Sniper

Bill Berry

The machinery of culture is the mime of time.  It’s late in my life and I haven’t been on television yet.  I am still no one.  I will die anonymously.  I will be nothing forever.  Because inside of me the machinery of my culture clicks away like a tick tock ticking of a clickety clock, I am quiet in my despair.  When I introduce myself, it is not my hair and eyes that are important, but not even my sex sticks and stones.  It is my bones that I show, what under pulpy tendrils of lavender are alive and kicking.  It is the gloom of dust and ages that wears the smile of my lips—televisionless.  Infantality.  I am a child inside the womb of my mother.

The machinery holds me silent in its infancy—without words.  Because I have no language, I have no home.  I have no home because I have no mother tongue to lick me up and show me myself and say to me, “You will die forever alone and nothing will swell inside your soul to form the skeleton of time’s tomb.”  In the realm of politics, this means that I am a consumer, from whom thousands of dollars will be made on a daily basis as I purchase and not purchase my happiness from the breadbasket. 

The machinery holds me silent in its infancy—without words.  Because I have no language, I am a savage.  I have never voted.  Because I waste my vote on nothingness, I lose my choice.  Because my choice is lost, I have no story to tell.  My life is over before it has begun.  Where has my machinery taken me?  I find my gun hidden inside me and I remember that I am a concealed carry law to protect and serve.  I decide to protect and to serve.  Because I do not want to suck cock, I choose not to vote.

I stand hidden in the brush of this machinery known as a spider’s web.  It’s sticky, and I can’t get out because every move I make spins only more democracy for we the people there is nothing we cannot do.  I look through the scope of my rifle and I see a blur of cars passing me one after the other and I know, because my gun has been hidden inside for as long as I can remember, that I am the only one who can make this choice that I never made because I forfeited choice when I said no to the republican war nation of the north Atlantic trade organization.  I hold it’s steel in my hand, wooden butt end of smoky days and the stale cold smell of the television flicker that always told me no and maybe never I could be only as good as I imagined everyone else already was.  I hold the gun in the flesh of my spider’s web and I see with the crossed spectacle of my sights, the cars running by me on the road in front of me as I lie in the underbrush of bone and silence and machinery.  Together, we are one.

Because I introduce myself with only my guts spilled inside out and wondering why I’m only pretty on not even the inside can make me feel like a human being, I decide that in my motherless world of silent despair that I will hunt.  I will hunt for reasons even politicians can never understand the glory of my knowing and not knowing who or what I am and how and why I belong to it, this web of machinery called choice.  One small step for me is another giant leap for our economy.  And I vomit.  I vomit on the ground beneath my belly and into the dirt I lie in on the side of this underbrush by this interstate.  Cars, not smelling my vomit over their belching exhaust, speed past me as light escapes the vortex of a star.  I am escaping.  I am fleeing the vortex.  I vomit some more.

I can smell the sin of booze and gambling in my bile.  I would like to smell the sin of sex in my sticks and stones, but I haven’t paid my cable bill.  I vomit dry.  I decide that my body is in revolution, and I allow it space.  Because I am revolting, no one will look at me and I fire a shot into the air from my concealed carry law.  It echoes into industrial static and is never heard by anyone, because inducing myself into a revolution through sin and booze is all it takes to make the first mistake and smell the smoke of that error resting in the eyes of our leaders.  I wonder where all the flowers have gone?  I remember a wall of stone with name after name of concealed carry law engraved on its marble epitaph and I remember the smell.  I can smell it now, in the underbrush of the freeway, life speeding past me with each bat of an eye, with every blink of my heart.  My heart beats to the tune of a different drum.  My heart is a chainsaw.

Bloodlust and spit.  Because of my vomit, I see little pieces of me everywhere.  I am over there, in the whirring traffic that knows not where or to whom.  I am everywhere, like the light that smells the industrial fumes of silence.  I am both this and that, in my own seepage.  The smell of concealed carry law lingers near me.  The weapon, not my sex, is still intact.  I remember my history for a brief flicker—it flashes past me every second but I never notice until now, in vomit haste.  I am forever here and always there.  I heave once more—silence inundates me and I caress the butt end of protect and serve.  Stone images of politician’s names engraved on plaques that line walls of places too expensive to afford remind me that I am an economic wasteland devoid of choice because I am controlled by not choosing.  I see without seeing.  I am not omnipotent, but I enjoy omnipotence.  Just like television, my mind flickers from one instance to another in this vomit refuge.  I am again reborn into the silence of my anonymity.

