A shaman wanders off, having detected a seam in his Earth.
Entering the crevice, lighting a torch Krunga saturated with oil, he stitches his agency in the darkness.
He carries his necessities in a satchel cured and sewed together by Krunga.
His hand, pressing against this limestone, feels something passing through him with each step. Something passing through him alone, conceiving its self some verb-creature vibrating his web. It seams his fibers, texting pages of DNA for something or someone else. Together they envision Krunga weaving a basket, naked, by the fire they made at home.
He settles his torch in its notch, removing their ochre and pigments and other implements of their trade from her vole-skin, squatting and chanting…
He caresses the figurine—hips, labia, belly, buttocks and tits carved by Krunga from his last lover’s knee cap. Pressing his eyes shut, he masturbates, chanting, praying to fuck her, his feet sliding across the limestone, the flame panting against his face.
Orgasm. Semen on stone. Spermatozoa, so they say, trickling down the wall, impregnating something with something…ejaculating into whatnot.
Adding water to the ochre and pigments, mixing them according to whimsy, spitting and pissing in them, masturbating in them, bleeding into them…all the precious bodily fluids he can muster…smearing these hues on his face, chest and penis, rising, chanting and dancing, smearing colors all over the wall, rubbing his body all over it, imagining himself permeating the membrane with his juices…
He does this until it seems spent, until it seems sketched and stained, giving shape to a form calling itself “me.”
He feels…he seams, knowing it as his self.
He feels it passing back and forth through the stone through his feet and hands, a self embracing all sides of it, carousing outward through the top of his head and careening or intruding inward through his heart…holes at the centers of other selves, which some might call “me.” When this stops, when he feels only silence, his intrusion ends…
The shaman’s people have language. Why should they be an exception? He will write his version of their story on the wall, spitting ochre over the symbols he makes with his hands.
The first sentence reads: “Krunga is a bitch.”
Indubitably.
Buoyed by respiration, having embarked upon his journey, looking vaguely human—he forgets the possibilities of modifying each sentence’s generatrix: That which was via his intended modifications will hereafter be according to its own dictates and whatnot, wherever they may lead. He will serve as his narrative’s limitation, within which anything will be allowed to happen. He will allow its lust to interfere with what he might otherwise edit, hoping it might force him to slap back when the need to define its limits proves overwhelming, when its grammatical breaches transmogrify from mere annoyance to sheer terror, modifying its parameters of acceptability and thus altering the shaman’s being and seaming and writing and suturing in the process of narrating itself…and whatnot.
He feels one must not insist on anything, including insisting on non-insistence.
Though mis-taken, it seems to me our transgression’s come due, seaming self serving forms into non-existence.
Trust no one here. I’m not…especially my self, or…
Photo by Mariano
