At UTD, we have an annual literary magazine that I have finally been talked into entering. Spent an evening throwing together a few short things:
Fingertips
That the process of restrained cannibalism is, in itself, worth writing: the spewing of self on the surface of these pages, the fleshy bits and fingertips, thrown up and ageless and moving like mercury, merging to form meaning: here’s an organ-grinder for your digestion:
I came home to write today, and put it off in all the thousand ways one does—the cleaning and cooking and prep-work and purging—all to try to believe that clicking keys and glowing phosphors could somehow become more profound than I’m feeling right now. So instinct says: start gnawing my literal fingernails and start devouring my literary skin-and-flesh-and-bits-of-bone—bite those fleshy bits stretched on my lips like plastic-wrap melted to the heating coil of a coffee keeper. Scour and devour—scrape that skin inside-in and start digesting myself, my words, my histories—all the meaning I’ve ever penned that makes up a part of me: some lines I liked, and some were too trite, the ped-ants fighting for the crumbs from my licorice cliché soliloquies. Just digging through the volumes, the stacks, the racks, the piles, the tomes of what I’ve already expectorated, praying for piece-meal neography in the whole mess—some divine line of what I’ve already done for me to clone and kick half-formed into the future. Discovering I’m a Narcissistic-cannibal, just like every other writer: loose change and organ donations appreciated; please deposit in the space below.
Babble: Flits Hands, Dances Knees, Chatters Like A Squirrel
When someone won’t shut up and can-it,
no matter how inane their thoughts be,
There is the cultural necessity
to lynch them—run an Epilady over
and over and over their tongue
Until you’ve yanked their skin inside-out—
tongue and gum and bud and pore—
Put a sign at the entrance to the sea of knowledge:
“Please check your nuts at the door;
we don’t want you jacking-off in the gene pool.”
Frosted Flakes
Frosted flake, with her hair a-glitter and her colagen-candy smile—her hurtful eyes and artful lies and lipstick by the mile. She lip-syncs to the sit-coms, eighties-glam-rock, and the Molly Ringwald chick-flicks with electriporn-piano soundtracks and hot-air-(balloon)-hair. The high-school papers knew her name, and not a headline since then has cared. Her depth is that she writes loud haikus in invisible ink in places no one will see on her skin; she plays canasta in her dreams (and other games she doesn’t understand) with electric lambs, and never wins. She flits on by, with an upturned nose that just makes you want to cuss. It’s a miracle of moderneveity, the way we melt when she smiles at us.