January 4, 2020
Scoff at the pretension of opening a piece with a Whitman quote, then do it anyway as applicable.
Whitman said that we contain multitudes. What’s more, what we wear contains multitudes of multitudes. That exponential stuff that accumulates when we walk around and do life.
It’s simple to imagine we’re all the same and simpler yet to suppose we’re all individually complex. Look to different religious scripture and see how we’re all one soul or kinship or cut of flesh from some cosmic cloth. A wry observation is that we’re all uniquely similar and similarly different. I’m guarded and yet post unabashedly publicly, confident that whoever cares to read me will share some salt-shake of sentiment. You may say you have no secrets, all the while conveniently omitting this or that facet of your infinite personality. This is to say, as I must say for lack of care to say without saying, that we do contain multitudes, but that we only contain them.
What universes are within us are wrapped up within us, within that wrapping paper cosmic flesh cloth from which we’re cut.
But our clothes are exposed. They’re the artificial skin that skims the world we float through. The dust-collectors. Shoes more literally, but have you ever thought about the shit that gets on your sweater. It’s great. It’s a great big filter what whacks at the wind you part with the bow of your bodice. You’re a grand ship careening messily through a mass of air. And that air ain’t clean. Not in a pollution sense, not chiefly, anyway, but in the way that it’s indifferent to what else weasels through it. Spit, shit, and all matter of all else. The world’s toward you and you’re a sprung racket whizzing toward it. Particle collision of the most mundane sense. Super small sensually insignificant smashings together. Molecular sex.
Sticky
I’ll bet the last thing you cleaned off your material likeness was sticky. Some amount of something got stuck on your somewhere and you had to up and wipe it off. Maybe that made the wiping instrument leave bits of itself where it tried to remove bits of the other and you ended up with less of one thing but more things than one.
I’m traveling on holiday and traveling light. That means one sweater. It avoids direct sweat as a proud outer layer. It’s brown and big and built of synthetics. Found in a pile at a place of piles peaked with sale signs at the last stop of the metro on the left bank. If time is money, it cost a sneeze.
It’s said that sundries from that market should be washed thrice with salt to oust the demons who crept in while the various garments withered there in heaps. Sulking, separated socks; sleepy, slapped ass of the past stockings; burnt, blood-clot bent-back brandy-stained blouses; crust caps; grave-digger dirt-nail dog-chewed gloves. My sweater is from such a place. It’s been washed and iodized. Exorcised. It’s okay now.
Collect fresh
When’s the last time you got your clothes off and got off. Maybe you were with someone. Maybe they smiled between writhes and then it was done and you sat twisted flush and fresh. Happened to me recently. Except the clothes hadn’t been entirely removed and had taken artillery fire.
I found a corner of hell to write in on this holiday and I don’t smoke but they do here, illegally, and I’m fine with it. Means generally calm people and the absence of small children. Trading transitive lung hits for peace. The walls are peeled, lights are low, liquor is liquor and there are two holes in the wall to sap energy into my keyboard. My brown breastplate can’t shield the windpipes ’neath but breathes a bit of tobacco for the both of us.
I love curry. It’s so goddamn good. Nothing has flavor compared to curry. It’s potent, tastes like tiger fur and ocean current. Can’t dodge the smell and stain and don’t want to. I’m a clean man and it still gets around. Pour me a bowl and paint me a grin. Satisfied boy.
Sweat. Capillarity works its scientific wonder and it breaches cloth. Time’s the accomplice.
Sickness. Like the Passover plagues, name it next. There was a bug in the bag on this trip and it drained me dry. Count some cough on the fabric because it’s there cozied up ’cross from the rest. Fluid lineup. Residual residence.
Bean juice and hare hair. Coffee’s decent but I hate the word. This century’s done with the stuff, least I am, yet my throat ain’t. And she bought me a new winter hat quiff with rabbit coat. Don’t eat meat and feel a bit for the bun that bade farewell to footsteps to keep my forehead aflame. It’s on me now. It all is.
