cry out in animals

identity is theft

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Anything but Surgery: Sexuality in the Shape of a Toilet

BathHouse Journal, issue 18

Spring 2018

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automatic drawing/ eyes closed/ self portraits  (from upper left to lower right: in rearview, in pain, before bed, before bed, in hospital (interrupted by nurse), pre-surgery, in hospital bed, post surgery)

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@r3volutionaryb0dy

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@ cryoutinanimals.tumblr.com

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Almuñecar, Spain 2015

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The reptile’s in me-

-when I look in the mirror with all but the moon behind in the black reflection. When the moon is new the stars are knives. 

Today is injection day. You say that morally upstanding people piss you off. I picked a bug bite till my elbow bled, but I still don’t feel anything but the itch. Sometimes a fly walks up or down my back and it feels like a finger. Things are always the same. My sameness to the world around me gets thin and bites at my feet when the rubber stomach wears out, starved one too many nights in an abandoned hotel. 

In the lobby a man sleeps under his jacket on the sofa. All I hear is white noise until I smash the coke button on the vending machine, which startles the man so much that he jumps off the couch startling me. I yelp then he screams and runs out the front door. It’s just me and the white noise again as I collect myself from behind the heavy black plastic flap. I decide to write white noise instead of attending therapy. 

Because I’m drifting off to nowhere I run into a tattooed creature walking like it’s just risen from the ground. “I’m the projection of your imagination, you’re my evil twin,” it says then shits its pants. The creature’s gender is moving so quickly all I can see is the ink. 

My hands are blistered and broken from the ax or the chainsaw or whatever. I wonder how to pray with broken hands. All you’ve ever needed, like the jewel thief looking everywhere but his own pockets, is broken. It’s a good thing I brought duct tape. I wrap my hands up in prayer and scream until the clouds cover up the sun and rain begins. The mud and shit in our pants becomes one and I feel rooted to the earth in ways that can’t be filled with explanation. My holes are ringing. Each drop is hot wax on the earth’s enormous body. A body only satisfied when many other bodies are being satisfied around it (like the woman in Margery Kempe who couldn’t be aroused unless other people around her were moaning or feeling pleasure). A body that coats the surface of all things. It shoots up my legs, around my hips, each bug, every leaf, every dead dog being eaten out by flies, this surface creates a body called god. Like a vacuum-sealed plastic bag pulled taught over the planet. I plunge my prayer hands into the surface runoff. In and out I press my mouth to the holes and suck out god’s fears. “Tell me your secrets,” I whisper as I arch my back and stick my legs in the air. My hand strokes each piece of earth like a sick dog. I get a whiff. I realize I’ve held the jewel in my pocket, in the pockets of my body, my scull. I think of the snake eating its tail and wonder why it doesn’t just start where it is. I begin to eat starting with the inside of my mouth moving down past the tongue and into the guts, delectable. The gut bacteria melts like cotton candy. Red wine poured into hills of fresh snow. Drunk on the surface of a hill, each of us coating the ground with our fresh pair of eyes. I would ask to swap sets but the temperature and the duct tape have my hands useless unless for prayer. I ask instead if I can feel you but even my hairs, which seemed to have expanded my surface area of sensation, are sexually submissive to god. They lick at my mouth until my lips are sore and salty. I can’t feel you. I try to gasp but the air in my lungs is rotten and will no longer ripen in my throat. 

An apple is pecked at endlessly by hens until even the dirt, all the dirt is growing in our bellies. It weighs them down and flies gobble up anything that leaks. The flies make war, the flies are never satisfied. “Hold my wings back and fuck me.” We roll across a body. Dead or alive, your abdomen, your eyes, the clicking of legs on legs, the hairs and straws, the veins of chalked out skin, the waist. My bug body arches as you finish in less than two seconds and we’re tubbing again, twitching in front of the camera, lying naked and dead, legs involuntarily revolving in the air. I can only see other bodies. I have no way of knowing how to be. 

