by Michael Gira
(1984)
A SCREW
I don’t trust anyone. I’m trying to guard myself. I hate these creeps. Their dirty penetrating eyes see every humiliating flaw. I know I’m better than anyone I’ve ever seen or met, anyone I’ve ever worked for, anyone that’s ever seen my face. When I’m exposed, I’m hiding something. I’m holding it in. I’m hiding because I’m better than they are. I’m transfixed. I’m staring at my naked body in the mirror. I’ve had it shaped according to what I want to see. Slabs of fat cut away, my breasts uplifted, reduced to perfect size and shape. I’ve worked on this body. I’ve put myself under the knife for it, I’ve sweated for it. It’s mine. I control it, use it for my own gratification. It provides me with perfect sex: self-inclusive, contained, rigid, unrelenting, punishing. It’s mine. I’m perfect for myself. The smell of my sweat, the feel of my muscles tightening, satisfies me, fucks me. I’m perfect. I fuck myself. My image in the mirror is fucking me. I turn myself on. Everything else is superfluous. I’m self-contained. I’ll eliminate anything, any creep, any ugly living flesh that gets in my way. When I look in the mirror, I make time stop. I need nothing, no one. Nothing can fuck me like I fuck myself. No regrets. I’ve worked myself into what I want to fuck. I’m fucking myself now.
(1984)
PUNISHMENT
Every one of them has a concealed motive. It takes years of concentration to peel away the lies. Every quirk of behavior, every trivial response, is premeditated toward a certain end. The only honest behavior is an immediate physical reaction to pain. Real pain — not emotional or mental — caused by direct physical violence. For this reason, one or the other is usually in the process of plotting an attack on the enemy (the other). The only thing that stops them from committing murder is the threat of punishment. Since they’re unable to express their violence in any immediate sense, they’ve developed ways to make their violence more abstract and complicated, delaying the ultimate release until it's no longer bearable. Without tension or desire, everything is equal. So they play their violence like chess in order to exist for violence.
(1984)
BAPTIZED
She’s spread out on the bed, saliva and sperm running out of her mouth. A pool of blood and sperm is forming between her legs. Her stomach’s rising, falling, rising, falling. Otherwise she looks dead. I’m sitting in a chair beside the bed, fully clothed, smoking a cigarette, looking into her eyes. She says, “I’ll tell you when I’ve had enough. You shouldn’t have stopped. You should have stopped.” She seems incapable of moving. She tries to get up, lifting her head, then falls back, apparently content with her weakness. I tell her. “It wasn't me. I wasn’t here. Who fucked you? Who’s cock did you just suck? Whose cock was in your cunt?” When I finish my cigarette, I take off my clothes and lie down on top of her, forcing it into her hole.
(1984)
FEEDING THE ANIMAL
I can’t breathe in. The air is trapped inside my lungs and feels like burning sulfur. I’m sitting rigid in my chair. My feet are screwed to the ground. Directly in front of me, my eyes have worn away a small patch of wall. I’m looking at myself there, a red smear on the white paint. Because I can’t turn away from it, I feel myself becoming it.
I feel myself draining out of me, as if my body were an emptying sack. I’m decaying, my metabolism is breaking down, I’m losing control of my mind as my brain dies.
Using all the energy I can gather, I shift my weight to my legs, trying to stand up. I can’t, though I feel weightless. My skin holds in my intestines, light, as if they were filled with air.
I want to stand up. I can’t concentrate. I make it halfway up, then fall down on my back on the ground, knocking over the chair, ripping the bolts loose from my feet. I lie there, my body spreading out around me, distended. My head drifts up toward the ceiling. I can’t move.
Time passes while I think nothing, then something creeps silently up to my exposed entrails. It wraps its fingers around my heart and squeezes gently, as if trying to coax it into a last weak pump. I lie there waiting. The dog/man opens up the flaps of my chest and inserts his face, brushing his cool nose along the wet coils of my guts. With my last strength, I pull the face into me, whispering my name into its ear.
(1994)
HER ONLY LOVE
Unable to bear the smell of her parents’ decay, the little girl gets out of her bed, leaving the protective warmth of her soft blanket, and walks down the hall to her parent's room. Her bare feet are silent on the thick carpet.
