Caliban's Cracker 2

Someone should have told me when I was born that I was a fractured, monstrous thing – a bitter, sulphurous flood fracked from a northern impasse – a jealous, cracked and gaping maw spitting vicious, erotic profanities in the chidden blow. Someone should have told me that I was a monstrous child; warned me that I was mother nature’s bastard baby: I’m the crotch split canker, the soft, milky kernel of venereal disease, the foul gale shredding through the elm copse; I am a body sucked up from the fenlands. I wasn’t a lost lamb but the barbed thicket; I wasn’t a girl but a thirsty, awful, towering night of tantrum storms; someone should have warned me that I’m the reason they built shelters; I’m the reason they invented fire; I’m the reason, the author, the cause (my very soul) of sudden violence. Someone should have told me, when I was born, what a monstrous, filthy thing I could do.

But they left me on the mountain to conduct lightening. I ate the matted quarters of fawns and carcass birds; I heard the mewling of the honey-eaters and the awkward gait of dogs barking up against the oaks. The soft of the moss, the dissolving micoses on the fleshheads and the heat of a broken, nestless keel: I ate them whole with a double jointed jaw. Nightly then I drank naught but brine. Hourly, I mouthed my nebulous spider words - meted out my meteoric assaults. Whatever it was they forgot to tell me, whatever I had missed, I grew profane, foul, and female. I learned my first words, and they were filth.

So the woods taught me language and now my profit is to curse; I headed to the city and crawled into the midnight bars. Under a salting of glass lights and androgynous silks, the sonorous glut of synth-lines and bass notes, I splayed and crumped towards the people drinking rum; through the barking fuss of limbs, I thrust into their space, my bow of sausage meat gurning in endless ellipsis. They stiffened as I waded on in; I’m a gastrointestinal leakage in a dog-suit, long honey fingers wanting, wanting, blistering like a dank ganglion of fur in fever: wanting. I may as well bid my obdurate genes to crawl out of my gut, than drown the hooting zero of my mouth. What even am I? Why am I like this? I want to brain myself, to batter in this beauty with a bat: there’s wood enough within.

But I have the freedom to want, and want I do. I find you in the toilet stall and touch your body electric against the leaking gas pipe of my aching skin and we explode - animated, sticky, secreting monstrous secrets like a Pandora's box of uncut blue movies; I'm with you to be spit-roast, dry cured, pulled beef and gristle – someone should have warned you: I'm not a nuptial bed; I'm bluescreening your binaries, I'm pegging in the square hole, I'm lusting and yearning and dying a little death just to wake up and forget your name - again, again - I'm taking you into me so I can shout my name again. I’m not a girl but a thirsty, awful, towering night of tantrum storms; someone should have warned you that I’m the reason they built shelters; I’m the reason they invented fire; I’m the reason, the author, the cause (my very soul) of sudden violence. Someone should have told you, when you were born, what a monstrous, filthy thing I could do.