A dog shot in its face
By Gary J. Shipley.
The Moon’s Jaw (http://www.bookdepository.com/Moons-Jaw-RauanKlassnik/9780984475278/?a_aid=3ammagazine), Rauan Klassnik
(http://rauanklassnik.blogspot.ie/), Black Ocean 2013
We’re in the concentration camps, where the evils are always banal. And we
have the usual itching from the usual twinset: the doting colluder, the
wrung out opportunist. I turn and almost every page takes its lead from
Catullus, loving and hating all at once, where every bit of tenderness will
border on cruelty, its intent ambiguous, industrial – them white noise
dogshit pigments of Klassnik’s gnawing cadences. For here, as in Holy
Land, the rat has become the brain, and the asshole the cunt, and this is
pornography, this is Artaud’s “overheated factory” beneath the skin, this is
The Moon’s Jaw – hanging off. We know how ethics sours our goodness
with its one thought too many, and it’s Klassnik’s method too, when he
ruins a saint or dirties an innocent – all his limping vestiges of beauty,
uglified. The snake’s jaw dislocates to accommodate a calf, and like this the
moon will open, a hole inside a hole, back to kill us as it talks us out of
death.
All sincerity is deviant, and The Moon’s Jaw knows this, and celebrates it and
suffers it. In my hands there’s this bodily rejection of self-censorship, this
ejaculation of fetters. And I was wrong: I thought Guyotat had dibs on this
much cum. But I’m getting there, where the pain’s in the waiting, where
the pleasure is, in the woods with my top as she takes a cheese wire to my
gleam. But I’m being slowed down: the dashes and slashes and ellipses and
colons and proliferating periods choking my orgasm like pictures of nun’s
cunts weeping gleet over the ruffled heads of birds. His dashes like sutures
on a skeleton, keeping together what’s already gone. And for all the cum
and blood, there’s no sex and violence here, only sex-violence: a selfneutralising amalgam that’s the antithesis of titillation. Like the rat and his
maze, the two have simply grown together. All opportunity for frisson done
with, neutered.
In Vegas—Lilacs, boiling, cool, & dark—You begin to eat my ass:
Wiping yr mouth, from time to time—& glaring up at me: Like a
Vampire, a Lion, a Shaman—Swaying, bubbling, seething: Down
into every nerve. . . Cold white shores swaying… Till—At last—
You slide in a finger… Then two. Fist! Elbow! Shoulder! Head!
. . . & you’re inside me: & yr breasts are my breasts. Yr cunt—My
cunt. Yr slow dark heaving mouth—My slow dark heaving mouth.
These appetites are sick, and terminally so; they’ve crawled up inside other
things and are dying there. And the softnesses here are those of the broken
down hooker, the jaded porn star, who when she eviscerates herself does it
cunt-first, exorcising the pleasure centre with a talon, with the heavy
undercarriage of what we thought of once as made entirely of flying.
Contaminated miscreations these, these “Chirping Gargoyles”, these
“Dolphins moaning in gangrene.” And yet regenerations continue, the new
creatures feeling themselves out, teething their cavities and bleeding gums
on the need to be anything at all: anomalous creatures that have “learned to
die. & not to.”
And again with the slowing down. As we drag out the death to the death,
prolonging the half-blind horror of our interminable decay, until the only
distraction left is that of fucking the shit out of it, cumming inside it and
breeding siblings to it, gestating its mutated fetuses in vats of the stuff, and
we drink it all down and we puke it all up – self-witnessing – and drink it
again until the appetites that keep us here die. But they don’t die, so bury us
this day in a river of tongues. For the appetite ignores us, like the cosmos
we stabbed that didn’t even flinch. We’re barely the steam off its piss on a
cold day. But I’m reminded he’s kindly, that there’s love in him that’s
ferocious to leave, but still can’t get past the breath off the page, the way it
smells like Dennis Nilsen’s drains. And I recall he was always just scragging
himself, and that he found a way to hang around afterwards, to sample his
own company. And he had sweetness in him, and light and tenderness, and
what weakness, what need – I’ll “pour his ashes on my head in the healing
sun.” And there, out the corner of my eye, those Sad Sketches of wardrobe
interiors, their folded dead men – men no longer men, but concepts of what
men do: externalisations, then, of that Mr Nilsen’s trauma.
You did up my hair—Holding it tight like I liked—& even tighter
as I cried out suddenly: Glancing over at a fetus in a jar. As though
it could save me—Crawl back into me—& fill me w/ milk.
Children, hands locked, dancing all round my gleaming body. You
painted me: & jeweled me. Posed me in bed: Dead, but reaching
up
still. Lips parted slightly. Shining blue.
The world returns like a scene from a halal abattoir, our own materials fed
back to us tasting of fear, our faeces gilded in opulent metals, in rubberised
gold, in “cathedral meat.” And now it’s a choice, and you can blindsight
gore or you can fuck it and eat it out, make origami storks and flowers from
its skin, put your tongue down its throat and into its belly and lick clean the
babies you put there. You can clean it all unrecognisable with the blackness
inside your mouth. But when everything’s refulgent, there will still be
pretty girls, their faces framed in roses, viewing themselves through twoway mirrors; a child killer cranking out one last sneer of semen into the
metal of a death row latrine, there on the other side. And out the jaws of his
keeper’s zipper, wilted and misshapen, a child’s sucked thumb. And there’s
another mirror, with an Austrian man in it, and he’s washing his cock after
visiting a son he borrowed and never gave back. And yet people still mean
well. And then the shutters are gone, and the locked doors left open, and in
the new light, “There’s no way out. But we don’t stop trying.”
Trakl tried and gave us twilights and poppies and celestial vaccines, and
those toothless angels, poisoned, their useless wombs reconstructed from
blue space and bloated with rats. And Klassnik? And Klassnik?… He’s here
now to reiterate that having your cake is eating your cake, and that the cake
is made from cum and from blood and from shit and from urine and from
all manner of excruciations, but that still the cake gets baked, and that
therein lies the flaw, and therein lies the dream of us, and of love, and soft
grass and flowers and a moon’s silence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary J. Shipley is the author of six books of various sizes. His work has
appeared recently or is forthcoming in literary magazines such as The Black
Herald, Gargoyle, Paragraphiti, nthposition, elimae, and >kill author, and in
philosophy/theory journals such as continent and Glossator. More details can
be found here (http://garyjshipley.blogspot.ie/).
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