CHRISTOPHER HIGGS’ ORIGINAL:

FIJI & THE GROCERY STORE

A bird and crickets and a parrot and a little boy on an oxygen
machine. The hum of the tone. The constant breathing of the baby.

This forest is dense with suburbia. This constant is nagging. Pay attention to the signs. Look both ways. Pirates make quick meals of tourists, if you are not careful you are bound for broke down passageways or worse jail time until September. This is March by the way. You must suffer for your allergies. Make it a point of breaking up the ice on the sidewalk where jugglers pay fifteen dollars to the milkman for pieces of Chinese cloth, hermetically sealed amphibian bile ducts, and phone cards capable of contacting Mars.

We all swap peanut butter, we all sell cakes. We all make boisterous, reprehensible statements. Gather the berries. Pick the flinch, milk the sardine cans for the scum of their innards. I make haste and hesitate, my goodness! My alphabetized goodness! My unrequited goodness! I declare. Make it official, sound it out, put your payment in a pink envelope and hand it to the munchkin guarding the door to the canopy-dropped misaligned delusion. Fetch your own porridge. Jack the gilded filament relevantly, repeatedly, no matter the ill responses. Downplay the mercenary compunction floating around, the rice bread and sourdough pudding.

My idea is the opposite of sedimentary. My idea is the opposite direction. My idea is the realignment of satellites. Hear the organ? Where did the organ come from How could you? Who gave you permission?

Turn off the lights and evacuate the cinema.

Who designated you ambassador? Who tie-handed you the golden challis of night?

I lambaste the ambusher. Periodically. My noon is the five of July. My salvation. Eat gruel and call it gourmet macaroni. Pay the fidgets. Eat the multiple of twelve or make a difference. Eat a ton of raw uncooked division. Multiple. Make a polynomial sit down and behave, make an elephant the mayor of the slaves. Eat alphabets. Eat vaccines and pidgins on parade. Eat an unemotional condition.

This unmade mate in the winter salutation. This quadratic equation. My hope is that the great and fall of Jupiter comes sooner than the ballet moves from town to town. Make all kinds of appoints. Try to understand. Call an all points bulletin. Nail down the ecclesiastical conditions. Make blank appointments, eat bullets and laughing fat men in greasy containers. I’m just trying to understand this cocktail party mentality. This banal of all evenings.

My choice is the plunge of a neckline. Shades of repetition. Shades of we all swap peanut butter, we all sell cakes. We all make boisterous, reprehensible statements. This life is on a loop. We are not “real” – we are waves of reverberation, echoes through the cave we call “our lives.” We are not dancing. We are breathing. We are nothing but feedback loops. We register only in pulse. We cannot be said to continue. We suddenly begin and end. We magically appear. How else to describe it? Try to understand. These upset gimmickry behaviors. These unintelligible sentences full of hermetically sealed amphibian bile ducts. All things considered. A little immature. The conversation is being manipulated, stretched out and compressed, it slows down it quickens. The gold in the voices becomes resplendent and conversely proportional to upset, coffee table backdoor greeting card instruction booklets, trying to understand. A laugh a billion laughs a meaning for the meaning of my meaning.

You want the answer I cannot forgive the vampire for forgetting. Stake the heart of the man, or make a pact to deal the frustrated permission waiver flavored hiccup attack and panic conclusions. Jumpstart the Yorkshire terriers. Clam the gruesome and all things a little immature, try to understand we can’t get upset, murmur, it’s something, we get the information, I’ve had conversations where I don’t even get involved, we can see them, they get upset, the humming, the candor, I believe in the law, no…what is illegal?

I’m trying to understand, getting upset, bikini top, the dream or summer differences parking all things or a little insurance. Trying to understand. Get upset. Make speed of the dream or the cream of the information is so long it seems a deficiency, a ball, it seems assured. I’m trying to understand, trying not to get upset. Slow down. Get white like little information.

You can mark my words with that.

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THE REMIX:

SHADES OF REPETITION

This suburbia is dense with oxygen machines. With little boys and babies. With the constant breathing of babies. The hum of their tone.

This constant is nagging.

This tone is dense with oxygen machines. The constant breathing of babies. The boisterous, reprehensible breathing of babies.

Look both ways. This constant is nagging.

This forest is rife with the swapping of babies. This hum of foliage and here we all sell little boys.

This suburbia is wild with little boys and babies. Pirates make quick meals of little boys and babies. The tone of this crunching. The wilderness of their oxygen escaping.

This country is dense with children. With the life we have been. Turn off the lights and evacuate the cinema.

These children nothing but our emotional condition. But what we have been born.

You must suffer for your babies. The constant wheezing of babies stored within hermetically sealed amphibian bile ducts.

The hum of the tone. This suburbia is dense with the chambers of babies. This zone of constant humming.

Shades of repletion. Shades of—

Gather the children. Gather the world you have been. Pick them for the milk of their faces, for the scum of their innards. Look in all their areas. Learn the tone of their wheezing.

We all swap babies in this suburbia. We carry the bulges of our wives from house to house.

We swap babies from within the bulges of our wives opened. We swap our children for our children. We swap our wives and we swap what we implant in our wives, in this suburbia, this wild, this suburbia of little boys and babies.

This world—

This hum of machines. This crowd of infants and infant flesh. This evening of all banal.

This life is on a loop. These children—

The waves of their tone. The reverberation of our oxygen. The density of their echoes—children crammed and brimming the cave we call “our lives.”

This life is not dancing. This life is a life of children breathing. These children nothing but feedback loops.

Eat this suburbia dense with vaccines and pigeons and infants on parade. Eat an unemotional condition. Eat what you have born.

My idea is the opposite of sedimentary. My idea is the opposite direction. My idea is the realignment of a life returned and returned.

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Remixer’s process: Very early on I became interested in looping various phrases about the children, babies, little boys. I ended up varying the phrases or altering the phrases a little more than I intended, mostly because Higgs’ language offered opportunities that I wanted to indulge.

Looking over the piece at the last minute it occurs to me that creating a sort of feedback with the oxygen machines throughout would have been clever. Alas.