New Mother by M. Gira Drunk, I stare back up at the place where I was born..She shuffles towards me on the bar-top, keeping her bloated and corrugated hips in close, no sensuality or grace, just the listless movements of a stoned old whore. The years that have passed since I left her warmth are a formless stream of neon color and liquefied catatonic experience that I've allowed to wash through my skull in order to avoid the pain of separation from her musk. I can smell her now. The smell has a consciousness - cautious, familiar, covetous, weaving through the labyrinth of barroom odors, seeking me out like a snake. I feel her winding through my body, tasting me, illuminating my insides. She's a clumsily pirouetting cadaver in front of me, slowly grinding her massive bulk in non-rhythm to the schizophrenic blips of the electronic dance music, deflecting the dulled interest of her customers with the matte surface of her juiceless, corpse eyes. My drunkenness is a soothing physical restraint I feel wrapped around my being like a compress of cold meat The air slides deliberately in and out of my lungs with the texture and weight of oily black sand, a poisonous sludge that kills me as it feeds me The other people in the room are formless, flesh-colored blurs that hover at the edge of my vision, grunting and moaning, an incomprehensible slur of encroaching vaguely animal shapes and sounds. As she approaches, she brings all light and color with her, pulling herself into focus as if she were a Iiving organism beneath a microscope directing the blearied attention of the lens. Her stomach is at the center of the swirl, swollen and stretching It seems to contain a giant ripe fruit or tumor struggling to burst through the skin. An intricate web of razor-thin red fissures emanates out from her navel like veins in a bloodshot eye. My drunkenness allows me to stare without blinking, in slowed-down time, so that my concentration penetrates her skin. I can see inside of her stomach A demon manipulates her lifeless body from a glowing core hidden deep beneath the layers of dense subcutaneous fat and inert muscle that swaddle her torso. The demon is a knot of glutinous, tangible, living light. I see the vague outlines of a luminous red spiral congealing, then disappearing, then congealing again behind the yellow skin that sheathes her belly. The creature is signaling me, calling out to me. Through the retarded and leaden movements of her dance it's talking to me, before words, in a language that in my drunkenness I can easily comprehend. Vomit rises up from my stomach like a liquid erection and fills my esophageal tube, caressing my larynx, pupeteering the sounds that shape the words, " I love you, Mother, I love you,". Though I'm sure she couldn't hear me over the music, my mother sidles up closer in response, squatting slightly as she pulls her thighs apart. Her pointed, pudgy fingers are candied and painted chicken's feet that leave their exact silhouette as a purple-brown x-ray bruise on her spongy flesh. Television monitors hang from the ceiling in each corner of the barroom. Each screen exudes a crystallized fog of prisming light that mingles with the suspended and drifting planes of smoke and animates the curling filigrees like miniature, vaporizing magical animals caught dancing in the flashing light. The bar itself rises up like a U shaped altar, emblazoned with gold embossed random musical notes and staphs, given further dimension by the background of the richly stained wood, cured with years of alcohol and nicotine. The walls of the bar are deep maroon velour, the sheen of the fabric dulled with a stippled glaze of dark nicotine scum. The floor is a once-plush carpet, now flattened and hardened by years of pressure and liquid abuse. It's utterly black, bottomless, resonating with the color and light it kills. I'm aware of the objects in the barroom floating above a black void. If I step from my barstool I'm sure I'll tumble down helplessly forever into emptiness. A further row of television monitors unfolds in a luminous fan above the bar, mirroring its shape with dazzling color and light. Each screen holds a different image of my mother's sodden figure, seen through different lenses or filters or seen from slightly varied angles and perspectives, switching constantly and rapidly from screen to screen a she dances. Pores, abscesses, scars become instant, abstract desert landscapes given definition by the ultra high-contrast, medical light. The shriveled lips of her pudenda, shown from directly beneath, become the giant jowls of a chewing rooster as the camera zooms-in in slow motion. Her severed foot, seen highlighted in center screen in front of the backdrop of a flat fluorescent orange disc becomes a mock-religious icon, the open red and purple wound cut into the upper arch the enigmatic mouth of the Mona Lisa. The thick black and grey coils of hair that cling to the sweat on her neck become the blackish green moss that grows on the enameled gloss walls of an abandoned jungle hospital. Her glaucous eye is a distant, mutant planet in the center of an entropic swirl of flesh-colored cosmic matter. Her jagged amber teeth fight with the jerking grey pulp of her massive tongue at the entrance way that leads down into the sweating purple caverns of hell... But eventually, as I drink, I realize there are no cameras in the room, that the images in the screens are flowing directly from inside my mother's belly, manufactured by the demon as it mutates and rolls its liquid body in her womb. As my drunkenness increases further, my concentration becomes hypnotic and total, unobstructed by any sense of myself as separate from the sight of my mother's physical body or the images in the screen. I'm aware of my concentration feeding the demon, feeding the images that flow out from his nest inside my mother. Since my watching nourishes the life of the images, they are also born in me, simultaneously. The light funnels out from my stomach, my eyes, my mouth, into my mother's body, into the demon, into the brilliant world behind the screens. Gradually there is a slippage between the images in the screen and the plodding dance of her body on the bar. I feel my own body dying, numbing slowly as its light is sucked away. The tip of my tongue and the pads of my fingers turn into alien zones, entirely disconnected from my flesh. The