
dashed (haiku)
counting his fortunes
he amassed a lifetime’s dashed
hopes and dreams deferred

What I’m Reading:
“Dusk—and the shimmer on the sea
has quickened and gone still.”
— N. Scott Momaday / “Hotel 1829”
counting his fortunes
he amassed a lifetime’s dashed
hopes and dreams deferred
What I’m Reading:
“Dusk—and the shimmer on the sea
has quickened and gone still.”
— N. Scott Momaday / “Hotel 1829”
A gentle reminder that all gerbil removers should be stalled/or emailed to the off-license mandrill.
After office hours, please call the froth destroyer.
Please do not stop the malformation stalks or call the stalks directly or labor on the gewgaw ointment knuckle-duster.
All sex resets will now be routed via the mandrake oil dormitory.
Thank you for your cooperation.
The Management.
What I’m Reading:
“Making out inside a Richard Serra
Strikes me as the right way to take in art
Like embracing an echo”
— Sarah Jean Grimm / “Object Permanence”
What I’m Reading:
“The world is washed
in yellow,
& behind each
door —
another door.”
— Marisa Siegel / “Dear Emily”
He demons in language.
During his compositions
not to cognition
The letters instead
The letters
kind of flashy
correspond to kind
of potential colors,
whose called for colors,
high pitched
evoke
image
lights imagery,
a whole kind of city
distanced from
emphasis on his
bold language
of commerce.
What I’m Reading:
“Blood is gushing from between my legs
I can’t feel a thing
No really
I can’t feel a thing”
— Dorothea Lasky / “A fierce and violent opening”
What I’m Reading:
“I have nothing to give and make a poor servant,
but I can praise the spring.”
— Linda Gregg / “Taken By Each Thing”
pollinate crosswind
ride the six-mile iguana
bwana johnny time
What I’m Reading:
“And poetry isn’t dead
It’s gone to live on an upstate farm
The world is like that also
Getting over its need to be seen”
— Sarah Jean Grimm / “Object Permanence”
“Pick your place anywhere in the world and Great Salt Lake is a mirror reflecting a flashing light on what is coming and what is already here. Our natural touchstones of joy will deliver us to heartbreak. Each of us will face the losses of the places that brought us to life.”
— Terry Tempest Williams / “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake” / The New York Times
“you could mistake grief for a diamond
the way it shines when cut into, like fish
eyes in a boat’s drain.”
— Melissa Studdard / “Philomela’s tongue says”
“… I looked at you in the photograph, coming apart into each grain of your gesture, and I wanted to know this. I wanted to know when I looked at your hand in the air of the photograph, alight but limp, almost floating, toward whose caress I cannot know, what the grain is.”
— Chad Bennett / “The Grain”
“But through the box walls, I feel their fingernails
rising out of the corners of my rooms,
their presence, these strangers, these spies,
these unknown people who have walked
through my home,
have touched my private places in my home,
done this abominable thing of touring
my bedroom, my sleeping place, where at night
I revisit my ancestors…”
— Patricia Jabbeh Wesley / “Black Woman Selling Her Home in America”
“When my daughter’s class made a gingerbread house for the holidays, I licked the frosting and told her how good it was because emotional connection optimizes mental health. But I secretly spit it out since frosting’s nutrient profile is suboptimal.”
— Tom Ellison / “I’ve Optimized My Health To Make My Life As Long And Unpleasant As Possible”
“Should there be a new language for this off-kilter world? When mackerel, the traditional catch of West African and Spanish fishers, show up in Iceland, are they still mackerel? Are pelicans that glide over the Schuylkill River, at least five degrees north of their historical habitat, still pelicans, or must we translate them?”
— Anna Badkhen / “The Language of Catastrophe”
“I made a bouquet of bones and left them for coyotes.”
— Terry Tempest Williams / “I Am Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake” / The New York Times
What I’m Listening To:
“I’m just a symptom of the moral decay
That’s gnawing at the heart of the country”
— The The / “The Sinking Feeling”
I was begat by malpractice & malfeasance
Death had no use for me
Because I would not squat for death
There would be no dearth of fezzes
(and jaunty chapeaus)
Have I got a crazy memory for you—
Nine pigsties & a professional provocateur
Stop shivering in the cemetery
You’ve got bags under your eyes
Viper teeth & elfin ears
After 25 misconceptions
The monocle countess is 20 pilchards short
Wear my cassock
In roughly chronological order
Take me out & ridicule me
You are brimless & cylindrical
What I’m Reading:
“The universe is 95% dark stuff that we don’t understand. The remainder is this sticky matter that makes up things like you and smallpox.”
— Zach Weinersmith / Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness
an elegiac dogma puzzle
a threnody absurd & atonal
life is: fuck fuck fuckity fuck (not sexual)
so often dark dark darkity dark (terribly dark)
enjoy the respites, enjoy the ephemeral—
the transient transits of sun
the sun sun sunny sun sun (succoring sun)
the gloaming comes on quickly
a waxing crescent turned inside-out
the sun is a dying star
What I’m Reading:
“The night was darker. The moon had turned over on its side. A night bird sang in the bluest distance.”
— Joy Harjo / Catching The Light
“You fill me with stiction.”
“Friction?”
“No. Stiction.
“Shouldn’t it be inertia?”
“No, stiction, damn it!”
“Sorry, I don’t know what that is.”
He was filled with a horror and a hate so acute at that instant that his fist automatically clenched and his arm seemed to move autonomously driving that clenched fist to an inexorable meeting with his brother’s face…
The author’s stream of thought is broken here, and a lyric, and then a deconstructed thought impinges:
Anger is an energy. The certainty of reason is a tyranny.
Speak in aphorisms. Think in signifiers. Be the signified.
And so the author continued on another string. The nascent narrative broken…
“You fill me with inertia.”
“There, that’s more like it.”
“Like what?”
“Like what I like.”
And then unable to completely gather their wits the author’s work and discipline was irretrievably disrupted, and they were done for the day.
What I’m Reading:
“… I belonged to my mother
six hours west and only left
once a season
for the purpose of daddy laying his belts and
depression on me.”
— Courtney Faye Taylor / “Visitation”