She opens the door. The air rolls over her, smothering her with its stink. She walks in, lightly vomiting small chunks of matter and blood into her hand.
The bed is black with flies, burrowing into her parents’ flesh, planting the eggs that will become new flies. The wound she made in her father’s neck is infested with them. Her mother’s head rests on her father’s shoulder, her mouth open, dense with flies.
The knife is on the floor by the bed. The carpet soaks up the blood. She picks the knife up, admires her face in a patch of shiny steel that peeks through the blood, then tosses it off into the corner.
She walks over to the window on the other side of the bed, and with great effort, finally opens it. The cold winter air moves in. The flies dig deeper into her parents’ flesh for warmth.
She removes her nightgown, then pulls back the covers on the bed and slides in between their bodies. She’s immediately covered in flies. She pulls the covers tightly around her neck, keeping out the now freezing air, and gradually drifts off to sleep. She feels the flies tickling her skin beneath the covers, like miniature birds gathering around her trying to lift her into the air. She rubs her leg against her father’s cold stomach, dreaming.
(1986 / 1994)
HIS CHILDISH GAMES
The old man is lying naked on his bed watching the television. His face is pressed up close to the screen at the side of his bed. He looks out over the downy white hills of his pillow into the magical world behind the glass.
The only light in the room is the light of the television. The skin of the old man’s face is pale blue. The details of his skull are visible behind the surface of his skin, like an x-ray.
There’s a bowl filled with cold cooking grease beside him on the bed. He smears it over his body as he watches the television, providing himself with a vague impression of sensuality.
After an almost sensationless ejaculation, he goes into the kitchen and takes a carving knife from the drawer, then walks back into the bedroom and lies down on his hack in front of the television. He relaxes himself, emptying out his mind.
He slips the knife under the skin of his right arm, at the wrist. He’s careful not to cut too deep.
After an hour, he’s managed to peel back the skin, up and off to his shoulder. He feels fresh, thinking he’s been remade into a better version of himself. Any pain he feels seems irrelevant — he’s lost the ability to distinguish between the pain in/on his arm and the sensations produced by his greased skin rubbing against the wool blanket on his bed.
He gets up and gets dressed. His arm sticks out from the sleeve of his T-shirt and smears red everywhere, bleeding over everything, dripping to the floor. He works his way down the stairs, stopping at each landing to gather strength, leaving a small red pool at each resting place.
Out in the bright sunlight of the street he feels naked, on display. People look at his stiffening bloody arm and spit. This gives him a sudden feeling of freedom. He thinks, “They should envy me.”
During the first day, his arm is red and moist, the creases and sinuations in the muscles glistening in the sun. But as days pass, as he wanders aimlessly through the city streets, propping his body up against a wall at night to catch a few minutes of dazed halfsleep, his arm forms a crust, and it swells to twice its normal size, like an awkward and cumbersome club dangling loose from his shoulder.
His eyes roll back in his head, exposing yellowed whites, webbed with thin red veins. He walks blindly down the stree
t, tripping on his own feet. He stays where he falls until someone comes along and reluctantly helps the filthy old man up. He offers them his scabbed arm. When they grab hold of it, the scab comes off like the burned skin of a roasted animal, a conical hollow crust in their hand.