images of her naked body in the screen are slowly shifting backwards in time, as if the life and sense drawn from my own body were being pulled into the vortex of light emanating from inside the screens, bleeding my life into the open mouth of the screen as the living image of my mother regresses backwards into youth. She's strutting down a blinding white runway. The light flares on her polished alabaster skin like magnesium, glittering with the flash of the photographer's strobes. Each flash gives new power to her superhuman smile. Her black, mirrored high-heeled shoes are pedestals that raise her loping body up as an object of supreme adoration. In one screen, the camera tracks backwards looking up at her gigantic, perfectly muscled and honed physique as if the camera were the cowering eye of a feral beast cringing beneath the sight of her advancing, heroic elegance. Her breasts are perfectly proportioned augmented and plumped with saline, rising up arrogantly from the roped fingers of her ribcage. Her skin is stretched taut and resilient across the arching crossbow frame of her shoulders. It glistens like latex, pulled tight into the knuckled ridges of her spine, shimmering with a delicate, iridescent gossamer fur dusted over the sloping planes of her lower back, expanding, undulating, working to the point of near - rupture as her buttocks drive her legs down the runway. The joy my young mother extracts from the eyes of the adoring spectators ignites her blood and radiates light from behind her skin. A procession of 4-foot-high hollow raw wood cylinders line the catwalk on either side. Each cylinder is 3 inches in diameter and rises up out of an enclosed box 5 inches square. In each box is a high wattage lightbulb that shoots light up and out the cylinder in response to the movement of my mother down the runway, holding her arms outstretched, flickering the wooden shafts with her painted nails, igniting the parallel columns of light as she passes. I wait at the end, her naked, imbecilic child. My erection protrudes into the whiteness, red and obscene, burning with color. The demon spiral glows just beneath the rubber-smooth skin of her belly, shifting colors in response to each rush of sensation in my penis. My mother takes my little claw-hand in her hand and lifts me to my feet. My head reaches to the height of the spiral. I place my open mouth over her navel and suck the demon into me. His substance is simultaneously liquid and solid, a radiant, corrosive lava that infuses me with new life I feel myself falling into her, through her. My penis is the crooked finger of the demon as it reaches out into the world through my groin. As the photographers click and whir, she kneels and places her mouth over mine. Her breath has the sweet, sulfuric thickness of the demon we now share. I love her, and I'm happy that the evidence of our love has been performed in front of an audience and for the cameras. The bar is dark now. The video monitors breathe out only a dim light, as if they were half-sleeping. The alcohol sifts through the soft murk of my blood like muratic acid. It eats at the insides of my veins. The entire web of my vascular system can be seen through my clear, gelatin skin. Each vein is charged and articulated at once with bright liquid neon. My naked body is bent over and withered, a glowing, shriveled pod in the deep amber musk of the barroom. My mother, the swollen corpse, looms above me on the bartop. She's a moronic cyclops about to reach down and pluck my head off like a cherry. Her breath is the breath of trapped fecal gas escaping, sinking down over my face, a moist warm veil of decay. The music has gone almost silent, just a faint muffled thud of rhythm swallowed by the darkness. My skull feels soft, melting. It's an oversized, transparent capsule covered with a fine white sheen of baby hair. It shows the furrowed grey egg of my brain inside like a trinket in a vending machine prize. My mother reaches down and spreads her hands over my skull as if it were a crystal ball. She can read the progress of my thoughts by watching the blood and electricity travel through the labyrinth of striations that flood the lifeless meat of my brain with consciousness. She's controlling my thoughts. Her fingertips are magnets, pulling images and sensations like liquid metal through the network of tunnels and canals that intersect my mind. My mother laces her fingers beneath my chin and she lifts me up by the head until my mouth is at the level of her vagina. The hair that protects it is long and full, ripe with life and the smell of her leaking insides. It hangs down like the densely foliated and supplicating branches of a forest willow, caressing my face. The twisted and knotted strands are alive, smooth and moist, a teeming nest of black, boneless, greasy fingers tracing delicate arabesques on my cheeks and forehead with the cool, shiny slime that drains out from the walls inside my dead mother's stomach. Behind the veil of hair the inner walls of her vagina shine like mirrors, refracting out the light and brightly colored media-images the demon generates inside of her. Inside her belly the images are mixed together in a fluorescent soup of concurrent past, future, and present sights and sounds. The center of the universe as it inverts into itself is the sucking spiral-demon inside my mother's womb. The light pours out from her hole over my face. It's a clear luminous syrup that runs down over my body and adheres to it closely, enclosing me in a sealed placenta of glittering jelly. This transparent cocoon expands and contracts like a delicate lung, laced with electrified tendrils and veins that reach down from up inside my mother's vaginal canal, feeding out from her charged and glowing uteral core. The demon liquid inside my stomach is boiling with pressure digesting me from inside as my skin and muscle dissolve in the fluid she pumps into the sack that contains me. As my body melts and becomes liquid I feel my mother's images rushing through me, eating me as I become them. As the demon draws me back up into the body of my mother I feel the selfless ecstasy of the images pouring forth from the video screen. I'm pure liquid light inside of her. I have become the demon that inhabits her body. I am my mother : I control her from inside her dead body. I'm dancing. It pleases me that you're watching me. - 1997