SHANE JESSE CHRISTMASS — Doll Muzzle

It was Day 57165 of the Fourth of July celebration. The motel TV was fuzzy again. Room 6 ... halogen-lit ... smogged with hash and Aqua Velva ... smelt like goat tongue and diesel fumes. My wrists itch ... an echo of the handshake I gave you in the carpark. You’re big-boned ... heavy-set ... told me your name was Tony ... your teeth ... pressed chrysanthemums between them. The colour of your cock in the bathtub ... cactus juice made from human tears. Your eyes roll across the bedroom. We are here to teach. Our words carry the weight of the entire world and are always just a whisper. There is no need to say anything at all. You sold me a VHS titled: LICK THE GUTTER JESUS. You asked if I believed in hyperreality as mood board. I told you I collect Herni Wintermans in jam jars and piss on museums. You winked ... then bled from your nose. Your tongue on my fingers ... pork chops ... the honeyed beaches of Tahiti in a tin can ... inverted streetlamps ... I’ll have the scrotum from the beast of a man ... the bones of a boy ... the blood of a pig. I’ll have my hand through your hair. I want to take you into a jungle ... but I don’t want to know where it ends. We’ll sleep with the tigers ... we’ll sleep on our feet ... we’ll sleep on our backs ... we’ll sleep in our teeth. I’ll take you to a place ... you’re so good in the back of the car ... your hair smells like the toothpaste. The VHS squealed when I shove it in the player. The screen showed a man dressed as a uterus ... wandering through a Walmart ... screaming about deli meats that remember World War III. The man’s voice sounds like ashtrays having sex. I drink some cough syrup ... some fucking Robitussin ... three fingers the pour order ... I chew the plastic arm off a doll I found in the bin behind the Baptist op-shop. I’m not going to touch you like I want to touch you ... your little pink pig ears ... fluttering to the gin ... your hair is getting so much longer. I can see your gullible face in the mirror ... the icy glee that it holds. The self is in pieces ... your body is fragmentary ... violated ... reshaped. Names are lies ... gestures are betrayals ... and even physical features mutate ... your identity is no longer fixed ... buried wires sparking under flesh ... the body is drugged ... invaded ... eroticised ... weaponised. A world built on media static ... junk symbols ... dead-eyed simulation ... celebration as looped spectacle. I’ll hold your hand with my hands ... your eyes are like deep sea abysses ... black moths ... the screeching of the crows. My hands in your hands. I’ll be as gentle as I can ... I just want you to know how I feel. Your teeth are all broken ... your fingernails are bloodstained. Your hand has claws. The wind is carrying your scent across the San Fernando Valley ... that is all. My phone rings ... it’s you again ... or someone pretending to be you. You tell me there’s a sinkhole in my chest. You tell me you’re coming right over to fill it with broken keyboards and old Action Man figures. I nod down the line ... even though you can’t see me. My tongue has gone grey ... my eyes are in a leaking Ziplock bag now. The front page of the New York Post ... an empty apartment ... my life like a spiral of deadlines. where you can’t go to the top floor of the Empire State Building ... where you can use the toilet while watching a movie ... where you can only use a fork to eat your hamburger ... My entire life is a series of deadlines. I leave the motel wearing a tinfoil suit … stitched with carpet from the bar down on Charnwood Street. Everyone there has teeth like corroded cogs. They speak in hiccup ... flinch when you mention the algorithm of flesh. I’m looking for a cleric with a mouthful of flies. I’m told he trades confessions for toe bones. When I find him ... he’s wearing aviators ... riding a Segway ... talks to me about animal grief. He tells me I am the last wet fax from the divine ... to now go ... to go perform. So ... I do. I unzip the sky with a bent coat hanger and climb in. Back in the carpark of the motel ... Room 6 … you’re a big old fat mule and I don’t care where you take me. Your cunt is a dead man’s dick ... it’s the last refuge of scoundrels ... a coyote’s snout ... my hands ... all of you dead ... your feet ... I’m a mutt-faced boy ... my tongue a dwarf’s claw ... your face like the backside of a pencil eraser ... a piece of shit ... a gnat up my ass ... the end of the world ... the end of the line ... the end of that bitch ass ... the end of that asshole ... the end of that pussy ... an egotistical mutt-face ... a gnarled up ball of pencil eraser ... shark fins ... shark gills ... the end of the universe ... you’re a big old fat mule and I don’t care where you take me. This video isn't available anymore. Go to home. Out Indianapolis way where they insert fruit into your stomach by state decree ... campfire where they roast coyote ... a tinderbox full of human bones ... rotten bottles full of bad eyesight ... Calabrian condoms and rat’s claw prints ... a hit on the Henri Wintermans ... sex acts causing salmonella. Bedlam by an iron grate ... sporadic guerilla warfare ... your unread letters. The first time we fucked was a summer of unpleasant habits ... a summer that made me feel a little bit out of place and slightly alienated. Sex with you isn’t intimate ... it’s ritual ... violence ... performance. ... a consuming alteration ... our bodies blur ... mutilate ... degrade ... merge ... doll parts as snacks ... your reality is unhinged by drug use ... grief ... obsession ... mania. This mental illness isn’t pathologized … it’s ritualised ... turned into performance art. This motel is despair ... repetition ... your death is recursive ... an unfinished broadcast. What is left of us after trauma and desire have carved us up? Collages of experiences ... pornographic symbols ... synthetic grief. Is language enough? We’re the same shape. When you die ... you’re in the middle of my sentence so I’ll eat my fingers off and be free of you. Salt crystals by the river ... you’ll find them on the sand ... I’m leaving them there for you ... the river’s not deep enough to hold the body ... so don’t forget the spider web across the entrance ... you'll find it there ... across the entrance to the subway. A liquid taste of Seroquel on a summer’s afternoon. You’re wrapped in an evil smile ... bed sheets ... blow dryer belting out from the bathroom. Tourists flocking to Siem Riep by horse cart ... insatiable stations of HIV bodies ... torturous corpses unlit as the gas lamps fail. You give me special orders from the war department ... I grab a yellow overcoat ... your sarcastic smile ... some local boy's cock ... his cauliflower ears ... bullet penetrates radioactivity insect experiments ... the collapse of the human nervous system ... Coca-Cola. I try to remember what you smelled like ... vinegar and the backseat of a Pinto. Your face flickers on the screen ... you’re in paper mâché teeth ... stroking a severed antenna ... muttering about a utopia made entirely of dialysis tubing and tape hiss. And I don't come back. Feel rather than understand ... make monuments to collapse ... make manifestoes to abjection ... scribbled in spit and glitter glue ... resist clarity on purpose ... you’re meant to drown ... religious questions are not designed to be answered … only inhaled. And don’t come back. Leave Tony to the cockerel bones. Shane Jesse Christmass is the author of the novels METH-DTF, The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks, Latex, Texas, Xerox Over Manhattan, and Belfie Hell.