Because of my vomit, I am a savage.  I am only an animal because I do not buy cosmetics.  I find beauty from my purchases but am never satisfied with the happiness they make me feel nothing but television pride.  I am clanking in a clickety clock sort of way through the sticky ooze of my grind.  It crushes the bone and debris of my hands and the creation myths that surround me linger in a gunpowder haze of justice for all.  I am curious to know where the metallic pieces of light, which flashed before my vomited eyes, burst in mid air only to land in dust and gloom again inside is only never pretty as outside is revolting.  A revolution.  The warm butt of wood harkens back to a time before the Iron Age but its coalescence with skin and silence create time.  I have nothing but this vast space of time’s hands.  My face rests in puke under the crawling belly of my choice.

Because of my vomit, I have no home.  Here in the underbrush of this revolution I am reminded of my infantality.  I am in pantomime, as language passes through and beyond recognition.  I remember bone and arrows, smoke and concealed carry.  In the primal ooze of this revolution, I remember my name and I hear a voice.  There is no language attached to the voice, it is gutter and audible.  It is animal, throwing muses into the air and spitting up the tendrils of life through its vibrations.  I remember my beginnings in this sea of homelessness and chaos.  I study the order of its miracle.  I notice, because I am unnoticeable, the sea of homelessness in which we swim, all of us together.  It is this gutter, this animal.  It is this arrow that has no bow, the bow without its arrow.  I ooze from the bottom of my lip the bile of my love.  I am homeless here and now.  I am now.

The echo of machinery aches in my recognition.  I smell with my senses the feel of the Earth beneath my flesh.  It is moist with those parts of me that were unnecessary or unwanted, my body is held abreast with the firmament of calcium.  I hold the world in my hands, and it is at peace.  I hold the world in my hands, and I am at war.  Together, there is a revolution, as I notice the spinning pieces of life and death hurling away in the night.  It are stars.  It are escaping this velocity trap.  I caress the stalk of power called protect and serve.  It is hot, like newly created.  It is molten, like fresh destruction.

I heave, only a tremble of bones clutch up and into my mouth.  I taste the smoke fired shot of revolution.  I taste the sting of salt from the ducts of my tears.  I listen to the whirl of machinery, the beat of my heart and the rush of my blood back to the source and out again pumping through and around the stars and back into the irises of my tears.  It is only a reaction from the smoke of this revolution.  I flicker and blink.  The hazy fuzz of my television mind focuses in and out of tremble and delight and I feel the erection of my pulse.

I heave, only a tremble of fired smoke and shot flash of television switch kill channel switch click moment.  Waste of sludge and time I am moving and swimming and singing and smiling.  The water salt of sea refreshes the dribble of my mouth.  My nose swells full of life and the sound of my body inside itself.  I cannot remember a time when my cock without a television was so alive.  I cannot remember a time when television had the machinery of time inside this infantality.  In the realm of politics, this means that I am a consumer, from whom thousands of dollars will be made on a daily basis as I purchase and not purchase my erection from the breadbasket.

This machinery holds me silent—without words.  I have found my gun hidden inside me and I remember that I am a concealed carry law to protect and serve.  I have decided to protect and serve.  I roll onto my back and stare out.  The blindness of what I see causes my eyes to dilate and loose again.  I loose again.  So much is always lost.  I am dilated.  I am again blind.  I see a haze of noise.  I see a funnel of smells.  I see a crunching of earth and bone and pulpy extraction under the root of my buttocks.  Because of protect and serve, my concealed carry has sprung forth and in the instant of my final heave, I rolled into the overturn of my stomach from there onto my back.  I stare out.  I am erect and blind.

Because television has left me motherless, I have no home.  The only time I leave the political landscape of my consumerism is here.  When I am now, I am dead.  When I am dead, my heart has never beaten so quickly.  I am aware without realizing.  I am grass roots fear of black sheep.  I do not want to suck cock, I see only my mother.  My cock hard, my concealed carry smokes molten—image of metaphor and darkness—I remember my name.  It is mine.  I touch the cold steal of its shaft where my hand almost burns.  It smokes.  The haze of its protection has left me in the desert of spasm after spasm of strewn biology.  It is smoking.  My hands feel its butt end, woody and soft.  The glazed carving supports the metallic thrust of its magnificence.  It is all too obvious, and I must continue on.

Because television has left me motherless, I have no language.  I hear the gutter, the sound of my nostrils as they flare from smoky gunshot haze.  I do not want to suck my mother’s breast because I do not vote I have no right to her data-stream.  My world is electronic, pinpricks of light fathomless voids away from me here and now.  In this dark, pinpricks of hazed over pollution light the sky into almost dawn.  I cannot sea, but only television my mind with images from the Hubble telescope.  It are another world that I create.  It are another world hearing the grind of staticless television emptiness.  Where there is no picture, there is only chaos.  Television is order out of chaos.  Television is the cradle of the world. 

