PUNCTURE WOUNDS

Mosquito Bites

She had a puncture wound like a mosquito bite in the soft tissue at the base of her neck, where the clavicle bones meet up with the breastplate. She said that the closer you got to your brain, the quicker the dope would start working. So it seemed reasonable that starting at the neck or breastplate was an efficient way to reach that 20-minute high she would do anything to achieve. Yellow-blue bruises that defied description, and had they, would have made one sick to one’s stomach. Wend and trebled skin, scallops of raw unrefined tissue that seemed to cinch up around the crayon of her face. These things and imagines I remember, against my better judgment so it seems. Orange syringe tops, to keep the point form getting burred and troubled. Scabs of blood and mucus clogging the plunger keeping it from being driven home. You can use a condom, a lubed one, she said. By rubbing the condom up and down the plunger you can make it almost like new, getting rid of all the shit that’s built up in it. A fit is a tool, an indispensable mechanism, and like any mechanism or tool it can be repaired or upgraded, extending its half-life. I have never stabbed myself with a tool or a mechanism, perhaps once with a screwdriver, but with the exception of that, nothing else. My great uncle used a sledgehammer, swung over the hip of his shoulder, to fell cows once they’d outlived their purpose. Now, so I hear, they concuss them with compressed air and hydraulics. Public transit is like cattle cars, yet those being conveyed by them have no idea just how horrid an idea that is. When I think of cattle cars I think of death and train stations, bootstrapped young idealists screaming orders in a language those being screamed at barely understand, if understand at all. I think of babies being wrenched from screaming mother’s arms, tiny shaved heads being tossed into stoves and cattle stalls. Heads sheared white, to prevent a contagion of lice, is not a requirement for riding any bus or train I know of in my world. We have our own Auschwitz’s and Dachau’s in this country, but there called crack houses and shooting galleries, where emaciated soulless addicts torture and violate themselves, the result of faulty social engineering and up trickle economics.

You might ask why I write these things, these horrors. Writing is memory, and memories, by their very nature, must be dredged from the bottom most reaches of the self, from one’s being. We are all hostages to our thoughts and memories, to the things and yet to be things that make up our inner most selves. There is no surgical precision to this, just a hacking and dredging, an evisceration. We are all, to a one, vivesectors, nature’s beasts and miscreants. Once we get that through our thick skulls, not a moment before, life becomes meaningful again. Meaning is produced. Nothing is given or absolute, with the exception of memories, which we have whether we want them or not. This brings me back to the beginning of this diatribe, I am a fool, and as such, someone who should not be trusted or put faith in. Our prisons, and we all have them, some with windows, some without, are within us, built from memories and forgetting. I have chosen not to forget and will pay the price for having memories. You may not, but your are idiots to think that you are not hostages to your own selves. I am a hostage taker. I am a hostage. I am nothing more than memories held hostage by the hostage. You see the hostage and the hostage taker are one in the same, they live off of each other, like maggots on rotting carrion. We are the maggots and the carrion, the hostage and the hostage taker. This is where the notion of the binary comes into play, the dualities and ganging up that precedes the taking of hostages. Liebnitz was right, we are nothing more than solipsistic monads, but one’s whose windows are blackened out to keep the memories from escaping or rushing headlong back in. The clubfooted scoutmaster, the rectory parasite, the bomb droppers and emasculators, they all live on in our memories of them, taking us, the hostage taker hostage. The little girl with the sound box strapped to her chest, the very one we made fun of when we were children, she lives on regardless of my forgetting. The fear of castration, not phallic, but a simulacra of castration, a faulty copy, a poor representation of something we will never understand, and were we to, would castrate ourselves in horror of the thought that we could have but didn’t. The hostage taker and the hostage are one in the same; they are the castrator, the moil snipping away at the foreskin of our memories, like chickens pecking at each others necks, torn and bloodied beyond recognition. Now you may understand why I claim foolhardiness and not bland idiocy. Anyone can be an idiot, but only the few are fools. Castigate me for what I say and think, but the castrating is mine, as the memory is still fresh and heady. Another word for binary is testicular, having orbs of equal size and measure. A phallus is severed, not castrated.