I see you across the barren parklet. You are eating bits of soft pink flesh.
My hair wilts. Your curls frizz.
I lick the hot sauce off my fingers. You yell that you are an arriviste.
I scream that I was once part of the noblesse oblige and waved banderitas.
You warble an Edith Piaf song. I huff gas out of a brown paper bag.
You sing two registers too low. My viscera gurgles. I pee my pants where I stand — mud puddles form around my feet.
Tomorrow you will sign away your inalienable rights for a used 78 rpm record of “Thee Infanticide Blues.” I will strum The Hits of the Borscht Belt Songbook tonight on my ukulele.
The gloaming hour.
I leave a minute after you do.
You to your elevator shaft. Me to my abandoned mine.
Dark. Wasteland.
We may meet again next year.
What I’m Reading:
Every nation is scared of the truth of what they have done to others.
(First, you’ll find intercalated pustules of censer smoke ringed by ferrules of frankincense in your heart. They were placed there by us. Do not panic.)
Travel.
And when lost abroad …
You’ll find mussels in Malmo in an impossibly dry place.
Dresden is everything it’s cracked up to be, you’ll find Friday morning virgins there on Sunday afternoon.
Milan is … well … Milanese—and that is inauspicious—the rain incessant and the shops shuttered.
Don’t waste your time in Barcelona. You’ll find the last remaining speaker of Njerep there, displaced, and waiting for the placement of the final trencadis tile at the pinnacle ofthe Sagrada Familia.
Avoid the French.
In Lisbon the fog is impossibly thick and it smells of something long forgotten.
Decamp for home from the marshes of London.
Practice the cathecism of free markets, derivatives and tranches.
Breathe deep the smells of amok-capitalism in the morning (essence of napalm available for an additional fee).
AND sing the anthem—early and often.
Oh, the places you’ll go!
What I’m Reading:
Where do you find the parts to make yourself into some other kind of person? Can it be something you read in a book, a gesture you see on the street? Half-smile of a teacher, the walk of a girl on the beach.
Use this taro chip as your viaticum, the priest says.
Where am I?
In a priest driven ambulance, he says.
Good luck, the one in the passenger seat says.
What are you going to do about the primary explosion? the nurse administering my I.V. asks.
Play it as it lays, another says.
No, you did not leave anything on in the kitchen, yet another says.
So I told them: I put on my tight disco pants, and applied plenty of hairspray. I think there were invaders at the gates. I wrote as fast as I could before midnight. Then I turned into a malevolent parsnip with pomegranate tendencies. I didn’t parry her sari because she asked me nicely not to. Remember that. So I repeated it often through the night to myself. I reminded myself to use my inside voice inside my head. I didn’t have to be so loud. And I made a point of not speaking my internal monologues in front of strangers again.
Amen, the priest said.
What I’m Reading:
Fire-fighting plans for the dead flare up in stereo—there’s more than three voices
in the room, there’s several uncandled persons of good worth and seesaw habits.
A savant mushroom with a seedy past in Africa discovers that its worst fears have come true.
An artisanal clutch of gourmands are out to ambush — deracinate, tear and shred. There are ambuscades forming at the usual fringe mush casinos.
The Order of the Medieval Tamarinds of Chivalry, Tamarins and Rookeries are on high alert.
Two chimeras claim their birthright on a magical bluff—advertisers stumble over each other to sign lucrative sponsorship deals.
You rummage through neighborhoods of kipper prints keen to be deposed.
The first-perversion is an introspection — an accusation of a man’s lifetime in exchange for neutrality.
A successful yachtsman is asked to help solve a locked-rosary rush of the stage — nannies and ninnies need not apply. Although Ned had previously applied for the position of Autocue Presenter and was now baffled.
I arrive at a courtyard with glass eels and aubergines — all are nonplussed and embroiled in pedantic sophistries.
My father’s grating voice keeps counterpoint to mother’s grating of ptarmigan (for the ptarmigan parmigiana).
Busybody pollsters allude to les accents aigus and oleander glower, while vicious workmen heeled in sod transcribe “Hotel California” to Morse Code via ASL.
This is an invocation to prove the innocence of a convicted Shiitake.
During the courtroom sidebar the Asterisk Committee undertakes an undercount of footnotes and bibliographical references.
A mutant blancmange eats a buckeye, then an eclair, an English schoolboy, a darkened alcove, and a memorial to brocaded sofas.
A king’s unfounded jerkin destroys his fanfare and kipper rigging. We are disgusted with meritocracy and resort to meretriciousness for a 10¥ note.
