Bray of Winces (redux)

S. understands nothing. He tries, squint-eyed, to turn his brain over. Without spark, the ignition doesn’t catch.

S. sees himself, monochromatic, on the screen of his childhood 1974 Panasonic. He’s talking globular in a rectangular city. He makes connections obliquely — only in transient bursts. He needs raiment for the soul but finds defenestrated appliances and tatters in mounds in their stead. He walks a bray of winces in piles of miles of monticular hunger. Nothing for the stomach and nothing for the next life. He quanders in squandered lines of obtuseness. A sign up ahead reads: “Squelch and Skronk, $2.99/lb.” He makes a beeline for the whole ball of wax — a hive of astute astringency on loan — from a god lost in this corner of the universe…

He’s lost in the reticular coldness of the attenuating picture — a cathode ray tube snow (fuzz from his childhood in 1974) and a muzz of voices echoing from the exhaust vent above his head. He’s one with the toilet seat now, one with his pins and needles thighs, and uncomfortably prescient.

He continues his note: … all will be needling shit this new year… Happy so and so… New Year so and so…

“Screw ‘Auld Lang Syne!’” he says. “Screw Robert Burns?” he says to his reflection in the mirror.

And some person outside his hotel room door — which is disquietingly close to the bathroom door (for hadn’t he last night passed one door where he swore he heard a fugue of wet untethered flatulence, and walking by another door heard wretched retching and moans?) — why did the man outside his door continue saying “hogmanay” this and “hogmanay” that, and what was that infuriating accent?

S. understands nothing.

What I’m Reading:

What the wealthy would wage
to feast an unfamiliar creature is enough to shatter
an ecosystem into oblivion, is enough to defaunate the earth.

— Mai Der Vang / “Twelve Million Loops of Wire” / Primordial

Venting Splenetic

Nothing additional to add to the crimes against humanity? Huh?

There are mental impingements circulating in the ether. We are helpless to change their direction, their aim, their relentlessness. What we did to deserve this is make clear and unconsidered choices — petulant choices. 

We could have chosen the lesser of two evils, the lesser destructive ineffectualness, or plainly put: the least stinky turd. But we chose comeuppance and “I’ll show you!”

And look how fucked we are!

And see how bleak it looks for the foreseeable future.

There’s no place in the world to hide from this scourge.

One tells themself political violence is not an option — it’s the choice of the impotent and narcissistic crowd — remember January 6, 2021?

Remember those historically dangerous and imbecilic clownboys and their rich dark money benefactors?

There is no end in sight, and the garrote tightens.

What are we to do?

What I’m Reading:

A fascist is president: infection in the sentence breeds. We can’t help talking about him.

The comedian says people can’t think when they’re afraid. Satire makes them laugh, forget their fear . . . 

— Aliki Barnstone / “The Sign as You Exit the Artist’s Colony Says “The Real World”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

“The thing is, May,” the hum said, “the goal of advertising is to rip a hole in your heart so it can then fill that hole with plastic, or with any other materials that can be yanked out of the earth and, after brief sojourns as objects of desire, be converted to waste.”

— Hellen Phillips / Hum

betelgeuse is turning on and off
like your love—everybody knows
it’s dying

— Julian Talamantez Brolanski / “hasten slowly and you shall soon arrive”

The world is changing because it must. If seeds can germinate in the inferno, so can revolution.

— Mohammed El-Kurd / Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal

I hear the hush of sheet iron being cut,
The tear of frost where pear trees
Lean in a wind white with your breath.

— Nancy Ryan / “Poem”

YOU WILL KNOW THAT YOU’RE DONE WITH something when you can’t imagine making it better. For some writers that’s a state of exhilaration: They’ve done everything they can. This beautiful accomplishment! Nothing can improve it. Others of us arrive at the same place, despondent: This ramshackle thing. I’ve reached the end of my powers. Nothing can improve it. 

— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction

I heard my voice from below:
It called me by my name.

I ran downstairs.
When I arrived, I was dead.

— Ulalume González de León / “The Stairs”

“We are all villains,” the hum said. “The system only gives us villainous options.”

