the author is free to make narcissus dislocate
from his bedstead narcotic—
a demon of countless bitter decanters
he is both limber and in rigor
in bedroll and nape
with a perpetual jab
a wrecker among the dislocated galaxies
folding the hole in the sky
What I’m Reading:
“When a mother dies, everything you’ve given to her comes back to you. Now the tea pots line up on my mantel like grief.”
— Victoria Chang / Dear Memory
I don’t like the song that you sing
the way that you sing it
the key that it’s in
I don’t like the lyrics
That turn of a phrase
The bridge or the chorus
The tempo it’s in
You sing like you mean it
But it’s truly a sin
The way that you phrase it
The pitch that it’s in
I don’t like the song that you sing
The verses are cryptic
Your ear’s lined with tin
You say that you like it
Without any chagrin
You snort like a trumpet
Sound reedy-thin
I don’t like it
The song that you sing
What I’m Reading:
“Music for when the music is over
Is what a poem is. There’s no music
In a poem, just the imaginary
Composer breathing beneath the deep wreck…”
— Rowan Ricardo Phillips / “The Peacock”
When you awaken your dictionary is large—the days of abridgment have long passed.
You search for globes with a friendly eyebrow cormorant and press on.
You seek out varied terrain, and the enemy of trance, riding with fully loaded pageants—prospecting and westward.
You might try for a chain of mountains to the north—you seek out hired hands among the wolves.
You have a foul expectation of the liveryman who speaks in tongues and whispers to an invisible mate—a tumbril escapist with gold-fringed epaulets and a torn pannier for a hat.
You billet with a cardiovascular tactician that speaks of hernia surgeries and the resulting black scrotum. The mule driver speaks of shaving his nipples.
You’ve hired a team of champions and you’re off for the call of the northwest—a place of intractable weevils.
Oh, the pure joy of being alive another day in this millenium.
What I’m Reading:
Ela Minus Recommends:
— Ela Minus / The Creative Independent interview
Blindly devote yourself to formulary Z-074. Make triplicate copies send one to me, one to Human Resources, and one to the Department of Repressive Operations. Sing, glory be! Glorioles and halo benders and everything is ordinary until it is not. Then we’ll have to consider how I melt, multiphasic, multiplying the meaning of nothing—this is something unseen… what doesn’t kill you makes you spastic and ekphrastic. Please don’t embarrass me in front of the secular pilgrims, they’re in a hurry and frying fast. They’re fasting at the speed of light, gasping at the site of blight. Remember the feeling you had when your teeth were removed with a mallet. Remember the pity you felt at shaving your beard with a hatchet? The nicks and the deep lacerations from running in place with shaving cream in your eye sockets and one hand in your pocket? Well, that’s what I’m feeling now.
What I’m Reading:
“Today she was wearing an old flowered bathrobe with all the threads pulled out. For a split-second, my mother appeared to me wearing the pelt of a wild beast … All that I have standing between me and death is my demented mother.”
— Annie Ernaux / I Remain in Darkness
Let’s celebrate the approaching Spring / Vernal Equinox on March 20th along with longer, warmer days—let us:
— scallywag tinkle, so we’ll all be missing that eyebrow housemother of slink and shade
— veil our cultural and religious homicides for those who observe
— sing the “eyeball sling” and shackle our clothing
— gouge a prepared neighbor and bigamist
— gorge on baked blackbird prepared by talented druggists, or stay a while and ride our tin bicycles
— reconnect, sleuth, and sex our chops before the grandiloquent school board councilor
And don’t forget! Sunday begins Deadbeat Saxes Timetable, so we’ll all be missing that extraterrestrial slumming hour and set our clones ahead one hour!
What I’m Reading:
“I am not even a real artist—know I am a fake of some sort—sort of write from the bowels of disgust, almost entirely. Yet, when I see what the others are doing, I go on with it. What else is there to do?”
— Charles Bukowski / On Writing
The Communists are organizing grumbles.
The empire neophytes need lighthouses.
We’re singing the virile draftee ballads of gelding escapades—
While women with pinched noses file reports with the Stasi.
The expansionist neocolonialists have a mercantile exchange they’d like you to join.
I stopped caring, but continued counting…
We expect the worst because humanity always disappoints. We take pride in our overactive suspicions.
Make new cleric armholes in this cilice—
I like my hairshirts roomy.
