Tongue Waggery

What stilted foolish pride that spittles from your lips. Black heresy of rationality to connect imaginary dots. There is not water wet enough to make your mouth moist. In all this air, all this hot hot air the things that steam forth from out your teeth melts the fruit of calm.

The fruit of calm. That calamity of peace and stillness. It is bright and dim, never enough light to offend, never enough darkness to disturb a man's voyage. The fruit of calm is growing abundantly and your opinions are weeds, an ocean of weeds descending upon my crop. My labor of peace. My divine stillness is saddened by your sensitive tongue waggery. Your poverty would be cured by this fruit. Your reckless understanding which blinds many men is curable with this fruit.

This tart, sweet, still, bright and beautiful fruit. When you are over your sickness and laboring in the orchards of peace you and I, together, we will cut out your tongue. Fertilized the soil with it. Crushed and ground, spread out over the seeds. With patience your tongue will be watered. It will grow with the fruit, mature, ripen, juicy.

Grind and whirring makes my lips.

It's not a soft thing, it's not a delicate thing. It's coarse but weightless and it's all morning and all afternoon and it's oils and labor. Gavin Masterson thinks precious thoughts are cloud like and sweet things are moist. It's dark, it's available, it's ready when burnt. It was a plant, it was a commodity. It will come and go and come and go forever.

You're a rotten peach. Get it?

Under the faucet the peach goes. Over the peach the water goes. Gavin Masterson prepares the fruit for his mouth and the water runs off of the fuzz and down the drain. The peach, previously dull and soft, illuminates as it is massaged. Scrubbing illuminates and the peach grows more promising to his eyes. "How good you will taste, how colorful you become as I get to know you. I know you will be juicy and I know I will wash my hands when I finish." The bruises on the fruit are amplified, suddenly visible, more imperfect, darker and bolder they grow under the water. The reds are the Sun. The yellows are the Sun. The bruises are the bruises.

Flick the hands dry. Dry the hands dry. The first bite, the unavoidable suck and slurp. "Strings, cellular, I hope to not get so sticky." Gavin leans over the sink to finish the fruit. Suck and slurp. The bruises have no taste, his mouth and tongue ignore his eye's order of prominence. A sweet cellular, a sweet string, a pinch of sweet and the juice pops from the fruit and spits on his hands. The reds are the Sun, the yellows are the Sun the cellular is the Sun the bruises are the Sun and it sits soft in his mouth far from his eyes.

Instant cure for the summer nap sweaty sad-mouth syndrome

Gavin Mastersons eyes are stuck. His mouth is dry and foul. His body is covered in a film of afternoon summer nap, it is sweat, he is not well. Temporarily not well, curable for certain. His eyelids peel off their protectorate. His mouth snaps and closes, sucking and pulling half breaths. His tongue too tepid, too salty, too unnatural to speak. His shoulders walk for him. They navigate out of the bedroom, his left shoulder, his right shoulder, they feel the walls and bounce and bang him from the bedroom to the kitchen.
His body is sour.

There is a one foot tall glass cabinet on the floor of his kitchen. It sits under a tall slender oaken end table, upon which rests a coffee maker. There is no table cloth or cover to hang down over the legs of the table. The view of this glass cabinet and its contents is not obstructed.

Gavin Masterson sits on the floor. Looking into his glass cabinet, his eyes open widest and he opens the door. There is a very tiny tree in the cabinet. A cool air prickles itself over his arms and his face and this refreshment begins. He picks from the tree. He picks grapes from the tree in the cabinet. He eats the grapes.

They snap inside of his mouth. Instantly revived and refreshed he snaps down again and again on the grapes, his hands move faster, pulling picking, snapping, mouthing, chewing. He hears the sound of rice shaken in steel bowls as the grapes mash and shatter juice and heal. His throat declares it's savior, his teeth no longer acrid, his eyes open wide, and the film over his body is gone, his body no longer sour.

Gavin Masterson closes the cabinet on the tree. The cabinet hums and within seconds the tree has sprouted new fruit. They new purple blossoms blink into life and bow the mini vine ever so slightly. "There will not always be such a refreshment," Gavin Masterson mutters as he heads to check the messages from friends who only call when he sleeps. "We must use it while we can I suppose."

Why Wash Hands.

It was a perfect piece of fruit. Half of it already eaten, sticky hands, sweet and tart, Gavin Masterson proclaimed to himself, "This is my most favorite of fruits and perhaps the most perfect thing I will ever put in my mouth." He took another bite knowing that soon the fruit would be gone. He chewed slowly, not wanting to hurry towards the inevitable hand washing. People are punished for good sweets with soap.