Ken Baumann
Solip
for Gian, Michael, Blake, Dennis, Chris, Mark, Eric, David, Evan, Alec, Ignatius, Vicki, Bob, Aviva, Aviva, Aviva.
The call of love sounds very hollow among these immobile rocks.
Bending limbs in dark like this is only cautionary movement. Were I to lock up, creak to a slow, I would be nothing but a gravid caterpillar within my womb, self-entombed and shallow breath presumed. To die! My father spake of me with wet eyes on evenings salted cinnamon; the oven! The oven, he said. How he wished he could stick me in it.
There is a room.
Or to place myself in time: Years. A here. Ensconced. Within a stripping of skin. Within a way of asking.
And to time myself in place: A perception of me and limit of me is something I cannot grasp. I have not hands small enough.
More?
Games like memory and sense went gone years ago. I've grown bigger.
How those that have roaming space delimit that place until it's plainly a set of compartments to move through.
In a wide gutted prime there are corners, grime. Six planes or ways that stop. In a box. Room? I've felt only five. Room? A room as a well is the ocean.
There could be a roof. I can't reach. I've lobbed handfuls up, and no slap. Peering over the edge of the well, and dropping a stone, and never hearing water talk, this is speaking in here. Where I am. What I am, here. An always empty stomach, looping symbol. Loping cornered. Bound up because there is no door.
For I can and only motion for the body, its concerns. I speak now inside myself, receptor, in hopes it cepts and sends. Taking full working hours; the clock is a body that buries. Time is a body. (our boy) Time is a body in light.
I am in dark.
Prolonged corporeal twirls, optimistic arm-weaves, can sometimes get me to a euphoric plane, familiar to those who run past walls. Walls.
Had I cut my fingernails short at length day one, I could've measured the width between our walls. The height above me, if I kept cutting and throwing on a burial mound, pyramid, pyre. I could've stripped and stacked, or laid end to end. Could've cut and bit and used to bit. I could've gone to prayer for every calliope.
We are not unlike, you and I.
A box, a box, a box, a box. Dark and walls, a box, a box.
Too human: Tumorous concerns, like a singing stomach or the severed proffered hand that often comes and goes. I'm bothered.
Can I go dumb if I refuse? Forget at all if I use? Talk not to stop ought. Rather bark. Sour tickling is confined: Base of the skull or summit of stem. It's very peculiar!
I want you here for a long time. I want you to know me.
Alright, goddamnit, back to it. Outside. Grab the ball. Turn around. Goddamnit. How long we're going to teach you is up to you, boy.
ECHO: We can stay here all day. (night)
Calisthenics, no form, grace given not gained. A morning sweat. Ritual. Ritual. Breath-phenom, a boy wonder. Contained Against His Will! Girl Cries Wolf, Sentenced to Eternal Room! May He Die? May We Die In Here Already?
If I condoned the formal use, I would recall and retell all the loss: The loss of my clothes to grabby hands, the hose, the bootstrap leather welts, the hair pulled and cut back in a jerk, scalp slit too, out of sloppiness, the subsequent graft and gown-wearing, the white walls instead of black walls. Black walls are the walls.
Black walls are the walls—
Fevered I achieve loops of it, glints of pain. Connect a welting to every breath. Proceed to breathe. The breathing forms the loop. The loop is a delirium, yes, but a stir worth starving for. Handling a large box swathed in a layer of foam, with just an inch of pin sticking out and into our chest, the pin pushing into our skin, and the box cannot be dropped. A handling and a breach. Every breath. Cannot, acone, not be contained. Vision: Every exhalation as smoke.
To those receiving: Please close my cell in. Close it in so my cells can swim.
FUZZ: Broadcast journalism at its finest, folks.
Imperceptible spider webs in the corners of the roof. Congregations of spiders. They meet where the walls meet. They meat everywhere but center. I stay there when I hear their webs billow. I don't need light to to keep—
A sweat fugue. Self-preservation is the state.
(god laughter)
And even though I haven't eaten from the hand I still feel I can go without breathing!
Transmission will be intermittently interrupted by sounds of sobbing. Pardon us. The sobbing is getting clearer. A nirvana among weeds.
Ethos of an era embodied by: Me! It is? That's it, the sound — Meee! — of a boiling lobster. I am that lobster. I can fake new limbs in any direction. Struck, I am! Stuck, he makes me. For each mark he makes, a soul he takes. Our father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, uhh.
Rest?
To those listening: A map! A map will be done. A map I will map of my flesh; promises cannot be kept. Promises cannot be kept about content. Suffice it to say I will stay avarice. Because sometimes in this dark I'll forget parts. I've been conditioned so. My back will cease to be, simply. Suddenly I am half of me, dreading a half of back. Toes vanish. Maybe they go, or maybe they are misplaced. Either way, they reaffix when I stumble over them, upon them, onto them, as if they come and go again and again in yearning, magnetic or sticky. Phantoms.
To start with the skin: The cup runeth over, my dear. I'm encased in the stuff. A treatise on dust would be pertinent if I could see motes at all, but no, too dark. I am in my negative blanket fugue and must behave accordingly. But, need reminding: Dust is the stuff of the stuff of the body. Now grin.
Covered completely in myself, congregated, a mass of dilated pupils and shedding wares, supine. I often lie. (down) The floor must be pumped cool underneath by a machine of great quiet; the humming I can only hear once the ghost is gone, the fatherless hand, and I'm retrieved. There may be noise. I do feel hummed. No good. Retracted.
Made a promise? Redacted.
The webbing of my fingers is a great gloam of worry. They'll be cut. They'll be cut, he say! Fsk fsk! The royal birthmark, a scar truly, bloomed his right cheek and down to his neck, under the shirt we suspected. The royal. A man with glasses. We as children knew only to pass. (hymn)
My head is down. My head is down. With complete conviction now: My head is down.
Imagine a yellow plain. A breeze. Wheat makes the sound. The plain, now, an oilfield. Thumping cyclic pumps from the red hammers. The hammers gone. The plain yellow with wheat, clean again. A spout of fire a hundred feet high, burning oil. Men worry, to burn. The great fire so great it catches the oil afire in the tubes; the men run the field, run to a point in the tubes where the oil hasn't stoked; can they beat the fire? Can they beat the fire? They run for hours and reach stake and dig, dig and dig, checkered soil mounds surround the men and their hole, form loose pyramids. The men are the most tired they've ever been, they could ever be. They labor through it. Their bodies start to fail. The hole grows wider. They jump in without planning a way out. Their shovels begin to blunt.
Finally: Pipe.
The tallest man reaches up with his shovel and strikes down on the pipe and:
When asked, decline the radial censorship test. They will give it to you anyway.
Transmittable, not immutable.
(they burn)
Back to body! Body to body: Is the brain, a sponge, not body? I cannot stand for twenty-one grams. No, no, no. Ever looked inside the caverns inside? They are deep and bubbled with gastric pink. Cave ripples and slick. Dripping stalactites are thoracic rib spikes and spiking stalagmites are the veins of the feet. How the blood pools in the center. In the center, see? See him out there? Swimming. Water so blue it's black again. His breathing echoes through the lungs around him. He can only go, diving, so deep.