On Biting Tongues

Essay 55

I’ve found in the past days on the edges of my tongue two trenches of tooth-bites, deep. I don’t recall biting my tongue ever before, never literally, how angry or sad or what else I must be.

One always resumes writing slyly—we easy, the guilty—only when that’s only where one has some sway, the drowning finds the log like a moss, the suffocating the loosening lock, gusts of air travel up the nose when the tongue has been docked into knots by the jaws.

I am such a snob. Yesterday I saw my hands shake, what a show. The conversation of the world assaults me, you know, I wake up and it mauls me, I train it, I tame it every day, the care, the dare with which one tends to and tries, and listens and guides, we advise, we resolve, we force fortunes to favour the told, the flints catch luck, and still, every day I’ll fuck up, it’s something I missed, I know, I know, someone I have not heard, guided, been soft enough with, been hard enough with, fought well enough, advised. I grab onto my little log all capsized, and my teeth will find my tongue and… impale—Anna, inhale, exhale—and not let go.

Where did the air go? How can I do more…? The light’s thinned at the base of my door, if I lay low it grows wider: a movie screen in cinemascope, a lint-ball blown across it the rider, and behind him the sun-kissed landscape expands into windfall, a Cinecittà soundtrack of outlaws, of heroes, bales me back up on my toes to stands straight and start walking—or talking, it’s the same—past the fails. The lone horsemen on this road chose the quiet, they say.