NO! to sanity.

Bombardment. Body snatching. Wrath. Susceptibilities. Just four psychological subalterns, as essential as conceit and distraction.

Shall we start a sacrilegious adherence imperilling the hegemonic horse-carts of bodice rippers? 

Bring out yer’ dead!

Bombs can be dropped like bread stuff only by  those already hobbled by the hardship of have. Who runs the turnstiles? Who counts the crocodile tears forfeited by the ripeness of insecurity?

Bring out yer’ dead!

The rightness of bully power. The right to do as you wish. As you decree.

Bring out yer’ dead!

Let us decree . . . NO!

NO! to sanity.

NO! by way of bone-pile monticules.

NO! by way of wedding parties attacked from empty skies — and the rightness joysticked by half-bored video game zombies 8,000 miles removed.

NO! by way of fiat and orders executively deranged.

NO! . . . way to stop this nightmare slowly unspooling — as we worry about our club’s relegation, or the college championship, or who will be crowned the best dancer, singer, housewife, or where the betting line hovers . . . 

Let us take solace in our neat, and twisted, insignificant lives — thee world is shaped by great men.

Let us take solace in thee “resurrection men” and bombardments; body snatchers and thee demented fools and their llickspittles. 

Let’s joystick ravenously to oblivion like Slim Pickens on thee missile of mighty hegemony.

Let’s crush our denim and crush our enemies. Let’s crush our oranges and crush our pestilential ideals (never worth the ink investiture, anyway).

Let us continue to invest in death by numbness.

Bombardment be our holy name. Holy aim, and god-given blight.

What I’m Reading:

Like a man on a bike hit by a car.
His spine, singing.

He rolled over the hood.
Into the shattering.

Like time after the painting
expanding, believed-in —

back of the brain, now.

— Elaine Bleakney / “Bluets, Black Balsam Trail”

Nothing to Clown About

I’ve been, generally, very happy with the professionalism of this tin-opener as opposed to the nonsense vaso-ergots — nothing to clown about, just go, go, go, go, go!

My only condescension is that recently I’ve been black-out dizzy upon posting these phone spasms — both prone and listing. And I am listing. There have been some slight neckaches (nothing on the skidpan) — and especially distressing to me during my fencing lessons imagining my ill ex-lover at the end of my rapier. 

On guard to them!

I’m an arthritic dagger artist at the end of my wits — 5,000 watts too far gone in my electroconvulsive therapy. I see mill-workers, under the sea, at half-past every hour — and on the quarter-hours, too, during REM sleep. In various dreams I’ve seen tracers transecting my tibia while I tour Tenochtítlan in my teens. My youth impacts my transfiguration.

Please advise.

I thread the western way: lovey and consumerist. I’ve ordered uncounted products recently. I’m trying to reset affluence all on my own. I may have been too keen on being number one.

Again, maybe too strong for my current skidpan. My bedpan is fine, a bit underutilized but never unfertilized. Morning constitutionals are my thing.  The deposits: moderate to wreckage. Exchequers be damned!

Damnation, I’m late to the inquest and streams of consciousness are drying quickly. Please send nephews and arbitrators! Collective bargaining turned right at Paducah. Kankakee is next to godliness. Consult the oracles.

Consult your orifices. 

Gulp if you’re able. I’m on my windowsill keeping my daggers company. Go ahead and butcher your 4,000 calories. 

I, on the other hand, will be ingesting these 1000 ibuprofen blended in to my mackerel shake. Weatherproof your vanes veins.

All best.

What I’m Reading:

A saola is wounded in the act of capture.
A saola grows ill in captivity.
A saola dies and takes this future with it.

— Mai Der Vang / “Death in Captivity, a Surrender” / Primordial

The Revanchist’s Score (to Settle)

She is clearly not amused. Events have gone awry. It is her score (to settle) now—it is placid and peat-boggy notional—certainly “doable.” She will take back her river of grass. The dissonance is too much to bear. The timbre is in the blue spectrum according to her synesthetic nerve pincers. The shadings smell of coronal shadows. The sky will turn white. Each pitch shift has a half-life of citrus suffused with cadaver. She tilts her ear to the sun—it is all hers for the taking. She tips her right index finger, points it up at the void, and begins.

