe first spinning you into a rag nothing left but a blot of blood smoke lying on the bottom of the pool. Start to rescue minute patterns?—That’s how it talks to you. It is only for the eyes to read—nothing gumsmoke to an inchworm. Placid, knowles, binge reading the dead. A piece of bark slides through the air, hits roots, rots, goes back to the sky. The great lizard pockmarked below your skin—tattoo for a mole. Brimstone Cadillac is the mark of bestiality practiced in a Catholic school. Wish we were from the other camp a lyre of satanic camp children showing their panties to Tesla’s eighth dimension how could it be, Mom—how could it be that you versed me in the arts not knowing that you yourself were a practitioner—rotted to a golden stump that wakes me each morning terrorized by you but for reason that now I am the master—you forgot everything you ever knew! You made me in your image then left me fending for myself in a novelty store. You had me at hello. Dropped me in a foldable baggie no seams honored the knock at my door spread your legs in Shark Week ocean—I was the first one of my kind. Born to this space. Making a boom boom boom.
When I meet a new person I get to make up a new self. They come to me streaming, I show my clit for the world to see, live on the up and down Periscope and when I turn the camera on myself it is shocking to everyone but me.
I have drums in my ears, pins, zippers, helium bombs.
I rock a Sybian, hair curlers in the shape of ram horns.
Goat tattoo—head of a goat, motherfucker.
And my left fallopian tube excreted on the extern of my body, Ask Jeeves mounted with a syringe full of your sperm—I can input sperm to an ovum at any time I press on the plunger and impregnate myself at the end of a video seg. My profile says WATCH ME PROCESS SPERM. Coupla hits off that. You get your jim erect and when I push the sperma down with a hand hand hand you imagine the babies were yours and we were living in a stable relationship in a house in the suburbs. Mail me genetic materials with the corporate postal rate—send me bombs and foldable girls paperclips fingernails scabs from where you did it too hard then mount an excursion via multimedia! you will never know how squishy it is through the phone. For fifty dollars I cum in your throat, flyboys screaming through boxes of tissues don’t you know you scraped your greatness off the wall. Don’t you know your legacy is—in most cases—just your predilection for colors tastes a certain type of pussy you’ve come so far from 14 now to 17 and you want the girl who is not quite an illegal drug. I am the girl you strap to the bed. Tie me up with pliers between my legs I learn to love you and you learn to love me, my captor—certain joy in knowing I can never be through with you, that you taste my grool in your sleep it falls from the side of your face and pools on the sheets you say, “You’re pouring water on me,” when I wake you up, the morning sings. Punk-alley bitch-ass bullshit from a frog nine. Bring the extra clubs and I’ll walk, Cirque-us style, in a van we rode from Cincinnati with you sitting on my knee and we (both virgins) sang to Reznor Closer you would have been my first you would have been my first I let you violate me perpetrate me complicate me but a year later when you saw my feed you were like fuck this, freak—I don’t grow babies on the outside of my body. Told a Watergate that this toad will never turn into a princess—ever—regardless of how you stroke her. I had garden gnomes installed in my Slip ’N Slide and when you get to the groove I say, “Sail that ship, captain,” and you sail it all the way through to the end. No amount of academics could prepare you for this. No amount of MILF pussy can prepare you for this. You’ve got foodborne illness coming out your ears—nothing can prepare you for the schluff-off jizz machine stuck between my chewing gum lips. I’ll Hubba Bubba your military ass till you can’t stand up you’ll have scabs between the hole between your legs. I am the woman who broke into your workplace put my ass crack down and spray painted the mutha templates cross your walls like Banksy. Stacks of limbs, stacks of elbows, stack of cherry, loops of fruitcake, white slices looming ’bove the necromancer hall messages delivered on flame—tip of the tongue, blazing orange, insides, come to momma. There was a mountain in the fairytale, slice of lemon, lemon cake, lemon drop, lemon tongue—you might want to grab the roll bar ’cause my tingles are coming off the rail—slept with me in Havana, virile monkeys spreading citrus remedy for the coke between my legs. Everything was born there mismatched chromosomes wired like a deadly bike accident. Buried deep in the center of the hole, a rock, likened to a pearl. If you just misspell something you can call it art.
That was the dark arts.
Those were the yard darts.
A sail run up in red and white, ladybug screening, countenance forward muffyn tingles and a ho-dee-ho-ho. I sliced my natal lips in 12 pieces one for each maniac of Jesus, Liberace, Colin Jones, they made up medical equipment after me, I am the namesake of flasks and monitors, pliers and tweezers, kid nothing is the scream team watermelon bug. Buffalos, cows, a hybrid Egypt/alien bubble, terror catechism, handbook Riley, believe this or not motherfucker.
We have you on lock.
Every carry monitored, every roof, every step, every syllable and breath. If I contract my pussy movements there is a field. If I scratch my inner nostril with the back of a fingernail there is a field for that. Every time I hold your breath underwater, baptizing you to death—there is a field in the database for that.
We adorn your movements with Cheshire, asking nothing in return but your five-dollar bug spray, tenteen condoms, hail, pussy hair, the clippers you use on your beard, I have once laid into a woman scissored her but no baby was to come of it and I had already siphoned here pheromones for future use. Tenteen fucks and a ho-dee-ho fragile horsey broke my hymen but forever I have come to hold it in this vat of children’s stories formaldehyde.
See, here is a nostril.
And here is a toe.
Everything depends on what size you are. If you’re big, then toenail clippers are for cutting toenails—if you’re small, then toenail clippers are for cutting your head off.
There is a sad part to this story. It is called a funeral.
Funeral for fun, for spare parts, for time served.
We had it good there for a while, didn’t we. But now I am watching you on my screen as they put your body in the ground.
You played ukulele with a hundred strings, tapping drum sticks together where all the members of the 27 Club partied Alice style and Megatron pushed the Cat into the ceiling died from cardiac arrest bottles were all over the room cocktail of Rx drugs and heroin, usually—that’ll do it.
My kids never had the chance to see daylight, the eclipse, a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
They spent their short time in a glass-walled terrarium, standing on hind legs—geckos—churning the sun.
And if I advise you the short follows the long—listen to me. And if I advise you the hot follows the cold—listen to me. For these are the precepts of pain—a goddess lives here, sampling Jewish gods and mastery, monsters fornicating in the tall grass, laying down a codex of hair and blood and fingernails, never to fall, always to stand in the circle that’s real a square, public figures shaken by the clock, squeezing water from a rock, there is and there isn’t a way out—as according to Nails, The Way Out Is Through—and Mamet was in there somewhere.
I am a woman with a washboard, living in a Coen brothers film, ratty by the edge of the creek, baptized in an overhead shot (early Technocrane), busy with the business of washing blood from the end of one day so the next one can begin illusory, clean. Constructions of meek emotion saddled from a wrinkled face to your own—you are riding the wave but the wave is crashing. It is coming down upon your heads and only the lucky ones will make it long enough to suffer in our particular way. The fetus, fortunate, lives longer than the rest, carrying a glimpse of trashcan dream and Elton, sky livid, butterflies made of acetate and yarn, enough to break the fall of Gotham’s caped crusader, directed in cineplex by a teenaged nomenclature—Dawn—her dream is to save it all in her rolled-up pant leg, walk from work one day onto a bus, that goes to another bus, that goes to another bus, that goes on and on to the left coast, looking out the window and there I am, there is the creek, there is the baptismal in Technocrane and she puts her hand on the window sliding down in condensation, the Joshua Tree is now located conveniently in a trash can just outside the California border.
We make a cat stew near your grave. After the tourists have come and gone, back to their high-rise, watching lesbians eating peen because we paid them to, after the commercials play, after the credits run, after the television slips into sleep mode, this is the second coming, not of JFC, but of my tonsils and my tongs, my enchilada stew pot, your sanguine is what makes the sauce special, special sauce borne from the ears, carried to the tongue, fragments of the frontal lobe—don’t you know that there isn’t anything but life? That all of it is living. There’s no thing such as the dead. My forebrain liveth and reacheth out to other forebrains in the stars.
A cataclysm of nervousness.
A catechism fit for Queenie (was a blonde—her age stood still).
Parades of silverfish, carrying banners of rage, none of them with the depth of a couch cushion. This is what became of your children—they grew up in absentia of skill absentia attending spans between amniotic fingers, blowing their nose equivalent to blowing their minds, pushing a broom and smoking the nettles out of a thicket—that is the result of your diocese and your doctrines. Diplomas. Dagweed. Dogwood. Dirge. And simply death.
