Fragments of Dead Matter

He lies ventricumbent, a knife stuffed squarely into his ass, a cenotaph, an Eiffel Tower, an Empire State, but not a leaning tower. The room is scarcely larger than seven foot by five foot square, the bed adjacent to the west-facing wall; the head of the bed facing the sole, tiny window, which has been closed, at this point, for many days. The door sits in the opposite wall - the north-facing - on the opposite side, that being, adjacent to the east-facing wall, along which runs a crudely improvised desk, hashed from an extraneous board and an array of extant furniture once stored, idly, in the garage. On the desk, well, an eclectic personal library whose subjects encompass, chaos, hyperspace, Victorian occultism, French symbolism, avant-garde manga, psychoanalysis, social theory, esoterrorism...some albums, whose dustsleeves are so worn as to obscure the names of the artists appeaing on them.

He's naked, face-down, as has been established, the relative sheen and tautness of the skin suggesting a recent death. The lone admissable evidence of death in fact may just be the tarn of blood beneath the lower abdomen, if one were to set one's gaze beyond the knife. The knife. A large bone-handled cleaver, obviously sourced from the house's kitchen, worked into the boy's ass upto, say, seventy percent of the blade, so approximately five inches. To the detached observer, the buttocks and their stridently erect violator may resemble a bulbous, messy bird with giant eyes. To the boy squatting against the base of the door, ears framed by skinny knees, the entity on the bed resembles potential, an opportunity, a new world order, a conceptual revolution, but not a bird, except maybe a phoenix.

When I was thirteen, and masturbating over either of two famous shots of Rimbaud, by Carjax, I would cut out two confetti-like segments of paper and cover the boy-poet's eyes, so as to shield him from my clumsy, pubescent transgression. Frequently I'd sketch tiny landscapes onto the paper blinkers, I figured whilst I was using his image in such a vulgar, disrespectful context I could at least provide him with a captivating vista for the duration.

The boy stretches out his slight, undernourished legs and proceeds to tear with his teeth at a protruding cuticle on his right index finger. He's, maybe, sixteen. Like a nest dropped from a substantial height, his skewed thatch of mousy hair projects a greasy half-sheen. He's been daydreaming. A recent newspaper story detailed a case in Italy in which an disused animal sanctuary was discovered by bandits, and found to be housing a number of muzzled horses, arduously starving to death. So emaciated, their skin a cruel gesture, they had apparently been muzzled, it was revealed post-investigation, because their owner had succumbed to a paranoid delirium so overwhelming as to suggest to him that the animals were chanting blasphemous incantations in unison; a grotesque, tremulous whinney, in chorus, lambasting the eternal host with absolute unearthly vitriol. Rather than slay the beasts, for they alongside us are amongst god's more privileged creatures, he opted to mute them, whilst failing to acknowledge that a creature deprived of the use of its mouth would find ingestion quite troubling; failing to acknowledge or failing to care frequently perform synonymously it seems.

When I was fourteen, and graced with a greater understanding of Rimbaud's philosophical concerns, I omitted the paper segments altogether and realizing that the poet would have deemed my actions over his image entirely apt, worth celebrating, in fact, invaluable to the revolution of consciousness he clamoured for with such rigour throughout his brief but exalted life. So my masturbating took on an exaggerated air, a violent theatricality, and between exasperated breathing, I'd whisper slanderous assaults on his character, conceived to manifest a power hierarchy in which I was the subservient participant, all the while my internal theatre looping scenarios involving his aggressively fucking me, ripping at my hair, absolutely annihilating my ass, literally making it, me, into nothing. What primal bedrock lies behind the fascination with orifices? In classical narrative theory, there is exists a template featuring a cave; a cave which the protagonist must enter to confront his innermost fears, his shadow in Jungian terms perhaps, and once his fears have been apprehended and annulled, he is presented with some notion of truth or at least clarity, or space. I know whenever my gaze lingers on the wisecracking mouth of a beautiful boy for longer than say, ten seconds, I enter a perversely zen reverie in which I reach inside his mouth with both hands, rabidly tear at the hole, prize it apart, bisecting his skull, savouring the sensations, his teeth digging into my palms, the ridiculous scream dissolving as his acoustic chamber is opened out to meet and become the air outside, the fusion of fluids, blood, snot, saliva, unidentifiable body drizzle. More and more frequently I'm prone to enacting this theatre in my head. Primarily it's the lips. Having never administered cunnilingus, I can make only an imaginative guess that the pout-y, suppurating lips of a cocksure teenage boy engaged in competitive banter with his street brothers must possess a similarly brutal and eviscerating allure for me as the inviting, nebulous gash of a woman must for the very boys of whom I write. Such a visceral magnetism, it resists rationalisation, is in opposition to the rational; upon attempting to analyse it's compelling qualities, I see, instead of a lucid tree of logical reduction, extending into the abstract middle-distance, a field of television static, a vortex, the most addictive and commanding manifestation of nothing. And perhaps that's what I crave: nothing. Assimilation into absolute nothing, the opposite of matter, of thought, and the most immediately accessible portal into this non-dimension seems to be, depending on observer's persuasion, the mouth, the ass, the cunt, and we all want a ticket, some more than others, to inveigle our grim, compromised, incomplete selves into this negation of space-time, this rejection of awareness.

