SIMILE, BOUBA AND KIKI, and FOOTNOTES - tragickal

◊ ◊ ◊ · 作 家 Gary J. Shipley · 日 17/01/2020 · friendly_admin  No comments SIMILE, BOUBA AND KIKI, and FOOTNOTES SIMILE You ask me what it feels like, like a list of similes would do it. Like one by one they’ll aggregate the likenesses into some haecceity you can own. Like I’ll try, if you like, like so: Like the cadaver at its autopsy – waking up. Like the end of Tokyo Story. Like the thought of my dead son, who isn’t dead. Like brain cancer in my rectum. Like rectal cancer in my brain

cancer. Like the TV in a rest home. Like a snail in a uterus. Like a woman born as a man inside a man born as a woman. Like the end of Tokyo Story reshot by Harmony Korine. Like Harmony Korine directed by Ozu. Like bacteria perched on a cliff. Like the end of The End of the Affair. Like a bird of paradise fed on dung beetles, a spider ruined on rice wine, a wormhole inside a worm, a porcupine in a bubble, a scalpel in a cake – like blood in a storm cloud, like eyelids on a rainbow. Like even if this was enough, it wouldn’t be enough. Like this looks like what it is. Looks like fingers in hair. Looks like pea soup. Looks like bulldozers. Smells like hospitals. Sounds like ghosts, laughing. Tastes like chicken. Looks like rain. BOUBA AND KIKI After the diagnosis I forget. I need a second opinion, a third, a fourth, one for every day. Funny how they’re all the same. It’s a shame, but I’m not quick enough to be a hoax. My con is so long I’ll pass it down to my children. And for obvious reasons there are no benign art projects. Although, conditioned taste aversion does make the eyeballs easier to digest. Lucky for me I have a protean diet. In other words, I repeat the same words. But which of these two shapes is the product of your incest? Is it Bouba or is it Kiki? Look closely! See, there, she has her mother’s missing teeth. FOOTNOTES In my other language the fog is always yellow and the light is the light of afternoons. The trains are always silent, and derailed, and the men on bicycles, circling the crash site, are

never only that: they are growing into one another, like men into cockroaches and cockroaches into women. A Frenchman watches a parade while hanging from his belt, and the fog comes in, the colour of mustard, the colour of children // with kidney disease laughing in the other language at the men’s faces turning blue, turning purple, turning black, turning soft. And I’m pissed rotten pissing blood in the Hofgarten until I collapse, and I never have to wake up, and when it rains nothing is compelled to grow. Or else it grows the other way, so we don’t have to see it: a garden under the ground, stretching for miles, stretching for the sake of stretching, like the dogs on the mud, their tails in the air, forbidden to dig, and growling, and drained of air. Gary J. Shipley is the author of ten books, most recently 30 Fake Beheadings (Spork), Warewolff! (Hexus), and The Unyielding (Eraserhead). He has published in numerous magazines, journals, anthologies and academic journals. His monograph on Baudrillard is forthcoming from Anthem Press. More information can be found at Thek Prosthetics. Search... GO