The harder you tend the garden, the more the nettles grow—the wilds, camping under the stars keep your doggy safe with you—nature will eat him like a Starburst. Yellow or purple—I think purple.
That’s life in the wilds, arranged toothbrush like muffin, lined cacti from door to bed in the red room, interleaved by fetal caskets, read to sleep each night with a parody of pain.
No one feels it anymore—even if your fetus died you would have not the mechanism for feeling—anything—much less loss. Put up an icon that designates your sadness, then go into the thicket and drink a Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
It will hit the spot.
It will do the trick.
See? No one even gets drunk in the future. It’s all a play.
If the Great Mystery took over me—my sacred fetus, my divine—it would see these digits of zero and one, rocks running over the water, I pluck them out of me with pliers, my catechism feeding the funk soul brother (check it out now) you know there is a limit to the number of times I’ll allow you to look at me with that counterfeit smile counterfeit being counterfeit culture counterfeit family countered by generations of systems and patterns and lies. Overdraft protection for your fucking mom. She says she loved me—kicked me like a dog. Told her it hurt me the words she used telling me I’ll never make it as a mom saying the strata of her siblings would not support me that’s when I started to brick myself in, cinder by cinder, birthing my babies in private locks—germination of a psychoactive toad—signal broadcasting colors—every little handprint stamped in construction paper—footsie booties knitted from spider silk—a rainbow of fruit flavors!—robber barons crossing the dentra with the dantra—twisting the mentra with the mantra—and only a princess with crusty underwear, smoking crack in an amniotic tree, could ever keep me company—she’s an imaginary friend for the imaginary inhabitant of an imaginary room.
A dream within a dream. The theatre of my consciousness. A me, hallucinating me, drawing me in window marker on the bathroom mirror—that is all the me I’ll ever be, figures changing with diet, sometimes a stringier me than usual, sometimes fatter, tireder, more tender, more or less hunched, as my father says gaunt, hair mussed, eyes like Manson. Totally in control, necklace of Spree, original Game Boy code sequence tattooed below my button: up up down down left right left right B A start. Touch to play—select start if you want two player. Sea men bristling my nipples. Behind a broken window Matthew Broderick thumbs the nuclear launch codes. I keep a towel and a beach chair under my bed for the day it happens—I’ll be sipping a Sprite holding hands with the alien sons and daughters of the revolution, writing #sixwords in blood on our arms. I was a girl on grandmother’s bed. You and I shared a religion class. And instead of doing our project we laid on my grandmother’s bed I told you how my mother was conceived in this bed and you took the bait, unzipping my school uniform (I always wore the pants) playing my vulva with your cock, rubbing my clit a velvet coin purse messing around with my pee hole a bit and finally finding me with your blessed dick hole, sticking it in and I didn’t mind a bit that we only got a B- on our project. I wanted a fetus in me that day, each day, every day since I learned of my baby box and every egg I’d ever spin was with me when I spouted from my mother’s hole. I am a hole, ever empty, something to fill, a lack, a potential, a place to hide. The essence of an innie/outie. Your teddy bear. Something about me looks like a daughter looks like a mother to you. Somewhere to put your sticks and rods and guns and pricks and fingers and tongue and toes. We get freaky behind closed doors. Order breast pumps from the internet. Watch a dying breed of compulsory sex and feeling—future holds no love for these and flying objects land on my roof seeking to reach themselves in the past, to learn our own essence, always a mystery to the intuitive. Blankets us with bomb, with carpet, with dizzy spells automatic sleep sudden combustion and naive head replacement. There is a descendant of mine looks like a marsupial rod, she has eyes of a tree frog, maybe, or a sentient raccoon. The baby community will never embrace me—I am neither fashionable nor legal nor egomaniacal enough to be a surrogate god. I make myself a sacrifice, doubled over painful with a hedge trimmer sticking out my belly, playing Operation working out the kinks in all my tubes. You’re licking my vagonomics trying to stimulate me for the big event but hand me my glasses I can’t see through this spray.
The surgeon of this surrogate head.
And what I have to tell you isn’t pleasant—what I have said even less so. “More matter, with less art,” says Gertrude. But I swear I use no art at all. If I have used a complex style seeming of nonsense it is because I found a need to gate off various readers, potential readers, and their company and kin, a ratings guide intrinsically, built to the text itself, such that a sentence and a word will mean exactly what each listener must make it mean—to those not ready, nonsense—to those with wells of resonance, then Joshua’s horn a weapon a thimble a running of red and blue and purple and the gray edges of the hole left by suicide mome raths in Disney’s version erasing up their tracks as they go, leaving the forest path empty sweeping up all traces that you my friend were ever here. Like a text that eats itself, eating my placenta on birthing, expulsion of natal vitamins in a PEZ dispenser laid down in my baby’s grave in magic hour there were film crews following me to the edge of the yard I didn’t care to speak and told them, “I am mourning the death of a child who came from my left hand to my right in the space of 13 minutes she spat and sang and cried to the carrion crow above.” Then I was one with the dirt the filmic rain a condenser mic in my face recording the breathing noises of a thousand civilizations, initials of emperors wrought into stones you can step over with a bruised and bloody knee I bow to stones containing empty breaths in toxins out toxins once a princess tore her pocket on the sword of a king—right here in the devil’s Camelot, the home of my schooling and youth, you wouldn’t believe the dispensations cataloging from this tentative union of magic and muse—frightening the one who reads over my shoulder—my ghost can’t even stand me anymore.
She reads YA fiction because she cannot stand the darkness.
She calls her mother once a week, checks Facebook for the news from high school, characters turned bigger and brighter and full of the same shit they were back then.
She tells herself she will only eat one—then she eats another and another and another.
She is normal, she can walk the streets.
She holds my hand when I am pregnant—she reads me Goodnight Moon. She reads The Little Prince. She makes my cocoa with the right amount of sugar and the right amount of chocolate and stirs it the right amount of times to please the underlings of my blood bubbles—brain—and uses the tiny marshmallows.
When you look over your shoulder do you see her?—She sits over the right and reads one sentence ahead to make it safe for you to proceed—to read and read and read—she comes to you in your sleep and cleans the room. She touches every corner and sweeps away everything you have learned since 17. She doesn’t protect you. She is your witness. Bad things will still happen. But while you suffer—while the raindrops touch you—she sits in the corner with her hands folded above her knee—and she listens.
She is the white—opposite of red. She sits like an angel, a ghost, a sinking ship, a colored flame. Dress lit with candles, mouth opens soundless—her song is on the other side of the dime. Screaming, echoing in an empty room. Before the furniture. Before the paint. She opens her mouth and touches the holy wall, pinprick redness of the hole, touch her pussy with fingers, blood, ailment, a loosening agent. Rev up the lawnmower and cut off my head. I rock back and forth on a nigga, slide whistle that cum off his head, Pietro Petrol—it seemed like an innocent decision—but what works does not necessarily work on you. It is like a mountain. You climb it but it is not there for you to climb—mountains have their own agendas. That is the thumb for dealing with others. I create enjoyment for you with a plush button, slapstick clit cuts the head off a trout, but all the while my motivation isn’t visible on my face—complex masses of gray, dense as a diamond, lying next to each other on a pillow. She goes this way, he goes that, and in the end your whole experiencing of this place is such that you are responding, responding, always caught responding, lack of meditation, lack of breath, lack of autonomy. Drops of water seeping through the mountain—they come out pure. I stood in the grocery pondering 30 types of water, picked the most expensive one, and said, “This is my life.” I am going to take each step like I want it, breathe each breath like I can. I’m letting my family go. I live in their house but my room is locked and I will never ever see them while I’m alive. Finally changed the track. Birthed myself bloody and new. Created adjectives that perfectly describe me. Some called me a killer. Some, a mother. Some scientist, some architect, some semiotician, some ice cream, some black pepper, some ant traps, some cat food, some rapper, some poet, some angel of death. If you whisper into the microphone you’ll reach people in the back row. This is the remix. The view from around the bend. All fear is a fear of becoming and this is what you might be. Eccentrics seek out eccentrics, they don’t know who they might be. Herd people scream for help when they encounter us. We give birth—they only hold themselves underwater. Ours is a land of bloody eyeballs and bloody hands and bloody dicks and bloody cunts, generative, whetting your mind for the big flush. Swirl of menses in toilet, swoop streak of it going down the tube. I leave it there to remind me of my femininity, remind me of my power and my weakness, a magnetic pull that leaves da Vinci’s man burning in its tracks. I thought I was a polymath in my 20s—I did not understand the word. Recommend you see the world as paper thin—flattened in symbols everything a misreading of a representation, consciousness exists in the observer not the observed and I am passing in the hallway in my leotard, the black hallway by the photo lab and I had you take my picture so I could bring you here and kiss you with my pepper breath, hoping hoping hoping for your touch. Reach me! Reach down and touch between my legs! I am not a whore today, not a goddess—I am five again I am in the treehouse I am on the trampoline I am in the laundry room and this is the germination of my sex—touching me there I complete the loop I am the feeler and the felt I create my own totality, universe, whole. When you play those two notes on the piano again and again it moods me enough to jump in front of a train to fall from a parking structure the very top I am head girl in some YA book hearing the echo of your voice in an empty room I could learn to play just to impress you you are my emperor—fine—molten—brilliant—hurts to look at—that’s all I can say. But you loved me from the time I was seven inches, a hand length, crippled hands fully formed stubs of teeth brain damaged before I ever said a word. You loved me when I was just a seed, when a tree was no guarantee. When I could not ride a bike. Before I could divide. When my cells were too few to count. Before the tire met the pump. When you could hold me in a single palm. Before I learned to talk. When the sky bent so low it touched the stars. Before the ice cream melted. When my fontanelle tempted your fingers to implode. When my soft spot closed. When I became a demon, taking on demon clothes and demon matter and demon art, swallowed you for nourishment, ordered off the menu, raw and undercooked eggs—mine are always squishy in the middle when I flush them down the pump. I’ll squeeze your finger, tell you a riddle, count my blessings before they hatch, video you all with my phone squirming alien babies on the dresser floor. Fictive life, couch dweller—you are a scream in a well, stone walls and the puddle at the bottom, made all in a movie, tiny credits roll my name, and believe it or not this is the cradle I was born in: slapped down, conceived, baked, born, dropped, and forgotten.
