My Tooth Is The Point From Which The World Unfolds

Anatomically:
My tooth is covered in semi translucent Enamel. It’s the hardest material of our bodies.
It protects the also hard, but sensitive Dentine and beneath it: the soft, living Pulp:
The core where our teeth have the capability to sense / feel.

Together, the Pulp and Dentine contain our DNA,
and it resides there far beyond our physical deaths.

...which makes its "DNA an excellent means for identifcation of unidentifed human
remains": Identifcation on terms that don’t consider a language of adequacy in
complexity...
At the best, my DNA, these layered teeth, are an always partial translation of
something always in movement.

Especially because this is a "departure from the straight and narrow, [the possibility of]
new futures"¹

My tooth is
The point from which the world unfolds.

In search for orientation, for a line to follow that hasn’t been lived, I’ll get my tongue to trace behind my heel and leave a slippery path.

For the bigger picture:
It took me a week in nausea wondering whether i got the right to let my fingernails tap the keyboard with unfinished thought.
And then another few trying to translate into words.
Like, 1) still passing for 10years below my gvmt age apparently
and 2) working hard not to lose the softness that used to inhabit my face cuz 3) the air is freezing my cheeks stuck
and 4) HOW DO YOU WRITE
IF ALL YOU’VE GOT ARE FRACTIONS OF LANGUAGES
and you haven’t replaced any of your teeth with prosthesis for meaning and/or accuracy???

There are options, millenium-old options from across the globe:
-The tooth made from cosmologically powerful gold
-Or silver

-The tooth made from purifying jade,
-the ones threaded together with gold wire

-Or the ones that are dented and filled with round gold plates

Would you engrave your teeth with tender warnings for your body not to be torn in opposite directions by definitions when language has left you?

I need them to know that we are physically here without ever having been allowed to move past the moment of our arrival,

because alla my black and brown clown zaddies, queer clowns of color, and those who aren’t clowns at all
those who depart from the straight and narrow have (had to) master/ed that trick, and the opposite.

with my jade tooth in cheek, because
prosthesis is semiosis, the making of meanings and bodies, not for transcendence, but for power-charged communication², where

Mobility means translation.

I enjoy getting lost in an outside of the outside and losing what little sense of self
I still possess in the multiple contradistinctions of being.³

A departure from the straight and narrow⁴ and a contrast between the pathologisation of racialised immobility and the celebration of queer mobility⁵

It’s not about fixed location in a reified body, but about nodes in fields,⁶ slippery paths leading to inflections in orientation.

I just want to point towards a lack; and towards the fact that
Identity drag is not just a means of survival but a way of inserting the joy back into detachment.⁷

v femme on some days actually, but what we know best is clown face - the only full face of make up that I know -
clown Daddy and femme clown and the clown that actually isn’t one at all, are all the same,

the clown zaddy with the gold tooth dipped in about 40 layers of enamel just to be sure you’ll have the time to reflect before getting to my DNA, because all of these are still just fragments.

My tooth,                    is where language and body meet, they melt to a layered
making of meaning.
All of my words pass through them,
                                    and I regularly bite off more than I can chew.

Anatomically, yes, my tooth is covered in Enamel. It’s harder not only than bone,
but harder than any alienation in the form of air so cold that lungs freeze and breaths stagnate.

The Enamel protects the Pulp and Dentine, which contain our DNA and feelings.

If this is where the last bit of excess of my language is absorbed before leaving my
body, it is also the point of the biggest potential of preciseness,

an always partial translation of something always in motion, rejecting any one language as standard for conversions⁸

My tooth is
The point from which the world unfolds.⁹
"if orientations point us to the future, to what we are moving toward, then they also keep open the possibility of changing directions,
of finding other paths, perhaps those that do not clear a common ground,
where we can find hope in what goes astray."¹⁰

“Queer would become a matter of how one approaches the object that slips away,
a way to inhabit the world at the point at which things fleet”¹¹, and where translation is always incomplete.

And prosthesis becomes a fundamental category for understanding our most intimate selves.¹²

...attempts at language.
They build a body, my body, anyone’s body tbh - one that is always “complex and contradictory, structuring and structured.”¹³

and they’re still figuring out what to cling on to for orientation. For now, this is the point from which the world unfolds.
It starts at my tooth, where i’ll pin the point where language and bodies melt to layered symbiosis, the making of meaning and bodies.¹⁴

My pulp, my DNA peeks through semi-translucent Enamel. It’s the hardest material of my bodies.

With age, the enamel peels away, the dentine becomes more and more exposed. A journey, too, relies upon a frame.¹⁵

My tongue traces behind my heel and leave a slippery path, to map the “spatiality of sexual desire of geographic subjects whose translocal, rhizomatic and often ephemeral networks defy logic of time and place, opening up the potential of alternative subject and temporal-spatial formations.”¹⁶

It’s often perceived as aimless, excessive, threatening,
as poisoning authentic formations or derailing debates away from the ‘real issues’.¹⁷

...like if my DNA is true     -     it’s just the point from which the world unfolds.