(1986)
SOME WEAKNESSES
I’ve got muscles, so I want to use them. I get up in the morning, pose naked in front of the mirror, and flex for half an hour. Looking at myself, I want to beat someone’s head in with my bare fist. I want to see my fist forced down some asshole’s face, reach down, grab a handful of intestines, and pull them up and out the throat. That would make me feel good. Whatever makes me feel good is what counts. The reason I build my muscles is to use them. That makes me feel good. It’d be senseless to work out for years just for the stupid satisfaction of feeling “healthy” or knowing I look good when I’m about to fuck somebody up the ass. I get satisfaction out of grinding a face in the pavement. I don’t want to question it. I like causing pain. That’s how I am. I see an immediate response to something I just did. No bullshit. Pure animal pain, me the victor, me in control, me on top, you on the bottom. I never allow myself to be in the position of feeling pain. I’ll do anything to avoid pain. I’ll run, humiliate myself (if it’s the lesser of two pains), betray a so-called friend, anything. In order to decrease the possibility of pain, I’m never threatening in public. I obscure myself. I don’t show off my muscles. I’m soft-spoken. I don’t need to impress anyone. I couldn’t care less what they think of me. All I want is satisfaction. I get it when I need it. I cultivate it like a hard-on, stroke it, build it up to bursting, then, when I’m ready, I find somebody to fuck with. Somebody to destroy, somebody to ruin. I brutalize them, then I fuck them. But they can’t be “into” it, they can’t be some wimpy masochist getting rid of their lame authoritarian guilt. They have to honestly be scared, maybe even think they’re strong. That’s when it feels good. That’s when it feels good, when some pompous turd feels my boot in their eye, or their ribs breaking under the impact of my fist, my big fucking sledgehammer fist snapping their ribs like matchsticks, then my cock fucking them in every hole they’ve got, my come mixing with their stinking blood. Yeah, I turn on thinking about it. I’m just now pulling on my cock. I’m imagining my meat in your toothless mouth right now. I’m shooting a gallon down your throat. You’re vomiting a thin green liquid into my lap, then I kill you for that mistake. I twist your head right off your weak neck for that mistake. I kill you like the worthless chicken you are right there and then, then I fuck you some more. Later, I eat your sour brains and throw your corpse out with the garbage. Now you’re perfect. You’re doing what you do best: you’re dead. I used you. I fucked you. I wiped you off the face of this rancid earth. My main goal in life is my pleasure, and that made me feel good.
*
I’ve been milked. My tongue’s hanging out of my mouth. My fingers are boneless. My spine’s loose in my back. I can feel the rot spreading through the insides of my teeth, into my gums, then crawling up onto my brain. I can smell my brain rotting. If I pressed both hands on either side of my head, my mouth would ooze pus. My eyes are turning to jelly. I can see much clearer because of that. The table across the room reveals its true appearance: it’s half-cow, half-man, its ass sticking up in the air, yellow shit pumping out the hole. I realize I’m looking in the mirror. I get up and go to the bathroom and wipe myself. I smell like a dirty whore-cow. If I can figure out a way to lift my legs to walk, I’ll make it to the bed, where I can cover my head and smell my fingers. In bed, I’m a pig. I fart and pick, suck my saliva through my mind. The saliva comes back into my mouth tasting like nicotine juice. I’ve poisoned myself. My brain’s squirting piss into my mouth. I have to swallow it, because the goo that’s accumulated on my lips has dried and sealed my mouth shut. I love myself. This way I’m closer to myself. Nothing leaves me. I stay put. I’m sealed tight, sewn shut, like a dead pig’s eye. Sewn shut, like I sew my fingers together by pulling the needle and thread through the first layer of skin on each finger, making mallets out of my hands. Then I hold my hands up to my face, wishing I could sew them to my face. I consider it (feel it as) a violation to be looked at by someone. Conversely, I feel like I’m eating when I look at someone or something. I’m already full. I’m bloated, the skin that seals my body is pressured outwards, ready to burst. I’m like a balloon full of guts. I don’t want to lose my guts, so I don’t want to look. I can only stay in this position for so long. Eventually I have to take my hands down from my face. Then, eventually, I have to open my eyes. Then I have to move my legs and walk over to the bed. On the way, I sit down on the floor to rest, poking my leg with my finger. I can’t feel my leg. I can’t feel my finger. I don’t know what I’m doing here.
*
You’ve got soft skin. I like the insides of your thighs, running my hand slowly up to the lips of your cunt. Your cunt was dry a second ago. Now it’s faintly wet, not quite soaked, just beginning to lubricate. That’s supposed to suck me in, supposed to make the blood rush to my prick, so it’ll get hard and want to go up inside you, so you can steal my come. I refuse to accept that ploy. I’m only tender with you in order to watch you respond, to watch you thinking that I’m something I’m not. You’re moaning like a stupid animal. You think I’m a very passionate dildo. The truth is, I could murder you right now. But I won’t. Then you’d be useless. I need you. I have to pretend that I’m caught up in this, that I’m “abandoned”, so that you in turn will respond exactly how I want you to. I’m standing above us, watching our imbecilic bodies press and grind, each of us thinking we’ve fooled the other. I’d like to throw gasoline over the sweating heap and light it, watch us scream dumb pain as we burn. I make myself sick.
