See also:

Let's be matadors next time. Let's press proud and out with our ashtray hips like castle battlements, let's dress up every day like Chinese fireworks, let's have our thighs and hips unzipped by near misses. We could have dirt in our eyes all the time. The bull would come at us heavy dark and dumb, like cough syrup, exactly precisely just the way we want him to. Just close enough. See by the time he gets to us his head is stuck down low by his feet like he's dropped pocket change, by then his neck muscles are too tired and too wet to be too useful. The picadors take care of that. If he comes at us a wrong way that we don't like all we got to do is snatch at the lollipop banderillos stuck sticky in his neck and untied sides, we'll jerk backwards from our hips and elbows like we're starting a lawnmower, we'll... (no? Matadors can't do that? Well why, who says?... oh then.)

Or monks, too-- we could be monks, if you want. We could pull and preen at blackbird robes, and panhandle on Easter and Christmas and bless babies and shave our heads. We'd sleep but for only five hours a night-- we'd light skinny wax candles between our toes to use as alarm clocks. (we could meditate carefully each and every morning on the glassblower blisters, we'd bust them and scrub them with cedar chips and horsehair to make them worse. we'd show off the damage to the world like dueling scars.) We could move to Munich. Or Tibet, or Damascus, Mississippi for all I care, we would never drink again, we'd sleep with our hands above the covers each and every night for five hours with a candle burning, no spider ever need fear since we'd never smash them we'd always pick them up in paper towels before releasing them tenderly out in the wild, we'd pick them up so soft and easy like they were newborn nitroglycerin, we--

... no? Oh then.

How about marksmen? We could be marksmen. From what I've heard the real secret with rifles is you got to squeeze the trigger, squeeze it, don't pull. I heard that from a marksman I'm pretty sure. Or maybe it was you? Oh then well instead you can choose. Architects? Acrobats? Pharmacists? Palm-readers? Let's you and me be the same things next time.

We'd be less dangerous that way, that way we could see each other an eye for an eye. Remember you the Punjabi peasant raising sesame and guava and spotted goats, remember how things didn't work so well for us then. If I were a peasant too, maybe it would have worked. I would think peasants get on much better with peasants than with cobras.

And even if sometimes it was okay, even with you the cottonswab tabby half-dead with comfortable living and me, I was a bale of sunlight that time, even then it was smooth sailing but what did we get out of it? It was alright but what else? It was us but it was nothing. It was smooth sailing, but too comfortable, and we didn't get a thing and even worse we didn't even know it. (we were better off, I think, with me the actual sailor, and you the beartrap coral.)

Let's you and me be the same things next time, I don't care what, you can choose. Just make us the same. Let's be unzipped at the hips or barefoot or bedridden, or harelips or lepers or roadkill so long as we both got it bad exactly precisely the same way. We'd be safer that way. Then we'd know. And once we know then we can turn different from each other, but better this time, better because we could go simpler, much simpler, so simple-- then let's try you a mouth and me an ear.

Who the hell is Ezra Pound?

April is the time I get uprooted the most, I become clipped and restless, I try on bad habits like I'm buying new shoes. It's lively but anxious. Mostly it's the watery sandy-itchiness that gets back in the tic-tac-toed scar tissue of my baaaaaad knee (think: handlebar moustache! waggly eyebrows! eggshell waifs gagged and bound to traintracks!) I guess because it's thawing out?; I guess it likes winter better than I do. In winter it's pretty polite, it only gets creaky and whiny the day before snow.

(though in my head, when I'm thinking about it I mean, sitting in class or terrible-colored bathrooms or at redlights, I can't help pushing a pencil eraser/fingertip/coffee cup down through the denim into the bubbly numb gap in the cartilage, where the surgeon worked, [two of them actually], in my head I see it looking not much at all like a thing that would creak but instead very squirmy, pocket-linty, like gristle trimmings on a salaryman's dinner plate.) Up til April though it's pretty well-behaved.

This year in the middle of researching Civil War medicine was when it hit room temperature. I tried folding and propping it at any possible agreeable angle in the library and ended up kicking the shit out of some poor guy's ankles. ("Oh-- fuck, sorry man.") I'll be honest: the impact was refreshing. The research paper had come aground way sooner than I'd have liked and there's no doubt it showed in my shoulders and eyebrows. It did warm things, hate to say, for the cavewoman in me, taking it out on a stranger like that. That must have showed too since he stuffed his bag a couple minutes later and took off for another spot on the other side of the bookshelves.

(I'll be honest: I liked that it got me the table for myself.)

There was an unforeseen abundance of roughly six hundred goddamn pages dedicated to amputation alone, since apparently there were (are?) different (kinds?)(techniques?)(styles?) (fuck.) One very informatively called the flap method was preferred by the Union army because it involved less blood loss, required less bandages, and could apparently be performed in as little as two minutes. A kind of sleeve was tailored from the skin several inches below the necessary point of removal, then split twice down the sides; one of the assistants would hold these out of the way while another one bullied the main artery shut and while the surgeon surgeoned. Then the sleeve would be folded over very neatly, quite like the chromosomes had lined up thirty years previous with that exact intent in mind, buttoning up the drooling pocket where two minutes earlier had been potential for musket-loading and letter-writing and apple-peeling, and poker-playing and lover-loving and grudging masturbation, but through the alchemy of ether and salmon-shaped bonesaws could become a pink nub and delirious meat. The sleeve would be folded up very neatly, like a fortune cookie.

"... but when performed poorly, the cleft bone in these amputations would continue to grow, and in time begin to protrude through the stump."

Up til this point I'd been enjoying pretzel sticks.

For all my talk of taking instinct over intellect*, this picture of a very individual and physical mutiny is pretty horrifying. I can't find any particular roots for the fear though. Invasions of the Bodysnatchers was not one of the movies I bandited out of bed to eavesdrop on from the hallway, (I still haven't seen it actually, or even got much a handle on the plot, beyond the involvement of bodies and their otherworldly abduction by means of perhaps snatching), I've never had a seizure or sleepwalked or anything like that. The closest it gets would probably be the scene in Alice in Wonderland I once had a nightmare about, the one where she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay far below her.

'What CAN all that green stuff be?' said Alice. 'And where HAVE my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can't see you?' She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant green leaves. For all she knows she could be spoonfeeding heroin to the white kitten.

When I was younger I was much better seduced by the Hatter and Cheshire Cat (who wasn't?), but I've come to find Alice more and more interesting, I think because I like her the least. I think because Alice is an invader. She talks very politely with the Pigeon and Mock Turtle, but she HAS tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was a very truthful child; 'but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.'

'I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon; 'but if they do, why then they're a kind of serpent, that's all I can say.' She's invaded the nest, and she's talking with her food; Alice is a cannibal and doesn't even notice. And that something as animal and primitively simple as breakfast could be usurped around into something destructive even by accident gets at me as not even a notch beneath horrifying. ("Oh-- fuck, sorry man.")

([These are the things that get into my head in April.])

I'd like to think April's cruel with good intentions-- that it thaws the cavewoman out just so I've got time to recivilize her by the end of July. I'd like to think there's some other better method though; I'd like to find, just above her head, some necessary point of removal; I'd like to eschew any offer of ether and hold up my hand in request to whoever may be standing there watching and say 'bonesaw'

[*see: "sour grapes"]