— Hellen Phillips / Hum

What I’m Listening To:

Sisters and brothers, our struggles
mirror each others’
Recognize you recognize me
Mutual, support, unite

— Stereolab / “Cloud Land”

eyeless and unctuous

take my eyes
i want them out

the colors blanched
it all went soft monsters
everything i saw lost its definition

there is nothing worth seeing in this world now

What I’m Reading:

I bathed in a bathtub full of full- 
fat milk and never felt more a monster.

—Mary-Alice Daniel / “Ancestor Syndrome”

darklight nightmare ii

drag city intimacy clipped
i look back at the wake
of my time there and see
only the outlines of bioluminescence
in the roil

today, at 7:15, will be taxing
documents of the trash city sick
like the light limning the outline
of the bathroom door in the dark hallway
your contours faint in the void

What I’m Reading:

The life’s work of anyone who gives a damn about humanity is to resist the economic elite, demand the taxes that reduce their power and defend the space in which the rest of us can thrive. If your “elected representatives” aren’t helping with that, they are not your representatives, but theirs.

— George Monbiot / Bluesky post

Mainlining Extinction (redux)

An overheated tragedy unspooling
in a slow motion, so obscene—
so perverse—in its deathly insistence,
and the players moving about
as if in a deep pool of molasses.
What gives? Why this suicidal main-
lining extinction by heat, drought,
famine, forced migration, acidification & flood?

(while the planet’s little wars start joining hands)

Who’s at the wheel of this floundering mammoth?
Who cares?

Hello! Is this on?
Hello!

What I’m Reading:

When I despair or doubt, I tell myself that I am an artist. That is both highfalutin and modest: it gains me nothing. It promises nothing. But it puts me back inside me, where art occurs, and nothing is quantifiable. 

— Elizabeth McCracken / A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction

Darklight Nightmare

Flotilla face on the yardarm angles me grace in deliquescence. Crill face sanguinary acts without the bliss and bloom. 

Wreck me a fantastic drool spanner in deep blue space. Deep sea snow is dying whales and jellies as bottom feeder regalia rejoices. 

I see these letters pooling and drifting down to the depths where translucent fangs await glinting in darklight. 

A tenacious cold envelops their trajectories toward impalement. Impatient teeth. 

Impenetrable meaning impossibly inert in the void.

What I’m Reading:

There is snow on Vesuvius
And the barometer has dropped to one.
Winter again and Spring suspended
On metaphors and appetites.

— Nancy Ryan / “Poem”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

How could I forgive myself if I left you alone in the crowd. The sky rains down
iron and the earth’s an old carpet getting shaken out. From the crowd, the
hospital is far, the sky persists in its deliriums, blue and green are gone, and
there’s only ashes in my eyes.

— Nasser Rabah / “The Hospital is Far Away”

But then, here she was. Living in the minor corner of the real. In a forgotten country. Without TikTok edits or multiplayer games. Barely even a meme. 

— Lydia Millet / “Tourist” / Atavists

every shout from any distant window
wakes me from my deepest dreams so I follow it
like the blind man who raids the air with his hands
toward enemy territories
where his eyes were smuggled and a ransom demanded
I hear the wind in my fingernails

— Sargon Boulus / “Story Without a Moral”

It turned out the plastics industry was well aware that many products marketed as safe BPA-free alternatives actually release other damaging chemicals. For years, corporate scientists had been studying the problem and burying their own damning findings. At the same time, the industry had worked to cast doubt on research from outside scientists-often employing the same methods and consultants that the tobacco industry had used so successfully to discredit the science on smoking.

— Mariah Blake / They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals

I’ve sold my hair, bowed to the brogue
of dreams and agreed as a mermaid
would to walk on knives.
Good dagger be good to me.

— Tory Dent / “Ocean Park”

Two things are simultaneously true:

1. The Iranian regime treats its people with extreme brutality and cruelty, and we should honour the citizens seeking to overthrow it.

2. A US attack on Iran would turn a crisis into a catastrophe.

— George Monbiot / Bluesky post

When he laughed, respectable senators burst
with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in
the streets.

— W. H. Auden / “Epitaph on a Tyrant”

What I’m Listening To:

The world’s changing, no it ain’t
You’re just scared to death through hate
Scared to death through hate
Scared to death through hate

— Sleaford Mods / “Flood the Zone”