A negative feedback loop. Petroglyphs and door flips. Petrichor — a savage feedback loop — a savage republic. Put out the fire.
Frying in its own fat. Permafrost melting. The warming leading to fire. Fire and friars with intention — without compunction — never knowing regret.
All portent from here. The dark briars thick with illness.
Without agency — a magnificent disaster — falling and implicated. Smothering never staying. Praying without saying a thing. Prattling.
Sneak a chunk up your pant leg — white hot and abrupt. A life of impunity ends abruptly on a moonless dirt road. This country is vast and vacuous.
What I’m Reading:
I set out in the blue American night, this stupid sparkler raised in my fist. Electroshocked dandelion. Smoke columns over the sock factory giving the moon that Inness blur. No we’re not falling. Things are just floating back where they belong.
If you insist I write at least 100 words everyday in this space, then, here goes: if I started at one hundred and started to count down until I had written another 99 words in this space then it would go something like this.
Somewhere around this point I’d have 50-some-odd words left to finish. Then I’d think hard and deep about concision, and how I’d write something meaningful in the space left to me—always being aware that 100 words is a minimum, and I could always write beyond that.
I’m not limited to 100 word stories, 100 word poems, or 100 word micro-essays—I could elaborate and reel off well beyond 100 words!
And then there’d be the picayune issue of extending the verbiage by writing “one hundred words” v. “100 words” every time I mentioned it—I’d add a word at every mention, further diminishing the pressure (the burden) to get to 100 words. Then, I’d want to know if (parenthetical) words would count against the self-imposed word count.
Then I’d come to my senses, my thumbs getting tired from poking at the gorilla glass (TradeMarked) on my phone’s writing app—and then I’d wonder just how far along am I? And I’d count (and include the parenthetical words) and find I’m at 223 words—more than the RDA calls for—and then I’d come to a dead stop at 240 words.
Here.
What I’m Reading:
… gulls were the only patrols in the sky; when women in bright dresses walked barefoot or in cheap sandals, in sandals, in sandals instead of boots, before missiles. Before missiles, I, too, loved it all.
— Lyudmyla Khersonska / “When Crimea was still a place of light,”
southerners and vitamins felt on the drumstick artful showers / groovy serializations / trippy visual sexes innovative campground muckrakers shopper-bug cup finches / impulsions on villages
the boyfriend ogres
trippy opiates / closing serializations / including atonal flickering / experimental imagery rectangles compete positive and negative expletives lsd raging from felons of euphoria to intense aquamarine elixirs of the avant-garde
allow your head to be rearranged
What I’m Reading:
They love me. Each morning they fill the strongbox in my chest with grass and salt pellets—I have good hallucinations. I think I am a caterpillar. I think I am a wall. They spray me with anti-freeze, they turn me each spring, I watch the buds spread open, metal lips fluttering.
my nightmares forsaken and bubonic my pestilential inner eye palsied my parsley looks like paisley
i am contusion-adjacent in black the quinces are in the tinderbox and i am ill with the human condition
send colonists and hogsheads o’ vermin we’ll rule the world in a century or two
i apologize for the indemnity of loud nonentities i apologize for the quicksand martini glasses
oh bondage, up yours oh bondage, no more
What I’m Reading:
Maybe it was a revelation. She’d felt so little anything in her life (longing, rage, hope), but out in the elements, with only a protective wrapping of simple cloth, she felt herself part of Earth, moving with it, drifting in outer space.
The Story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.
— Winston Churchill / The Aftermath
I have had my dream—like others— and it has come to nothing, so that I remain now carelessly with feet planted on the ground and look up at the sky— feeling my clothes about me, the weight of my body in my shoes, the rim of my hat, air passing in and out at my nose—and decide to dream no more.
— William Carlos Williams / “Thursday”
At least 35,000 more people died during Europe’s four record-breaking, back-to-back heatwaves this summer than would normally be expected, according to incomplete figures from barely half the continent.
Excess mortality in three of the EU’s larger countries – Germany, France and Spain – alone has already exceeded 25,000, according to the provisional national figures, and experts say the toll will rise significantly once August totals are consolidated.
— Jon Henley / “At least 35,000 excess deaths recorded in Europe’s back-to-back heatwaves” / The Guardian
Here everything is documented. Now we die forever. Now we’re live. What matters is Desire doesn’t keep. This is what life is like when Away.
— Temperance Aghamohammadi / “Behnt: Automata”
Last week, a flash flood in Nepal killed more than 1,000 people and left thousands missing. Today, UNEP published a report saying we’re about to breach the 1.5°C heating threshold countries agreed to limit ten years ago.
The two events are not unrelated. What happened in Nepal is the report’s warnings, translated into real life.
Even the best-case scenario now shows warming peaking at 1.8°C in the coming decades. But if we act now and fast, warming can plateau sooner, and we still have a chance of getting back to 1.5°C or below.
Overshooting 1.5°C and coming back down won’t undo everything. But the report is clear: every fraction of a degree avoided reduces risk. Every year by which overshoot duration is shortened reduces exposure.
Despair is exactly what coal, oil, and gas companies are counting on.
We’re not giving up. Are you with us?
— 350.org / Facebook post
what I am looking for doesn’t matter. that I am looking doesn’t matter. I exert no meaning.
— Donika Kelly / “When The Fact Of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then Youe Are Truly Alongside”
We are, all of us, moving through the void.
— Cal Flyn / The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
What I’m Listening To:
While really we keep on living like monkeys Incredible things are happening in the world Magical things are happening in this world
. . . and with a deep suspiration she set her thumbs to tapping on the gorilla glass:
a disconnect with attainment of desired goals a disconnect with engagement of daily responsibilities a disconnect with realizing this awareness and affecting change
an over engagement with the virtual world a disengagement with the physical world
few, if any, goals are actuated by the aforementioned
it’s fight or flight time . . .
then on with the headphones, on with her iphone, on with sic alps’ message from the law and on she danced to a new transcendence . . .
What I’m Listening To:
I received a notice from the board They were telling me get out, get out
But i worked for me, my rent was cheap I died In the kitchen I cried Barely looking back Squarely on the map
But it’s nothing but crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap Save me
we dream about a walkabout. we exhume gutter politics before they’re buried in the rattle brattle bund. we sling jagged zeugmas. we qualify this and that—our words signify nothing—we fill the interstices with air. the beckon calls for dr. bombay wanted down at zeugmatography go unheeded. we list and keel for what could have been—it inflects every point in our day. it infects every bitter requisition. a far away voice revives a chant:solidarność, solidarność, solidarność—opportunities taken, opportunities missed. a dead man says, a dream has the power to pollute the day. anoxic water is all we find—a blue-green algae, then a blood-red tide. we ramble on with viper thoughts … reality’s dark dream.
What I’m Reading:
We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep; We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;
the muck amuck amok i see faces repeating and repeating in these morning flakes in the bread crusts drear in the wake of your leaving as the motes of particulate air roil about the emptiness you created by vacating this space inside my now soiled heart
a conspiracy of eyes and mouths a cabal of carnal teeth fangs bared and aglow limned by the maw of dark impulses a face in the strawberry preserves jesus laughing at me on the face of the rubbery naan you left on the plate of hashed teeth
What I’m Reading:
but my hand is full of words like grass perforating the old lattice
leave your eggs here in the helix of my ear safe in the ‘world-class banking scheme’
thee istsfor manity reader 