Delia Tramontina

Cut up prose 12-01 #3
After Scalapino, Keene, DeBeauvior, Hejinian



PREAMBLE


I am a narcissist and I can't believe you didn't even notice. You, eating pâté in your jogging shorts, your nails shining, buffed by your climb to the counter top. I got tyrannized in a social setting; they turned me over, put a daisy in my ass and called me a vase. In case you haven't noticed, my forearms are tired from walking. When I was a child my mother filled my throat with rubber cement to make me a biology diorama called 'The forgotten hush doll'. It's cliché to discuss silence at this point. Everyone gets beat with hangers. I saw the Christmas tree from the inside cat's view; ankles, the darkened blue besides a denim seam. The cats start exposing girl infants very early on, as infants, by nature, are early; undercooked, incomplete, the lines have not been colored in - like Picasso - the vulgarity of representing images not formed yet. I was exposed; it's a fabulous potential to be un-colored-in.


PART 1


The cat is laughing. Were they always so symbolic? Cats in the sun, cats fucking, cats buried alive to guard the bodies of their owners in death. Cold hands mean Riga mortis. The poorer you are the less squeamish you can afford to be. The rich don't even shit by all accounts, their bowels empty on their own like a self-cleaning oven. Cats are the poorest of all. The boys who enlist in the armed forces, so they can pay their way through college, to get degrees in agriculture or dog petting, almost never get there. They end up taking forensics and bomb making and when tragedy hits, they look like swell guys, but the other 364 days they kick puppies and make plants drink antifreeze. We believe warriors are needed. You might not want their boots on your coffee table but aren't you damn glad they're here. In a gumball machine you get a vibrant plastic tongue and your sister shoves it down the front of her pants because she 'saw it in a dirty movie once', although she does not have the pretense of being unclean. She rubs herself against the high backed dining room chairs when company is over, or when no one is home. She is in slavery of reproduction; she can rub against things only to produce other things. A tazer can cook her into a better citizen. Even the cats sit on their money, keeping the pennies warm. The girl says 'My god, you are beautiful' as she removes the tongue from her crotch; turning white with her drying on it. She is what is missing when one cooks with the lights off. This is a misunderstanding. This is the life of a donkey; they always say 'you ass' but they really mean it. They say 'It's a shame you were even born' and make it sounds like a compliment. Like 'We are somehow shamed by your greatness' not 'Shit, it's you again'. They could go on but our legs are in the pistons and bicycles are costly, and cat's legs are too short, and bicycles are legs with cats in the pistons. My pennies are cooling copper forming portraits of people who lived when photography took a long time. My president wore a skirt but that part is not on the coin. We press a mud made of earth and water. We have houses made of sequins and pearls from costume jewelry. We speak with fake accents from some country that does not exist. We just think it's fabulous. It's a material calm like that caused by money or love. No, not love; it's not material; it just feels like the authenticity of wool buttons. We fool ourselves with balloons and ceiling fans - it's like religion - nothing ever does it justice; remembering before birth; what nothing looks like without the color black. That is a balloon and the sore fingers caused by tying it. In a housing project the air sits and plays pinochle. It takes money to move air, flavor it with scents from countries the inhabitants never visited. And the cats - they have stylish deformities to show their prestige. They eat tangerines and Chinese apples and run on little feline tread mills because they are stylishly fat - it's genetic. They waddle in their castles crowned with towers, and their pennies