C34
Collective Memory
Excerpt from novella: the mosquito says to the leaf, “am i in a trap?”

we found out how to extract

their poison and control it.
it turns out if you get enough of this stuff together
and shove it in you all at once
the numbing effect of the mosquito’s saliva
fills your whole body with
a quiet
which cannot be otherwise described.
the hallucinations are spiritual and guaranteed
with every dose of it.
i have learned more about myself
in two weeks with this saliva
than any other point in recent memory.

the proceeding itch, however, is
utterly unbearable.
it’s as if your veins yearn to be scratched from the inside
and the only thing that can cure it is
more numbing.
the trick, you learn, is to sting yourself just enough
that it numbs out the itch of the sting,
but not so much that
next time you need to use even more,
and so forth.

communicating while stung is difficult
because tangents are unnecessary in
stingy thought.
two stung persons communicating
,
and the other participant is able to accept the fact
that there will be scattered thought,
just as they are able to accept that
one of you will forget what you are talking about
at least once. these are side-effects.

a stung person communicating with another stung person
is mesmorizing and beautiful.
each will take large leaps in their thought processes,
that the other person inebriant
understands immediately.

a stung person communicating with an unstung person, however,
is nearly impossible because of these lapses in linear thought.

the side effects wane
after seventy-two hours of last use;
and yet it is an epidemic.

the sting is weighty,
sinking one into one’s self
floatingly and warmly held.
thought is unencumbered
and free-flowing,
some of it healing,
most of it forgotten.
that’s the greatest downfall of the drug,
you can have all of these great thoughts
but then forget them before you have a chance
to write them down.

it’s fucked with the food chain, our addiction.
we’ve done it,
and now the eco system’s going to collapse,
because each time it takes a little more
until you’ve ground up an entire pond’s worth
of quitos for a single night of numb.
not even a whole night.
maybe a few hours or something.

next thing you know the mosquito-eaters die off
then all these birds start to go
then the dead fish
and it just keeps going from there.

if there is anything a human can do
it is drain a resource
uninhibitedly.

Samson Manoah