As Jim says, “This is the end, my only friend—the end of our elaborate plans, the end of everything that stands—the end. No safety or surprise—the end. I’ll never look into your eyes again.”
My beautiful dolls, my beautiful lifeless dolls, black-eye dolls of a hangman’s marionette, models for brands at the eve of time, TV shows made by a handful for a handful, watching deep into the radium cloud. Numbering 88 albatross/crow/elephant—I was a cloud, tore out the insides of my pockets to prove to you I was a friend, lost in the defense of the ancients, riding trees like donkeys, yellowed newsprint placed atop cobblestone gutters, feces rolling to the shores, to faces looking up and pained—they are waiting for it to fall. And Chicken Little is on the news, channels set up to make you fear a speck of dust. The goner says: I still remember all the other times the world was ending. Right, man, right. Pea dust in a pellet gun, poisonous darts of Borneo—I keep kid skulls on my mantle, stare at them, hour-wise, imagine the thoughts projected on their foreheads, the kinks they’ll grow up to be (if they’re lucky). That’s the negative creep of it all, the king wizard, dancing in an alley, back back, forth forth, kinging under a streetlight in Cleveland—that’s where the true stars live, never in Hollywood, never in SoHo, you move to Portland then you move to Austin—nothing is hip enough you have a thirst to be on the edge make babies money security nice house homeschool Etsy shop prove yourself on Pinterest have all the right photos on your blog make it look right to your friends hide the television for your housewarming party hate the word hipster and you need a vegetable garden chickens and goats and a hundred-dollar massage every Tuesday and Wednesday from the hippie-looking woman with more schooling than a surgeon. Oh you need therapy but lie to your therapist when she asks how much you drink forget the industrial bottle of Jameson above the fridge. Pretend you only drink once a day (during your nap) but really it’s more like throughout the day and whenever the firstborn wriggles his brilliance underneath your skin. You have come this far but we all know when everyone else is lying—just not yourself. This is the cadence of the generations, and like everyone I don’t want to turn into my mom—I want to do it more and better and shake off all the patterns and make it better for my kids and that is why I keep their bodies behind glass on shelves cataloged and referenced, gene sequenced so I can play out simulations of what their lives could have been. This one a doctor, this one a welder. This one is on disability, this one died at 17. When I tire of playing with my dolls I place them on their shelf and pull my comfort over my head but it’s never warm and I dare not leave the safety of my room for a trip to the end-hall closet. Wriggle a little arm, dance with a little foot—pull the string at the back of my neck to open these eyes, release to let me limp. Dress me up in polka-dotted panties and a juniors’ training bra—satisfy your filth. Turn me over and spank me, feel your soft grow hard and seek my butthole turns you on brown eye to see what must be hidden touch what must be hidden—lick me in between. Then turn me back around and there!—My doll has working tears, saline solution administered through a door in my chest, every scar buffed away in the manufacturing process. In the future I will not have to suffer. In the future emotion is replaced with 400 IQs and world peace and never an argument and no suicide and school is easy and there is no fucking no cars no exhaust no accidents nothing to terrorize my nights and it’s so so great not to have to use my hands to touch my mouth to speak you are reading this novel telepathically you communicate with me in the past via undiscovered technology my mother is a million years younger than me Stephen Hawking shits in a wormhole for his training potty. But then what? Perfect begets bored begets plaything idle hands roll back the clock revising the ecstasy of change and here we go!—Mr. Rogers silenced, Kennedy shot with Morelli’s hypodermic—my mother’s interrogation leaked by Simba but it ain’t no problem-free philosophy. Every night the spirits own my walls, Tesla-opened doors, sights that make my eyes lock in the open position wordless theatrics of the comings and goings of what they once called God. Their space backs up to mine the crack of an overlap—accidental passing of the information of lost birds, each grain of sand powerful enough to run 12 Jurassic Parks and do you think they stopped there? No. The circuits in my brain are built to represent theme parks of computation, the entirety of it all contained in triplicate over and over like a backup, hordes of revelation, placing drugs on the planet as a traveling device for consciousness—everything as one and a mystreal knot, twisting the childhood of a cat’s cradle—if you fold time the right way even a fetus can run the stars, born by a tube (actually a series of tubes) running from my eyes into my belly, buttons for eyes and a corncob nose—everyone knows that yellow and snow don’t go together but I squat in the corner of the yard while cousins play and mothers watch and I do my deed, bringing to life a pee stick turning blue! My children will number the Earth, they will rule from behind glass and without a pulse with their eyes closed and a humming emanates from them and with their dreams, they remote control the world.
Jim says we are “Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain—and all the children are insane. All the children are insane.”
I am beginning my flush. Down the wire. The ending is unknown—do I have five minutes left? Five years? Walls of the uterine lining shedding me—all I’ll have left is a name. And when you’re through with me, even that won’t be worth the keypress required to type it. There is discoloration of the malignant kind, a swing set hologram painted before my eyes and her concrete shoes disintegrate—chunks and runs of shit, some like mucous, swirling in the bowl. I walked in on myself in the bathroom—she was sitting in the toilet, texting, and she looked up and saw me and saw that I was her and she was me and I closed the door and stepped back slowly and said, “Sorry, sorry.” It was all very “Malkovich Malkovich” for the 19th time. They say the hyperbole of youth, that if we order a lemonade it will be the best lemonade we ever had in our entire lives but look, since I haven’t lived that long it probably is the best lemonade I ever had in my entire life. I ask you to understand. The bowl is a fire in the sky and this tube is the Serengeti—I am moving along the ecosystem of those stinky decomposers bacteria for food and the stickiest night light you have ever known. Twisting, turning inside the large and the small, coming out below the mystery of a fire shark. My sense of balance is gone after half my brain was removed in the first eight years of school—rebuilding it now in the privacy of my own home. For who cares what is outside these walls?—Haven’t I seen enough? Do I ever have to do it all again? If I tried on your hat it all would be empty—tragedy strikes meaning nothing—engaging in the death ritual comforts us—letting it all go. Polyps threatening to disturb my Master Cleanse. I am lemon juice. I am cayenne pepper. For all my shortcomings I am the most fertile person I have ever come in contact with—but all my creations are abortions. Flames follow the tips of my fountain. As soon as I drop out the spout I will see it is my own slide and my own splash down pool—a 9x13 cake pan I snuck from beside the microwave. Wriggling around, a sweater made straightjacket, pulling my phone from the back pocket of my Zadig & Voltaires, but I get no signal in my colon—Black & Deckers could never cut me free. And down here I see (like Alice floating objects in her rabbit hole) the books I have read—Invisible Man, Native Son—those two especially in the shit—some book by Douglas Hofstadter showing mathematically that we really do live on in each other—that a person isn’t completely contained within their body—and I believed him, because he seemed sweet and smart and reasonable, gentle—and I liked his hair. I thought about how many of us a little bit of him would live in once he died. Stripping out printer ribbons, film from cameras, punching in character after character of my juicy babies, squishy fingernails, colons never used—no bacteria in them at all. This is why babies smell so fresh. Not all of that eating and if they were born with purple hair I would love them even more. Static clings me to the sides of my intestine—I am in the brain of the south—South American below the waist a brain doing all that processing we could never stomach above the Panama Canal. My lightning in the ether, sparks blue between my fingers, I am stretching—stretching to be a Wonder Woman, serial god—but I’ll die tripping on a shoelace. Choking on a Visine cap. After passing through the large intestine, a slow decline vis small colon rectum and out into the dirt of animal feces fish shitting at the bottom of the ocean of lakes we used to camp in swimming in dark water where you couldn’t see the bottom and I snuck off into the woods where I could touch myself and lean against a tree, looking up up up into the dusty light and when I cum the only ones who see me are the trees. The trees—who have been here for a thousand years, who were here before our stories were written—who are involved in a massive coverup by organisms larger than any single government—they take my fetus from me at night by burrowing in through the walls I find sections of wallpaper replaced when I search it in the morning and I know that someone’s been here. They know not to touch the windows—safer to go in through brick and drywall. And over time, the letters in this book will change. Hacking is more than the internet—we are hacking time and fucking atoms—even the books on your shelf are not safe—even the atoms in your brain are manipulable by dark alphabets they are like snakes: they morph to fit through the smallest spaces. But I see a turn ahead, and I skate on hands and feet to avoid being digested by my own system. I can only last about six hours—to live another day my lungs must evolve to breathe pure septic shit. The infection is inside of me and I am inside the infection. I am inside your guts, transferred through your eyes, your brain, the mythical blood-brain barrier, down your left arm jumping from hand to stomach and filtering through to your digestive pipes. I have your device down here, and with help from superhuman agencies neither of us will ever comprehend, I am totaling the value of your life.
