Talk Shit

Really, he cannot bear to face it. Cock flopped out, the fists of faeces getting ready to rock out - and, then, as down he lowers his butt, the horror, the horror of the toilet seat still hot.

Equally, those harsh facts from biology; unbearable. Smell is made from the molecules of actual stuff, not some different substance given off, as with the reflections of light.

Thus: the stinky air here is dotted with the sharp snap of actual shit, actual shit; it lolls about the lips, nests in the nose, enters him through the eye holes.

And so, only moments before, here his housemate's body must have hovered. This exact spot. Squeezing out the body-sifted debris. Sausage, fried bread, ice-cream and lager.

Revolting and pointless, surely, he thinks, to realise it. Such cruel facts of life as these - they are about us always, enough, anyway; so much human pollution of humans. Shut up, he tells himself, and just get on with it. Stop talking. Stop talking shit.

I, Fist, of course, have something else to say.

"Underneath the indignity, might you not sense a little story? Of having shared with your housemate's survivors a little moment that forms a memory? Like a blog entry does? Or more like a little touch of connection, like a comment is?" But he shakes his head. Enough of grandiose claims, he thinks, enough of faking some function out of the dirt of our lives, he doesn't feel like it at all.

"Something else, then," I said, meandering on, as if in the maze of the city, amongst walls made of mirrors and unknown corners. "Surrender that responsible feeling, which clambers for a hidden logic to hide the horror and shame, that groping hunger for pride. And then carry on anyway - with the search for words in common amongst the shit, with the attempt to name things which matter - even only if in a random form, say of an acrostic."