are silver dollars. I brought my hunger to Christmas. The family was appalled - the way my stomach growled; how it was so obvious what I WANTED, what I was lacking, what I needed to fill me. What a disgusting display, to be found wanting to everyone in the room. It's not that I'm not supposed to be empty - I'm not supposed to have any spaces at all. The sounds of the school bell heard me using foul language in front of the better children. I am empty and now everyone knows it. If they put a penny in my piggy bank slot, it would echo. Plunk! I do not break when I fall off the mantle. I bounce, balloon bounce - feeble attempt to catch the air in me. I am a tree. The boys bare arms in the vicinity and by the chameleon because they were vessels too. If there were a kind of person that did not need food, the boys would be shunned like those who now need tampons. They do not need to drool. They, in returning, half asleep, are too mature not to have full faculty of their tear ducts. Too young to shit themselves; those boys are forever caught between the humility of being very young and very old. God foresaw the Fall but they still insisted on running naked in the snowstorm. The boys say 'We run till we die' and they do and the skin of their faces are stretched into youth for their caskets; it was in their living will. I have stopped running to empty myself. I am nearsighted to a buttercup and trying to kill a rose bush with a crossbow. There isn't a bourgeoisie in sight to tell me otherwise; to say 'The flowers will never go quietly with the likes of you.' They are too busy looking full in the mirror, preparing for holiday guests. This is the Fall - here holidays are the same; over a month spent running out of color, basking in one's calf-like existence. They don't stone here, no matter what fluids ooze out of you. I did. I dropped my tastiness all over the supermarket and Christmas shoppers stepped on the part of me that is meant to be left in some man's bed. Love breaks the everyday routine, if I may call it that. Love, being what I left on the speckled tile floor - not as in 'making love' but in 'what I love about watching citizens slip and fall on their purchases.' It is Fall and the heart waves wobble off to keep me from becoming steam. Merchants say I'm bad for business. The warm pennies are pushed into finger cots and children pretend they're lacquered fingernails the way children do. Children compared men to plants; many arms and many legs, maybe a head if the leaves cooperated. A plant loses 90% of its heat when un-potted to demonstrate it could walk if not planted. The pot is a hard, up-side-down skirt, the way children see it; trimmed with colored ribbons because dirt and skirt do rhyme by no little coincidence. Pottery attire on a spinning wheel; like how they say history is. In the army the green is almost natural - they call it camouflage, as in 'we look like a tree, we look like a bush. Please don't call us cynical.' They have patches on their arms to wean them off food. They bunk in the rainforest and the landlady, for that reason, smashes all the pots and plants the trees in the ground so the army can have scenery to permanently blend with; blend like a windexed mirror. Cats puke green when they eat grass. I think that's proof enough, 'nature' is like antifreeze, but not sweet. Cats die of natural causes toward the age of 13 because at the age of 12 they become colorblind, love green and purple and in the absence of irises, eat foliage. They are not human so don't feel shamed by the way the whole body convulses in an upchuck. Desire is always embarrassing to children. Even worse in ill-found desire; desire that leaves us unsated and the entire neighborhood witnesses the writhing or growling or crying and they say 'She'll just keeps feeding her face till she explodes' or 'I guess she will never stop rubbing up against trees'. I give in to being insatiable like selling my car; realizing the world was not meant to satisfy me. Plunk! Crash! And the pottery shatters. The cats come to like my taste - fucking scavengers.


