“My knuckles are raw in the wash-water, my hips ache with a thousand unbirthed hopes.” ~ Seon Joon
You dream that your father, long dead, walks out of the bathroom like he used to do.
He’s clad in his terry-cloth robe the color of light ochre, the color of pollen shaken from the stamen of a common flower whose name you have forgotten.
It’s barely morning, the sky just shading into a faint silvery blue. Like periwinkles washed by rain, the fragile garment of their petals thin as breath.
Why are you here, you want to ask, what is the meaning of your visit? But he has gone to sit by the window in his favorite chair; he closes his eyes, begins fingering his rosary. You do not think it is proper to disturb. You let him be.
In the middle of a dream like this you know you’re watching your heart move through a landscape it has mostly hidden from view.
You know you’ve been the snail, rolling the evidence of everywhere you’ve been into a narrow ribbon. Would you call this economy, or efficiency? So much, crammed into such a miserably small space.
Everything fit into this spiral shell of echoes, plus some. You heard the water in the dishwasher. Tremulous sounds coming over the trees. Cars slowing down on the cobblestones, the high-pitched whistle of a train approaching. Two women quarreling, always quarreling, in the same house. The neighbor taking his dog in from a walk.
It’s time to go, children; pack up your work, your notebooks, your things. There are thumbprints on the edge of the wooden desk. The drawer is full of pencil shavings. Soon the trees will thicken with leaves, or birds.
You want to empty the blue plastic buckets standing under the rain spout. You want to feel their round, palpable heft as you tip them over the stones and the cool water floods the empty garden plots.
You want to feel the weights released from each hand, the pulley-ropes gone slack. A line almost of sweetness, the shock rippling from your wrists to your hips.
Write his or her name in the snow, get a comfortable chair and watch how it melts: the letters expanding, becoming illegible and finally disappearing into the earth.
Spend time—the only form of currency the dead still honor.
Find the perfect slab of polished granite and release it into its native habitat.
Every year on the anniversary of your loss, take out a small ad in your local paper. Let it remain blank—an oasis of propriety among the ads for legal services and riding mowers.
Become migratory.
Visit caves that have lost all their bats to white-nose syndrome. Stand at the entrance and listen.
Visit mountaintop-removal sites in the Appalachians that have been terraformed to look like Wyoming.
Wear a cowboy hat and squint.
Become addicted to a tear-flavored brand of chewing tobacco.
Bleed yourself regularly with leeches to remove the black bile.
Follow a river from its mouth to its source: a spring small enough to empty with one long sip.
She texts, mid-month, to ask if she could have
a little more money for food, her cupboards
nearly bare, the floating exchange rate
up again— or down, depending on how you look
at it; but in her case, more applicably, down.
A twenty year old gas range that doesn’t work
anymore, and in its place a little hot plate
toaster oven. But how could you properly boil
water or soup in that, much less fry an egg
or a strip of meat? Crackers, bread, instant
coffee: she says a friend brings her these
every few days. The ceiling leaks in a house
that’s fallen into disrepair. One brother-
in-law made bitter by drink, one niece, a nephew
with a gambling habit, live rent-free under
her roof, largely neglectful of her
circumstance— who in her heyday shared
so freely of her larder, day to day.
Too far away, farther than any train’s distant,
watery whistle, I read her brief bulletins at night
as I lower the blinds; or, mornings when I raise them
to see blue sky felted between the arms
of trees. This is my daily trial, grave
failure through omission: how do I sip water
or coffee or broth, pass fruit or bread sweetened
with butter through my mouth, without tasting
the salt of her hunger’s quiet reprimand?
Here at Via Negativa Industries, customer satisfaction is Job 1. Both our Words on the Street t-shirts and other swag as well as the fabulous book of 109 of the best cartoons have been rigorously product-tested under the most challenging outdoor conditions. Final statistical analyses of the results are still awaited.
This is the third and final video in Swoon’s “bacon triptych” (my term, not his) — see the other two here, if you missed that post. (He does say at his blog, however, that there’s a good chance he’ll be making more videos for my Manual series.)
In an email exchange, I told Swoon I thought he had a real gift for absurdism. He responded, “Absurdism is a Belgian thing I sometimes think… so it comes naturally.” Which immediately made me long to hail from a country where something like absurdism could be a general predilection of its citizens, rather than, say, self-righteousness and extreme credulity.
Repeat after me: reproduction is mandatory, but sex is dirty and sinful.
According to scripture, you can minimize contagion by keeping it in the family, or at least the tribe.
Hold hands when you walk, preferably ones that are still attached to bodies.
Check with local jurisdictions before deciding to go topless or baring an ankle.
Lower the newspaper between you slowly to increase your partner’s excitement.
Use the fire exit only for emergencies.
Boundaries are important in a relationship.
A zygote deserves every right of an American citizen, presuming it’s not in the country illegally.
Remember: oral sex never leads to pregnancy unless both partners speak the same language.
Don’t buy leather unless it’s been cured with brains.
Choose the lovers’ leap that’s right for you. Does the vegetation at the bottom match your blouse?
Holy spirit possession is the only truly safe sex.
Don’t just rock—roll! Make yourselves into a perfect cylinder of lust.
Angels, like snails, are hermaphroditic, which may account for their air of superiority.
Find new uses for mucous, O pushers of the envelope.
Know thyself, sure, but don’t stop there.
If you want the candle to stay erect, dribble hot wax into the holder.
Let your eyes do all the work, like a seed potato.
Use a 3-D printer to make plastic copies of yourself.
Don’t stop with circumcision. Remove the flesh around the ears, lose your eyelids, pull out your fingernails.
We shouldn’t presume to separate ourselves from the suffering world.
The mouth is born without teeth, just a tongue and a howl.
Nature is against nature.
Most birds have no penises, and most honeybees are non-reproductive females who act as sexual go-betweens for flowers. So much for the birds and the bees.
As for storks, they only live in the Old World. Their closest relatives in the New World are vultures.
Delivery of your order is by sea, and may take up to nine months.
