Will haul this body of gelatin, will lash forward this non-form, will push this organism of gas through the gray lands.
In the thin white hair tears a sour wind. A wind of vinegar and henbane
tears in the rustling, shed bird-shells that have been abandoned empty
and fragile after the throbbing bird boils moved on toward so called
life. Now I see the clever needle-trees sling these clumps of heavy
pouch-flesh back and forth between themselves: small feather-birds
“fly” above my heads.
I haul myself, I haul myself, I haul my dragging structure along the
river furrow’s muddy, sloppy, overlapping slopes. I am so bitter,
so wet, the mouth is smeared inside with the sweetness of the bit-apart
blood-chisel. Out of this blood I am going to suck my nourishment for
some time.
I haul I drive my dissolved substance, slowly across the metal of the
calm stones, the hovering thread-glue’s suction toward a point in
the distant middle of the perspective. Where the river’s beaches
will meet and where the thinnest needle of silver of liquid will drill
its dark tunnel-water straight into the heart of the dying image, the
moist up-loosened surface of paper which we cling onto.
I haul I force I touch myself, touch the skin-rind with chafed-up
viscous fingers. The little mermaid formed from ocean foam – that
is how I haul my long veils, layers of elastic cartilage, of slippery,
shimmering membranes, chlorophyll. The gills shudder and glow deep down
in this chasm of tissue – constantly rustling, squeaking, gasping
for air. This whirling, howling, desperate lack of oxygen; the scream
– if it had had enough oxygen to scream and a mouth with which to
scream – the scream for to swallow the entire lung-base full of
clear wind.
Lizards play, glitter green, blue and red between the membranes of skin
in the body dress. Where does this mass end? I search inward through
the layers to find the core of my plasma wet from juices, to find the
core of body-flesh despite the outer, surrounding flesh, the naked
body’s stable surface, a kind of human here inside the bluing,
plant-becoming. A kind of attachment behind the spread of the sickness
of mud, fermentation. But there is nothing that resists beneath this
mantle of slippery webbed skin, broken through by a pounding vein
net.
Now I lick my tongue against outer claws of the fingers in order to
tear life into the ions, to make sores bitter in the tongue’s
blue ventricles. A kind of pain radiates therefore against the inner
glands, a faint spasm of celebration before this, the nervous
system’s last chance to communicate with the dying self. The
mists smart, shimmer, the mustard gas’s lumps of blue cobalt
corrode through the otherwise red shroud-clouds that drag their bellies
against the surface of the river. In one of the skin folds between the
pockets of the genital dress lizards gather in heaps of glimmering
scales.
But time runs on time and starvation and the weakness carries me in
across the gray surroundings. And the soul’s dark night will
slowly be lowered through me. That is why I now slowly fold myself like
a muscle against the wet clay to be met with the flesh against the
sleep-gland’s mouths. I will sleep now in my bird body in the
down, and a bitter star will eternally radiate above the glowing
face’s watercourse.