And in case you have forgotten, I am the teller, I am the chip, I am the change. I am the zone, I violate the zone, hide art rocks in corporate spaces—I am the muck on the wall, the bacteria, the grime. I am disease. I am the code behind the wall, allowing this emoji disallowing that emoji and the frankincense and myrrh rattle down throughout the ages. Some rocks can never roll—some rocks step into a bar and what is the punchline? That I will never see my name in an amber alert? That I will never see my face in a bucket of wine? A holy Ledbetter embossed in hipster stationery a fake bee buzzing around my head you know the kind that can’t sting and I don’t know what they do if they’re not harvesting honey. We’d like to be gentle to me, laid out on the day of my lasting missives echoes in the warehouse whorehouse House of 1000 Corpses long-wasted loft spaces where I woke in my imagination, boy of my dreams at these lovely sides. Killer whales have to be the most disgusting killers on the blue and green—not even people bashing the heads of baby seals can live up to them. Wanted to lost myself in liquid crystal—70 inch display immerses me. I am the top of the wave. I am the curse of the fin. I hid a message in my blog if you read every 12th letter my true name is spelled for kings in binary—fulfilling dreams sewn by Princess Toadstool (an error to make it human)—you realize writing is a visual art, don’t you? And down a slide, Super Mario slide, for once in 3d my candles watch me make for the waterfall, falling off the edge of the Earth is nothing new to me—I took a parachute with me when I went rock climbing, ice picks when I conquered Everest and a blumpkin was how I first seduced young cum into my party pouch nothing like a Dorito fine-tined a burrito blam! taco mouth dizzying the sushi eater’s downright paradise. We ate one of everything on the menu parachuting from pixel-blue skies there was a bug in the code and I couldn’t play the seventh level of heaven ’cause of some programmer who was drinking on the job. My code—the ultimate one between my legs and rampant every cell—it has no errors. Even a mutation is on purpose—shining in the light of history mistakes of my kind are Pollock-like, form pools of mystery, I don’t crash, I don’t crash until the ultimate moment when People magazine Time and Life and Channel 12 conspire at once to show us knickknack pictures it is my nature to infect, I am perfect in alien form, infecting the basic format of your existence. That is what is known about me—nothing. Nothing kissing the sky and nothing making microwave dinners each night with packages delivered to my window by drone—there’s your satisfaction, there’s your drum. Your salt was caught in my tears—I was salmon hunting, I took the lost-one’s journey, ended up growing au naturel Where the Red Fern Grows and took me medieval style I was under the leaf it was red and yellow and rough edges and it spoke to me a prophet then sang weapon/death—shofar—spun off the whole contraption as a vehicular time machine they called into the radio station knowing more than General Public and for five seconds the radio transmission went to shit. It happens when whole countries dissent—we have our finger not on a plug but on a button, dyslexic training of a man of cobras of a bra sardines packaged in a bowl of feces fetus fecal lowliness in a rip tide undersight dipping cigs in a futile toilet—there—there—there. An underling ashing in that there gas station toilet but I am underneath the waves! I am godlike the scum underneath the bottom of this pond we call our evering notion of turbulence and blue. And the radio man says I will flush this ocean blue and the radio man says I am a dastardly god of witness and scruff—telling you the stories your mother denied, telling the themes and the characters and the subjects your whole culture denied!—that is the wish box between my legs a coupla flapjacks some blueberry syrup a few strands of chicken and the classic Filet-O-Fish from Burger King. I’ll have a couple sides of rice, the innards of a dictator, Che patties of industrial beef, maybe some canisters of military-style soul food—was that it? Was that the sought combination? The anti-twin? The cobblestone earring tied doubt to a kangaroo? Insert a statement from Bruce Willis here—something an action hero can say eloquently in a single day of reshoots. Why don’t you cuss out the cameraman? Why don’t you cuss out the lighting technician? Show everyone how insanely creative you are—I make babies, how creative is that? How creative to stick a wand between my legs wallow convulse engender re-engineer busy-fy, execute, produce, muffin contained in the back row, stockers arranging ice cream alphabetically, delicately kneading starstruck zipperfuckers, age-old ant-lions, twin stars revolving to each other’s spin, a cantilever at the bottom of my pool—a septic tank—loving and caring for the elderly, aging pussies raped by nurses from the other continent, spanking lips of who I shall become—a pool of consciousness strapped to a hospice bed—and before you implant me with cum, let me tell you that I will never produce babies again, I am forward, past the mark, delectable in my granny pants and safe for us both to pretend that if there was no me, you would fuck somebody else.
Soulless ravaging food in the beforelife. Before I had that bright little center of a star that can power an entire hospital. Before I had a mind. Before I had eyes. Before there was anything to see, only warm blood rushing around me, massaging me relentlessly, shaping my basic nerve responses. I am a wave, the moon is my mother. I am rocking before ever knowing a cradle, a chair, a set of loving arms. I know animal terror—one who cannot be explained out of it—because I have no words.
There is no sense of crime and the radio man says you will never leave your room the radio man says death will come with two seconds’ notice and the radio man says nothing you do can be undone and the radio man says you will not be able to control it and the radio man says your pleasure will be your downfall and the radio man is screaming. Screaming to Tokyo.
And the radio man says you will put your hands around the neck and the radio man says you will wring it like a washcloth the radio man says mistakes are compulsory and the radio man says love it while you can because it will be gone away away away gone gone and gone forever and you will not be involved in its plan—one comma out of place and the system will collapse it is engineering of the body the spirit the mind the electricity the soul the brain and your throat can be crushed by the pressure it takes me to tie a knot—death bow around your fetal little neck.
A master knows oblivion—it is the only true philosophy. It can’t be mastered learned known or owned—only followed. Only submitted to. Only pleased with a bow on a knee on concrete dirt regulation sand a bed of nails some medieval stretcher kit will take you from five-six to five-ten and you can finally model Gucci for the crowd. I am trapped in a vial inside a womb and I suspect the womb belongs to me. It could be my mother—but I suspect the womb belongs to me. And I have flushed my cornea down the highest slide at the water park and that is a projection of the daily photos of my life, right there on the plastic of the slide.
Sometimes the slide drops out, scoops a curve from the sky where there is no splash pool beneath me, only concrete that burns my feet, cuts them throughout the day, like walking on a stove, my soles are redder and redder every step I take.
And it is a maze with no kid blinders, I am subject to every worry in the book, to whether I will ever escape to whether escaping will be an improvement. I don’t know what came before or what will come after—only suspicions, delusions—they rule my world. And everything I say is wrong: if I make a statement, it will hit and miss, always a backwash poisoning my relationships with fecal spots along the wall.
There is a terror in everything that doesn’t happen—I am always worrying it will. What does happen—even if torture—at least is known, but I am prisoner to an imagination as deep as Asia, as wide as the ocean.
It gets in the way.
