WriteRightRite

If you insist I write at least 100 words everyday in this space, then, here goes: if I started at one hundred and started to count down until I had written another 99 words in this space then it would go something like this.

Somewhere around this point I’d have 50-some-odd words left to finish. Then I’d think hard and deep about concision, and how I’d write something meaningful in the space left to me—always being aware that 100 words is a minimum, and I could always write beyond that.

I’m not limited to 100 word stories, 100 word poems, or 100 word micro-essays—I could elaborate and reel off well beyond 100 words!

And then there’d be the picayune issue of extending the verbiage by writing “one hundred words” v. “100 words” every time I mentioned it—I’d add a word at every mention, further diminishing the pressure (the burden) to get to 100 words. Then, I’d want to know if (parenthetical) words would count against the self-imposed word count.

Then I’d come to my senses, my thumbs getting tired from poking at the gorilla glass (TradeMarked) on my phone’s writing app—and then I’d wonder just how far along am I? And I’d count (and include the parenthetical words) and find I’m at 223 words—more than the RDA calls for—and then I’d come to a dead stop at 240 words.

Here.

What I’m Reading:

… gulls were the only patrols in the sky;
when women in bright dresses
walked barefoot or in cheap sandals,
in sandals, in sandals
instead of boots,
before missiles.
Before missiles,
I, too, loved it all.

— Lyudmyla Khersonska / “When Crimea was still a place of light,”

boyfriend ogres

the moorlands…

southerners and vitamins felt on the drumstick
artful showers / groovy serializations / trippy visual sexes
innovative campground muckrakers
shopper-bug cup finches / impulsions on villages

the boyfriend ogres

trippy opiates / closing serializations /
including atonal flickering / experimental imagery
rectangles compete positive and negative expletives
lsd raging from felons of euphoria
to intense aquamarine
elixirs of the avant-garde

allow your head to be rearranged

What I’m Reading:

They love me.
Each morning they fill the strongbox
in my chest with grass
and salt pellets—I have good hallucinations.
I think I am a caterpillar. I think I am
a wall. They spray me with anti-freeze, they turn me
each spring, I watch the buds spread open,
metal lips fluttering.

— Mark Levine / “At the Experimental Farm”

octagonal agonals

im lost in the notion
of the circular motion
of your last rectangular
words

What I’m Reading:

Leave your coffins open.
The word for wind is, in another language, the word for soul.

— Carolyn Forché / “Wind”

i couldn’t

get it right
untruths undergoing a vector change

my nightmares forsaken and bubonic
my pestilential inner eye palsied
my parsley looks like paisley

i am contusion-adjacent in black
the quinces are in the tinderbox
and i am ill with the human condition

send colonists and hogsheads o’ vermin
we’ll rule the world in a century or two

i apologize for the indemnity of loud nonentities
i apologize for the quicksand martini glasses

oh bondage, up yours
oh bondage, no more

What I’m Reading:

Maybe it was a revelation. She’d felt so little anything in her life (longing, rage, hope), but out in the elements, with only a protective wrapping of simple cloth, she felt herself part of Earth, moving with it, drifting in outer space. 

— Deb Olin Unferth / Earth 7

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

The Story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.

— Winston Churchill / The Aftermath

I have had my dream—like others—
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky—
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose—and decide to dream no more.

— William Carlos Williams / “Thursday”

At least 35,000 more people died during Europe’s four record-breaking, back-to-back heatwaves this summer than would normally be expected, according to incomplete figures from barely half the continent.

Excess mortality in three of the EU’s larger countries – Germany, France and Spain – alone has already exceeded 25,000, according to the provisional national figures, and experts say the toll will rise significantly once August totals are consolidated.

— Jon Henley / “At least 35,000 excess deaths recorded in Europe’s back-to-back heatwaves” / The Guardian

Here everything is
documented. Now we die forever.
Now we’re live. What matters is Desire
doesn’t keep. This is what life is like
when Away.

— Temperance Aghamohammadi / “Behnt: Automata”

Last week, a flash flood in Nepal killed more than 1,000 people and left thousands missing. Today, UNEP published a report saying we’re about to breach the 1.5°C heating threshold countries agreed to limit ten years ago.

