ephemera finds a home

a monk’s murk roils
on tuesday thursday
within the hairshirt
of sadness and fury

the exophony of another
tongue begs:
please move on
with this glossolalia jacket

a derecho blows
feckless anagrams, altostratus,
and tornado doppelgänger
swing the heartache (beyond set)

beyond recognition
Ñackets, Ñackets! bullyboy cries,
this is the movement of fear
so watch your peripheries

do the bullyboy creep
and squall
it’s my birthday, too, yeah!
another year in the life of the fugu-flaker

we’ve hit the coda — poison,
lenticular, monocular, oulipian (in spirit)
and bipedal . . .
an ouroboros unclenched from its tail

parapraxis
say what?
another mono-tonal slip —
we’re plucking the scabs

this is a minatory moment
this is a crisis of faith
ephemera
finds a home

What I’m Reading:

As fascism always does, today’s Armageddon complex crosses class lines, bonding billionaires to the Maga base. Thanks to decades of deepening economic stresses, alongside ceaseless and skillful messaging pitting workers against one another, a great many people understandably feel unable to protect themselves from the disintegration that surrounds them (no matter how many months of ready-to-eat meals they buy). But there are emotional compensations on offer: you can cheer the end of affirmative action and DEI, glorify mass deportation, enjoy the denial of gender-affirming care to trans people, villainize educators and health workers who think they know better than you, and applaud the demise of economic and environmental regulations as a way to own the libs. End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy. 

— Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor / “The rise of end times fascism” / The Guardian

 fritillaries hanging

i lived on dandelions
when oxygen would not suffice

the soul craves . . .
the soul sinks from its own weight

sound and suffering
what do you see when you see death from above

there is no discernible end
to our inhumanity

there is only occlusion, delusion,
fritillaries hanging,

and the deal struck with the devil

What I’m Reading:

We might think Amazon was about making books available to us that we couldn’t find locally—and it was, and what a brilliant idea—but maybe it was also just as much about eliminating human contact.

— David Byrne / “Eliminating the Human”

cologne and ammonia

her delicate blue-veined wrongdoings
her slender handfuls of bone shards
her clubhouse lay crushed and pathetic
her lathe upon her black veil
her fragile fraction of cologne and ammonia
her frangible fiction coiffed in toxins
her old frayed cataract
her daughter’s prickled shank armhole
her boilers
her cowards
her tomes un-dusted
her snow-white petulance
her pickled discontinuities

she freed of meaning

What I’m Reading:

People who use large language models are picking up writing patterns, reasoning methods and even opinions from the chatbots, some research suggests. This pattern threatens to homogenize human writing and discourse, argue some computer scientists, and could even influence text written by people that aren’t first-hand AI users. But not all researchers in the field agree. In one study, a team of scientists found that certain groups of writers held on to their personal writing style after using AI, and some even developed one that was more markedly distinct from that of the LLM.

— Jacob Smith / “AI use could ‘same-ify’ human expression” / Nature Briefing

The Lady-Killer

The uterine is blasphemous!
His desultory words matched his affect —

Didn’t you have a mother?
Don’t you have a significant other?

Have you been to the Levant?
Do your needles pass an elephant?

You must know of what I speak —
Riblets, man! Riblets!

The tzela. The tzela, man!
His spittle spray profuse.

He had my father’s eyes —
That madness innate.

Semiotic spew —
Signs arranging and rearranging
In obscure topographies.
He wrote his own hagiography.
A drug-addled Rasputin shooting
Lasers from his third eye.
Healing hands like cudgels
Ready to inflict . . .
What?

Confusion, delusion, repulsion,
Disrepute.

Go now, you unmoored ghost.
Back into the recesses of a lunar mind.
Back into forgotten memory . . .

until the next visitation.

What I’m Reading:

I don’t want to have to go to work for someone else. I don’t want to have to participate in an economic system that leads to, you know, bombing a school of kids on the other side of the planet.

— Bike Farmer / “What Am I Even Doing Here, Instead of Working?” / Instead of Working

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.

— Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor / “The rise of end times fascism” / The Guardian

Bad men become trees.
The earth forgives them, as do I. They begin
to give. The wicked also dream
of love. They know darkness overhead
means night before and night behind, yet drops
of starlight have shot through this earth’s evening;
overhead, gingkoes have flared
against sun.

— Medha Singh / “Another Life”

The rate of global warming has surged since 2015 and is now nearly double what it was in the 1970s, according to a new study. That’s faster than some other estimates, but the authors say their analysis captures a more accurate picture because it accounts for the effects of natural factors such as the El Niño weather pattern.

— Flora Graham / “Climate change is speeding up” / Nature Briefing

Water becomes water’s shape in the water, inside the machine we become
the image of the machine, the dusk becomes the machine’s dusk,
in piercing we are pierced by the machine, we must use
a defective good to prove we are defective goods

— Zheng Xiaoqiong / “Water Becomes Water”

Time marches on, but literary discourse is eternal. The last week has seen a revival of the “should aspiring fiction writers actually read books?” debate. I won’t bother bothering you with the origins or the arguments. Obviously, good artists study their mediums. They also tend to enjoy the art forms they spend their lives working with. Why would you want to write books if you don’t like books? Or make music if you dislike music? Practice and study are the two ways to improve in any field. Everyone knows this, which is why I kind of love this discourse. It’s so absurd that it loops around from inanity to insanity.

— Lincoln Michel / “What Not Reading Does to Your Writing: More thoughts on ‘TV brain prose’ and why reading is, yes, useful for your writing” / Substack

News, a tragedy—so easily ours—
already breaking as I crack my eggs. Rage and prayers, rage and prayers, a boon
for the tycoon’s fear-campaign, clicks for the zillionaire buying up the moon.
Ad, ad, an AI figment, someone squawking, someone hawking—hours
consumed, of this only life, and who is left in the garden, who is tending the flowers?