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fiction notes

There are always so many characters. Some with large metal disks vibrating painfully on their shoulders. Some with golden clubs and legs sticking out of their eyes. All of them yelling. And they live this way, there are so many ways to be. 

“evil is called, quite simply, the imaginary” -Sartre

I’ve killed five flies in less than a couple minutes. I tell you, “I’ve never been so good at anything in my life.” When we say “the night is alive” here in Spain, it’s because of the frogs and toads the size of human heads crawling up the rocky cliffs. 

When I read Kathy Acker write that war is a mirror of our sexuality I think about control. There are power relationships everywhere, from country to country, and from body to body. The largest concepts and the smallest, the most public and the most private. Is it possible that our most intimate, secret, sacred pieces of our selves are controlled? Is it possible that I’m still munching away at the inside of my cheek like candy? Stacking the dead bodies with wings on the stand above the headboard. My desire to destroy always outweighs that to create. To punch down a building or snip all the clotheslines in a neighborhood. My ability to be evil to the flies is because of how much I care for them. 

For me desire and pain are the same. I’m not sure if phenomena such as desires, which are fleeting, even matter. How much of me is colonized? Will you help me destroy my identity?

Several skeletons that look like they’re sitting in chairs, but without the chair, glide over the highway. Families group together in threes and fours. The stones below the foot bones kick up and bounce on the gravel in drips of dust. Dead flies crawl out of eye sockets. Chew any flesh remaining along the spine or the inside of the scull. Children whack the backs of their heads. Flies crunch and slurp up the pulp with a straw. The little bones shove what remains of their hands in their open mouths reaching to where the flies have collected inside. Children imagine crows to take their bones away. 

Because “I” am no longer me, my wants are deep or translucent. I peer through them like a plastic grocery bag and suffocate until I realize they’re also wings. I’ve got dead bugs all over me. The fly wings on my guts and chest resemble rainbows and give me an erection. I try to shake them off. Their fuzzy legs cling like desire to the skin. Because I desire to be free I paste the wings to my shoulders with contact glue. I bury them in the dirt of my body and lay out under the sun. 

I’ve never been to a nude beach before and as normal as being naked feels I can’t help but feel like a naughty boy sneaking a peak at everyone’s genitals. A man like a walrus stands in the surf, his belly bending down above his cock like a beach ball. He waddles in and out of the water, amused at something in the distance. I’m fascinated and continue to watch his tiny limbs hold up all that weight. 

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fiction notes

Our sentence is not severe. Whatever commandment the culprit has violated is simply written upon his skin by the harrow. -Kafka

I must be a story because I’m tearing me apart. Alice Notely says that “the religious feeling becomes connected less to a god than to shapes for grief stripped to shape alone. If you can see that shape in its simplicity you can live in it.” I must be consciously searching for my unconscious shape because I am looking at my eyes from afar. Within my grief, my itching heart, I pull a comb through my gut collecting words with six legs and stab them incessantly with pens. 

why do you write?

Because I am haunted by my unconsciousness and want to catalogue it for analysis. Because I tend to forget intensities. Also because life, my life, is beautiful, and language is one way to touch this beauty, this disgrace, my evil pieces. 

I wrote a note on the flesh of a fawn for you. It’s walking towards you now. I can hear the feet slapping the pavement where the cars burn, where the headlights wind around mountains like knives. It’s much closer to the bone than a knife would expect. You must grasp the neck while placing your boot just where the chest and neck blur. When you hang the antlers in a plastic Target bag watch it fill with brown sludge and maggots. Place a maggot to your lips, listen for my whisper. There beneath the violet blooms and pines and fingers. I will be there as wind. I will be the storm that crashes through your screen door and swirls above you pulling up your lower back like a kiss. I will be a dead bat you find while riding your bike to the post office. I will rot covered in salt. My wings stuffed in a glass jar. I will be a map of hands tracing across your back while you stand under the stars after a terrible show at the Blind Pig. You refuse the beer because you will want to remember how I spell my name on the tip of your thigh. 

