Heather Phillipson

[Sunday]

Guess What?

From the get-go, we went along with the whopping scam. The whole
planet looked like food, and all its muddy creatures our handy/cosmic
pizza. We ate hungrily, because eating resembles hunting and hunting
resembles love, and we just loved the heat-up-wipe-clean induction
hob. We were hell-bent on love. Or our shoddy but realistic guesstimate
of it.

Sex, sex, sex was reliable. Walking along corridors, filling holes
with plaster, Bankers Automated Clearance Services, this was sex.
Restocking our mouths was sex. Stapling documents was sex.
Automated weaponry was sex. Locking and unlocking doors was sex.
A particularly satisfying variant involved long-distance chat with no
physical contact.

Who am I trying to kid? Excuse me while I peel my banana.

But we did have a trick up our sleeves. Putting it all down to remote
control, piloted from thousands of miles away, we could shrug off
common feelings like the common cold. We could pump iron.

I’ll simply die if I don’t.

Duct tape, crude oils, minerals + multi-vits! Anxiety came as standard,
or was it anticipation or a frisson of isolation? Quite apart from being
indoors, mainly, quite apart from checking the forecast, quite apart from
managing the mailbox, we had the wave of the future rushing under our
weakening thighs. We spent years pressed to the chest of boredom/
waiting, then    kerpoW!
Crematoria.

Motion is exhausting. It’s a gutsy thing to keep feeling the movements
of the world.

And that’s not really the problem anyway. There was something in the
brushwork of FuckYeahNails! that reminded us of the brutal interfaces.
Leopard-print lacquer was revised repeatedly. Women in face-masks
attended to our chipped outer-layers. O THANX! we verbalized,
because prevention of flaking was tantamount to love-making.

Do you l.o.v.e the sound of trembling in late September?

And then the handle came off my bicycle, right there in my hand, all
slithery! Down I went, nosing tarmac, about-to-snuff-it, alone with a
road-sign. !But what’ll happen to the wet kiss never slapped on his

hot lips? !I hadn’t been meaning to go on about the sliminess of
our situation! !How many handbags I loved and lost! !Don’t dead
bodies belong to others? Slouched like a bleeding ulcer on a thirsty

highway, I saw larvae collecting around the pre-rotten innards. I saw my
physical make-up, proportions balanced like an aerated chocolate bar

with mint polyps. It wasn’t easy to breathe, as usual.

Then I survived. But I hate all that BS. Language is like teeth which,
before we let language appear, were for murdering or caressing. They
too have celebrations and die. A dentist weeps for the rubble scratching
in our molars.

That’s why we get so behind, the daily mega clean-up. Water, thank
god, screams like brainwaves and, when it can manage it, floods a
person’s surfaces with no traces.

Then there’s the other side of the argument. Our underpants are
shrinking, partly because we’re in them too deep, like the contracting
continents. After the saturation and the clingy fabrics, wow the
circulation bubbles like butter! And melts away.

www.heatherphillipson.co.uk