And all I have—
—all I have—
—is an intuition strong as Fischer’s, before there was anything known as a central banking giant—global anteaters who if you can’t slide this slide, have no skill at all.
People rubbing the sticks together, sparking it, releasing their juice. People at a room party in the tenth grade, we split off in doubles and triples found closets to union in, lying on the floor with my mouth on your cock and your hand on my cunt. You pressed me so hard it hurt to pee afterward, year later knocking on my window but I had another visitor and decided to turn you away. People went drinking at the diner you threw a piece of food over my head and it landed on some geriatrics, they were trying a meal but our youthfulness got in the way we took precedence it was our world now and only time for them to die. Work constantly. Every tick is a universe—deliver it forward. My project may fail but when they excavate me (carefully, with brushes and gentle breaths) someone will find my wall, replete with dried fish who are truly the brine specimens of the age: dark, flaky blood skin, eyes dried out of their heads, fingernails intact, sharp like diamonds, a brief history of gastric input showing their first and last meals consisted of Cheetos and dog food and the occasional sour apple Jolly Rancher.
I press myself forward solid like a box—cardboard folded for recycling—in a colon or a cunt I cannot tell but my nails are sharp like diamonds, scraping the walls of my mother’s tube on the way to the water park. Red turns blue. A maxim (your last) will leave you at the breeding process—for nothing (of the mind) remains. Kid, I snipped your cord in practice classes in my dreams. It was mine to take you through the first 16 years—mine to homeschool you into a man the girls would kill to be with—but you stand upright in a frame—two sheets of glass, a chemical slide—and the only ones who will see you will see you through a microscope. They will count your cells. Bury your DNA. Snip snip here and snip snip there to bring us both down to the most famous case of murder-life in human history this is real this is real but no amount of screaming will make you think it so—if I clipped your cord and took a swim with you in amniocentesis, not even then would you believe.
I am meant as a vessel, I am.
Causelessly, remotely, viewing.
Ceaselessly, borne against the past.
A caring man who is a caring woman—what do you care? If s/he portrays the fairytales bled into you in the beginning? Is that an odd sex or the passage of hero’s legends—their education, their model of the world. And I stood—little girl—in the back of a crowd hearing wisdom from the only writer I ever saw speak live. And she answered all the questions wisely—said she thought her story was the story of children unsupervised—the neglect of the ancients—fetal pig served on the discount table—classics table—can you be the broad-reaching icon standing next to Greek ruins selling five-ninety-nine in the grocery section of the literature store? Can you do that for me? I am a shelver of books in 9th or 10th grade, working at the library and the only job I ever had before that was pulling weeds from an old man’s sidewalk. In the library I focused on biology, anatomy, sexuality—sciences every child should hold in reverence. And I am the hole. And I am the upright mammalian force in the photographic hall—buried once in translation, twice in horrifique the matrons hold holy to maidens’ hands thrice braided in a monkey nut.
Breathe the neighbor’s gasoline.
He modifies the lawn.
And there I am in triplicate, certain procedures banned, naked in the moonlight of a full, yard spewed under starlit carcasses, moistened in the drops of the sprinkler apparatus.
A book on mantises, the Latin mantodea forever locked sun my brain. Terrible nightlight. Casting ruins. On my sky. Did you see my tunnel is a tunnel of light? The faces hidden on its surface? My thought is to tight in every toenail space that I writ it large on billboards all through the sleeping period. And. Featured. In the next. Hour. I. Own. A cardboard. Blanket. Set up like a tent. In the Serengeti Plain. Noxious. Of a zebra.
Free fall, I, dunced in the sky, cowardly, lions, followed, in their own gravitational wall, this, is, the end, my faithful friend, the end. And all the people are insane. On one side placed a garden of volcanic rock. The other is alligator skulls. Together they paint my walls a cloaking, identity theorem, backwards skeletons. You have captured me in a playbox—plenary wondergirl about when you catch the siren, when you pluck the feathers, when you feed the ducks.
And with slowness—knitting, loving—I make picnics on the carpet floor with all may babies around me spreading my fetus in semicircle for the locus of a P, B, and J. &. Smoking an iris some future Silicon Graphics logo matrimony towered syntactically between a young girl’s hips—much like me.
There was a tree turned inside out and posted for a bargain on netly terminals drive the stock bankrupt—a posing for the financial stability of my toelace—brilliant for a forward mouse, killer the whale, ever so complex and mining for the core.
A silence dropping drop. Me in the core of the belly of the belly of the core. Inside, encoding for the universe, tinier than a tear, brogue-satient beings aerial stunting themselves and smashing ’gainst the side of a bridge, learning death in an instant, what is it like to know you’re headed to the trusses with zero seconds to live? I am a bone. I am a dog. I am a dog’s bone. Ten-dollar software lets me edit the womb—cut off all disabilities, diversions—I am kid viscous on a French Quarter tour everything I have seen on cable about the storytellers and the scams is what I drink from a two-foot cooler in my room.
My room—the fantastical birthing chamber of the ages.
My room—floor covered avec sweaters and leg warmers and raincoats. The trash peppered with baking soda and a spray nozzle.
My room—saddened surgery of an escalator dream.
I am the #1 video of crime on the web—tailored to expulsion about the neck and shoulders of an infant beast, organs and brain exposed in a makeshift surgery—the whole operation taking 60 seconds, seconds you wish you could retrieve, seconds you thought you had, locked, in spades, safe in the beef wallet, cowgirl spreading my ham and roast over beef envelopes calling to the cordon bleu Arby’s-style sandwich to the fixated grave elementary particles of lust for awards showing now—on the popular channel.
I listen in my cup shell. For the mysteries forming on the inside.
Bleeped-out mouth movements not allowed to see, dog next door would bleep my pussy so hard into the dishwater, gates of tyrannical plot outline where I’ve been and where I’m going—that is the story we long to see. In dreams. In mountains tantamount to the catamount I have been up the spout/trail/fishmonger with which this all was formed, tragedy sewn into the inseams, blagueur weakly dominion fragments—priceless—and a ho dee ho.
So in the weakness of bleakness.
So of the tragedy of tragedy.
When comes the beast—the motherhood—elemental crackle descending like plague fruit in a torrent beside which the dirt devil cannot compete—a softly moving piano, sound—that there emotion—that there rolled in cinnamon and dust—the beatitudes middle-chomping a subhuman PAC-MAN on my breast/plate, the girl in the shopping window that I thought was me—a brilliant example of the time but all she was was a girl in plastic dress invecting dynamite pussy juice (sperm) into the hoo-haa hole I am spitfire taking culture up the spout—an injection learning wherein the applicator goes up inside flaunts a subprime mortgage random discipline of cumming on the napkin between my legs in the middle of the night.
The sadness hole. No tours today, no tours today—the mystery is closed. Visitors report to the cashier for a refund. New tours will be announced tomorrow. Check your email.