Television smokes.  It heats up the inside of my bones and reminds me that I am part of the light it projects.  Television vomits.  It projects the parts of what I am into the minds of the unconsciousness of social moral.  Television perceives.  The speckled distance of blindness that presents itself is only the minds of every signal of television, radiant and pure, smaller and smaller.  Television is erect.  It is hard in its encased bone of polymer and plastic; its spinal cord is bent with the disease of its unnoticed perfection.  I am these things, reflected in the eyes of love.

In the jaws of my vomit, the arch of my back protrudes.  I moan out, a groan of guttered tranquility that is chaos.  I groan out, a moan of indiscernible force.  The question of me.  The salt of my captured stars, stuck behind blinking caretakers of flesh, pour out of the ducts of my tears.  The question of me—it smokes.  I feel a hunger inside the butt end of my protect and serve grumble and surge.  The machinery grinds around me and while I have been gone, it has been annihilated and reborn with my remembering of my vomit.  The machinery hurls forth from between my lips, molten and liquid warm.  It smoked in the weather of the night, like so much hazing.  The paddle of my teeth cannot clench it from within.  My back arches further into support.

I groan out, a moan of question.  The machinery grinds inside me and while I have been a traveler, it has been an ever-present stream of force and nature.  The smoke of its bile has infiltrated only my bone, but the stars still pinprick the hazed night.  The stone of earth, a wall of engraved politicians, name each one of us a child.  I hear this hush; it is all I hear.

In the jaws of my vomit, I protect and serve.  My concealed carry moves forward into the night.  My back recedes.  Before it was over, it had begun—this data-stream.  I am suckling the tit of my mother’s breasts, in the light of new circumstances wrenched forth from the old saying goes.  My data-stream steals hers in silent understanding that I am loved beyond word and earth.  I am held in the breath of her consciousness beyond the void of distance and sound.  There is a final bow that through which I am given the chaos of my force to groan out and carve names into the dirt of polished metal and cartridge.  My concealed carry has not left my hands.  Its lava flesh oozes, throbbing with the heat of its thunder.  In the cold weather of the night, the interstate remains anonymous in this distortion of truth.  Justice is the only way.  Justice is blind.  Justice is a revolution.

I wipe the sperm from my belly and find myself again on my stomach.  The strong hold of the bullets rustle in my pocket like children whose seed has been dispersed unknowingly.  I pull another shell from inside and push it into the contraction of light and society.  The two intersect here, in this web of sticky ooze.  I remember the force of my entrapment.  I remember the consciousness of my manners.  The two intersect here, in the sticky ooze of this web.

I remember slowly.  I have not forgotten.  I remember again.  I never forgot.  I am a spider, arms and legs asunder in the underbrush of this fabric.  I am a fly, caught in the war between nations and pride or patriotism and fashion.  Under the crawling belly of my choice, I feel the bile of voters.  I am an economic wasteland devoid of choice because I am controlled by not choosing.  Television flickers, “You will die forever alone and nothing will swell inside your soul to form a skeleton of time’s tomb.”  In the realm of all that is political, sperm dribbles from my lips.  I taste its data-stream.  I taste mother.  In the realm of all that is political, I have no story to tell because I do not vote.

The next night I am at a party and all I can see around me are pieces of dead meat.  I mean, I look in the eyes of a woman and I don’t see a whore, I see the rotting flesh of her life hanging in a freezer like a side of beef waiting to be carved into chunks of stew.  I realize I’m hungry and make my way over to the punch bowl.  Next to the spiked punch, terribly ridden with vodka, are these little party wieners.  These miniature hotdogs look like little pigmy fingers or the fingers of small children after they have been snagged in a machine and torn from their sockets.  I bite into one and I can taste it.  A woman approaches me from the left.

“Hi,” she says.  “I hate these things, don’t you?”

I imagine her eating these children’s fingers with me.  We’re in a park somewhere in the summer.  We are eating children’s fingers with glee.  We are in love.  I embrace her.  She is dripping in the juice of party wieners.  I open her mouth with my fingers and swish them around inside her pork factory.  She is eating and smiling and chewing and smiling.  I get my fingers caught in her smile and I wince.  I can’t imagine what it feels like to be inside of her other than this. 

“I say, I hate these things.  Don’t you?”

***

Bill Berry was born in Detroit, Michigan and live on Cape Cod.  He is a college professor who teaches writing and language.  Presently, he is busy with his dissertation on identity and writing.  His creative work is inherently transgressive.  He wants people to feel challenged by language; his fiction reflects this.