Organ Donor / Meat Market [FIRST DRAFT]

Hey! This is a draft of a piece I performed at an open mic at The Rising in May. It was a lot of fun - thank you to Moi Ko and the bar team who arranged it! It's in a pretty rough state and, though I've written 'FIRST DRAFT' in the title, I'm probably not going to be working on this one anymore. Still, it was fun while it lasted! Enjoy!

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The kitchen is all cold tiles and teak cabinets. Stacks of pots and pans line the floor with me in the middle, sacrificial centre of the pentagram. There was once a food smell also, now air-blasted out by years of open windows. But there are memories: handling raw meat, sucking its stray juices off my fingers, brushing with oil, egg, cream, honey, sugar, cinnamon, breath, sizzling, blowing out heat, shaking trays free from the oven, unloosing myself.

I start by untying my hair. I bow towards the cooker and smile as I recall the former threat of flames. This time I coax the fire into burning every strand, waft and ease it up, tickle it, tease it so it runs like squealing kids in a playground.

Then, when I am completely singed, I tap my left thumbnail’s tip with my right-hand index finger, wiggle back and forth back and forth. The nail loosens; a small amount of force, a little fidget, a squeeze and a grip and one quick yank. She is up and out of her bed. Awake, I let her settle and I descend upon the others.

When out, I arrange them in the spice rack, smallest to largest, left before right. Left thumb, right thumb, left pinky, right pinky, all the way up to the middle. My toenails are next.

Afterwards, a blowtorch to the eyebrows. From creme brulée the smell still sticks to the mouth even though I often fail to caramelise the sugar; it’s all out of gas but I’m too sick from aches to stand the trip to any oil-supplier or homeware store for refills. Yet with gurgling flame I strip my brows of all offending hairs.

Then there is skin. You find the softest part to push your fingers in, supplicate with flesh, claw through to organs, and snatch it off like a tablecloth. You will display it, piece by piece, limb by limb, armskin, legskin, torso, head. Beneath the nails, upon the chopping board, one more row on the floor.

I negotiate with wobbly vitals, pluck out bones. Soft tissues go in pans, slow cookers, kettles, and toasters, wherever one can cram the odd pancreas or loose appendix. All else is ordered: bone with bone, nail with nail, skin with skin, tooth with tooth. Only the meat is unruly. It has to be contained.

And once I’m laid out on the floor, after flesh and bone and blood, after time, height, weight, and breath, after heartbeats, stretches, wanderings, malingerings, eating, drinking, cutting, slicing, dicing, tearing, ploughing, pissing, shitting, kissing, fucking, falling, now all I can do is the thing that I want. Now I can think.