For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

mouth.
Do you even have a mouth?
[...]
[...]
Would that matter?
– If you didn’t have a mouth? Perhaps – and this like
smoking, like drugs, like certain sexual practices, like liver – so
long as you’ve tried it once, so long as you once harboured a
mouth, I reckon this’ll work. – So long as you’ve tried a mouth
out before, so to speak; so long as you’ve let stuff in, expelled stuff
via a mouth – shoved a salty finger in there to retrieve a nugget
of wet-wadded crisp pulp from a craterous molar, felt the relief
of removing a too-thick strand (sinew, herb, hair, other) from
between two of the more plate-like teeth, suffered an ulcer or a
cut or bitten a lump of cheek clean off, or temporarily disabled
the tongue with a bite meant for other, dead meat; burnt your
tongue to leave it craving abrasive, toast-like textures; detained
something in there – smoke, an egg, a momentary orb of spring
water; expanded the mouth and proceeded to aerate and cool
some scalding morsel of [...]; performed that particular sucking
moue – matched by, MAYBE, a look of utter contempt in the
eyes – concentrating the saliva in your mouth into that depression
in the tongue solely conjured for the purpose of spitting;
similarly, hawked up some tough, slimed chunk from a sinusoidal
passage to complement or empower or justify the spitting
– so long as you’ve confused the scale of things in there...
Most importantly is for you to have some appreciation
for the complexity of the tongue: To have licked an ice cream, a
plate, softened wood, a clitoris, a stamp, a wound, a penis, etc.
So long as you can appreciate something of the mouth and its
tongue hegemony, then when that word, ‘smoke’, reaches into