thee istsfor manity reader

What the Chakackas Guitar Riff Wrought

Ox Mayday was a brutal man… (No, I don’t have to show you the throttled necks, the extracted teeth, the multifarious testicles hooked up to electrodes, or the sound of the crushed metatarsals—I ain’t Chekhov! I’m telling you Ox Mayday was a brutal man—take my word for it—you don’t wish to cross him)… but Ox Mayday was a flummoxed man this evening—sweat beading on his pockmarked forehead, his carotid artery palpably pulsing on the surface of his sandpaper neck, beneath the glistening cauliflower ears.

Suffice to say that listening to “Jungle Fever” by the Chakachas on repeat for half-an-hour drove his cortisol levels to extremis.

So Ox did as the monk said and looked into his hands—mentally carding as if through a cluster of wool—looking for ancestral generations. Looking for others beyond the gamblers, thieves and drug runners and abusers; looking beyond the counterrevolutionaries; beyond the abusive harpies; and finally beyond the conquistadors, inquisitors and crusaders, for someone to connect to. Some aspect, however fleeting that resonated deep in his being, and with what he had intended to be. He found no purchase, no place to moor his vision.

Light streamed from his pouch, or should I say his “pooch.” And Ox soliliquized for the first time in his snub-nosed life:

The damndest thing, the damned cur opens its mouth and laser lights pierce the dark like it was a Pink Floyd laser show at the planetarium. Then as it whimpers I can hear strains of Ummagumma seeping out between its canines. There’s no one about to explain to me what the hell is happening. First, why Pink Floyd and not Pink Flag by Wire?— I hate dinosaur rock, with its attendant mellotrons and 3-hour guitar licks. Make it stop. Then, why lasers? Why not spotlights, or better yet, why isn’t the mutt breathing fire or something? The strangest stuff always happens to me, and of course I can’t get any post-punk or no wave strangeness, its always progressive rawk fossils like Genesis, circa 1974 — or King Crimson, any year in the last 6 decades. Please, someone make it go away! Bring back Mark E. Smith and The Fall, or at the very least X-Ray Spex. Uh!

(Flat, flat, flat, ‘dat…)

***

It is my job to write and that is what I’m going to do…

I hear hammering.
I hear you knocking.
I hear the sounds of the ‘70’s.
My head is a morass of sound and lyric snippets, voiceovers and music beds, stingers and soundtracks, and movie scenes.
Once there were harsh, deep, metallic sounds that echoed like bombs coming from the dumpster.
Our former president was not only a dumpster, but the fire to boot.
To boot a golden ball, this quadrennial, one must have golden balls or an approximation of Au testicularity—muscularity in synthesis. Synesthesia, anesthesia, and amnesia supreme. Haven’t you thought about a stop bath or D-76 lately?

Come bring your angularity to bear on my planar surfaces. You bulge out in the right places for police confiscations.

You struggle in the right places for lacquered telestrations.

Take this telestrater, brother. May it serve thee well.

(Something to that effect).

(What was that all about?)

What I’m Reading:

“To make love, turn to page 121.
To die, turn to page 172.”

— Bernadette Mayer / “[Sonnet] You jerk you didn’t call me up”

i dreamt

i dreamt myself into being
at the aperture of solitary sanguinity
it was somewhere near the sun
for i felt the furnace heat

the cold tried to muscle through
but it was kept at bay
in darkness

i dreamt myself into a foray of nucleotides
so base in the compound of life
compacted, refracted, primordial
i felt the furnace heat

death
in its infinite darkness
was away at hermitage

i dreamt myself into a swagger of hope
the heat and the hate sloughed away
a second skin
barren husk

i hissed at the universe—
sir,
i exist!

i dreamt
that i dreamt
at the bottom
of a dream

What I’m Reading:

“Everyone tells everybody else to write on water if he wants a durable medium. I hired a durable medium once and got to talk to everyone of Karl Marx’s imitations of Attila the Hun.”

— John McKernan / “Dear Y.”