3.17.2012

thing i'm working on on saturday morning


SUBJECT BETA-01


Consider your genetic fuckup mutations and brain pan defects. Mutual transference by way of ectoplasm. What do you bequeath, all human-like and genetic? Your children destroyed before they're conceived in the sinewy primeval slime of what the fuck. How to know which of us parents mutated the most fucked traits? Brain trauma, googly eyes, suicidal depression, a strange desire to pet three-legged dogs. Imprinting wrongly on hangers and belts—leper marriage fantasies. Scientists and doctors can only guess because knowledge is bullshit faith wrapped in brainy observation corsage, or something. All interlocked and bloomed, flowerlike with tendrils, that great wavy octopus of eyeball popping. The million invisible rabbit of it, tied in titanium wire, bulbous and pod-like, flowers not flowers, flowers, not flowers.
            Do I mean courage? Corsage? Something to pin to your face.
            When I think of scientists I imagine the hundred million gears and pulleys all roiling together hoping to cause one mechanical arm to stab a dictionary with a dagger at the end of the universe.
            If I were trying to be fucked profundity-ist, I'd say, this is how we define our selves.
            How to cover the universe with tarpaulin? Or panties, all sewn together? How to put the earth to sleep?
            When I think of my wife I imagine a frozen peach wrapped in a pink napkin. I think mostly of her nipples. Stifled, maybe. How nipples expand once a daughter is born, how they widen. Diameter, coloring, once pink now brown or the reverse, inverted, all new and finally useful, udders, as it were, fleshy straws. Fleshy targets for the baby mouth. The vampire monster of it. Groaning with milk. Our daughter, with target eyes, crossed up and confused.
            A fear that all one can muster will turn to slop.
            The wife asleep.
            I stand over her, our thermal blanket all body-wrapped to chin, her brownish hair curled and spilling along pillow-gullies toward the bed-edge where it waits, half-suicidal.
            Her hair (of course), already dead, and I'm overly dramatic, a pod-head bereft of stalk.
            Still, so much hair to strangle me, to hold me beneath the placid surface of a slop-puddle.
            To take the edge off a little, I'll mention that her hair only speaks at night, when the wife is fast asleep, when the eyes get all rapid-eye-movement-y, defocused on some dream scene of dancing obelisks and horny crows.
            A soundless talking, that hair. A tangle language. Not unlike bones and blood. Not unlike.
            I came home late that night, as I've fucking told her (and the goddamn hair).
            I hung my rain jacket in the hall closet, after parking the bicycle in the garage beneath the Lego® arch.
            I checked (as always) the thermostats in our little house. I warmed some rooms and cooled others. I peered into the office, the bathroom, closed doors or opened them.
            I stood over our bed and watched the wife breathe in breathe out breathe in (just as now) while undressing dressing in my sleep shorts before the mirrored closet door, the lumpy shadow reflection casually observing the sallow me, my sparsely haired chest. A silent hair, untangled of words, rangy, a kind of mute hair dog.
            And then her hair. I said, oh hair why not tie your strands around my neck and cinch down all winch like until my eyes widen and my face blues into a shit-faced death mask.
            The daughter door half-closed, heat on in its consolidated whoosh, just across from our door (as usual) and so the climb into bed, grasping for blanket corners, for warmth pollution.
            A little restless sleep, all wobbily and cold, and then the text.
            The pair of us ceiling-staring, adjusting our eyes to our phone-screens, getting glow-eyed, transmutated, hypnotized. Mouthing we are we are I am I am not, right?

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