The boy stands, his T-shirt crusted with blood, the cuticle dealt with, his icy blue irises mottled with jetsam, junk, perhaps from having witnessed more than most ever would. Rubbing his giant palms together, he hocks up a globule of thick phlegm and expectorates at the bed. The viscous lump lands in the hair of the corpse, sieving deliberately through the mesh, with little urgency. The boy whistles a ditty which might have been a military bugle fanfare, or at least a pastiche of one. An itch prompts him to smudge his cheek against the door, and is hungrily alleviated by the coarse grain of the wood. His skin still possesses that transitional luminescence with which flourishing youth is so gloriously endowed. Moving over to the bed, he grabs for the bone handle and retrieves the blade from the asshole. A further geiser of blood exhausts itself briefly from the freshly released orifice. He wipes the blade through his T-shirt, already awash with crimson. He studies his teeth in the reflective pane of the blade, good solid, milky, slightly uneven, and embedded in rich healthy gums.

I often wonder if Rimbaud might have ever killed a man. If consistency is sought between theory and practice, and Rimbaud being amongst the most pragmatic of explorers, it makes absolute sense to me that the endeavour to assimilate into one's understanding of the universe every available experience - a Noah's Ark of possibilities - would have to at some point feature the causing of another person's death. If so, who might he have killed? How would he have selected the victim? Opportunism or premeditation? I used to declare with unflinching neutrality my resignation to the idea that at some point, to feel complete, to have tasted the whole spectrum of life, I would have to kill someone. In a delivery totally bereft of melodramatic sensationalism, I'd state it so matter-of-factly that some listeners would even groan sympathetically...a man's got to do... I still maintain I have no choice about this. It will happen. I'm reconciled to it. But there is one irreconcilable conundrum to this principle.

The boy now buries his face in the unearthed, opened out asshole, like a dog relieved of a long starvation, rabidly excavating tissue, fluids, excretia. Once satiated in this area, his bloodied face rears up, he wrestles himself free of clothing, and adjusts his stance to mount, straddle the corpse, spitting chunks of dead ephemera onto the floor. He straddles the dead boy, attempts to slide his thick, erect cock into the mangled fissure, blood and shit lubricating the motion. A series of propulsive thrusts, a cruel parody of a death rattle, and the boy's cock settles at last within a tighter section of the corpse's intestinal canal, where it lingers, jolting rhythmically. His hips are preternaturally wide, protruding like horns...or the famed photos of malnourished Africans. His skewed, angular pelvis is rocking almost casually. The boy's daydreaming. Or taking a moment to appreciate the new textures, smells, sensations afforded him by access to the deepest folds of the dead boy's firmament; he reflects that only a fractional percentage of the world's population will have been gifted the privilege of experiencing this arrangement of concepts. This refreshed appreciation of his spectacular singularity renews his verve, and he attacks the corpse with a violent and decimating sequence of thrusts, such concentrated aggression, that the tryst threatens to fall off of the bed. He bites into the corpse's shoulders and neck, applying such pressure that strips of epidermis peel back, and are chewed on, and subject to as incisive an analysis as every other new concept, of which this liason will yield so, so many.