We’ve had enough of athletic cuts and fitted styles—
We’re going to pot with abandon.
What I’m Reading:
“I sharpened knives
All night.
To welcome you
In the brilliance of their blades…”
— Radmila Lazić / “Love”
“Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr. / Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
“Empire, white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia are linked in complex ways, and our struggles against them require moral consistency and systemic analyses.”
— Cornell West / “Introduction,” The Radical King
“Having ruined the future of becoming fossils, finally we will know that it is for nothing we die, never in place of drowned sea turtles or swarming locusts…”
— Cindy Juyoung Ok / “The End of Crisis”
“I’m not alone in being unacceptable. Toni Morrison and Stephen King are banned, too. It’s supposedly because there is too much sex in our books. So, when are they going to kick out the Bible, because that’s got lots of sex in it? What century are we living in for heaven’s sakes? Really, it’s a show of power. Governor Glenn Youngkin is saying: ‘We’re in control of this and we’re going to make life very unpleasant for students and librarians.’ And the subtext is we don’t actually want our kids to be educated and successful, because one of the biggest factors in whether kids do well in their marks is whether there is a school library with a librarian.”
— Margaret Atwood / The Guardian
“Let it pass let it pass because everything will pass and be effaced
I will be back not yet erased
Memories
Are hunting horns whose sound dies in the breeze”
— Guillaume Apollinaire / “Cors de Chasse”
“Looking after elderly and sick people doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Making art doesn’t burn a lot of carbon. Teaching is low-carbon. Day care is low-carbon. And yet this work, overwhelmingly done by women, tends to be undervalued and underpaid, and is frequently the target of government cutbacks . . . It was an attempt, in short, to show how to replace an economy built on destruction with an economy built on love.”
— Naomi Klein / No Is Not Enough
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr. / “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”
What I’m Listening To:
“I’ve got some edged bummers that you’ve never seen / Come on in, there ain’t nobody home but me”
— Kaleidoscope / “Come On In”
She had grown red and corpse-like below the Danish authority standard issue yellow canopy—beyond the dune and deadwood. Nearby, crusted and congealed, many rats in hazel frozen a on twig.
Bleating, and she a sheep, that sand crackled and raised in the wool course of the afternoon. The wife to pooling streaks of curly substances. I’m pre-litigating the issues glued to highlighted clauses and codicils.
A lining of corn is what I picked out—in far arcs instead of center nodules. I notice dried mud and qualities of contractual clouds of condensed water on all sides of the windows.
I sawed the far central branches—and what of the ears?
Those?
In an increasing density at the left of the central smoke bone, she said: “what an attractive calumny as the stumble chooses. What did he choose?”
I chose. Her. Intently. There.
We dove tumble blind. The rocks (later chosen) over the chin into what we consider sticking faux yellow moves in air.
Did she?
You, who watched living rings in our mouths—a technology unsparing and compared those to wire geologic plates—radioactive, venous, glowing red and white.
You found that sort of liminal feature—a leaf glowing dizzy in the eddy of a creek
What I’m Reading:
“Most of the water that will drown Miami and New York and Venice and other coastal cities will come from two places: Antarctica and Greenland … What really matters is what happens on the two big blocks of ice at either end of the Earth.”
— Jeff Goodell / The Water Will Come
Floral bottleneck jacket-wearing flâneur for contortionist runway shows needed. If you are 7’2” tall and weigh precisely 147 lbs., please apply at the council bacterium’s office. If you know the choreography to the “backwater cough” and the “continental armadillo,” and are fluent in borehole pidgin you will receive priority consideration. Must possess a contempt argumentation voguing license class 2, and a sack-toned twirl certification. Ability to work in knee-high inertia a must. Please bring copies of dour-faced ornamentations and most recent phrenology chart to the interview. Only serious and sacrament-botched candidates need apply. Top pay!
What I’m Reading:
“Even their sneezes sound like Ravel’s Bolero.
Even the candlewax dropped on their smocks
makes ornamental masterpieces of their sleeves.”
— Claudine Toutoungi / “Martyrs”
trickster tau tangles
sticky beta amyloids
are gray matter sieves—
a brain bombogenesis—
dark bramble vise on your mind
What I’m Reading:
“Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror the Human Form Divine ”
— William Blake / “A Divine Image”
thee istsfor manity reader 