MY SKIN IS A DRUM
When an exciting hand brushes your skin, and it sends ripples across the valley of your arm! A rainstorm comes. So soft and soothing and wet, the patter and energy of it dripping down your arm hairs. Imagine then, that your skin is wide and deep like a crater. Image it envelopes landscapes. Every time you swim along my surface, you send sparks so great they could be lightning into the skin of my body. I am everywhere alighted and it quiets me and scares me.
Don’t you see that I am the drum for so many? There are great beings, wise and hungry, that graze my skin and nuzzle into me. Some have been gone so long from these flatlands that they have become ancient myths. But I remember their grateful and lapping tongues on me. They only exist now as memories in the earth, as fossils. The rest of us mourn for them, we who have been around since the last sunburst.
So life drums on my tight skin, with their feet or feathers or mouths. Pum. Pum. Pum. They drum and they pulse and together we make a melody that strikes the hearts of all the little people swimming in the undergrowth, and the undergrowth itself, which is my sinewy muscles. That song holds purpose. It is a voice whispering that I am your mother and everything is okay. That you are my sister, and everything is okay. That our bones are shared houses carrying life forward into the unclasping hands of time.
But then you, the two-footed ones that don’t have any feathers and yet try to soar like the great geese, you are breathing all the oxygen. You hyperventilate. In and in and in, sucking too much up into your lungs. And I worry for you. You build bigger than the beaver. And you try to replicate like the tiniest micro-organism. I worry for all of the creatures you aspire to become and also to surpass. What will be left for them? To be more like them, must you consume them entirely? To envy them, must you take their essence into you?
My good friend tells me that you call yourselves people. As though you’re the only ones. That you call yourselves intelligent. But as a body, and as a mother and as creation, I know that all these lifes in me, tiny or enormous, that make up my organs and my tendons and my digestion, that they are worthy of this sunlight and this oxygen, too, and rainstorms on their skin. They are worthy of being people. And they are suffocating. So I know I must go.
I hope the people, the ones with all that air in their lungs, I hope they can understand my decision. I know they like to dip their toes in me. I know my waters make them feel alive and at peace. I have heard their thunderous laughter, bellies trying to release all that trapped air. So I hope they will be okay without my waters and my skin to glide along, that allows them to release all that pent up energy. And if they are angry with me, I hope they don’t punish the others, the rich clay and the earthworms and the pebbles and who else? Who am I forgetting? Oh there’s just too many. All of them, all my other bodies. I hope they will be safe.
Text by Brendon Goodmurphy
Recording by Rosa Roser
This piece is part of the 48H Neukölln exhibition, FINDING WHAT IS LOST (2023), located at Projektraum Altes Finanzamt.
MY SKIN IS A DRUM
When an exciting hand brushes your skin, and it sends ripples across the valley of your arm! A rainstorm comes. So soft and soothing and wet, the patter and energy of it dripping down your arm hairs. Imagine then, that your skin is wide and deep like a crater. Image it envelopes landscapes. Every time you swim along my surface, you send sparks so great they could be lightning into the skin of my body. I am everywhere alighted and it quiets me and scares me.
Don’t you see that I am the drum for so many? There are great beings, wise and hungry, that graze my skin and nuzzle into me. Some have been gone so long from these flatlands that they have become ancient myths. But I remember their grateful and lapping tongues on me. They only exist now as memories in the earth, as fossils. The rest of us mourn for them, we who have been around since the last sunburst.
So life drums on my tight skin, with their feet or feathers or mouths. Pum. Pum. Pum. They drum and they pulse and together we make a melody that strikes the hearts of all the little people swimming in the undergrowth, and the undergrowth itself, which is my sinewy muscles. That song holds purpose. It is a voice whispering that I am your mother and everything is okay. That you are my sister, and everything is okay. That our bones are shared houses carrying life forward into the unclasping hands of time.
But then you, the two-footed ones that don’t have any feathers and yet try to soar like the great geese, you are breathing all the oxygen. You hyperventilate. In and in and in, sucking too much up into your lungs. And I worry for you. You build bigger than the beaver. And you try to replicate like the tiniest micro-organism. I worry for all of the creatures you aspire to become and also to surpass. What will be left for them? To be more like them, must you consume them entirely? To envy them, must you take their essence into you?
My good friend tells me that you call yourselves people. As though you’re the only ones. That you call yourselves intelligent. But as a body, and as a mother and as creation, I know that all these lifes in me, tiny or enormous, that make up my organs and my tendons and my digestion, that they are worthy of this sunlight and this oxygen, too, and rainstorms on their skin. They are worthy of being people. And they are suffocating. So I know I must go.
I hope the people, the ones with all that air in their lungs, I hope they can understand my decision. I know they like to dip their toes in me. I know my waters make them feel alive and at peace. I have heard their thunderous laughter, bellies trying to release all that trapped air. So I hope they will be okay without my waters and my skin to glide along, that allows them to release all that pent up energy. And if they are angry with me, I hope they don’t punish the others, the rich clay and the earthworms and the pebbles and who else? Who am I forgetting? Oh there’s just too many. All of them, all my other bodies. I hope they will be safe.
Text by Brendon Goodmurphy
Recording by Rosa Roser
This piece is part of the 48H Neukölln exhibition, FINDING WHAT IS LOST (2023), located at Projektraum Altes Finanzamt.