Dark thought on a gray day — gray in every gradation:
18% gray card gray the ideal photographic gray
of wet city streets & shards of east river gray
the cold of gainsboro gray rain
dead-eye gray pale ash gray —
the fortune teller cried last night & auguries of apocalypse
revealed themselves in halftone grayscale.
What I’m Reading:
At the top of these ridges is a view more beautiful and terrifying than one might imagine; the world is without color. The white horizon meets the sky, and where one changes to the other there is no visible seam.
— Ethan Rutherford / North Sun or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther
Instead of changing my shirt I changed my mind and requested a reverse baptism. Get the father son and the Laszlo Moholy Ghost outta’ my body. Get ‘em all outta’ my soul. Forthwith.
Can’t look back, won’t look back. Ozymandius Motors for all your autonomic pleas. Automatism at 350 horsepower ////// Wayside shangri-las and all the disjecta ejected in your superego moods during our President’s Day Sale!
You get rid of meaning by getting rid of meaning.
Start with Rasputin and work your way out from there. The peach cream turns bitter so allow me to lie down under your steamroller. Play me “Steamroller Blues” through your tinny transistor speaker and do your worst. Go.
Docket your trash—use pincers and gloves. Keep me at arm’s distance for I’ve seen a handkerchief of clouds (tzara-cumuli).
Keep me at a distance—I’ve heard a talking •Hugo Ball• head singing:
gadji beri bimba … tuffum I zimbra.
image: p. remer
What I’m Reading:
Get rid of meaning. Your mind is a nightmare that has been eating you: now eat your mind.
this belongs to my dead aunt fedora, she says, channeling her from beyond the green
a guest of the foredecks couldn’t salvage her nonchalance from a platoon of ambient debris
let’s call her dorothy march, let’s not, better not bother with her at all
we’re looking for an innkeepers wife who walks upon the mizzenmast with bells about her cankles in the blinding fog
or we’re not looking for anything at all, actually, just passing time until our time is up
we thought we’d alight on this page but now we sense our mistake
who would land here and stay here willingly — for its full of queer brocades
two possibilities from this point on:
mid-fifties housewives
continuum canoe conundrums
these aren’t really logical choices who needs to be ruled by logic anyway?
What I’m Reading:
Even before the twenty-four-hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting “spread” in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.
There were not one but two American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century: the struggle for independence from Britain, and the struggle to end slavery. Only one was won.
— Jill Lepore / These Truths: A History of the United States
Cats don’t quit after one yowl, and neither should you. Keep speaking up, keep demanding what’s right, and don’t let anyone convince you that you’re asking for too much.
You’re not.
Whether it’s food, fairness, or freedom, you have every right to demand it—preferably in a tone that makes it clear you won’t be ignored.
Fascists, for all their posturing, are hilariously bad at handling assertiveness. They think they’re the ones in charge, but the moment someone yowls back at them, they’re completely thrown off their game.
— Stewart Reynolds / Lessons from Cats for Surviving Fascism
The snake never shuts its eyes. The mouse sits tight.
— Mary Oliver / “Evening Star”
“Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, a billionaire backer of the president,” he wrote. “The president’s international policies and his support of ICE make it impossible for me to ignore his actions. If you feel as I do, I strongly recommend that you do not use Amazon. There are many ways to avoid Amazon and support individual Americans and American companies that supply the same products. I have done that with my music and people who are looking can find it in a lot of other places.”
— Andy Greene / “Neil Young Trashes Amazon, Gives His Complete Musical Catalog to Greenland for Free” / Rolling Stone
It’s all about sex and territory, which are what will finish us off in the long run.
— Margaret Atwood / “February”
. . . the global average temperature over the past three years has surpassed 1.5 ℃ above pre-industrial levels — an increase that nations pledged in the 2015 Paris Agreement to prevent. It is “hard to describe just how serious the risks to humanity are, as we rapidly take ourselves out of the climate our entire agriculturally based civilisation is based on,” says atmospheric scientist John Marsham.
— Jacob Smith / “ 2025 shows Earth is getting hotter, faster” / Nature Briefing
I now understand that hope cannot be bought; it is passed around, like cutlery. Hope is not abstract. It is solid, and unbearable. It wounds.
— Billy-Ray Belcourt / “Childhood Triptych”
What I’m Listening To:
I’m stuck in my old shoes waiting For that finger feelin’ Come on over me
teeth bared like a hounded fox beneath the matted fur the soft center of his core
line of struts drawn back the fall of manchego reducible to jacket-ore and earl crust
snot runnin into his philtrum like stalactites stretching optimism he is the soft heart of dejection
he looks the morass in the morass he is the morass
What I’m Reading:
But there are no grown-ups, that’s what you must grow up to know fully; your parents were just two more bodies experiencing landscape and weather, trying to make sense by vibrating columns of air, redescribing contingency as necessity with religion or World Ice Theory or the Jewish science, cutting profound truths with their opposites as the regimes of meaning collapse into the spread.
