Word of Mouth
by George
Sparling
That’s
not my mouth you’re using, is it. I’m
the only person inside, right. Wrong. I seal my
lips shut, clamp my teeth, but still your tongue
moves within. But they’re not your lips and
tongue, they’re mine. I’ve used them
all my life. Your tongue slipped around my
eyetooth and couldn’t see what you were
saying. Old sayings are eternal.
Though I think
the words I speak are mine, outside agitators
hijacked them, usurping ownership of my mouth. I
seek no wider territory except my mouth. When I
say, stop mouthing off, that means you. I heard
you tonight as I brushed my teeth; you slid
between my teeth as I flossed. I’m not you
and have no major complaints in life, but get the
hell out of my mouth.
I’m not
paranoid, but wouldn’t an invasion, using my
mouth as Nazi Quislings and their collaborating
mouthpieces, make one approximate paranoia? These
are my lips, voice box, tongue, glottal stop,
teeth, and palate. You’re foreign: you have
no passport or visa, probably you first entered
my mouth as the dental hygienist cleaned my teeth.
You’ve employed high tech surveillance,
hampering my ability to speak my own mind. My
mouth’s guerrillas will hit you where
you’re most vulnerable.
A dental
filling rattled around today and I spit it in the
garbage. If you like, I’ll send a suicidal
bomber after I can be certain it’s your
mouth he blows up. Catastrophes bring out
opportunities; the insurgency builds like plaque
on my teeth, but not your plaque.
Have you heard
me literally speaking in tongues? You moved my
lips then, now telling me don’t make puns,
the lowest sense of humor. I simultaneously spoke
as you chewed me out for being lowbrow, and I
said this: Move outta here, you have nothing to
lose but my mouth. Russia lost its soviet
republics and you’ll also surrender
territories you once had.
When you tell
the world that I have violent thoughts,
you’re an accomplice to murder. It’s
not I who has to serve time in a Super Max, but
you. Today, when I introduced a fake stutter your
mouth wasn’t prepared for, you crept in
through my nostrils, not unlike a prisoner force
fed by a feeding tube, which is torture.
This morning I
gagged, coughed, couldn’t breathe, had an
asthma attack, and nearly choked to death. But
that disaster killed you, a morsel of food jammed
down your throat. Thankfully, a companion
administered the Heimlich maneuver, reached from
behind and pulled hard on my stomach, and the
obstruction ejected from my mouth. My insurgents
then rescued me. They lobbed a peach pit into
your windpipe, and it choked you to death.
After all,
speaking for myself, what are friends for.
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