Teeming

I was supposed to be reading, with my nose perched and commanding down over, but I couldn’t stop fingering my mouth and thinking about these teeth I badly wanted straightened up to undo a childhood of sortof intense thumb-sucking. I tightened my lips to try to close the mouth off from the page, but a habit of sometimes sounding out words kept opening it back up again and pouring it out too 3D and wet for the words to remain unaltered.

I kept thinking of all the things inside my mouth among my teeth, and the position of my mouth to the world, and how it was this jug-like space always filling up and emptying out again– where I held some things and expelled others, where I swallowed good and bad stuff and spoke and smoked was kissed and got chapped around the edges and held this fatty tongue that coiled down through my neck, bringing little thoughts and swallows and sighs up and down and in and out.

A terrarium of mine, a place for osmotic intermingling of the dippy, mad, interwoven fluxings and flowings of all the world’s things about my face.

a mouth become host may not do what you expect it to do. I’d like to wedge this thought against my gums right now and see if it might grow, maybe petri-dish style, make me speak different. 

It’s tasty to think of all this stuff layering across a voice on its way off the tongue. You could dine on the thought that the tenor of our mouths is made of a riot of many things, an imperceptible bedlam, the silent roar of other mouth-worlds on the cusp. A stacking of lively films like plaques, unbrushed dins wavering and calling-up movement between the states of worlds and selves and meals in motion. 

I set myself off on a bum steer from reading as I couldn’t stop tasting the Mouth. Some kind of waxy coat of Colby-Jack remained on my gums or the crevasse space behind my molars. I couldn’t quite place where it lingered but wherever it was it wouldn’t leave me alone, and so I just sat there unreading, reminded for too long of a disappointing sandwich. Colby-Jack, it’s a junior, ugly flavor, uncouth and lame, that carries with it a quick visit to a scummy kitchen and a grocery store I hate, and the lack of time I spend feeding myself and my tendency to binge-down on comfort.

And I can’t really come to grips with what Colby-Jack’s orange and white marbling ever did to make me want it in the first place. It looks like wrong salami from a discolored world. A humdrum goo that read ‘easy cheese’ to my dairy-aisle eyes. It spoke the sweet-talk of a perfect digestibility. Just right for the simplest grilled cheese for my tuned-out American belly. Just to have a lunch, touch some boring bread and shut up for a while in that way the paste of spitty chewed-up wheat and cheese will make you do.

It’s a conjunctive and collaborative thing, assembled together into a perfect little cyborg cheese that lives easily in public on the dairy shelves across all groceries in America and even some convenience stores and gas station fridges. Not Colby or Jack. Marble unlike marble. A form itself yet uncannily not itself at the same time. We’re all this way too– compounds pulled together into some solid slices with ignorable congregations inside. The taste of creamy sinews and orange dust, or nothing at all if you eat fast enough.

The stuff inside your mouth is always with you and it stays with you whatever you’re saying or reading. There are some things you’ll eat up that you’ll regret, and they’ll take up residence, and they won’t release you, and you’ll breathe them out into the world long after swallowing. You’re a freaky bit of me right now Colby-Jack, have jailed me up Colby-Jack, been a difficult tenant Colby-Jack. I feel the same about some words that I should have chewed before swallowing. 

I’m still stuck in my mouth among my lunch and I’m supposed to be reading but I’m realizing how hungry I am still and that the world looks like a meal to me, a dish I want to take inside myself and make travel through my gut. 

I want a world I can stick my face towards and bite, I want to chew and tongue-at all the vegetable of my surrounds, all this liquor on my plate.

In reading or in having teeth, going on is about some practice of mashing things together. Some masticating way built of combinatory propensities and whims, impulses towards savoring or throwing up. 

I wish things not-food, things word or thought or sentence, had the same soft sticky flavor so that I wouldn’t forget them like I tend to do. So that I could cultivate them in my mouth for longer and feel myself sprouting up and out from fission with the words, and teem with a ripe anarchy like that of diamond studded canines or a melted retainer or a brave culinary fusion.

Being in the world involves an appetite, cutlery. A way of gnashing things together and sending it all inside ourselves. Galores, torrents, lawless potlucks of it all. And isn’t this lovely, all the fat fare, all the carnal alterity emergent in the face of shifty relations and drawn-out meals and sentences gone wrong.