Clodomira’s legs are whirring pistons. She’s up over 100 revolutions per minute on her bike. The countryside streaks by her and in these few seconds there is no revolutionary struggle, no ultimate leader, no great leap forward.
The fervor of the People dissipates and all is still. She is frozen in the moment, and the moment frozen all around her. The landscape a stilled blur of streaks. In this instant all of existence becomes the object of her consciousness.
Life in this infinitesimal moment is bearable — worth the battle toward transcendence.
A flash and the moment is gone.
The bicycle, a humble 1956 Rabasa, feeling greatly misused upon resuming at that diabolic speed rebels, and disengages its chain breaking into a dizzy wobble. They jackknife.
Clodomira is thrown into the sugar cane detritus — the edge of the field heaped with the sharp husks of post-Marxist labor. Now in mid-air she pictures herself as the radiant spear point of the vanguard, but as she hits the ground a shard of cane husk pierces her abdomen.
Clodomira rises to a sitting position. Our Lady of Charity hovers in the distance in an alcove of roiling cumulonimbus. All manner of birds and land animals are swept into the funnel and disappear.
Clodomira seethes. Oh, to be swept into that vestal vortex. Then she feels her father’s leaden hand on her shoulder, his grip tightening and constricting the blood flow to her head. Then his other hand under her shirt and rubbing her belly.
She is earthbound.
What I’m Reading:
The past was rushing into my veins. I wished nothing on the past.
I answered questions of the dead. I am capable of terror.
fearful old fronts and the vain seersuckers of the path
Thee Thigh of Translation calls upon you to wander and crawl
through hoods and butterflies — prophecy and foreboding reveal
themselves as fata morgana shimmering on the arid horizon line canted
unto temptation and the diptych lined sky
What I’m Reading:
Risks of extinction, such as the kind of event that led to the fifth extinction some 66 million years ago (known as exogenous risks), are probabilistically inevitable; we are not responsible for them. In contrast, we would be responsible for the risks of extinction that would be avoided if only we were to change our behavior. That is why extinction risks that our actions give rise to have greater moral gravity than those over which we have no control.
— Partha Dasgupta / “The Repugnance of Human Extinction: Why Our Survival Matters” / lithub.com
shallow accidents folly — you evoke that old eggshell expressionism imaginary warpaint on the first indream ashtray — phlegmy black and carbuncular
there follows a montage of young sombreros and the play of wasteland hellscape japes we live hostage — unmoored — upon this drift quit before you hit your stride twenty-four knuckle homonculus aping president gas derangement
fitness passing as finesse your fellowship hairs tangle
What I’m Reading:
Hug me, mother of noise. Find me a hiding place. I am afraid of my voice. I do not like my face.
I have no idea what she says, or what tongue she speaks. She doesn’t speak English or Spanish, and that’s all I can muster. I haven’t the slightest idea of what she is up to, out in this perpetual gloom. But she keeps saying: “I dag ar det tisdag, I dag ar det tisdag, I dag ar det tisdag…”
I must have an odd look on my face because her lower lip quivers and her eyes well up. I don’t know what I can do for her. I offer shelter. She doesn’t understand, just repeats the same thing. I don’t know how to help. I want to help. What is she, ten or eleven years-old? How can she be out here alone?
So I say “yes!” and give her a big old bear hug.
What else is there to do in this hard-dead world? We once contented ourselves with keeping our families safe and near. Those that were content, maybe had a close circle of friends (some circles were larger than others, some were merely small frayed arcs) — maybe we tithed and volunteered to read or feed others more needy — for some this seemed enough.
But we don’t concern ourselves with the wider world anymore. Is there a world anymore? We’re safe here. It’s all waste out there.
She doesn’t battle this bear hug and she stops speaking. I squeeze to give comfort. She evanesces. Atom by atom all that is left is air.
I’m left at the shelter doorway looking like I’m hugging myself — that is, if anyone were there to look. Who would, who could, in this darkness? I’m alone, wondering why I don’t do this more often. Hug myself.
I go back into the shelter and down the stairs to the writing room. I’m down to a ream of paper, a handful of pens, and two candles… but I must compose some lines…
I.
Did I hear it in a dream? Or is it a long-distant memory? I dag är det tisdag…
A drooping of the eyelids in a sleepless Moment As you fight the sweep Of darkness Upon you. Only the whispered Supplication From the darkest corner Of childhood Releases you from penury. Peaceful Sleep never comes.
II.
I condone what you done…
In the wimple sun I slapped away the wattle arm Of the man that bred Me to a hardened son.
I agree with your version Of sublime reparation.
I condone what you done…
III.
Condone / Condemn
I dag är det tisdag…
What I’m Reading:
There’s something sick in the wind, a warm stupor of venom and insects. A curse creeping out of the devastated lands. We can feel the vibration of something destructive coming into being.
thee istsfor manity reader 