What Use is the Persimmon? – Mike Corrao
February 21, 2020
The PERSIMMON is not ripe.
And your tongue is dry.
Performance of drinking water.
Your socks are always wet.
Your fingertips are always pruning.
The delicate caress of metal tears your skin.
We see what’s inside.
Aged meat. Integumentary threads.
Pack the wound with salt.
This is how a butcher cures their cuts.
Do you own a cleaver?
What kind of performance does the cleaver demand?
Take a few passes first.
See how the weight feels in your hand.
Then when you are ready.
Take off the head.
See if you can thud right thru the spine.
If not, that’s okay.
Just rotate the semi-severed head.
And pull it from the socket.
Like uprooting a weed.
The nerves resemble a bulb of ginger.
With obscene growths proliferating from somewhere.
What do you mean?
There are certain um procedures in place.
Slimey open cut-wound.
A PERSIMMON is a ritual object.
A PERSIMMON is an edible talisman.
When arcana is rendered feastable.
Place the segments in your mouth.
Cut by your own hand (cleaver).
The body can easily be augmented.
Made into a new kind of anatomy.
Where the hand is a cleaver.
And the ribs are made from flexible plastics.
It is unnatural but baby does it feel good.
Even under the cut of a heavy hand.
Only a brittle crumb chips away.
But I’m still here unharmed.
Disconnected from whatever neural structure.
Will you build me a palace?
Or perhaps a box of ornaments.
A carefully carved ossuary for my children to keep.
With Tarkovskyan symbols carved on the side.
A knot of thread or a mossy tank.
I smell the leakage.
Navigating abandoned homes.
In the exclusion zone.
My legs are replaced with better legs.
My face is covered in half-healed scars.
Indicated by the noticeable cross-stitching.
When the grain does not match.
Will you begin the performance?
There is no um procedure in place.
The steps are undetectable.
Only visible with the use of certain sleep-induced techniques.
Have you seen the hypnagogic flow?
Entered the trance.
Like it is a desert or a field of dead grass.
When you cut the PERSIMMON.
Touch your finger to the flesh.
And your finger to your tongue.
And see if you can taste the dryness.
Is it ripe enough? Can you taste the sweetness?
We are going to process this and take out the flesh.
Then it is ready. Placed in the wooden chest.
Buried under a heap of drift.
Forgotten about for THIRTY-EIGHT years.
Interior. Wooden Chest.
The PERSIMMON is ENTOMBED.
Fresh planted in the dead-box.
For whatever usage.
For whatever nonsense ritual.
Something to pretend that meat is not meat.
But I do not think this is ideal.
It is good to be made from meat.
The meat is an intricate web of gross.
Gelatinous machine wobbling through a desert.
Let me explain the blood (M Kitchell).
The trance leads you into a lecture hall.
And you feel the urge to vomit.
You open the PERSIMMON box and vomit.
Close shut and let the fluids ferment.
ENTOMBED in a stew of pickles.
Packed with curing salts. Pink sand.
Vibrating eye sockets in a landlocked country.
Someone mentions the benefits of turmeric.
It is a safe place to build a habitat.
There are generous alcoves in the rhizome.
Exterior. Wooden chest.
Sea vegetables cling to the grain.
I feel compelled to build an altar.
Or to create a facsimile of an altar.
Something that is sacred maybe.
An altar is a geographical-object.
It is a thing and a place.
At its most simple, somewhere you can hold.
Is this my attraction to the blood-table?
Let me explain the blood (M Kitchell).
The outer skin is unnecessary.
It can be peeled away and laid over a slab.
Of quartzite or diorite or something porous.
You could do a roll-cut.
Sever the sheet into starched gems.
I feel like I’m holding a bouquet of stones.
The building blocks of an altar.
An altar to the PERSIMMON.
Or an altar activated by the PERSIMMON.
When it is mutilated or ENTOMBED.
Leading the march into an abyssopelagic hell.
Drowning in something.
The hypnagogic trance (e.g. ancient reptilian brain)
The rutabaga is made pungent with age.
I love to steam them.
This is not the fruit of our labors.
