Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths Demux

And you don’t seem to be.
And how could you be?
And no provision has been made for the casual life in casual,
freshly-laundered bedclothes, trousers dropped to excessively conceal the ankles.

And pain exists in the concave.
And pain exists in the convex.
Allowing oil to puddle, importantly.
Allowing the camera to pan back to the groin.

(Certain skittering forms impressing the rainbow meniscus. Lifespans of a few bleak seconds.)

And there’s a certain earthmover named ‘Dispassion’.
Printed in an ersatz military typeface
on the bright yellow muzzle – right beside the curled exhaust flue.
The ‘Dispassion’.
–Named after an icebreaker that used to clear those unnamed straits
at the top of the world.
To allow for the blood to flow thickly;
RED one way and
BLUE the other.
Or to flatten – to medicate and temper the earth.

And I’m here in this trench. The last trench, perhaps:

I don’t want to hear any news on the radio
about the weather on the weekend. Talk about that.
        
Once upon a time
a couple of people were alive
who were friends of mine.
The weathers, the weathers they lived in!
Christ, the sun on those Saturdays.

And this whole thing a concession, really.
A compromised surrogate for a REAL fucking experience.
–All hobbled legs and gelatinous irresolution,
hauling itself inexorably through the murk
by the will of some unknown coronary motor.
I say ‘coronary’, but I have no idea whether it even has a heart.
I say ‘pulmonary’ without the slightest clue what a pair of lungs
would be doing down here.
Or a brain.
Or kidney-shaped kidneys, sensitive genitalia.
And what would these things be doing down here if not performing their anatomic
function?
And what desires power it?
And where is it going?
And what will it bring back?
And where will we hide when it’s back?
And what the fuck is it looking at? For?
And what will we watch while it’s out?
And how might bioluminescent THRILL be understood as both generative and symptomatic?
And of what?
And how!

A description I remember of a Christopher Nolan film
was that everything in it looked like a fucking gun.
That the camera moved like a fucking gun.
That the music sounded like a fucking gun.
As if heard down the barrel of a fucking gun.
That Leonardo Di Caprio looked like a fucking gun.
That he would approach his reflection and apprehend himself
– with WILD ignorance – as a kind of fucking gun.

And that scene
with the playing card and the bullet.
Or that one
with the balloon and the bullet.
Or the one with the apple and the bullet.
Beautifully scored, also.

And I mean to say that, I don’t really know how to make a gun.
I could make a bullet, I think –
– and perhaps eventually come up with a way to propel
the thing sufficiently enough to make a mark – perhaps even kill.
And I don’t KNOW.
And I can make EDUCATED GUESSES.
And I am in a relationship with guns.
– Of semi-intelligibility.
– A little one-sided, I suspect.
And I suspect that guns know a frighteningly large amount about me.
Their particular penetrative aspect, etc.
Never constructive –Always destructive.
As in, we’ll never manage to put that playing card back together.
And guns don’t work down here.
And nothing works down here.
Nothing save for that NASA pen
and the off-screen Bathysphere.

This one goes out to the long, oiled cock of a rifle. The ornate, occult rifle and its occult subject / object proposition:
I don’t want to hear any news on the radio
about the weather on the weekend. Talk about that.

Once upon a time
a couple of people were alive
who were friends of mine.

The weathers, the weathers they lived in!
Christ, the sun on those Saturdays.

Black curtain dropped. More an accident than stagecraft.
‘Here’,
And the semantics of presence are borne out as demonstrative bags of flour or sugar,
one or two sagging cod loin, held aloft –
or swollen, obsolete telephone directories –
swollen with the same name over and over: the name of the
ONLY PERSON THAT EVER REALLY MATTERED.

And a trellis of smooth, thick cabling across the floor.
A confounding of muscled tentacles and the thin, cheap speaker cabling dragged about by coelenterate and certain slow-waveform eels and the stiff, glowing pricks emerging from certain LOPHIIFORMAL FOREHEADS and the too-straight lines of scientific investigation, PHOTIC EMPIRICISM and the pasty gymnastic ribbons of jism.

–And me playing the role of the decrepit spider who most certainly belongs on the landing and not in the bathtub, at the terrible whim of your ghastly children.

A spider-web stretched between the trunks of the last two forest trees. The trees were loaded with snow, and the web loaded with the spider, which was smooth khaki, big as a football, with a black hourglass shaped across its heavy back, quivering a very little on the taut, almost invisible strands.

The web must have been spun since the last fall, for it was clean of snow, and glistening with adhesive as if it had just been extruded. Neither were there any husks in it, and had I not paused to recover my breath and admire the sparkling of the sun on the snow-plain beyond, I should never have seen the gigantic wheel-and-hub shadow thrust into the wood almost to my feet by the cold sun. I should have hung there like a cloudy stocking
with a full cap of bushy black hair, before my cries had shaken off the last snow from the far reaches of the forest.

The spider clutched the very centre of its trap. As I stared, a claw reached from beneath the speckled haunch and seized as with tortoiseshell pliers the next coil of the spiral.

With a sudden revulsion, and not wishing to see its face, or have it bounding across the snow at me on terrier legs, I plucked my revolver from my pocket and fired. The spider exploded with a soft thud, and like a firework showered its gold and vermilion contents all over the wheel.

The sun broke on the shambles of wrinkling tissues; golden juice lashed away from it.
Gobbets of amber gum, rags of crimson flesh, black plates thickly set with spines and thin brown sheets like mica cascaded past, frosting and shattering in the cold. ginger, straw-berry, and apricot: it was as though pots of various sorts of jam had been flung across a whitewashed wall. The bony forehead-piece studded with its eight eyes in sets of two, the size of walnuts and clear and unwinking as diamonds, glided over a hump of ruby tissue and sank into the snow. The whole mess started to steam and through the rolling clouds I glimpsed a portion of the copper-coloured jaws still munching.

This one goes out to you: slathered with HIGHLY-factored sun cream, pick- ing your way across the beach, taking in the unwound, undressed bodies scattered according to the geometry of sunlight, two proud ellipses of yellow sand stuck to your two tremendous buttocks.

I don’t want to hear any news on the radio
about the weather on the weekend. Talk about that.

Once upon a time
a couple of people were alive
who were friends of mine.

The weathers, the weathers they lived in!
Christ, the sun on those Saturdays.

 

 

 

Excerpted, appended and re-edited from a text originally written as part of ‘Tomorrow Never knows’, commissioned by Film and video Umbrella and Jerwood Projects December 2012