A mural made for no one
Got distracted, forgot how this should end. It doesn’t, really. Should wash that fucking sweater.
January 3, 2020
Whenever you should be experiencing something is when it’s the absolute worst time to experience it. I’m somewhere I ought to be relaxing in an even more specific place I ought to be writing in and it is the most excruciatingly uncomfortable place precisely because it is not at all meant to be.
It’s a curse to require such a specific environment to create. Anywhere but that refuge, writing feels like bloodletting. Language is meant to transport you to the mind of the writer or wherever they’re able to conjure, but I can assure you you do not want to be here with me. I’m slouched in a chair with crumbs and crippling music and non-music making sour sound stew, auditory shrapnel shooting pins into head cotton.
Nothing is worse than a quote and the wall across is built by them. Brittle word bricks.
How does it feel to be a Whitman in a realm rendered by all things poets’ words were written to hide us from? When the mundane to the grotesque become celebrated cerebral text, the real world is left to prove it’s capable of overcoming the protection of the mind. And that leaves us in leaves of ass. Woodland waste tissue. Biodegradable biomass, biologically abominable bile. Unpleasant.
What’s fit to publish
I’m embarrassed to promulgate the publication of a mind’s every whim. It’s 80% ugly. But, quizzically, the rest is trash. I myself am tired of what’s touted as readable these days. There must be balance between what’s worthy of your time and what’s inseminated with the truth that makes you question the time spent on anything you’ve just exchanged it for.
Anything you think you want to read is because it’s easy. Because you and I are lazy. But that’s nothing new. Nothing is.
In defense of zero structure whatsoever. Anyone who calls themself a writer is a dick. Me included. The pen is a phallic extension of the mind.
I’m a lazy writer. I don’t make much effort to understand parts of speech or narrative structure or anything that makes written communication coherent. When I do I feel foolish.
You end up struggling through essays like these, trying to understand what message I’m trying to impart, in part because you believe in meaning. I’m elated to let you know, dearest you, that I cannot provide any assurance that anything created by anyone meant any more than that which was created for the sake of its creation. And I’m elated because now you understand that I am as lost as you are. It’s just that at some point I decided to snip off a squiggle and at some other point you decided to reel in the eel. Let’s meet up again when we can both make a little more sense.
███
January 2, 2020
Aka. Rusty Cock. An unforeseen floorboard upturned tempts the toe of my shoe. I foresee it. It sneers at me. I spit on it and kick it. It hurts my toe because it is a floorboard and I am a human bean. I just haven’t been boiled. Hard boy.
Man at the counter is a mustache. He has a grease stain below his belt to the right. The belt’s too tight and it squeezes the blood to his balloon top like a tomato paste tube. I can’t smell his ash tray breath across the counter because two actual ash trays come up to meet my clogged nostrils from next to the cash register, flanking a gilded wavy-cat. I finger the cat’s paw between thumb and index. Its small mechanism sputters epileptic in my small grip. Mustache hasn’t noticed me yet—he’s chewing a receipt and rubbing his lubber.
“I’ll take a Rusty Cock,” I say, loudly.
Mustache’s mustache slides down his pocked chin and moldy olive eyes meet mine.
“The fuck is that?” Says mustache.
“I’m at the Rusty Cock, I’d like a Rusty Cock.”
“You’re out your mind, we don’t have no such thing.”
“Make it up, you’re a smart man.”
He clearly wasn’t a smart man. His chin dripped something sticky and a rat’s tail riled in his apron pocket. I sat at a tiny table in the back. Really, sincerely tiny. My minuscule buttocks had not a chance. I keep mixing up my tenses, which is fine, because I have a porter in my stomach. And soon I’ll have a fantastical titular cocktail, whatever that may be.
I’m in the back on my microscopic chair when the door at the front of the establishment becomes disestablished. By that I mean the door just leaps up, rolls its eyes back, turns three shades of purple and disintegrates. A woman walks in, of course, and all 30-some somebitches in the Rusty Cock reel backwards to reveal her to themselves. She’s normal. More girl than woman, her eyelashes rustle like wheat and pupils dart around at the clientele like a doe’s in winter wind. She reaches for her pocket and then realizes she has none because she’s wearing a dress, then glides across the room to the WC for a nervous hand washing.
