Consonants and Vowels

I've made a zine! It's very exciting. Here is a little fish from the sea:

O o oo ooo o o o o oo

I struggled with o. O and I could never be mates. O was round, I was straight.

My teacher was Miss E. Her glasses were round. She sent me to a private tutor where I was to learn how to improve my letters; spin the circles all the way around until they’d bite their tails.
I sat waiting for Mr. O on the floor at the end of the hallway, just next to the school dentist’s office. The air was thick with fluoride. Underneath the sink, someone had spilled something sweet — possibly a face-down peanut butter jelly sandwitch. A trail of ants was approaching. I leaned over them. Their bodies had three joints:

>o
>o
>o

>o
>o
>o

>o
>o
>o

It’s alive it’s alive it’s alive it’s alive it’s alive it’s alive it’s alive
dead.
sang I to myself and squeezed one to an ink-stain with my finger.
It’s alive it’s alive it’s alive it’s alive it’s alive alive it’s alive it’s alive it’s alive it’s alive
dead.
sang I and whacked another.

3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d
dead. (2d)

Eight legs eight-legged crawling running pushing pulling living
dead. (ing)

Buzzing crawling smiling whisp’ring playing
dead.still.


Whitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhite
black. (ink)

Waitingwaitingwaitingwaitingvvvvwaitingwaitingwaitingwaitingwaitingso that’s where you’re hiding?
Above me; the great Mr. O, Coffee breath, knees falling out of the jeans, the buttons visible, reflecting the lightbulb. A notebook, square, undoubtedly full of O, round, in his hand.

dead.
said I.

I i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i

Diamanda Galas...

...sits on my balcony. well, the book i'm reading on her is, but it's getting dark, the sun is about to set, and i can still see the sun reflect in her fingernails and teeth through the book cover. There is much bone in her.



She talks about the occult, and how witches back in them witch-hunting days possessed the power over both sexes: a transsexual power that she herself presents with her voice, and her appearance (does she look more like Gaiman's Death character, or Marc Bolan?) is, although certainly not androgynous, decidedly confronting.

I put one of her recordings on the stereo in the shop that I work in once, and for a while, it seemed like a different space; a series of bony corridors; a dark vault; the rows of cds along the walls were tombstones. Cds really are tombstones, aren't they? There are names on them, and some kind of title:

Eric Clapton
"Eric was here"

R.L. Burnside
"Wish I was in Heaven sitting down"

Phyllis Dillon
"Love was all I had: 1966-71"


The Diamanda section would have the best inscriptions, then:

DIAMANDA GALAS

YOU MUST BE CERTAIN OF THE DEVIL.


So is a record a symbol of death?

On the bus

On the bus today I wrote a song, and it goes-a something-a like this:




A CHOIR OF CRAYONS
Gee I love you very much you are the sweetest thing I ever saw
I'm so glad that I found you, yeah
And I'm really glad I'm singing this (I'm way too drunk to spell)
Each consonant bangs against the head

I just called to stutter
and belch out some colours
you know the world is very red and purple and
yellow and red and purple...

I've been thinking 'bout your gender issues
and your little man moustache
and last night I went on the internet
& stumbled upon a picture of a testosterone-enlaged clitoris
I thought it looke like a little crayon

I just called to tell you that
but I dialled the wrong number yeah
you know it's stupid but I just mistook the 6 for a 9 and the 6 for a 9 and...

...the world is a cornfield of crayons singing

Hallelujah. hallelujah,
all the colours, all colours yeah
we know it's stupid but we've been singing too much and it's colouring
to red and purple and yellow and red...


-------------------------------------------

After I'd left the bus, and at the end of the day, I imagined the driver cleaning the bus: sweeping up hundreds of leftover little clitoris-crayons.

I work in a shop

My hands are cold. They type slowly. They don’t move much at home any more, now that I don't use them for writing. They curve around a teacup in the mornings, or fall heavy on top of the newspaper (that I don't read). They hold plates and sandwiches, knives and forks, but never pencils, never paper. They barely know how to press the remote for the tv set.

But throughout the day, they fight battles to hold onto money and piles of cds, dvd alarm frames and cold cups of coffee. I work in a shop, and long hours, my previous writing hours. It is as if my hands are allergic to touch when I leave after holding so many alarms, magnetic buttons, and thin metal discs.

I realise I write at work, all the time. The handing of change to customers has become an act of love, holding hands, and writing in them. It has made me silent and still, word empty, as if I am losing language.

I imagine writing into the customers’ hands, handing them not silver coins, but words.

“ONCE UPON A TIME, A WOMAN KNIT HERSELF A MAN OUT OF WOOL,”

I wrote into one hand, a right hand, scarred, middle aged, thick skin.

“SHE WAS A BIG-BONED WOMAN, AND MANY BALLS OF YARN WERE NEEDED TO DO THE JOB,”

whispered a 50 cent piece into another. A small girl with very pale skin got

“NO ONE ASKED HIM TO LOVE HER, BUT HE DID ANYWAY”

At the end of the queue approaching me, was a very tall guy about to buy a film for his wife,

“HER HUSBAND NEVER KNEW.”

His ring and the coins met with a clunk. The coin bounced from it and onto the floor, where a little boy quickly picked it up and put it into his mouth. His mother started a riot. Through the stereo playing, the boy crying, the mother yelling, the man apologising, and the heads turning, nobody but I could hear the word the boy had swallowed. I wrote it.

Not writing

I had a novel, and it slipped. One day I was thinking it, living it, the next day it was gone. My desires spread in all directions, loose legs. Some were transferred, unjustily, to somebody I didn’t really like, but who reminded me somehow of one of the characters I was writing about. His hair curled the same way, the neck bounced forwards when he walked. I saw him at a computer store, and I watched him, I watched the hair and the neck and the eyes, and I didn’t write it.

Or perhaps I did write. Can I ever stop the writing? Will it not need to stop itself? It felt as if I were writing, frenetically, but on an excercise bicycle, and that all the letters were just folding on top of the others. Like when I write emails or instructions, or copy something off a newspaper article. It was like in a dream, when you run but don’t get anywhere. I was being, doing, existing on some level, but unconscious to it all.

WRITING IS THE PASSING OF TIME.

These were the first words I wrote for several weeks.