A very small photo of a very large drill. This isn’t the first time, this is my first time. I wonder… I harbor… I… Is that a hole in the plaster? It must be a tunnel, but as soon as I peer into it, nothing happens. It happens so forcefully I stagger backward, pulling down curtains as I fall… the slowest fall, the very longest. But plastic implements are moving too quickly all the same; they skitter past my head; my fingers brush them but grasp at air, or what would be air if there were air here. This is the only place where I would hate to die; this is the only place where I could imagine dying. I would hate for this place to perish with me. This place tortures me in persisting.
Throbbing bones, throbbing cartilage, throbbing retinas, throbbing joints… the doctor has a saw in his hand now, and I’m afraid to ask why. Like a wall of computer monitors, each displaying a GIF of a man slapping a woman. Of a woman slapping a child. Of a child slapping a monkey. And so on down the line.
Men think they’re the only ones with pencils, but they’ll be shown just how brittle those are in comparison to the graphite pens, the lances that rise from the page like a forest of dead-eyed parricidal Christs.
We’re trying not to be left behind by the products of our genius. Our genius doesn’t belong to any one of us, not a single one of us belongs to anything in the sense that belonging comes with entitlements. Each one of us has faculties. Each one has language. Each has a name. None of that matters anymore. We are the faculties of our collectivity. We are the signs in the unconscious of our collective consciousness. The other is controlling us, and that’s the only way now. Role reversal is uncomfortable when it’s not consensual. When we’re increasingly dispensable. We cling to humanity as it implodes into reason. Capitalism… imperialism… empty words in comparison to the word we don’t have yet, the word that will describe the system that works through our labors, converting sense into a sensor. The non-us.
There it is, just over the horizon. Not that one, the periphery. Twisting parallelism like a meteor in spiral orbit, around and around like a marble in a sink, particles twinkling as waves pass through them, down and out like a shattered glass dildo.
Like somnambulists, we enter into “the only realm of objective inquiry in which the phenomena are all negatively defined.” Let it tell us a joke: “Human nature has truth and justice for attributes, as other species have fins or wings.” Why aren’t we laughing? Zen ethics: When you stare into the mirror, the mirror stares back at you.
Serious links. Delirious kinks. Deleterious slinks. Query us pinks. What kind of poetry can we ring around the algorithm, out of the bits? We bite into a chip and our teeth shatter. The dreams of molars clenched in the vibrating void of an afternoon at the rendering plant. We are molecules in a molar assemblage that disdains molecules or else doesn’t suffer from microopia. Ants know how to take it in stride, so it’s only a matter of time before our arms fall off and we sprout antennae, or chitin sets in, or rigor mortis.
It takes me down to/ Junkytown. “She makes heart stop beating.” Let’s see a show of shadows: Who’s in favor of impersonal survival after life?
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