A Tongue In My Mouth: Some Ecstasies of Daily Life

By Dia Felix

Into our night, I curl like a snail. To the bottom of the silver bridge, a tiny snail sticks. In this heat there is no real night. It’s dark but it’s warm and sticky and I never sleep hard.

 

Morning, I haunt the drugstore, my feet are barely touching the ground. It’s an effort to keep my toes touching it. I’m wearing the navy blue canvas sneakers that my mother wore when she was my age and traveled in Spain. I cannot speak. I cannot open my eyes easily, they feel like thick, sticky pasta. My mouth feels inert. Behind the pharmacy counter is the Russian girl, the woman who appears too young to be in the workforce. I see the top of her head, her straight, serious, tight part, as she does her work on the counter, moving around squares of paper, and bottles, and plastic tubs. Her head moves with efficiency and grace. An efficiency that I do not understand, it is so highly specialized. She looks up, sees me. A light in her crayola blue eyes, the gap in her teeth revealed as she smiles at me. My smile is disabled, my head tilted, I am inert, inflated, and cannot

cannot

cannot

as in a dream I cannot raise one arm or even smile or do any of the social cues I ache to do

 

she is so kind she is an angel she rubs my drugs into the sand dollar of my back with her sweet, small hand, so smooth like cheese she rubs and rubs me this girl who smells of tea, soap, blankets

I dream of being on a boat with you chemist of my dreams, your dress as white as the gauze you sell, your eyes as hard as vitamins and skin as smooth as enamel-glazed iron, impervious to irate patients for decades

 

youth

 

 

 

 

 

The night is hard and the morning is soft. I thaw like a mollusk and turn into a giant pussy. New York seems to hate itself and people are miserable. Black shining miserable shoes, oh but then a lemon-yellow dress lifting at the ruffles, loving a pair of proud thick thighs, twin engines. I throb awake and walk through the tropical wet walls of air to follow this perfect creature for a couple blocks until the chilly bus swallows her.

Mentally I eat her thighs for lunch. I almost get caught rubbing up against a brick corner. A man who walks with too many dogs. I fart on him but oh it’s quiet.

 

I crash into a shady plot and let the afternoon sun suck the air from my lips and bead candy sweat on my moustache area. Here and there itches but I won’t reach and do it. The evening thumps. Bikes buzz around.

 

In the evening into a snail again and stick again to the bottom of the bridge for an evening’s shelter. If I were a snail I’d like a piece of paper for a blanket and another piece of paper for breakfast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Found a body against the concrete barrier on the bridge, wrapped tight in a black blanket. Didn’t want any trouble but couldn’t walk on by, I nudged the blanket with my foot and it had the squishy bounce-back of a for-certain mammal. She moaned and turned onto her back. The fuck. She had a tired teen face, light hair covering it like a cocoon.

     You’ll be arrested, I said, and she came with me. We bobbed along like two sick dogs. She had a body-warm avocado on her person and we shared it, digging in with our fingers. Not a cell was wasted.

At the beach we napped. Though it was hot I needed her flesh heavy on me. I didn’t expect it but her body took my cock into it and we fucked like slow turtles. She fell asleep and I tugged myself to completion, ejaculating into my hands then rubbing it into the sand, leaving me with a sand coating.

Don’t know why the guy gave us free ice creams but he did. The sex made us close, made us in a relationship. She put her head on my shoulder and we watched the sunset, slurping our ice creams. She felt around for my dick again and tugged it slowly. It was nice of her. When she was done with her ice cream she took my cock into her face and finished the job, with kindness. My dick is small and I didn’t care, not like usual, where I at least entertain the idea of making a joke about it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The day Michael Jackson died I wept in your arms.

 

I mean I wept in your vicinity and hoped you’d take me into your arms.

 

Gay heroes.

 

It’s embarrassing in public but it’s not public, it’s ours.

 

Our childhood rhymed, we composited them together in adulthood.

 

It braids us together hard.