What I’m Reading:

My mother, if that
was what she was
told me drowning
was the most
efficient way
to leave the house,
no footprints,
hard to trace

— John Yau / “Memories of Charles Street, Boston”

Beyond Grammar: Ellipses Lost

Clothes hoist. They can’t stop every time it gets windy or they’ll never finish the job. Don’t disturb Papa. He’ll rage out of the room and throw darts at us. I wish we had never given him that dartboard as a present—it doesn’t matter how professional grade a set it is. We’re the ones who have been the targets of those darts. Look at that welt on your temple—it still looks angry as hell . . .

A kind of ode to money for which the widower shines. I’ve been drinking and my alexandrines are sleek by the dozen, she said. Here, look, a whole armada of alexandrines. For food I had guayaba and queso blanco—the breakfast of conquistadors with too much time on their hands, and hairs on their hides. We’ve run out of auto-da-fe candidates, he says. Go bugger yourself, she says. Do you just live beyond quotation marks now?

i live beyond grammar and orthography she said
rules are for rabbits dont u know
and philology is the is valium for the gods
i will go on as i wish making myself seen and heard by the dusty corner of our southwest wall
i become unmoored
an a syntacticle mispeleing fer pleashur n shur to pleace no von
im a lower case werd person with nuthin 2 loos

¿Que tu dices?

I’ve lost my ellipses . . .

What I’m Reading:

Meanwhile, from Greenland to the “Gulf of America”, fantasies of lucrative resource wars and land grabs beckon. Like a latent image formed after harsh exposure, the Homeland Empire is what comes into view after the dissolution of America’s fading liberal imperium.

— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator

What I’m Reading:

There’s no such thing as a better coloniser.

— Sara Olsvig / “Greenland Independence Statement” / Equator

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

In life, I was rigid.
I had a treatment plan.

I had a prism. It bent the light.
I mistook it for vision.

— Lisa Wells / “13.”

A good way to marginalize the most dangerous political movements is to prove the success of your own. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government. Redistribution is important. But it is not enough.

— Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson / Abundance

Cousin Death joins a table at the wedding,
the white cloth gleams, the waiting plates,
all are made welcome.
Mother War smooths the silk of her dress,
she feels young and will dance again, after years,
with her husband‚ Pity.

— Jane Hirshfield / “The Wedding”

The years from 2015–2025 have been the hottest stretch on record, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organization. For the first time, the report includes a measure called Earth’s energy imbalance — the difference between incoming energy from the Sun and the amount radiated back into space — which is at its highest level since observations started in 1960. And in 2024, the latest year that global figures are available, atmospheric CO2 reached its highest concentration in two million years. “In this age of war, climate stress is also exposing another truth: our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing both the climate and global security,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement.

— Flora Graham / “We’ve just had the 11 hottest years on record” / Nature Briefing

. . . for when the doors are knocked in
hot metal to force my poem where my mouth is
as a kingdom in the 21st century buys one nation
to obliterate another
our commander pins the future to a magic orb
and gives ol’ reliable a spin
he is rewarded handsomely
while the children starve.
as practice i light prayer candles
the way one would a spit
we are royally fucked
unless we tenderize the rich.

— jess rizkallah / “bootstraps”

All of this can be stopped. A better America is around the corner.

And protest is the first step to that better future. We know that non-violent protest works. It helps to stop authoritarian takeovers. And it opens the way for a better politics to come.

— Timothy Snyder / Bluesky post

My first language was memory.
The skin of my face my manuscript.

— Lisa Wells / “13.”

What I’m Listening To:

We put up our tent on a dark green knoll
Outside of town by the train tracks and a seagull dump
Topping the bill was Horse Face Ethel and her Marvelous Pigs in Satin
We pounded our stakes in the ground, all powder brown
The branches spread like scary fingers reaching
We were in a pasture outside Kankakee

— Tom Waits, Kathleen Brennan & Ken Nordine / “Circus”

The Arkansas Fluke (redux)

I ate the wrong crawfish on my first float trip. It really wasn’t wrong, but eating it raw sure was. A specialized blood test found a lung fluke eating me from the inside out. I didn’t like this because women don’t generally like men with parasites in their lungs. I was scared that I’d have this fluke in my lungs for twenty years. Then a secondary infection led to the removal of fifty percent of my left lung. After six weeks I went home, I was feeling like myself. Now I drive a pick-up. I like that, it looks pretty.

What I’m Reading:

As I fell from the sky, I smelled fish.
The fish was in my mouth.
My eyes were fish eyes, bulging, bugged out.

I fell like this for years,
in the fishy air. I stopped panicking.
I could think as I fell.

— Edward Salem / “My Aerodynamics”