Trail of ants—parade—I watch from the window of my dollhouse. Everything to scale: miniature glass—warped by sunlight, miniature rocking chair and miniature bed. A miniature ruler that measures in miniature inches. Miniature penis and miniature cunt (I have mine right here). To stroke like a lion and make her purr—kitty in the steep, steep jungle. I told my boy in 10th grade I had a jungle between my legs and to stop over but he gave me phone sex for hours and I had to go local for my first dish of sperm. They let it go like an infinite quantity—don’t seem to see how beautiful it is. Precious, really, a star of stars, the brilliant glob of toothpaste that goes up in, causes miracles, brings my pouch alive. There is a single clown sitting halfway back watching Stephen King’s It in the theater—I watched it on the news. Rarely do I see a story that interests me but anyway I sit, on the swivel chair, in my PJs, plugging myself with a finger and browsing for my kind. My entire room is inside the hole—we are floating like jackrabbits, entering and exiting the womb (normal traffic) bloody on the package but inside my chamber dry—constantly putting on and taking off socks, t-shirts, wool hats to regulate our heat. Can’t be too warm. Can’t be too cold. Can’t be too wet. Can’t be too dry. Experiment with outfits to accomplish this. Tattooing around the head wound, scorched bone, close range, probably executed. That’s how hot is the hottest spot. Popsicle in the jungle—pube hair from adolescence smells like a sweaty puma licking you on the nightstand. Mozart bows her head on the upright and keys a single note for hours, days—this is our fate. Heat death crawls me to a standstill, the hands of the clock, stop. Not even gold and silicon work below the zero—only a slug riding my fallopian—only a network of six to 10 million dopamine antagonists called “Frank” is the final resting place of a term (first used this date, last used that) and yes there is such a thing as improvised architecture you can build things safe and interesting with no plan—if you think small enough. But I can’t breathe here—that is the truth—not with a stethoscope, not with a snorkel, not with nitrous and helium and air tanks from the circus. A woman falls—terrible from the Ferris wheel—dresses flapping in the wind—she reaches out her arms in front and breaks them as she breaks her fall. She is the last-moment vision of children who will never be the same, children who were not even tall enough to ride this ride—children struck dumb for the rest of their lives. In my vision only disabled people reproduce—we are all unable—leaning on the machine more and more—the machine in us—the mech we created, first in science fiction then in science fact—we are all of us hapa—all of us trans-schema—all of us part everything. And when you cut me open you will see graffiti on my insides, every organ tagged—the niceties of soul transfigured, scraped in blood, phase space a canvas rented for twelve dollars a year off a server in south Seoul—that will be the least of your worries. Most of all an animus legend centering on a certain Tekken character doing capoeira that I memorized all his moves that drove me day to day, sidewalk square to sidewalk square when I used to leave the house the boy part came from me kicking assholes on a legendary squall. The lens cap fell off and these are the snapshots I see on the way down—through Victoria Falls Brazilian rain some kind of tundra only fit for a sled dog these are a catalog of places I’ll never get to see I am strapped to a stretcher on that long last haul through fluorescent halls overcrowding in the healing place but weapons dealers three to one which has become a perennial joke to you but was the really real gun in child safety videos from the year before 2018. Chop me in thirds like the Hirst/Cohen shark and become the impossibility of imagining me dead when I am speaking to you now—over and over and over, sea blood and formaldehyde, life before jellyfish, nitrogen was plenty and you could grow a flower anywhere. But let me tell you something. As friendly as our intercourse is here, if you came into my room I would strip you of your pieces turn you over and give a soul spanking with my daddy’s belt—you would evacuate the storm but all of that would be too late—shredding you like the cheapest chicken—tossing you in the blood fryer—reinvigorate your theories with a new set off truths—there is a spirit for the taking and it has your name. All the while you have been waiting (doctor) at the exit of my baby tubes, I have been standing behind you! and waiting to catch the catcher, blood and rye, channeling the recluse intern, scalpel at your back, running to the snack machine to grab Doritos to pour inside your wound and pick them there sustain me as I connect your tubes to mine. The first-ever baby junkets to scathe the Middle East. Torrent. Suffocant harms. Bleeding your dreams. Tiny dancer breeding, scabs on the gusset. I was a folk singer in 1975. I brought the free-love culture into a decade when Nordstrom markets crotchless panties far from the fringe sexual advert is mainstream here is your Toblerone here is that axe you ordered here is the scythe your momma wants if you are to survive I suggest an English-French dictionary and a puddle—flat with all the wrongs of yesterday.
There is a hole—I meet it halfway down. My only chance to escape is cutting the rope loose, lose my basket to gravity and let the sail fly off into saturated heaven—the stars the firmament and everything that lies beyond.
I follow a book that is still being written, get high on nothingness (’cause nothingness is free), sell my appetites to a groaning man I trade thrills for little bits of acid your Sea-Monkeys set my ruffles free pink fringe a garter a gusset egregious salty tingling between the lips and folds the battle flag wants to go exploring Roto-Rooter style double down that’s my anklet you’re plumbing. Deadly spice rack lost in the foil when we tipped we tipped all the way upside-down pinafore forms an umbrella parachute but I cut my spicy little tendons and don’t give a shit no more life has become flat like paper a set of instructions represented in abstract lines and symbols the way I experience it makes everything a tragedy, everything a celebration but on paper!—On paper it’s emotionless as unknowingly stepping on an ant—mourning is just some feature of big-ass brains maybe never big enough for me the way I die is mine—I do it every day. The tragedy of never knowing anyone outside my room is not a tragedy to me. My veins are already flat!—My heart already stopped—You just don’t know it yet. There was a coming and a going outside my door—a whooshing and a sucking and tornadoes smelling like a freight train. This is my awkward love note to the end—the end when I fall out the ending of the chute like a water slide that ends in white-hot foals: chemical carnivores implant this bloody fang in your diet box and next time I ask you a question don’t be so demure. On my way here I learned that “demure” is just a word to keep a woman down I am spicy I am spanky when you exit the door I mount the bed and jump myself lifting up my 1800s skirts they leave us here and expect when they open the door that their passive wife cadet will still be sitting in the chair, rocking, sewing—well I’ll sew your Eyes Wide Shut. Lift you out of my specimen grill and cook you animal style off the secret menu conning a double double with cheese your dickhead is a discount it used to be go west young man but now it’s go west or go east and if you go both for long enough you’ll end up with me, demure, modest, unassuming, meek, mild, reserved, retiring, quiet, shy, bashful, diffident, reticent, timid, shrinking, coy—I think that’s it.
Lean to the left—lean to the right.
Understand where I am coming from with the dodging and the groaning, modest hair and towing, bleeding from the vag surrounds me—I am wiped in shit, lowly companion of the companion of the companion, do my duty, wrap myself in newsprint ailing Jills and ailing Joes come from across the ocean, blithely imprisoning each of their own left toes with handcuffs intended for a magic trick executed by a performer whose eyes are clinically blind. He wears a blindfold just to make you feel better but dude has no perception whatsoever and he’s been that way since birth. He drives a MAC-10 cross country spinning plates from his left eyeball there’s a screwdriver functions as a bike tool you’ve got Trent Reznor tattooing a piano (three notes) in your right ear and the Olsen twins smoking cigarettes in your left—your only problem, in life, is that you’re not a billionaire. Get yourself together. Crescendo up, fade in the Mozart, pick an attitude, pick your grave. Pick science as the new religion. Pick overdosing on candy, snort granulated sugar, diet soda, and corn syrup. Pick in vitro fertilization. Pick genetically modified food. Pick your nose. Pick bloody towelettes to litter your floor, basins of mouse ears grown on pig backs, elephantiasis of the pussy, crosshairs in chopsticks, auto-abortion with a turkey baster—pick a community of your peers where there is none—pick a name for your child that will never fit him, that he will change as often as his phone number, pick drapes and carpet indestructible coloring your baby room, accept every registered gift, turn inward rejecting all your friends, devote your life to caravans of children hatching growing larvae feeding on mother’s fat cells, the twigs between her brain, the trials of blood which define her—live for the day when they all come back and make a meal of you—your offspring consuming the seed they came from. She builds a contraption entombing her spirit with flames and every screw and every lie and every story told and every lesson learned—this is the catacomb of Giger, Bacon, Lovecraft, Zipperhead, and much, much more.
I hold my own pigtails in the blue moon light.
Swinging on burning tires placed around a dead man’s neck.
If you want to see the eighthmost wonder of the world, look no longer than a news vest, cradled Gadget notebook, niece Penny sporting a video watch and secretly solving every case behind the back of a spokesman presiding the authority of birth it’s always in a white-walled room with a white ceiling, white floor, white sheets, and some doctor staring at a fetus head. When he gets to the end of the tunnel, doc holds him up like Simba, reigning, leading the pride to certain death your figurehead ideal objects of Aristotle they’re just there to make you look one way while from the other, slicing blade—they say you can blink three times after your head falls off the block.
Hand in hand, walking, mother and child—appears every time I close my eyes. I see you in shadow, me in light—I am the younger of the two, sometimes—sometimes in reverse. A knock at the door—I freeze: everything outdoor is the danger of my criminal within, bald man just from jail, come by to remember the good that pussy was, comfort of the redness of my room, where we dined on monarch caterpillars and recess for boys and girls together—all in one cell, let outside for two hours a day, all for hiding in the woods from a flashlight a gun and a dog and when your knuckles hit the wood, your life story etches in terminal causeways beneath the great pyramid—Khufu’s Horizon—my mother in the night sky. She is born! She is born! She dies! She dies! Terrible nightcloak busy paralysis stunned at the gate nothing of value noticed until it is dead by the time you hear these notes the woman in the red room will be maximally disintegrated, flowers, rocks, roses, stones. She release my hand running legless in a daisy field, wilderness of spots, pink in panties, my Ferris wheel stopped with me at the top and no way down. Trash bag parachute—ya dig? I am driven—I am not the driver. Like a diner working at a piece of chocolate cake with an Allen wrench. Fix a bicycle with powdered sugar. She guides me through a path of thorns, squeezes my fingers to alert danger—she knows the other side so well I wonder if she is in it. I recognize those whitened finger tips rap rap rapping at my chamber door! Know that my end will begin with the white wind rushing through my door—distance of an inch killing me, looseness of a chain that clicky-clangs with every stroke of the pedals. Squeezing my fingers, she bends the pinprick rules, my eye is gone! Gone through the tenor’s holler, gone by the side of the road on the only move I ever survived—after that my head was in a vice and the rest of me kept alive on machinery filling a red room from carpet to roof—this is why I never leave. I am no body, only a head with imaginings still and vastly churning there are skies that churn this way and preternatural beings bending over the bed checking my organs with ET hands—bright orbs the size of marbles—I am alien. Part of someone else’s breeding plan—subject of someone else’s experiment, Dark City, unknowing my identity, switching us around each night—am I a murderer? Rapist? Raped? The one at the door? The one barring it from inside? Part of a clan of blind girls touching an elephant? It’s a snake! It’s a fan! Of course, reality is one, though people speak of it in different ways. I am the hurt and the healer, the punk and the Punk’d—I am desperation. I am relaxation. I am hoarder, ascetic, humble, pride. I have come to dance. My feathers touch one man, then a man, then a man—the floor lights up with every step and only lost in a memory, found—only seen in phantoms, the stage is obliterated, dead.