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fiction notes

You step into my apartment. Watch me peel away this candy wrapper as tender as my skin drapes down in folds on the floor. Plastic squeaks between my fingers, my toes curl back as if my body is trying to tell me something. I take notes about my parts. I write, “I appear to be moving time like a snail, round the coin machine till you can only see my little finger waving above the yellow plastic.” 

Two nights ago I awoke feeling the presence of a human form stirring outside the caravan. When I go outside I find stars and movement in the brush. Maybe a pair of cat eyes, maybe a toad. If I sit up straighter I feel better. Yesterday I caught three flies with my bare hands. 

I’m in a stairway surrounded by loads of people. Someone in the distance, way off in the outfield yells, “peanuts...beer” but seems to be handing out chainsaws. I walk up to him gazing and purring into his eyes like a yogi. I buy the machine. Holding it high with one arm I thrust my other arm out toward the audience of people who continue to cock their heads back awaiting the pour of beer and soda. I hear the crack of a bat. Thick foam erupts from noses and teeth. I sing the blade into my wrist decorating the crowd and foam with red flecks. I drag myself knees first down the stairs, my machinery shredded, arm hanging down through the floor and pulling on the stalks of dreams in the apartment below. 

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fiction notes

You sneeze and a book opens. The pages walk like flies in a spiders teeth. Huge eyes watch the black guts leak out in codes as dreams leave my body to waste. If I am, and I am, a creature, I am your creature. I will float in and out of being. I’ve lost a lot of blood so far. 

Catching flies is hard unless your hands are wings. When they drop and press their groins into your palm you will close down around them as the camera zooms out to capture you licking your paws. 

When I get home the table is completely empty except for flowers and vases and breads that flicker on and off. I’m scratching my arm or pretending to get rid of the bugs carving circles around my belly like moons. Outside there is a drone of mating bees and dead dogs being beaten past death. 

Though death can be found in these knives I also find my reflection. In my face there are burning hairs that I quickly smear off with a blink. My reflection or the knife is now red. I decide that I attract flies because I’m a past dead dog. 

I am seduced by fly legs. Can humans fuck bugs? That must be what death is, I think. They are caressing on my back and I want to masturbate instead of writing. I find myself writing “thorax”. 

There is a boy somewhere deep inside me climbing my ribs. Now that I’m being open I can grab him by his long hair and munch him up like flies. There is a long window from my neck to my navel so that you can view my deepest thoughts and emotions. If I crane my neck I can kind of see my face in the reflection but other than that I’m a bed sheet. Sometimes during sexual or spiritual experiences my skin wavers like this sentence, which is confused between performing the sensation or describing it to a thick line on a forest floor designating the separation between several countries. When a needle slips too far and touches my calf muscle. When I stick in razor blades. Maybe I’m simply experimenting with new methods of tattooing. Sometimes I find blood on the carpet and press my face real close to lap up its meaning. When I close my eyes I hear flies getting bloated from all their munching. Sometimes I die in my dreams. 

My reality is sharpened by a pair of scissors. Sometimes in the mirror with wet hands and eyelashes. The table, I decide, is empty so I go to sit on the back porch steps. A swarm of flies forms the shape of an arrow and points toward a plastic cup of dirt standing on the bricks. When I pick it up and press my hand down into the cup a song begins to play...”daddy, come here daddy, come here body, daddy donkey...” I wonder what the perception of up and down are for bugs, especially those born on the underside of leaves. I mean, gravity affects them, I think, but what would it be like to be born on the ceiling of the house you were going to live in for the rest of your life? The song continues...”daddy, sugar sparkles on the tips of your ears”... I drop the cup of dirt on the bricks because its the nicest gift anyone has ever given me. I watch the pieces fill the cracks and the gift grows. I watch my old selves grow still. My body grows still. I sit back down on the steps. The plastic cup lies dead on the red bricks. I smoke a poorly rolled cigarette and end up with lots of spit to swallow and pieces of tobacco in my gums.