 

I found you in a 7-11, a baseball hat, I scooped you up.

 

We are not of this world we are better: wake up on the beach with birds

 

We did.

 

Then we didn’t.

 

The night takes a thousand years to close.

 

I drip syrup into my breaths, stripes of wet.

 

I have myself, I’m deep in this coat.

 

I’ll lay you down in the fire and take the stone from your heart-chamber. Everything else will melt away.

 

I don’t want to die, or be a zombie. But I can’t care about myself, my health. A broken dish.

 

The house is empty, airy, waiting for the next people to laugh into its cubes.

 

every day,

I fill my shoes.

 

 

 

dreamed of a cake with slightly tart chocolate frosting.

 

Interested in stars, trains.

 

An afternoon moves on, an afternoon was built in a shop.

 

Cuddling something cool, underwater. Curl up with a guitar, with my transsexual legs. Rubbed my briefcase against your briefcase, remember I needed a friend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

all the materials on hand of a serious accident

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

gold

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

my experience

 

a cow, a heap on a soft

gold gold

body is

 

Tucson sky, a

phlebotomist beholds the sky, her finger throbs

finger to cloud

 

a crystal, clear and ringing out from the jaw of a deity,

a piece of the jaw for your jeans butt pocket

singing out one note

 

We’re in Tucson, she melted on her bike

 

I peeled her off like a banana peel

from her banana seat

cool water brought her skin back a luster

reanimated she ran to the tub, ran the cool water

which was not cool but soupy warm

 

she sucked her fingers

she wanted anything

 

in the morning banana bread and unsalted butter

she, in a bikini, looking good in my tight kitchen

 

fuck work,

we stayed in bed all day

inventing sex with fans

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let the weather do something to me

 

I don’t sleep exactly, I don’t know what to call it

 

I just be, like a bug

 

I roll into the hammock and I pass through stages of experience

 

“it’s a dry heat”

 

often I roll like a marble down the highways of the past

 

I encounter my grandmother putting out jars on her front lawn

why did she do that

I think to make the dogs not shit here

dogs, go shit somewhere else

did it work and what was in the jars

and if it worked then why doesn’t anyone do that anymore

 

similar era, the neighbor ladies putting out jars for sun tea

sun tea, that sounds so good

 

on spaghetti legs I quiver to the kitchen to make an iced coffee

which lustfully cleaves my brain in two like a lewd, fluo melon

and licks it down the middle with a frozen metal tongue

 

 

 

 

 

 

rows and rows of tulips develop in my mind

 

fast and uniform, rows of tulips, tulip ammunition

 

I want to call someone but I’d fall asleep

 

a warm baby of gold the perfect weight on my chest (imagine)

 

I startle awake–no baby, but a laptop bleats

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My room.

 

Look, my face. Deep wrinkles between my eyebrows. With my electric toothbrush I express self-love. As I am brushing I close my eyes and I see in my imagination a flamboyant clown on stilts with white make up and a black velvet jester hat. I re-enter bed, read for a bit. I think of all things I must do–mail back the contract, deal with a number of bills, call three or four people, return the flash drive to Staples before the end of the day or else it won’t be within the return period…my obligations take the dream-shape of a pile of envelopes, higher and higher. I feel the anxiety of that, plus a feeling that there is someone in the room, someone tall and watching me. Despite these strong feelings I manage to clamp myself into the blankets like a self-induced trap and squeeze into a sour sleep, where the clown on stilts looked me in the eye while she stepped side to side and did not fall.

 

 

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Dia Felix is a writer and filmmaker. Areas of interest and expertise include romance, celebrity, obsession, decadence, 2013, and rock and roll. She has written for many blogs and online channels and self-published some number of booklettes. She has performed and screened at many venues including Radar, Segue Foundation, Mixfest, Frameline, and Poetry Project. Her novel “Nochita” will be published through City Lights/Sister Spit in March of 2014.  Born and raised in Southern California, Felix now lives mostly in New York.