Everything I hoped is only in my head. I am a knotted tree, split at the base—one half dead and the other half carrying the weight for us both, the moving part and the still part, someday it is that the only part of me alive is a single leaf at the very top and a twisted vein spiraling all the way to the ground and sending up through dying trunks just enough molecule for me to read the light—the rest of me is bark and scales. Wondering if I will ever be saved—but I won’t. This is it: the end of me, winding from the dirt into the sky, waving at the height of the world.
Taking in a momentary glimpse.
Starting out as momentary love, the admiration of my mother becoming her burden, her slough, the axe in the winnow of her hair—to a shirk, to annoyance, to a slithering, to a tow. And then to a pinprick, to a tack, to a nail, to a mouse, then to knowledge, then to horror, then to commerce, then to a hole in the door where an old-time key would fit—and thence to a cradle! Then to a grave. Then to the all-hallowed screaming shingled under the outer name of every place of peace.
A formal collection of handhelds from mother to daughter.
Profound conversations.
I see the mouths moving but cannot make out what they say.
They are on a dock somewhere in Mexico—a cruise ship—some meeting of minds decorated the backs of my eyelids, one a fetus, one a mom, one a teacher, the other taught—I hold to this image desperately I hope that when I wake I will remember it and I hope that it is true that what happened there really happened that I am remote viewing someone’s life who was better than mine someone who didn’t each throw away the key (one overtly, as I have—one covertly, as my mother) but that this vision is my future—or my past—and we will hold those hands forever.
But that is not the case.
I have closed myself inside a coma inside a room inside a house inside a world you are not welcome. Decided dead would be better than what everyone else brags about on Facebook: proclamations of fealty commitments in straw braggart love living like words below the wave. Messages written in sand—revoked in a fine period after viewing—meant for the ephemeral—temporary, transitory reading—a transient fish.
Everything is alabaster. Alabaster everything.
I seen you hold it in your hand, I see the twist of the digits, seen the dove turn into a rock and the rock turn into a dove. I seen the nightlight turn off by magic—by time—and I am left to the visions performed by my brain—in a theatre of time—forced to watch a voluntary troupe of improvisers—each of them drawing on their dreams—until the light comes back again.
Each of them—each members of a squad—writing on the mirror in blue marker. Each of them writing a Latin letterset. Each writing in between. Each writing faster than the last. Each writing—quickly, precisely—each writing—
—loosely, slowly—
—each writing—
—briskly. Each writing, letting its blue out on clear, almost-100%, reflective, predictive, pure. Zebra patterns. Indelible in form, pattern perfect, repeating in squad, immaculate, indelible, glass—indelible to the glass. Invincible. Invincible to the runt. Invincible to the runt. Invincible. Imperfect, cannot predict, immoral. Blameless. Unutterable.
I cannot utter the blameless, cannot predict the immoral.
I cannot briskly write, cannot pick the blue from sky.
Pick blue from crayons, write on table. We wait.
I draw blue clouds, blue sky, blue birds—everything blue!—blue house, blue Maytag man, blue flowers, blue door—to blue—house. Everything is blue! Blue grass in the yard, blue grasshoppers (eating people’s lungs), blue mishmash lollipop, blue socks on my shoes, blue shoes!—
Blue shoes for the footprint family.
Blue watches for the wearing-watch family.
And a blue sky (on the tablecloth)—it has blue for everyone.
Blue mirror mask blue blue blue hard times. That’s the blue for everyone—blue for the sky! for antelopes! For Naples. Fornication. For—nic—ation. Fornication. Leap in the swimming. Jump out—take picture—jump in—’nother picture. In pic—out pic—in pic—out. There is a fetus on the last pic (FETUS ON THE LAST PIC). Fetus on the last pic. Unadorned. Flying model. Piece of cake—piece of cake! Unadorned flying pic, flying pic, of the model in Caro space with Lipton (unadorned) set hardly on the table by (1) hand (dressed neatly in seven colors) (2) wrists of the hand (undressed hardly from seven colors)—and that’s it. No more dressing, undressing—no more hardly unhanding—no more capitals. She (the hand) sits on the table—politely. (Polemically politely.) When the lamp lifts the lamp lifts the hand off the table quietly—polemically—but politely.
Quickly.
But quietly.
I have my friend. Here with me at the table. His name is—redacted—and his shoe size is—redacted. His sense of humor is—redacted—and his place of living is—redacted. But even so, he creeps over me—drives his car—stops at the gas station—burns his Newport 100s—redacted—redacted—redacted.
I was put here by a firetruck. Yes, I was put here by a red fire of truck. Truck of fire truck, placed in this exact spot drawing on the table with crayons. Unplaceable truck. If I am in the truck—am I unplaceable? Negligible? Am I unmonitorable? (The words fall apart for me at this point—They are uncatchable—Unfindable—Blank.) I Scrabble on the floor picking up every tile—Z A B—finding every one I want—M C D—placing them on my board backwards from the shelf back back backwards! spelling out everything! every word imaginable! every word part! each and every tiny little word! and word more known to the animal kingdom (this is quite a few!) and known behind the anima kingdo th anim king t. Put here by a firetruck.
Unplugged. That was the word I forgot.
Make me remember that one.
Shallow me in hand to remember that one.
Lick me in lore to remember that one.
That is the one I want to remember—unplugged.
Because unplugged is what happens to me when the child comes out. Because unplugged is the reason I was connected. Because unplugged is the opposite of plugged, and plugged is what happens when I am With Child unplugged is the nature of it all unplugged is how—unplugged is how I became connected to this world, plugged in, plugged in, plugged.
“The umbilical cord (also called the navel string, birth cord, or funiculus umbilicalis) is a conduit between the developing embryo or fetus and the placenta. During prenatal development, the umbilical cord is physiologically and genetically part of the fetus and normally contains two arteries (the umbilical arteries) and one vein (the umbilical vein)—buried within Wharton’s jelly. The umbilical vein supplies the fetus with oxygenated, nutrient-rich blood from the placenta. Conversely, the fetal heart pumps deoxygenated, nutrient-depleted blood through the umbilical arteries back to the placenta.”
That’s what my encyclopedia says—more or less.
It’s not very clear—salient—not very that.
I am come down from the Mountain, come down from it whiling, whiling, forking, nettling, climbing down from the yellow body sensors, yellow and black sensors all over the body, elevating, ‘levating, tensing, tensing from 100 down to one, cycling, cycling, run-picking, dumb-picking,’-pointing, splinting, splitting, spitting, spiting, down down down. We go from 100 down to one, rum-splinting, devouring, pum-kicking, picking, splinting, saying it one to 100, saying it again, saying it once, saying it over and over again. That was the rum kicker, pum-splitter, splittance, devouring words from full-size down to small—a size for all. A size for all—a mall—going shopping with Daddy, when I was a little girl. When everything was my size—all shelves to my satisfaction, all items my length and height—all sizes small—all rogue beasts my little-girl height—every soldier my girl—every soldier my girl size—every soldier my girl’s (self) little or more—little or more, my soldier’s gate—little or more, Deathclaw—little or more, my Deathclaw—zoned you to size five—zoned you down to size my—size blown down to four—that is all.
