Davis Schneiderman

BLACK IS THE COLOR / NONE IS THE NUMBER

We will not talk about the rotting maggots drooling over a distant relative's fortune; we will not talk about the Last Supper or the epiphanic moments at the end of James Joyce stories; we will not discuss the macrobiotic, isomorphic, corrupted plane of dissected sheep brains cluttering high-school science labs at the state and county pen; we will not talk about the tubercular lines of schizophrenic mental patients shut up by the apparatus of hook, line, and sinker, or lock, stock, and barrel like the anal retentive repetition of your most god-awful roach motel; we won't consider raising our sphincters toward the sky on Bastille Day or letting our subliminal kidneys excrete vials of ethereal urine and so remove effete nitrogenous matter from the blood; we won't even think about your goddamned happy hour with its shimmering bags of cellulite and collagen, the gel-filled facsimiles of breast meat cutting an arcane swath across that composite film of makeup, ash, crushed pretzels, and beer foam on the bar, reminiscent of your breath upon a window pane warmed just above the freezing point; we won't discuss the cut-off shorts and tank tops, the high-school mascots of half-feathered falcons, pre-processed burgers, and extinct, impotent lumberjacks sporting confederate flag buttons made from your secret cache of genetically altered swine; we won't imply that yes, a gelatinous conspiracy of candy magnates spikes everything with the cartilage of your ancestors caught up in the fervor of professional sports and lovemaking by applied mathematics; we won't fixate on the shunts of broken light peeling in from those dim basement windows; we won't watch those 13,000 camels jump through 12,999 needles in endless variations of musical chairs and negative dialectics; we won't broadcast the necessary angels dancing on pins and needles in your lazy child's legs, those little eyeballs rolling across the inside of baby fat layers, accelerating the process by which we all receive cancer; and most importantly, we won't mention the net-and-bolt operation of the ever-growing multitude, the rotting limbs of oil-soaked retinas, the sorry gaze of the steel-toed work boots; we won't talk about the way it'll all go down Moses, the soft caress of bodies, the sexual dynamics of entrepreneurial elephants and syphilitic donkeys; we'll never tell anyone how we'll creep into the boardroom with our city-street perfume, our nine to five bedroom eyes and the cocksure swagger of our faux-leather briefcases; we won't tell your crooked truant agents about the lawsuits, the infringements, the incidents and payoffs, the wet, lolling lilt of your tongue and we chant the forbidden names of our old world saviors, "Astaroth"—"Baal"—"Umma-Segnus"—"Abraxas"; we won't forget your faces, scarred by the chemical drinking water, mutilated by age-defying makeup and jump-cut gangster films; we'll never say a word as we raise your expectations and entice you with French Fries soaked in beef tallow, washed in the blood of your people, baptized in pools of ultra-solvent hemoglobin; we won't even think to mention when our crooked fingers rub your head, warm and inviting, when we place our fingers on your wet lips and together incant the dewdrops; we'll never tell a soul how your face smelled like sunshine as the 3-inch titanium bolt penetrated the side of your skull, shocking your brain into hemorrhage, splattering delicious blood all over our blue Wal-Mart aprons; and we'll never tell anyone how softly you fell, there, in the boardroom at the end of the earth, just after the data has been processed in a stream of cum and industrial surfactant, ecstatic at the rise in your own yellow-tinted fortune; if asked, we'll keep our mouths shut, and hold everything in our matrix of bones, in a secret of skin, of tendon, and ligament.

 

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Thinking about meat. Thinking about deer. Thinking about the cataleptic world-historical forces of third-stage multinational capital as opposed to the extended excursus of the net-and-bolt operation. Thinking about gelatin.