*
The idiot cop is telling me to move. I’m standing there like meat. He’s prodding me with his club. He knows I’m pliable meat. He’s meat. His head is solid muscle. I’m also meat. My mind tries to convince itself that it’s not meat, but the physical fact of being prodded, pressed, locked in dead concrete, dulls each thought, each hate, making them meat. This makes me want to cut meat. I’ve been thinking: “I’ll never leave here. I don’t want to leave. When I stare long enough without thinking, time stops. I move dead. It doesn’t feel. I don’t have to think. There’s no reason to think. I’ll stop thinking.” I continue to think. I cannibalize my thoughts until nothing remains but hate. Hate makes me strong. I’m willing to kill him. Because I’m meat. It’s the last thing to think about before I become permanent meat. Meat that eats and shits, moves when pushed, sleeps when tired, nothing else. He pushes me again. I pull out my knife and slide it into his stomach. I cut his throat. His face lights up. He’s surprised. For a second, he’s not meat. My mind begins to work. One thought after another, against my will .
Sucking in and out, with lips that look like clam meat, her mouth forms word after word. I can’t hear anything. I want to disfigure myself. Her long thin hands shoot up from her sides and dance around my face, driving me to the point of a scream I can never release. I’m gagged. She’s lecturing me, admonishing me for my inability (she calls it “unwillingness”) to speak. But she’s the one who put the gag in my mouth, the candle wax in my ears, and the tube that runs up from inside my ass, down along the floor, and finally up her ass, so we’re “biologically” connected, as she says. When one of us takes a shit, the pressure builds in the tube and the shit slowly works its way up the others’ ass. She’s berating me (I can tell by the expression of hunger-anger on her face) for not shitting more often. She wants my shit up her ass. I have the ability to hold it in. She knows this. That’s why she plugged my mouth and ears, so it would eventually have to come out my ass. But it won’t. Right now, I can feel it crawling up my throat, and it’s going to start coming out my nostrils any second. First in slow drips, then in a quick brown double-stream I’ll aim at her ugly, selfish face.
*
Every move I make is imitated exactly by
the guy standing in front of me. I don’t know if I’m willing my movements, or am myself imitating him. I know he’s imitating my thoughts because occasionally he’ll slap me or bite me if I’ve just thought of a violent solution, some way of exterminating him. Whatever I think turns back on itself and works against me. I can’t think anything without immediately realizing that the thought has been instantly apprehended (stolen) by my adversary, and consequently has been nullified because it’s no longer part of my mind. It’s instead more ammunition for him to use against me. If I’m in fact imitating him then I’ve become (or always was) a ghost, or at best activated flesh dependent on the will or desire of my enemy in order to respond in even the most primary way — as when a knee gets tapped by a hammer. As a solution, I’m making myself inert. I won’t think. I won’t move. I won’t allow my heart to beat or my lungs to expand and contract. I’m going to wait and see who make the first move. Whoever makes the first move dies. The other will kill him by imitation.
*
My clothes are sticking to my skin. I’m drunk, I can’t see. I’m being pushed back and forth in a circle of people I don’t recognize. They’re beating me, laughing at me, spitting at me, pissing on me. The men are pulling their hard-ons. The women are fist fucking their cunts. They’re enjoying me. I put my cigarette out on somebody’s hand. It was resting on the bar next to me. It was fat. I didn’t like it, or thought it wasn’t alive and wanted to see if would move. The hand belonged to somebody in the crowd. He or she must be worked up for some hot sex right now: I’m going to be dismembered, played with. I’m helpless. I can barely stand. I can’t form words. I’m finished. I committed the perfect crime: relatively harmless, punished by slow orgy and murder. I feel good. I understand my position.