15 October 2017

The Labret, part one (from "earth~spirit")

recorded January 17, 2012

“You have to take that out… It’s going to prevent conception.”
       The voice was very strong, and familiar tone. On the left side of my head it echoed.
       “No!” I whined in protest like a little child, “I like it.”
       It was winter, mid winter, January, 2000. We hadn’t moved into the big trailer, like the others. We had our cozy love nest down below. But we had no bathroom in there, or running water, and just a little electric heater, the lead cord running up to the main trailer where we were, using the bathroom, at least when the pipes hadn’t frozen. They were frozen now.
       I stood in the bathroom looking at my face in the mirror, in an almost nightly ritual of cleaning my labret piercing. A steel rod jutted out from under my bottom lip, with a steel round ball fastened at the end. Just like a new ear ring piercing, I had to clean it regularly with an alcohol saturated qtip to prevent infection. I had the bathroom door locked. I could hear the men a few paces away in the small living room of the double wide, coughing on the reefer smoke that was the only staple of Life that was available on this so called commune.
       “Prevent conception?” And even I feigned protest each night the voice came and spoke the same words into my left ear, I knew somewhere in my being that this was already written, somewhere, somehow. But I played the game with the bearer of the message, “You have to take that out, it’s going to prevent conception.”
       For two weeks I played cat and mouse with my invisible antagonizer. My ego against them. I liked this piercing. It made my chin lift up, the way cool rap or rock stars always posed for photographs. It was tough. Sexy. Rebellious. I felt a sense of confidence with my chin raised off the ground because of this steel rod in my flesh.
       But then, I knew. One night, after my routine cleaning, I unscrewed the ball from the thread at the outside, and I pulled the steel rod up and out from the inside of my lower lip. I didn’t know what it meant, or why I was doing this. I just knew that I could no longer disobey. (part 2 coming...)

No comments: