Ocean Sounds (redux)

She spoke to her AI speaker, “Play ocean sounds.” The speaker responded and complied.

She dreamt of a thin pixellated mist outside her window as the opening shot to her next film.

She placed her hand on her clavicle—fingertips finding soft purchase in the hollow just above the bone. The contact sent a hot fist-sized ball coursing through her nerves to the center of her brain where she felt a concussive shock which sent barbs out through to every nerve ending in her body.

“I don’t feel normal. I feel as if something is off,” she said to a formless shadow in the mist. “Without any raw footage I have nothing to edit. Where’s my Bolex?” She rolled her glasses up on her head, keeping the hair off of her face.

The shadow spoke: “I think you should reconsider what you consider an appropriate gift. The only riveting thing about you are the rivets in your underhanded glances.”

Squalls of psychobilly guitar cut the air. She did a pogo-twist as if she were on the stage at Max’s Kansas City.

The sound transfigured into a spray of arterial blood on her bedroom ceiling. The walls, the floor the mirror behind the bedroom door were covered in spatters. A small pool of congealed blood in the corner next to her hamper. Drag marks on the floor. 

She woke gasping for air. The ocean sounded like cyclonic roil. She woke up twisted in her sheets, on her side, with her head perched off the edge of the bed.

She called in sick. She had to sleep again to recover from the way she slept. She swore off indica edible gummies. Never again.

What I’m Reading:

And what might a bumblebee dream of? The moments of their life, perhaps: the flowers they have visited, their taste and smell. The paths they followed to get there. Other bees they have known.

— Brandon Keim / “Planting Seeds for Bumblebee Dreams” / Nautilus

. . . inbox detritus . . . 

Small drop leaf table and 4 vinyl/wood chairs, used indoors and outdoors. From home with a cat. TH 5 . . .  “I think it’s important not to shy away from showing the hard stuff, reckoning with how things are.” . . . What happens when reality TV begins to look like the Stanford Prison Experiment? . . . Does reading make us better people? Yes, but maybe not how you expect . . . Last week, we stood in a room with the Governor of New Hampshire and a group of businesses building things here, and talked about why we choose to do it this way . . . You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website . . . a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems . . . Mine is a life dedicated / to the calculation of loss . . . At twenty-five, my best friend from junior high took his own life . . . With full suspension, fat tires, integrated lights with turn signals, and app connectivity, this bike packs in a ton of features—but there are a few tradeoffs you’ll want to know about . . . Where in The Art of War does it say you should fire your senior military leaders in the middle of a conflict? . . . The trajectory of this month sure hasn’t been what I predicted due to a hard crash I took a few weeks back, head-first into some rocks . . . Attached is the most recent copy of the itinerary.  I have added in the missing day on Cape May . . . Capture faster, immersive panoramas for instant sharing . . . Cocaine pollution in rivers and lakes may disrupt behaviour of salmon, study finds . . . May is National Bike Month and that means the best month of the year starts this week!

What I’m Reading:

the body
emitting
the body emitting
flames
of radiance
flames of radiance . . .

— John Giorno / “Lucky Man”

the high rattles

the wean of lifetime—
avoiding the limelight

the constriction strings of lob
a radiator for a sofa
a poor heartbeat
a marginalized adult

reshuffle, hardscrabble, uprising
of three yes-men on third gear
as 300,000 pregnant woodcutters
can, and do, attest

send your epaulets for a wash
of explosive hybridity & astringency
gas for the vast disposables
in infidel mosaic rattles

hey! backcloths die
more than twice as often
the high rattles of teen promise
die in a lingering smolder

What I’m Reading:

I can not stop a future that has already arrived.

— Fernanda Trías / Pink Slime

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Within the U.S. today, people are again moving because of disasters, and because of the slow-grind attrition of heat, flooding, and rising insurance rates. Earlier this year, the nonprofit Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre found that disasters had caused 11 million evacuations or relocations in the previous 12 months. These numbers will climb.

— Vann R. Newkirk II / “What Climate Change Will Do To America By Mid-Century” / The Atlantic

---

Not sure what’s more embarrassing, that at fourteen
I still lusted for stuffed animals or that mum’s target
at the claw machine was way better than mine.

Precise as threading a needle, she’d push the steel arm straight
into the heart of the stuffed pit, wait, sipping
Pepsi, hand on hip, sure as a cowboy.
Once, her single turn brought back not one but two animals.

— Preeti Vangani / “Astro Mischief”

---

The right to roam is an American tradition dating back to our nation’s origins, when ordinary folks had the right to walk through privately owned woods and fields, and along the coasts.

While this may seem like a vestige of our past, gone forever like the flocks of passenger pigeons whose migrations once darkened our skies, there is reason for hope. In several European countries this freedom has been reborn and is thriving, suggesting that it can be reborn here. 

— Ken Ilgunas /  This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost The Right to Roam and How to Take it Back

---

This is a brutal place.

We blame the dead for their dying.

We train our eyes to make their bodies grow to monstrous girth.

We say their blood is a necessary sacrifice.

Or worse, we forget their blood.

— Ashley M. Jones / “Conflict / War”

---

An analysis of DNA evidence from more than 15,000 ancient humans has revealed that human evolution has accelerated over the past 10,000 years. Researchers identified almost 500 gene variants that evolved through natural selection in ancient European and Middle-Eastern people after the dawn of agriculture. Many of those variants are linked to the resistance to diseases, such as tuberculosis. Accelerated evolution could reflect the intensification of lifestyle changes that started in the Neolithic period, such as new foods and pathogens, says population geneticist David Reich.

— Jacob Smith / “Human evolution sped up after farming” / Nature Brief

---

We didn’t have a telephone.

We didn’t have a radio.

We didn’t have a fridge.

We used to keep the bodies for three days because that’s how long it took for the messenger to alert the relatives, by foot.

They put the dead bodies by the side of the river.

— Bhanu Kapil / “Diptych”

---

In the next 30 years, climate disruptions won’t make whole states unlivable, and demographic shifts might not reach full exodus levels. But in America, small change is often deeply felt, and bit by bit, the American economy and culture will likely be transformed by climate attrition and the redistribution of people. Southern states will lose residents and dynamism. Bad weather and ruined infrastructure will sap productivity and leave behind thousands of acres of abandoned farmland after crop failures. 

— Vann R. Newkirk II / “What Climate Change Will Do To America By Mid-Century” / The Atlantic

What I’m Listening To:

Now who the hell are these federal pricks?
Hiding in the senate like a bloated ass tick
Air-conditioned fuckstick loafers
Sittin’ in a room full of army posters

A coal to a diamond, a vote into law
They campaign up all the blood they can draw
Mold your world, a soldier’s just clay
How much does every soldier weigh?
Cut you at the ankles, and they throw that ass away

Boots on the ground

— Massive Attack & Tom Waits / “Boots on the Ground”

i’m not hungry

something changed within the wound . . . next, i was in a hall of whirling cylinders . . . from ooze to steady flow . . . a damned infection set in . . . the vicodin didn’t hurt, and it soon kicked in . . . late fly fragile sparkle theory ripe different voracious air chubby saudade . . . use my leatherman on the weatherman irrigate him quickly . . . i’m not a surgeon . . . sid vicious was the nurse and gibby haynes was on the anesthesia mask . . . my jaw locked . . . the slits were the surgical team . . . this was going to hurt — a lot . . . dolorous incantations from the raincoats as my nerves were severed . . . the biohazard bag was soon full of useless viscera . . . i felt pounds lighter . . . is a cold shower safe after the abscesses are spread on sourdough . . . i was completely exhausted then, half the person i’d been . . . i walked into the fog-socked tundra . . . 

What I’m Reading:

. . . the labyrinths you build for yourself have no exit . . . 

— Fernanda Trías / Pink Slime

Primitive Trails From This Point (redux)

Panda cycling and recycling, panda-demics, and panda demotics. Find yourself in the world of widespread fraud and plate tectonics in response to politic-tonics — those gestures and flourishes that are not of this society, of this culture, right? Write!

Go on and write so much so that you can pare down and shape it into something resembling cohesion — that will catch a sovereign ear rather than the father of the mishmash masterclass, of the pell mell muttering, and thee argy-bargy desultory twister.

Meaning is at once nonsense and resoundingly salient only to itself, its maker, and to ladies who lunch coiffed in Viking hair and festooned with scratchcard lanyards. Heep hoop!

Pick up the dry cleaning.

What I’m Reading:

In truth,
I haven’t tasted coffee
For twenty‑nine days.
I haven’t written.
For twenty days I waited,
Thinking it might be enough
To call your name
And weep for you.

— Marah Muhammad Al-Khatib / “Twenty Days”

What I’m Reading:

Alas, very soon everything will disappear:
the birdcalls, the delicate blossoms. In the end,
even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.

— Louise Glück / “Primavera”

What I’m Reading:

This interior thing, miniscule.
From the blackness of the blind viscera,
hot and yellow, the miniscule speck,
the luminous grain.
Yellow spreads and smooths, a downpour
of the pure light of its name,
tropicordial.

— Adélia Prado / “Priase for a Color”

Sangfroid I-IV (redux)

i.  The Ashen Landscape

“He’s got what?  Days left?  I don’t want to be there when he dies.”

“Sangfroid.”

“I’m cold-blooded?”

“You didn’t wish to come back to the village — to the sea?”

“I see… a Rothko — canted, a lost apocryphal work — an ashen landscape in three gradations.  My father tore out its center and revealed there’s no heart to the universe, only a corrugated armature — frozen, encased — as if the sky were stapled to the sea with liminal ice.”

“You see wasteland?”

“I see ghosts.  I was eleven.  My father placed the gun to his temple — then mine.  He abandoned me here.”

ii.  A Song for the Plague Year

I find my father supine on the bathroom floor, limned by a bloody halo — a pinpoint hole in his left temple.  Gorgeous.

The floor seethes and the ceiling lowers its claim upon me.  I’m extruded out of the bathtub spigot.  Suffering.  Wait.  Wait.  Suffering.  I’m in the heart of darkness.  I’m in the heart of the work now.  Shiver.  Fertile.  Gorgeous.

iii.  Molecular Organic Nano-machines

I’m at the morphine station.

I’m a soft machine inside a hard silicone husk.  I’m a warped machine rattling out flickering images: images of a gun.

I’m a soft machine in a hard exoskeleton — silicone dark inside — silicone smooth and white outside.  My memories play back on the cryoscreen. Here memories are particulate existences transformed into nano-globules (n-g.’s) that are secreted from the ferrules at the end of your iPuffer: smoky, hormonal, and projected inside and beyond your eyes.

“Please cue n-g. 173-A: the day I met my father at CBGB’s; and frame n-g. 173-B: the moment that punk rock saved my life.  Please add the blue 17 gelatin filter.”

A puff from the ferrule and the images resolve, but this memory is faulty.  The memory warps and echoes: a radiator squeals, brass electrodes buzz, my father is blood-crusted, ignored in a dusty corner, covered with mites escaping the evil heat.  Batista’s henchmen torture another… no, stop, this is not my memory but the anecdote he told me that night…

“This is not the n.g. I requested. STOP.  STOP.  Press the eject…”

Blood, on the tip of my tongue.  Where is it coming from?  Then a bestial din: the sound of a million cicadas’ lament before the seventeen year death — a rupture tectonically within me.  The smell of hissing green plantains dropped into overheated oil — the splattering: tinny, spastic —  and then the loss of control.

iv.  missing  STOP

im not who i was once was   STOP   aposiopesis   STOP   STOP   im a perfectionist   im obedient    get away from here    get away from that gun   STOP   STOP   STOP   dr x said im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   dont relive it    dont rehash it   and if it finds you   then embrace it    embrace the thoughts    embrace the feelings    be one with it and then release it     youre not your memories    youre not your feelings   be one with the thoughts   be one with the feelings   and then release them   STOP   

punk rock changed my life    no punk rock saved my life    the songs of the minutemen   no not that memory   STOP  STOP   dont touch him there   dont touch me stop it   put down that gun   38 snubnose    it weighs a ton    STOP   STOP   STOP    embrace this memory   embrace this emotion   im not my memories   not my emotions   STOP   aposiopesis   apoplexies   apophatic   and aphasic   STOP   STOP    dr x said    whatever happens   its ok    whatever happens is ok   im ok    whatever happens    im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   youre doing the best that you can   im doing the best that i can   STOP   STOP   STOP

What I’m Reading:

The night has grown martial;
It meets us with blows and disaster.
Even the stars have turned shrapnel,
Fixed in silent explosions.

— Louis Untermeyer / “End of the Comedy”

Excerpts from My Inbox (redux)

A serious mistake was made giving less than 24 hours-notice … We have a cat and a charming baby … I would describe it as a dark comedy I suppose … Creamy white leather sofa–like new condition … Joy’s daughter recommends the latest influencers … I am pretty nervous because my dumplings were undercooked … Are there a few people who have been biking and feel ready to take the next step—a roughly 40-mile bike trip? … I have to go through and use the skins … Legs removed for easy transport $75 … She’s going to be renting out a giant banquet hall … I am directing a 10 minute play … Brief rain shower in 7 minutes … The quarterly fire alarm and sprinkler testing will be conducted tomorrow morning … I spent the next year freaking out everyday … If you have a shopping cart in your possession, please return it as soon as possible.

What I’m Reading:

The fog comes in, flatter
than ever. The air, apparently

is blue somewhere, not here.
Flat and linear.

— Tom Clark / “Water”