So I recognise the innate paradox in my guiding principle: I cannot rightly commit suicide and be murdered. My philosophy is intrinsically flawed. Assisted suicide is something else entirely. The imposing of abruptly delineated categories onto these concepts cultivates a schism so delirium-inducing; I know now that any practical philosophy is a compromise, and also that it takes all of my energy these days to survive the wrecking assault of paradoxes and self-defeating concepts in my voyage through the dereglement of my senses. My physical survivalist instinct has been superceded by the impulse not to yield to the unremitting draw of insanity. When I was fifteen, and had discovered the wealth of magickal potential inherent in the assembly of collage, ironic juxtaposition, the passionate union of opposites, the creation of a third, unforseen, meaning through the interplay of seemingly incongruous components, alchemie d'image... I took to the mass-xeroxing of the Carjax photos, I'd cut neatly around the outline of Rimbaud's damned, cherubic face, and attach it to photos of anyone else my libido might attach itself to, so now I had that stare, those crazed ruffles of hair, the tight, cruel lips, only rendered atop an array of captivating white male bodies. This fusion would frequently turn me rabid. The monomaniacal plastering of Rimbaud's face across any body whose image happened to dwell in my room induced in me a similarly exhilarating claustrophobia to that which I first experienced (many years later) upon reading about the panopticon gaol, never implemented, oft-cited in the works of Michel Foucault... I knew that Rimbaud could see me from every angle, engage with every cell of my disgusting heart from every conceivable perspective, the vulnerability this galvanised only prompted my erotic fantasies to turn ever more submissive, geared towards embracing the big nothing, being nothingness, I dreamed of occupying a suspended nothing state, the most sublime passivity. In these revised fantasies, Rimbaud would stab at me with implements, regarding my asshole as little more than an archive of data, which he'd probe and unravel, dissect, plunder, devastate with every implement at his disposal. I'd become the vortex into which all matter poured, the ever-evasive vessel where maybe truth might dwell. He'd rip at me with teeth, knives, nails, fill my every fibre with his flavours and complexity, we'd fuse into a single, third entity, receptacle and analyst, woven together into a symbiotic fabric of learning; a cosmic equation so perfectly wrought, that when I did eventually glimpse absolute nothingness, the terror I felt kicked me into the most profound orgasm, a literalised little death. I'd emerge from the reverie exhausted, sweating, infernal, quivering with a cocktail of terror, relief, universality, insularity.... The first time it happened, I didn't talk to anyone for a month, so convinced was I of the intransferability of the knowledge I'd acquired. I recognised that knowledge could only ever be intuited, and that any attempt to express it would be as codified into hiding as the seventy-two permutations of the host's name in Hebrew. True knowledge rests in the intangible interplay of ideas, fused into inseparability, held together by the tension which threatens to tear them apart, flinging them into wildly oppositional orbits... so I muted myself, opted to starve for a month, whenever hunger pangs arrived I'd masturbate, and at least be sated conceptually.

He takes the knife, perforates the smooth, white, back with seventy-two shallow punctures, suckles at each of them, rips them open into blooming carnations of upturned skin and underlying viscera. Twisting the head around, the crackling of the spinal column is audible as its natural pivot is exceeded; the boy envelops the dead mouth in a lush, impassioned kiss, swallowing every perfume available, at one point, grabbing a clump of hair, he tears the head back and stares into the eyes - still open - as though attempting to decipher a posthumous signal, a postcard from the beyond he'd only get to appreciate once his own analytical faculties were subsumed by the eternal, and thus rendered incapable of reporting back. His poems would be intangible, interstellar missives, multi-dimensional satellites plummeting through all the tangible atmospheres into sea, alien junk deposited arbitrarily by a God desperate for his superior knowledge to be articulated, tragically assured that such dense otherworldy messages can only be half-intercepted by recipients so ill-equipped for paradox and incongruity, so corrupted by a rationalist epidemic, that only a crude, self-immolating grasp of the poet's distilled and infernal purity could ever be sanctioned. And so the boy, through both tears, and the iron conviction of his intensely focused will, enfolds himself in a rage of ruptured skin, sweat, blood, semen, hair, bile, snot, shit, saliva, viscera, bone, cartilege, to make something into nothing and at least semi-knowable. And we fuse into a moment, an orgasm so potent as to jolt the cosmos into reconciling every dimension into...a superior state of being known through the vile sculpting of language as 'experience'. And we never had to leave my room.

Nick Hudson.