— Leila Chatti / “The World Is Too Much With Us”

The wonder and horror for climate is that the great majority of people on Earth support climate action. The obstacles are not technological. They’re political. The fossil-fuel industry and the rich and powerful and governmental figures who either are or serve the fossil-fuel industry are what’s holding us back. So the wonder and horror exist side by side. You can be thrilled by all the things that are happening and horrified by all the things that should be happening but aren’t. Everything we can save is worth saving. Everything we can do is worth doing. We’ve already lost a lot, but we don’t have to lose everything. We don’t have to surrender.

— Rebecca Solnit, to Devin Oktar Yalkin / “Rebecca Solnit Says the Left’s Next Hero Is Already Here” / New York Times

What I’m Listening To:

Industrial waste never goes out of taste
In the Red Desert, the future is real
Fingered in the fog
Let’s pretend there’s an epilogue
Let the world burn
Feel your coin flames go higher
Stock market buy, it’s a black out
Stand by AI, AI, AI

— Kim Gordon / “Black Out”

What I’m Reading:

After missiles damaged oil depots and refineries this week, Iran’s capital Tehran has been blanketed by pollutant-laden ‘black rain’. Experts say that this rain probably contains both soot, which can damage people’s lungs and eyes, and cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and toluene, released by the burning of oil-refining byproducts. The pollutants could be dispersed in the air if there are no new fires, says atmospheric chemist Gabriel da Silva. But Tehran’s position in the Alborz mountain range can lead to temperature inversions, a meteorological phenomenon that traps polluted air masses. Rain could also disperse the chemicals, but that could lead to contamination in soil and waterways, da Silva says.

— Jacob Smith / “The consequences of ‘black rain’ in Tehran” / Nature Briefing

Phantom

The amplitude of echoes
Function like a phantom limb

Glucose seeps into the cells
Smell of white gas and charcoal

A swale once full of shoulder depth snow
Did you know Frazil are ice crystals
Formed in turbulent water, as in swift
Streams or rough seas?

Paradise? This isn’t paradise, son
You’ve cracked a tooth

The world doesn’t need anymore people
No further congestion or metal grates

I’ve apologized for the Spanish Inquisition
You can purchase a guayabera made in China

Why did she pop up in a search for sorghum?
Her voice is a natural vibrato

Now you’ll have to get by on your own.

What I’m Reading:

Peace is      
outworn;
it’s chaos that feeds the algorithm, no likes for the actual, the tangible.

— Leila Chatti / “The World Is Too Much With Us”

Aeonian or Aeolian? (redux)

She mistook her aeonian harp for her aeolian harp. She mistook her bemusement for amusement. Her confoundment for profoundment and her conclusion for inclusion. Nothing seemed to be what it needed to be and her mind kept elapsing and prolapsing into a crater like protrusion into the black hole nimbus that was her brain. From now on nothing would be what it should or sound like its meaning; rather things would be tinged in a greenish patina and sound like retinal shrieks of retinues and concubine purrs. Nothing like what she was accustomed to. She would have to reeducate herself in the ways of wares and the forms of norms. Much would be ochre now, because there was no sense in being saffron about it. At least that’s what the older boys meant, or what she thought they meant, when they claimed she was immature. Now was the time for ripening. The moment was upon her. Now is the only thing that’s real. And Cramps be damned!

What I’m Reading:

I’m writing love on a serviette
as mourners gather on a mound
for the disgraced dead, still
in grave-clothes underfoot—
suddenly, slow pianos sing
in air, the shifting earth
moving its cadavers to an ache
in the ocean.

— Medha Singh / “Another Life”

smelting your dreams

in the dream there was the tropical curvature
of the benevolent sunshine earth

the racked focus out of the blistering ice
to an armature 200 feet up in the air

there, a bay
beyond that, forsaken whelks
& pernurious periwinkles paragliding
into the breeze-sibilant palm fronds
quaking & shaking their nuts-coco
in profligate ways

in the dream there’s a big reunion
& no one comes

there’s a moment of telescoping horrors
hours of dark grays, smoke, black

the hypnopompic nightmarish
crepuscular — the tang of oil in the air
thick black raindrops

avuncular sam is at work again
smelting your dreams —
castrating —
then rendering human fat

the machine that never sleeps
coming to a dream near you

What I’m Reading:

It’s raining hard today.
The day is more like night,
the spring is more like fall,
and in the yard a driving wind lays waste
to the little tree that, seeming not to, stands
steady and firm

— Umberto Saba / “The Little Tree”

The Mandy Brush (redux)

He bent down to rinse the toothpaste out of his mouth and his left side cramped up. The cramp was the most severe pain he’d felt in his life. The sensation seemed like a vise tightening on his left rib cage and reticulating down to his hip.

He fell and the toothbrush lodged in his throat. And what happened next he thought ungodly — the Barry Manilow song “Mandy” began to loop in his head: “Oh, Mandy, You came and you gave without taking, and I need you today, oh Mandy…”

What the fuck have I done, god? Please don’t let me die with this goddamned song in my head…

“…but I sent you away, oh Mandy
well you kissed me and stopped me from shaking…”

Then he remembered his Nietzche: god is dead… god remains dead… and we have killed him…”

“…but I sent you away, oh Mandy
you kissed me and stopped me from shaking
and I need you…”

This is awful, he rasped with his agonal breath.

What I’m Reading:

Iran’s people were facing a horrible shortage of water before the war began. If we are destroying desalination plants and setting fire to Teheran we are committing unfathomable crimes.

— Timothy Snyder / Bluesky post