Sizing up from four—sizing up to more. Sizing up to five and seven and eight and beyond. Sizing up to nine, to ten—beyond. I always was the one to show you how—you make this all go away. There is nothing in the hole. Nothing here but deregulators, anti-matter anti-self anti-everything: gadgets on every shelf the size of a wand—size of a magical magical wand. We met in school—now I work in the well, calculating daily the size of the rocks we’ll take away. It’s nothing complicated, just simple—simple cutting in pre-measured castes—can’t escape your birth—can’t escape your likeness—can’t escape. Your birth. DNA-connected strings. Genealogy-inspired ribbons of birth. Death. Morbidity wound. Parthenons of death. Coilant-borne ribbons, angles of death, built from angles of life—same thing, same thing. Turn over stone: I am there. Look under river: I am there. I did method drugs yesterday (some number of days in the past—I do not know) and they scrambled yesterday’s page turned it into two days modified its rhythm and I have nothing to show for it—a mangled desperado of death, death, death. I now have no conceptual cover of light switch, no conceptual cover of lizard breath in a bottle really more like a cage/hound bent to perfection in Jersey, never flown to here for the quickness of a $10 sale. That’s all they come down here for—the $10 sale. Ten-dollar sale—that’s all they come here for, to a town with a school (deleted) that has one fewer schools than before, one fewer teaching huts for the teaching huts, teachers gathered for the huts, children standing far against the fence at the other other end of the parking lot talking with their teachers in a special mode: Where are you going for dinner tonight? The restaurant with the stinking rose (that’s where we’re going)—to the restaurant called The Stinking Rose (that’s where we’re going). Something I can never have And what are you listening to on your stereos tonight (that’s what we ask—and they say)—NIN or something, that’s what we’re listening to, now and always, now and always to the rim of the rim of the rim thank you much. Very. The syntax—I own it. I am courtyard over the syntax, presiding supreme—and always to the little man I am (because of this) indebted. This and other reasons are (to) why I remain indebted. After that (tomorrow) we will go to the sea. Redacted the drive-a-few-blocks-north sea of drinking JD and smoking weed we will go much much nearer south and with Faith and Jennifer to the nearer sea point, jump right into the restaurant, spend a few dimes, get Patron shots at the bar, get in Ashton’s car, smooth down over the seaside streets, use the bathroom in the Denny’s, get back in, and drive and drive and drive.
And as we drive, the walls come in.
And as we drive, these walls come in.
We are squished into a tunnel. The tunnel makes a block. The block makes us squish. We squish into a tunnel—fine—and fine the tunnel squints us into a brain, which squints us into a hole, which squints us into a fork, which we take the left side of, which leads us to a drop, which drops us into a falling, falling hole.
And we go into that hole, which leads us to a pond, which takes us thus into a spiral, taking us then into a stream, which streams us into a tight, tight diameter of pressing (of stream) of nascence, which ties us into a core, which cores us into a meek, which meeks us into the core of watching, watching, washing, washing, bore.
And that bore squeaks us into a wish.
Which wishes us upon a star.
Which wishes us into a melting pot of urine of urine or dandelion which pees us into a backwards-melting pot of score that takes us up through the gallant melting-pot of war which takes us up the gallant melting-pot of this and that and this and that—surgical melting score of valiant self-wittingness, self-battingness—surgical score of melting self-nascence, battly, frog, temporary-ness.
Temporary-ness. Klingon-ness.
Self-awareness of a dog.
Dog-aware this self-category-ness.
And my baby is with my self. With myself. This baby is in my dog-hound womb-what?-within-ness—self-assured. He is copied within me—copied within my womb. He is a copy of me and you—a copy of ourselves made so it cannot be unmade. A perfect copy of ourselves. Within me, without you—within me, without you. Within my womb—my womb without thee.
And I sit—and I’m crying in the hole—and I’m off without a hole—within me, without you—tonight.
And I sit on the bed, on the edge of my covers.
And on the edge, I stroke your hair—undone—in my lap dear one. And on the edge, I sit. And I sit on the side of my bed—just one play—and my door is locked and the room is locked and I have never left for years and everything I have seen and heard is from my memory—my future-locks—to be here in this hemisphere of room—my fetus room—to be here forever, locked in from inside—locked in restaurant-style from the ending right back up to the beginning.
I am spinning.
I am lately. Lately come for thee, lately come through the screen window, with a wish and a wear and a prayer—that’s how I come! Free-form, anti-continent, to you I come in my mind’s eye—the very mushroom of anti-continental. The anti-continentality of backwash of retro-substantivity in your mind’s eye—you are my target and that which I knew so so well.
You always are the one who showed me how—“gray would be the color if I had a heart.”
Take it all away—you took me all away in your magic hand and I opened every finger—one by one—and had nothing left. Nothing. From the tensile yawn at the center of the palm (at its bottom) to the digit extensile of palm-four fingers, there is the same: nothing. “You make this all go away. I’m down to just one thing. I’m starting to scare myself. I just want something I can never have.” Same for the mother, same for the daughter—this is ok for me, not for you, very not ok at all for the little boy. You can take it home, do it once, change your ideas about it, come back to the house, diminutive in its shadow—I could never touch it—reactive in its negativity, proactive in its effect, positive in its affect. Wild in its negativity. Highly/lowly portent. Leftly/rightly in its potency. Forever known to the tab of all reasons. Highly/lowly—fastly/slowly. Proffering me through a pantaloon of reasons, profering me through a pantalon of reasons. Seeking guidance counseling for my bird—lost. In the cage, Corky—lost in the cage. He sought counseling, chirped it out in binary, punched out the request over and over and punched it out again. It was lost or ignored, the request fettered, Corky-Cork made the request against his cage (bars) and retreated to the sun. How did he do that, you ask. How did he make the request? Well, it was made in burgeoning triplicate, through the air, with a tri-lamp on the side, where Corky used to hit his head—and that was all. (Punched it out.) Smack-rabbit in Drano, triplicate I never had. Made me steaks on the side—enough to feed two people—and I ate them snack-rabbit-thin on the green side with a stomach up and mystery reveling every hole—every hole—e v e r y h o l e. If I lifted the peep cover on every hole it would be your face in every one—every fucking one. And that upsets me. It upsets me to the final question of when and where and how you came into existence—you’re obviously here. You’re obviously real and “gray” and me and all those little adjectives that come into play—you’re obviously here and simple and idealistic—you’re obviously making of the worlds and calling everything into question. You’re obviously on the stimbly side of nature—obviously arrayed against my lookup dictionary—obviously set against everything—everything. This is the fallout side of the bomb—on this side we must wear suits to protect us from the planetary structure of WHATEVER WAS HERE BEFORE!! That is the mystery! That is the planetary! That is the wholistic structure of the arc. This is all the post-bomb structure revealed. This is all the post-birth bereavement of time. This is all the post-revelatory pinprick of a diamond’s heart once—once!—nowhere but once does it hang itself on my walls—nowhere but once does it do this or that!—nowhere but once does it zoom about trying the timeless mysteries of nature (god!)—the zoom/planet of everything—ancient but sodomized—you have presented yourself so wisely, piece by ancient piece—every one as two, such as I’d have to pick the correct one out of every two to consummate the total spoke as one, one of everything, one mother found, that is the chocolate cake =) that is the mobile whole—the consummate pleasure once in the baking, once in the making—once in the process, once in the cooking—once in the step by step, once, finally, in the darkness. If you look, that is where you’ll find me!—Stepping step by step in filial darkness. That’s where I am—deep in the filial darkness—that is all. Torn from crib by my sister. She is outside the Room, never to enter once more—rain and grief-struck tumult crying down from the light panel, boring me with the silent substances of grief. That’s all you ever knew: playing the grief on my room from above—(the side, the bottom)—that is where you lay. Turning on the grief. Turning on the bathroom’s shower—from the control panel. Turning on the bedroom’s sunshine—from the control panel. Say, “Action!” Say, “Let’s start up the rain now. Start up the panel fires.” Calmly. You incinerate me with unnatural fires, unnatural flames—unnatural carnage, unnatural butchery. Unnatural sharps and unnatural slaughter—winsome caricatures of the smiley kind. That is all you have known—all you have ever known. Of us, your children. Of us, your kind. We look up at you, eager-eyed, we look up at you after coming out of the hole. That is all we ever do: look up at you. All we have ever done: look up at you. You are mother, goddess, completeness of mankind. You are every little bit of more—every little bit of womankind—fastened to the rope around your neck. Loosen it!—Loosen it! Loosen that rope around your neck, dear mom, loosen it all the way.
When you do, when that you totally, totally do, then will be the moment when you look into my eyes—I am one of the things—and you will love me for the silent moment—love me in totality—love me once and love me once and for all—that I will smile at you, my momma, smile at you and close my eyes—and you will close your eyes—deleting words from the lexicon—and this will no longer be the pen of deletion—but of addition—you will close my eyes once and for all—but I will have closed them already—a race condition to close your eyes forever. And once these eyes are closed—that will be the end of my story.