The two events are not unrelated. What happened in Nepal is the report’s warnings, translated into real life.

Even the best-case scenario now shows warming peaking at 1.8°C in the coming decades. But if we act now and fast, warming can plateau sooner, and we still have a chance of getting back to 1.5°C or below.

Overshooting 1.5°C and coming back down won’t undo everything. But the report is clear: every fraction of a degree avoided reduces risk. Every year by which overshoot duration is shortened reduces exposure.

Despair is exactly what coal, oil, and gas companies are counting on.

We’re not giving up. Are you with us?

— 350.org / Facebook post

what I am looking for doesn’t matter.
that I am looking doesn’t matter.
I exert no meaning.

— Donika Kelly / “When The Fact Of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then Youe Are Truly Alongside”

We are, all of us, moving through the void.

— Cal Flyn / The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness 

What I’m Listening To: 

While really we keep on living like monkeys
Incredible things are happening in the world
Magical things are happening in this world

— Stereolab / “Peng! 33”

disengagement / engagement 

. . . and with a deep suspiration she set her thumbs to tapping on the gorilla glass:

a disconnect with attainment of desired goals
a disconnect with engagement of daily responsibilities
a disconnect with realizing this awareness and affecting change

an over engagement with the virtual world
a disengagement with the physical world

few, if any, goals are actuated by the aforementioned

it’s fight or flight time . . .

then on with the headphones, on with her iphone, on with sic alps’ message from the law
and on she danced to a new transcendence . . .

What I’m Listening To:

I received a notice from the board
They were telling me get out, get out

But i worked for me, my rent was cheap
I died
In the kitchen I cried
Barely looking back
Squarely on the map

But it’s nothing but crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap
Save me

— Sic Alps / “Message from the Law”

peripeteia (redux)

we dream about a walkabout. we exhume gutter politics before they’re buried in the rattle brattle bund. we sling jagged zeugmas. we qualify this and that—our words signify nothing—we fill the interstices with air. the beckon calls for dr. bombay wanted down at zeugmatography go unheeded. we list and keel for what could have been—it inflects every point in our day. it infects every bitter requisition. a far away voice revives a chant:solidarność, solidarność, solidarność—opportunities taken, opportunities missed. a dead man says, a dream has the power to pollute the day. anoxic water is all we find—a blue-green algae, then a blood-red tide. we ramble on with viper thoughts … reality’s dark dream.

What I’m Reading:

We rest.—A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise.—One wandering thought pollutes the day;

— Percy Bysshe Shelley / “Mutability”

the pareidolia amok

the muck amuck amok
i see faces repeating and repeating
in these morning flakes
in the bread crusts drear
in the wake of your leaving
as the motes of particulate air roil
about the emptiness you created
by vacating this space inside
my now soiled heart

a conspiracy of eyes and mouths
a cabal of carnal teeth
fangs bared and aglow
limned by the maw
of dark impulses
a face in the strawberry preserves
jesus laughing at me on the face
of the rubbery naan you left
on the plate of hashed teeth

What I’m Reading:

but my hand is full of words like
grass perforating the old lattice

leave your eggs here in the helix of my ear
safe in the ‘world-class banking scheme’

— Mantra Mukim / “Raipur”

stained pink rayon

first responders were able to get him out

the stained pink rayon nightgown beneath
his torn clothes was unexpected
no one says a word

he was not in the water but he was taken
by the 8-foot wave nonetheless
rough surf justifies
a rough serf

higher and higher
both he and the waves
he had plenty of sunscreen
slathered on slippery as a forlorn right whale
the right whale for harpooning
back in the day

humidity is up
but it’s only monday
im bleeding
he says

so he’s got that going for him

What I’m Reading:

… Scream it.
Automata! Automata! Yes, I am behnt
at the edges, powdering my cheeks
A coccyx electricity gets me going,
arranging my limbs mechanically,
oiled ambrosia in the patinated city
where swans whirr in fixed loops.

— Temperance Aghamohammadi / “Behnt: Automata”