I was supposed to be reading, with my nose perched and commanding down over. But I couldn’t stop fingering my mouth and thinking about these teeth I badly wanted straightened up to undo a childhood of sort of intense thumb-sucking. I tightened my lips to try to close the mouth off from the page. But a habit of sometimes sounding out words kept opening it back up again and pouring it out too hot and wet for the words to remain unaltered.
I kept thinking of all the things inside my mouth among my teeth, and the position of my mouth to the world, and how it was this jug-like space always filling up and emptying out again, where I held some things and expelled others, where I swallowed good and bad stuff and spoke and was kissed and got chapped around the edges and held this fatty tongue that coiled down through my neck, bringing bacteria and bits up and down and in and out.
A terrarium of mine, a place for osmotic intermingling of the dippy, interwoven fluxings and flowings of all the world’s things about my face.
I’d like to take the idea of all the multitudes within my body and the self diffusing into space through all these non-me things and hold it in my mouth for a while and see if it grows maybe petri-dish style.
I set myself off on a bum steer from reading as I couldn’t stop tasting the Mouth. Some kind of waxy coat of Colby-Jack remained on my gums or the crevasse space behind my molars. I couldn’t quite place where it lingered but wherever it was, it wouldn’t leave me alone, and so I sat reminded for too long of a disappointing sandwich. Colby-Jack, it’s a junior, ugly flavor, uncouth and lame, that carries with it a quick visit to a scummy kitchen and a grocery store I hate, and the lack of time I spend feeding myself and my tendency to binge-down on comfort.
And I can’t really come to grips with what Colby-Jack’s orange and white marbling ever did to make me want it in the first place. It looks like wrong salami from a discolored world. A humdrum goo that read ‘easy cheese’ to my dairy-aisle eyes. It spoke the sweet-talk of a perfect digestibility. Just right for the simplest grilled cheese for my tuned-out American belly. Just have a lunch, touch some boring bread and shut up for a while in that way the paste of spitty chewed-up wheat and cheese will make you do.
It’s a conjunctional and connective thing, assembled together into a perfect little cyborg cheese that lives easily in public on the dairy shelves across all groceries in America and even some convenience stores and gas station fridges. Not Colby or Jack. Marble unlike marble. A form itself yet uncannily not itself at the same time. We’re all this way too. Compounds pulled together into some solid slices with ignorable congregations inside. The taste of creamy sinews and orange dust, or nothing at all if you eat fast enough.
The stuff inside your mouth is always with you and it stays with you wherever you look. You’re a freaky bit of me right now Colby-Jack, have jailed me up Colby-Jack, a difficult tenant Colby-Jack. There are some things you’ll eat up that you’ll regret, and they won’t release you, and they’ll take up residence, and you’ll breathe them out into the world long after swallowing.
I’m still stuck in my mouth among my lunch and I’m supposed to be reading but I’m realizing how hungry I am still and that the world looks like a meal to me, that I want to take inside myself and make travel through my gut. I wish things not-food, things word or idea or theory or chapter, had the same soft sticky flavor so that I wouldn’t forget them like I tend to do. So that I could cultivate them in my mouth for longer and tongue at them and feel myself sprouting up and out from fission, with the anarchy of new seedlings and a bacillus spring inside.
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