We found deterrents in the aphrodisiacs and asphodels in the aphorisms.
Objections overruled — no one says a word.
What I’m Reading:
near 67th avenue, street of neon says jesus saves and I dream each night, about losing you to routine traffic stops where bullets turn off body cams and graffiti makes you landmark
— D’mani Thomas / “for goldfish that remember seaworld”
I want you to root the violence out of the system, but you delay and acquiesce — this is the heavy-o-sity of our case. There are no life preservers to pass out—only anvils and 50 lb. kettlebells—on this sinking ship. No one about to make the problem commensurate with the premise. I predicate all action on entropy and numbness. Dire warnings and sirens go unheeded . . . while a singular burnt, chainsaw segmented, sequoia lies on the blackened forest floor.
Your charge is lobbed. Disorderly conduct on the Junior Prom floor: enervated dates stare at other, at others dancing; others are blind sullen-staring into cellphone flashlights; some couples herd listless at the punch. A punch or two meted out — uncertain if they are in liquid form or at the knuckle end of a fist.
We’re in a fugue — too many discordant notes — a fug of fanciful boredom. Did you drop that dollar bill? Did you drop the tiny purple microdots? The yellow sunshine?
Have you ever felt like a fatherless waif in the presence of your father?
I’m in need of a case of blues, you say, because a mere carton won’t do.
I’m in need of a reset, I say, in need of a pass, in need of a decade’s worth of do-overs, in need of a full-out pardon!
You say: why proselytize for your lost cause?
I got nothing, I say . . . Sonic Youth is broken up, Morrissey’s a fascist now, and Mark E. Smith is dead. I have no desire to be effusive anymore. I’m changing my middle name to Ennui . . .
Furthermore, aren’t we too old to be at a prom?
What I’m Reading:
For years I will dream lucid dreams of flowers growing from my heels, Borage and Helleborus, peeling off and scattering behind me as I walk, sometimes struggle, through the thick underbrush of a forest. I watch silently as the plants grow up my legs, twist and twine round my body, feel them begin to creep up from inside my throat, pour out of my mouth …
My ancestors crossed The Sahara with rats plagued Rich with penury
ii.
My ancestors arrived in Spain in search of an oasis that was a mirage. The oasis would appear one-half-mile ahead beyond them, and at their arrival disappear. In this way they crossed the Sahara with plague rats in their camel sacks.
At the straits they crossed on a ghost ship, the rats now rich with penury. My ancestors joined the conquest and helped build a minaret in Alhambra. There my ancient Moor forefather raped my ancient Spanish foremother in a rheumatic alleyway infested with the ghost ship’s rats that were on an ascension to the throne.
This was my bountiful bequest that arrived across centuries of impalements to the heart. Now I juggle my multitude of children, every third one floats away on a convection of air that carries them back across the Atlantic to begin the cycle once more.
iii.
We’re going to feed two people Paradox slices— I have Infinite feed. Do they need to be full?
What I’m Reading:
The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
The smoke trees blared their summer green. There was deliberation in her fibrillation. Her heart fluttered like an insensate butterfly—heliotropic, yet abjured to the sun. The world is my pistil, she said—a fluttering cavorting beastie—a moment of proboscis licking nectar drinking. She was forever cofounded by synecdoche and metonymy; and what was metric or metronomic. To the regular clatter of unceasing chatter, the voices in her head crescendoed into a din of metal machine music—and in a mere 23 hours she was home in the northern city again, apparently having brought the southern clime with her. Days of 90-degree weather gerrymandered her senses into discrete ultra-heterodox salamander shapes. Her olfactory was a red eft. Her haptic a hell-bender. No one was offended and no one complained. She would get to the decompression over the coming days. For now there was only exhaustion and an empty psychic tank to refill—and an unstable budgie to contend with.
What I’m Reading:
Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
a strange fortune the ministry where they linger— throttle linking (and also separating) belles from godsons (or ankles?) a lovely novitiate that homely workhouse, that most quotidian of sizzles— the portcullis?
what of grandmother porticoes— postage-standing facade of tendons or is it tom-toms? pasted in plaid upon our donkeys arguments, secular aggressors, our spleens, our spelt, wherever they may be, legations sit with them awhile affecting phrase-estimates and the rondos of chants:
there’s no place like home … there’s no place like home … there’s no place like home …
What I’m Reading:
In the great room of many volatile gods where I keep burning. Hot grass. Absence of trees. In which a world keeps noxiously turning for the survival of what? Gives loss its feral name.
— Muriel Leung / “At the end of the world, you tell me about the bees”
thee istsfor manity reader 