4/15/16

schweinefleisch


 When Jimothy was a fat kid, he didn’t get made fun of at school. This might have been because he was funny or because he was ale to beat someone down with his heft. In reality, he probably only looked like he was able to beat someone down with his heft. The day he went to the doctor and they told him that he was over 100lbs, he felt weird shame about it. He didn’t cry or anything, but he felt guilty for a good day or so. After that, he went back to Salisbury steak during lunch, including potatoes and gravy.[i] He increased in size as the years went by, bench marks of various kinds passing as he aged. He graduated from elementary school as a double chin was starting to develop, reveled in mathematics as he grew into a size 40 jean, and had some trouble fitting into the chair/ desks in college. He fluctuated a bit after that, but remained mostly the same size as he was when about 23. His size and physical description had very little to do with his life otherwise.
Sometimes Jimothy did not feel very sexy, though. When he masturbated, he would close his eyes very tightly and massage his buttocks so that he could get a sense of what life might be like when touching another cohabitant of the material plane. He did his best to keep a tidy workspace, so to speak, tissues at the ready, nary a wad or loose thread to be found strewn about. Other than these moments, his acquaintance with his body was nil. In the shower, he spent hurried moments rinsing and lathering and rinsing again for purely perfunctory reasons. There was no pleasure in the act of bathing as there might have been in, for example, a Dove commercial wherein the model lavishes herself with a plastic loofa sponge. Jimothy tried not to think about this when he masturbated.


[i] To be fair to the lunch ladies, it’s important to note that it can be tough to try pleasing the palates and appetites of a school’s worth of idiot children seeking food and know-how.

4/5/16

Letter to my Mortician


If I had the ability, I would apologize for the smear I have left on your steel table. But, since I do not have the ability to give voice to my inclinations at this time, I will lay patient while you perform the task that you have taken on, in service of this body, which I used to inhabit.
Every dead cell you manipulate into position is grateful and yielding. They thank you. I thank you, inasmuch that I am able. My mouth is wired to a gentle smile, restful.
Tubes drain me of blood and various waters. Tubes fill me to brimming with the substances that will preserve this flesh. A kind of simulated plumpness ensues, which belies my distinct lack of motion and life. Disinfectant permeates all, for your protection. Though I would have wished to be stuffed with dried flowers and herbs, I cannot begrudge convention, especially given my current state.
What meaning would my life have had to you if I were meeting you just a few weeks ago? This husk, this slough house, a vehicle of bile and putrid phlegm would have been a conduit of love and ideation. But, the bloat you slit is not the seat of my intuition. It smells like a dead fart. Thank you for expressing the contents.
The years I had were bright and warm and beautiful. If only I had chosen cremation.

3/31/16

The Desert Witch Iterates Herself


“I do not live in this hole in the ground, I live in this body which floats very near to but slightly above the ground… for clarity, I should iterate that I am not truly contacting the ground with my bare feet inasmuch as I am simply not capable of such. None of us are. This fact is not supernatural, mostly philosophical, but I use this as a method by which I gain meaning from my life. I do not twist in this wind, for I am not the thing that the wind twists, though I sense it.
“Furthermore, the distinctions between sensation and being, yes they are discrete, but they are so often lumped together. The thought:  ‘What I sense is a direct result of my personhood.’ and:  ‘What I sense is the only truth.’
“No, I say. The sensate ‘demi-self’ is the version of you that lives hungry and twisting in the gully of your throat. One’s own self is divorced from the display or the signifiers of ‘self,’ amorphous, odorless, without mass or temperature. I, myself, my self, live(s) in here,” she touches her breast, “where the pumping blood and the wisp of my soul present one another with facts about their existences.”
She tilts her chin toward the rocky outcropping in the distance, where the dust from the desert obscures finer details. Wordlessly, she goes.