What use is the PERSIMMON?
Will it break against the roof of my mouth?
When I press it hard with my tongue.
Against the ribbed interior membrane.
Julienne the raw body. Then soak it in something saline.
There is a beautiful hive of alcoves inside.
What kind of sprouts would you like to grow?
Breaking something gnarly.
Until you have navigated your way towards something tender.
In the morning we eat rice.
And pretend to know the dance.
Whatever arrangement will summon the fruit.
Pierce the skin.
Reveal the innard.
Hobbled mound beneath my gait.
Illuminated by VHS static.
I cannot bear the jarring noise.
I have to watch the lights play in mute volume.
Glaze my eyes with monitor-primaries.
Record codes from the um screen.
Compare these notes to X and Y.
Incorporate them into the performance.
Exterior. Wooden chest.
You and I dance a ring of PERSIMMONS.
Watch the fruit levitate.
The air is stagnant.
You and I are a xenogoth.
Acting like a black goat.
With horns touching the soft underbelly.
And slowly cutting the fruit-skin.
Letting gravity pull flesh through the open slit.
Our performance is an adaptation of organ loss.
The dance of a liver slipping from my abdomen.
Let me explain the blood (M Kitchell).
Pool of thick juice.
The geographical-object humming.
With my teeth clenched.
What do you mean?
I swim in my own blood-loss.
Let an iridescent skin form.
And drag my finger over it.
Collecting matter.
My fingerprints disappear.
The dunes flooded by cake and dust.
Medium hugging mold.
A heat-reversible adhesive on the surface.
Weighed down with pewter bars.
Do you want something heavier?
The PERSIMMON burst under pressure.
But baby does it um feel good.
Interior. Wooden chest.
I am slapping my skull on the grain.
There are two kinds of people.
In my youth my arm-bones suture.
They make one thick bone.
That cannot be broken or cracked.
Like a rib of plastic.
Or a kevlar stomach lining.
Three bullets are found outside your tent.
Will you feed me a PERSIMMON?
So I can taste the dry unripeness?
And sever its bulb under the guillotine.
Watch the juices saturate into the exposed flesh.
A film forms.
Sheathing a temporary skin.
Let me explain the blood (M Kitchell).
It is a repetition of bodily motion.
Thinned / heated slime in the veins.
You look like a fool in Lear.
Prophetic and full of shit.
While I screw plates to my bone-shard lip.
What a lovely thought.
The stanza is a tool for marching.
For mimicking the descent into an ugly cave.
Or carrying your loved ones to the grave.
What a lovely thought.
Interior. Wooden chest.
The ossuary contains fruit-marrow.
Sea air dries the exterior.
A stanza can be used for spelunking caves.
A textual cave lacks texture.
The PERSIMMON is a means of tactility.
It is familiar in its softness.
I can feel it in the breathing walls.
When it is dark and I am ENTOMBED.
What kind of mess can be built from Fuyu?
Or scaffolded by Hachiya?
I will dig my way out from the grave.
I will dig my way deeper into the earth.
Until I have penetrated the crust and discovered the hollow interiors.
A weaving of caves.
A stagnance of dance steps.
I think it is beautiful when I break my teeth on the floor.
When we have a dinner of rice.
A breakfast of rice. A lunch of rice.
The PERSIMMON is a tool for sweetening your meals.
ENTOMBED under starch.
Concealed under THIRTY-EIGHT grains.
The appeal of a fresh altar.
Maybe it comes from the unuse.
From the lack of blood / the lack of history.
We have arrived here teleologically.
Let me explain the blood (M Kitchell).
A stanza can be laid on the table.
Like it is a serpent or an eel.
And cut into segments for consumption.
The eel-sacrifice might have Persian origins.
Like Hekate’s black dog.
Which we throw into the open air.
Where it levitates momentarily.
Then quarters and evaporates.
The essence-black-dog penetrates your lungs.
This stanza is a thread of nose hair.
Speckled with mucous.
It hangs too far.
Its length is too fragile.
The PERSIMMON begs for its severing.
So that we might find ourselves.
Lost in the cave below.