You threw the noose over a rugged hook of igneous rock, protruding about 10 feet up and slick on the underside where the curdled water, like gone off gravy, had gathered all the local bacteria. You, you, you. Yes, you might not have meant to arrive at this outpost, far as it was from your usual routes, you are a linguistic gooseberry, seeping thick sticky into the world you think up. You let language guide you, and the paths become well-trod, least resistance etc. Your steps like words, you move like a sentence and even catch yourself at times marvelling in the accumulation into paragraphs, essays and novels. The erotica of time collected and banked, no seepages, no spillages, just viscous liquid time drip-dripping directly into your swelling libido. The first few times the noose never stuck, you kept trying, frustrated though you were, didn’t you. Sucking on those gross bonbons of lemon sherbet, strawberry daiquiri and toffee. Toffee was your favourite right? Chomp, slap, slicky, licky-suck, hoovering up the excess saliva so it filtered through the E numbers and became a toffee flavoured gob, which you swallowed in delight, aloud and with no inhibitions. Glibbering down the phone, you polished harsh instructions all greased with that fine saliva, more from the front of the mouth, something about fixings and claddings. Coddled clod of eggy earth you had smeared above your brow line in 3 small vertical strips and one from left cheek across nose-bridge to right cheek, like a lead singer, which you are not and will not ever be. This for what purpose, to make your activity seem more ritual than crime? Like high-vis for doing undercover, unofficial interloper billboard changes from car ad to giant image of your own anus, like you did in 1995. Without getting caught because, well high-vis, so.
As you took another attempt to sling the noose, you had an idea, slip down that crevice there and find a sheen of smarmy mud, pick it out of the flayed sandstone nostril below and rub it with old Murdoch rags until all gloopy, not gleaming but heavy matt and then add a wad to the noose end for extra ballast to be removed at the next convenient moment. You couldn’t remember the name for what you were about to do, the process, so you didn’t do it, fearing the unnameable as though it was godless. Anyway, your harness had become sticky and gunked, the central carabiner jammed up from the splashback of that sap you had tapped earlier, thinking it was maple syrup you could’ve used. So the most pressing task first, you thought, like you don’t start from the middle of a sentence or novel, do you? Yes the most pressing task became the smeared harness, those cleats in the sandstone bits would need relocating and that would mean a total repositioning of most of the apparatus. You quelled your grave hunger by poking the last two iced buns into your ulcerated mouth, chewing carefully. Then you went about fixing the problem, first you removed the sticky bits with a wet wipe, discarding each wet wipe as it became too full of the honeyed material, as you idled through the task your mind wandered, you imagined a language consisting only of adjectives. All the gear cleared of blockages, you used the sandstone forearm as a place to clip in for the night and set up your suspended bed using those un-stickied, freshly screwed-on cleats. You were fearful of going back to ground level, the bog had a proper stink which you feared would turn your mind into salt marsh lamb, anyway you hated the idea of your big toe squeezing an ooze of black smug mud between your other toes and necessitating another deep clean of the lingo-less crap from about your operation. That and the nodes of formless matter whose vibrations sent you loopy. So it was for the night you paused the noose slinging and gathered milky strength from the moonlight.