from "Biography of My Automaton"
Interval: Another war against species
After awhile the flashes of despair materialized as flickering lights inside the womb, illuminating a placenta come unstuck, a muffled unborn wailing. Each year the bleaching spread. The unnatural stacking of dead groundwalkers. Elsewhere beings kept growing with scorch marks. Something like weather, like the vacuum of a scene, is laughing, I was told. Gases, liquids, and light—laughing. The old mythology of the passive egg and conquering sperm made way for not any gristle to be left behind. Instead a whole uniform unit of food. I found I could be one of many pores. Poor pores opened up to stashes of contaminants, to sit like gaping bowls with small stones inside. What is worse to witness: a disappointment, or a loyal incomprehension? I never think of my physical symbolism; it is because my young do not burn more easily than I do. I find that they have inherited only my deep unrequited longing to hear a voice gently calling Wake up, love. We all want it more than anything, the calling.
Interval: Dealing with the concept of light or hunger
In the few seconds it takes to watch a horse with its neck snapped in half, head bouncing along its withers as it careens down a mountainside, in the few seconds it takes to feel a deep regret, in the few seconds it takes to forget the creature altogether when the lights flare their cones from above: pleasure made up of leisure and shame like slicing tubes width-wise for biscuits. The costumes of capability differences give a soap, a soap, an astringent squeaky lack of oils and other tastes. Another preferred technique: opening up the insides under lamps to scrape away webbing from the night-grown flesh and rind. Not holograms but the quivering hiddens that had pulsed and chewed in the underground of the internal. Or another: studying how thick white spicy radishes get pulled up under spotlights, glowing from their black burials. And still others: a great pail of milk flecked around the edges with vivid grass clippings; premature young lain bonelessly deflated atop surgical napkins; paper-thin tissue torn at by water droplets.