There’s a cool cold clammy closed up cloak next to me. It houses a snail. The snail is drunk of its mind and shares company with a fork and a muskrat. That sly fork. It catches me glancing at it and attempts to furrow its brow though it doesn’t have one because it is a fork. The woman emerges from the WC with a face illuminated by candlelight. The candles shy away and her face burrows into shadow.
It’s a tough scene. I’m not sure what will happen, really, and I couldn’t give a hoof. The pistols at one end are at the ends of their liquor and the harlots across them nearing bottom of their tea. Mr. Windles takes the stage. I hadn’t even seen the stage before now. In fact it’s hardly a stage—in fact it isn’t. It’s a table. Mr. Windles took a table as his stage, knocking smooth, silken, salty stocking knees together as he did so. His gills grew wide then wise then soft and supple. Then wide then wise and soft and supple. Wide wise soft supple. It sounded like a sequin in the sunshine pointing some sun glare at a blind man, which is to say no sound at all but the faint recognition of something there.
“A turtle in a turtle neck… is he just in a neck? Is he a neck?” Windles nippered.
Silence from the crowd.
“A neck, a neck, a neck,” he said, flopping a flipper at his lack of head-shoulders connector.
“Fuck you, Windy!” Travelled from the dark.
Windy didn’t fuck off, but flipped off, flipping his floppers off of the table and shuffling his stockings to an empty seat next to no one.
I was bored. Where was my Rusty Cock.
Suddenly, and it had to be suddenly as what else would rile the plot so, a sea cucumber rolled into the room. It was inanimate. Across the room, what felt like 500 meters away, a bomb went off. But wasn’t a bomb. Was Mustache. His footstep. He’d moved after seven weeks of sullen tummy-rubbin’. The man-boy slammed his foot on the ground once again. Everyone swiveled their eye-sockets. Snail sucked into the folds of his coat.
Mustache moved a severed hand across the counter, touching its corroded tips to a control pad. Some switch turned. Music started. The word “Anne” whispered lyrically across the floor, wafting into eardrums. I was so giddy, it was great.
The woman moved to the center as if there were one. She produced a herring from her handbag, which offended Mr. Windles, and proceeded to wave it in the air as an anarchal instrument. I was done with the chair that was now lodged into my anus, plucking it out and discarding it to the side. I joined our mysterious miss at the center that wasn’t the center. The woman. Her name?
“What’s your name, I must know,” I inquired.
“You mustn’t,” she said, staunchly.
At that moment, the man from the counter appeared with my Rusty Cock. Thank fuck. I drank it except for one dram at the bottom. It was decent.
“I’m shwizkdlzljfkls…” said the woman, gargling words into the fuzz of the night.
“That’s gorgeous,” I said sarcastically. I hadn’t heard what she said. I then dipped her herring in my Rusty Cock by way of raising the Rusty Cock to her herring, thereby wetting it. She wasn’t so started as amused.
“Thanks, boy,” she said across the room. Across the room?
I was at the exit. I twirled out. Mustache was waving my credit card the same way he’d waved a fan at his mother dying of horse-crab heat stroke. I faded into the doorway as he tossed the card into the bin and steadfastly resumed rubbing his continental tummy.
I checked my watch. Except I didn’t have a watch. It was whatever o’clock. The night was young. I couldn’t feel my tongue. The Rusty Rooster sign sighed above. Piano fucked me. It felt fine. I waddled down the street to my flat. Some songbirds flicked cigarette butts at my face as I smiled into the cracked mirror moonlight. The night nodded and nodded.
Some green seats need to know how it feels to be felt. When yours regales a fish dressed in fishnets, forget how many men it took to forge a forest fire. Finesse the taste of porter on your tongue. Reignite.
I have written this in hell itself (Somewhere, Poland), please excuse me. Have a wicked night.
April Littrell