PART 2


He dropped his mind in the sandbox and now there is grit caught in the folds. The smarter you are, the more sand sticks. A mind is not the brain. The mind is illusive, abstract. It can't be dropped. The mind is in Nebraska. The mind is growing slow with age. The mind is a folly filled limerick. The mind has no precise conclusion. He can't prove it's his and the park ranger puts it in the Lost and Found. He needs something on paper to prove it but without his mind he has a hard time locating serial numbers. His brain still controls gross motor skills; he can walk, but not plie. The mind was the ballet dancer. The mind has side door airbags. The mind is caught in the rain with bags of groceries. The park ranger tossed it in with the windbreakers, walkmans, and Tele Tubby dolls. The mind is being abraded by the unzipped zippers and headphones. A young child has 'an accident' in the sand box. Some accidents are on purpose or at least freely permitted. A swatch of velour is ripped from the child's generic fleece shirt. It's purple. Purple is always permissible. His mind is purple. He was so fond of it and now all he does is drool and speak in monosyllabic utterances. The park is full this time of the day. The mind is fruitful. The mind is squeaky clean.


PART 3


To satisfy a man's sexual needs I must tie my knees together with butcher string. Sexual needs like a billboard washed white before replacing the advertisement. Like hard and wet, not dry and mopey little appendages walking by like basset hounds. A row of outhouses is barely enough for a secret when a man's sexual needs are strongly linked to medical supplies and amusement parks. One can, most easily fulfill those needs by holding one end of a jump rope with a child awaiting her turn. Sexual needs - of a man - very obviously - the jump rope. For instance, who conceived that jumping over a rope was so much fun that we must do it repeatedly? The way we watch a movie over and over, though we know the ending, laugh at the same jokes, or have stopped laughing at them. To engage in culture is to foreshadow the opening credits. It's all very mechanical. She wears a mask from her husband and the world turns, home stereo equipment and all. His sexual needs are the top of the food chain. At least that's what they say in hygiene class. Yes, you too can drive a yellow truck in the sunlight, mysteriously forgetting to take off the emergency brake. I got metaphors! We shall never speak of sexual organs except in metaphors and diminutive language that suggest that a vagina is a small puppy and just as adorable - say nothing of human waste - equally precious. While the mind melts like the sugar it is made from and the body is merely encapsulating the mind, not the brain, although that is in there too. He's noisy, being drunk on 'non-mind'. The things they do to him in that sandbox, not having the mind to stop them. He never obliged them to say grace before they overcame him. Toddlers and young children slithering and grinding on him like horny earthworms. Children ripping off his clothes and licking him like summertime, as they are too young to know that right technique. They described the torso with their ice cream stained fingers and while there is jealousy on my part, as I never thought to caress him, I wonder if I should save him. Then I remember never to get between a man and his sexual needs. The haughtiest young girl could have her own call-in program regarding how to sexually torture the mindless. As he is lying on his side she climbs to the top of his hip and stakes a big pink flag in his ass cheek. She was not the first to conquer him and indeed only just got there, but was the only one to think of getting a flag. Certain high priests call this sin but children are immune to such things. They merely need to be beaten, which they are, when their parents return because their children resembled themselves too much. The fox that survives the hunt is granted a long life because dogs never change their tricks in the chase. It's not like they'll wind up the mechanical birds as a distraction. One child's daddy also coached basketball and demonstrated proper (sexual) behavior on the play board. One mother was a politician and taught her child how to lie about it, should the neighbors ask. Another was a decorator and had the child furbish her house in crisp autumn leaves, which needed to be replaced when they cracked and fell away, leaving the child too exhausted.


FINALE


Do a little laundry, porch swings like it better loose, hanging low, hanging out - my home is all about paint chipping. The balusters are not white, damn it. Anything but that. I have ankle socks, with little pink frills or the kinds with the pompom in the back I wear while I practice my backhand. It's also beefcake time. My instructor prances around in shorts so short that nuns in Idaho are wiping their brows. He waxes every week and when I'm 'good' I slide down his legs like a child. They say you can raise yourself 30 times before you learn not to lick the electrical outlets. My eyeballs jiggle from all the running - the ball goes that way and this way and almost always finds its way behind me, where there is a man whoring his smooth skin and I have been known to be fooled by expensive panty hose. Did I forget the cats? We'll be wrapping up sometime soon. He will complete soon. A moan is a moan accompanied on the harp to make it melodic because sex is like music, isn't it? Isn't it? Okay, well there's some kind of rhythm there and if you don't get it you're not watching enough movies. There are more cherries in the wood here then in most catholic grammar schools - I mean really - children are claiming a stupefied park pedestrian and we don't even know what the man was doing there to begin with. Was he with his child? Was he looking for a new child? One that might get discarded? They say couples should love any infants but this guy was only half a couple or perhaps a whole individual but not a whole couple and therefore out of jurisdiction. Should a park ranger in a hat and trench coat approach him, he would have been indefensible and forced to leave but no rangers were out the day his mind fell out. There is a duty of obedience on how to handle such situations - 'Create a barrier around the mind. Tell the teacher. Get a garbage bag so the mind can be safely transported to . . .' and the rest of the instructional poster was torn long ago. The end of this piece has passed from the Ouiji board to the tarot cards and 'they' say there is an end in 'sight'. I don't know who 'they' are and can't confirm they even have eyes. I will not be so prejudiced as to say the eyes must be earthly. The cats are still captive princesses but they never get their own house. They are captive to their instinct, their need to do it in the first eight weeks, if they are ever to do it right. While this cat is pumping her, violin the moaning isn't ever bad musak.


FINALE PART 2


He is about dead by now; the kids get is their last strokes and dismount. The mind is transported by a driver in the sweltering weather to the insane asylum because minds need psychotropic medications too. The nurses crowd around the mind as fervidly as bees and place it in a playpen. Either way, sexual needs are met in a state run facility. A nurse is denied her physical weakness and forced to 'wear the pants' in her relationship with the mind. When I was nine I trained myself to derive pleasure from pressing on my eyeballs; the way the tennis guy is so smooth it hurts. He is running away from the telephone booth, as sure as I'm sitting here, (and while you may not be sure, I am quite positive), the meaning of it all scares him. He runs till he dies. The mind runs on another kind of battery; included. The children buy nickel candy and a soda pop, prepubescent for smoking cigarettes. This is not their erotic life. This has not been filmed. This is like that young girl I once knew. She came by to baby sit for us and ate all the marshmallows before calling her boyfriend to join her. We sat in the living room and turned up the TV, so the sound, and moaning, was an orchestra.