What I’m Reading:
“Because people are a nightmare. Any system predicated on the idea of innate human decency is a joke. We’re proving that now, as we have been for centuries. That hatred, that bigotry, that superstition, that deep, deep longing for petty vengeance: I can’t step outside of that. It’s in me and always has been. What you want, white man?”
— Jonathan Dee / Sugar Street
I am certain that it is the devil’s work, and the devil doesn’t speak English, so here I am studying Mandarin and I have no idea how this fortune cookie, which is written in Spanish, got here.
I’m unable to sort this out. This is playing out like a David Lynch film.
I’m lost without a clear linear narrative, upset by temporal disjunction and gratuitous jump-cuts. I have no way of disengaging from this nightmare. I’d just like to fall asleep while at the editing bay, but the David Lynch film festival continues to loop in my head — Eraserhead is the only film projected.
I want to start again, I want a do over — to get to 500 lap dissolves already!
What I’m Reading:
“Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.”
— Samuel Beckett / Waiting for Godot
eye had been given death eyes
black eyes turned inward
coruscated eyes that burn
What I’m Reading:
“Was I sleeping while others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?“
— Samuel Beckett / Waiting for Godot
A red clove beatnik
falling against the snuffs—
you delighted—look ready for
our “do-come-in.”
We take our timing, warm up for the dark, eyeing the cobblestones, boozers, scarves—
four to six bridges, red flanges—
the killjoy cathedrals on their spires.
A holograph nightingale on the plenary road—
the wallows, the judgments, the chimes, our crimes.
They call out, appear to flag,
They rampage, we descend.
They call out, appear to flame,
They rampike, we defer.
We’re underground to feelers—
Everyone has two slipknots.
We toe the New Yew for one last tincture.
The yew opens to the glares of velvet sky.
We still hear the titters
where we sit hungry from second sight.
What I’m Reading:
“Gloria Steinem says women lose power as they age
and yet the loudest voice in my head is my mother.”
— Solmaz Sharif / “Social Skills Training”
“Then at some point there was something called the internet of things, a phrase I never really understood, but anyway I am now all about the internet of the senses, which can’t be monetized or hacked, limited bandwidth maybe but the privacy controls are outstanding.”
— Jonathan Dee / Sugar Street
“We will all be forgotten. This does not frighten me. What I do fear day to day is who am I forgetting.”
— Terry Tempest Williams / Erosion
“In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we’re meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing bad about this. This wasn’t suffering, it was erosion.”
— Chuck Palahniuk / Haunted
“to live / now is to speak / the
language of the tree / toppled
along the expressway / at night”
— Urayoán Noel / “cinquains written during a tropical storm”
“I do not think I really have anything to say about poetry other than remarking that it is a wandering little drift of unidentified sound, and trying to say more reminds me of following the sound of a thrush into the woods on a summer’s eve—if you persist in following the thrush it will only recede deeper and deeper into the woods; you will never actually see the thrush (the hermit thrush is especially shy), but I suppose listening is a kind of knowledge, or as close as one can come. ‘Fret not after knowledge, I have none,’ is what the thrush says. Perhaps we can use our knowledge to preserve a bit of space where his lack of knowledge can survive.”
— Mary Ruefle / Madness, Rack, and Honey
“We were in love
or in some other thing love served
as cover for. It required constant testing,
trying to humiliate while seeming
innocent, uninvested.”
— Margaret Ross / “Macho”
“Afterward, in my underwear, I would sleep in the position that put me farthest from everywhere I came from.”
— Garielle Lutz / “Rims”
What I’m Listening To:
“Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9
Number 9
… financial imbalance
Thrusting it between his shoulder blades
The Watusi, the Twist
El Dorado
Take this, brother
May it serve you well
..maybe even then…
If you become naked…”
— The Beatles / “Revolution 9”
like lithium fog
like muslin gauze
like truce & warfare
like a weariness that settles
like wondering & wandering
like the ever-lengthening line
like the slight scrim between u & the world
like a poem that ends here.
What I’m Reading:
“you are the cow that gives birth
to an unutterable fantasy
you are the jelly
& you are the come blanket”
— Harris Schiff / “Pure Poison”
es un automatismo franco
y elevado
nada que ver con el generalísimo
pero en general
es el género de nuestros eneros
nublados & nevlados
entre nuestras gestiones congeladas
& fracasos helados
te quiero decir
te quiero
pero divago
distraído
en la catedral
del cuy empalado
antes del plato fuerte
de nuestra ultima cena
it’s a frank & elevated
automatism
in general but nothing to do
with the generalissimo
it’s the genre of our clouded
& snowy januaries
between our frozen gestures
& icy failures
i want to say
i want to say i love you
but i digress
distracted
in the cathedral
of the impaled guinea pig
before the main course
of our last supper
What I’m Reading:
I don’t trust the human beast … and I don’t like crowds. I drink my beer, hit the typer and wait.”
— Charles Bukowski / On Writing
She mistook her aeonian harp for her aeolian harp. She mistook her bemusement for amusement. Her confoundment for profoundment and her conclusion for inclusion. Nothing seemed to be what it needed to be and her mind kept elapsing and prolapsing into a crater like protrusion into the black hole nimbus that was her brain. From now on nothing would be what it should or sound like its meaning; rather things would be tinged in a greenish patina and sound like rods and cones and retinal shrieks of retinues with concubine purrs. Nothing like what she was accustomed to. She would have to reeducate herself in the ways of wares and the forms of norms. Much would be ochre now, because there was no sense in being saffron about it. At least that’s what the older boys meant, or what she thought they meant, when they claimed she was immature. Now was the time for ripening. The moment was upon her. Now is the only thing that’s real. And sassafras be damned!
What I’m Reading:
“I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live that is where they have come to live which of course they do do.”
— Gertrude Stein / Gertrude Stein: Selections
there is something louder than your heart
it supersedes the asperity of your bones
a wind forced through an aperture moans
it sounds like a death rattle, an agonal breath
this which your mind fastens upon
will always remain impermanent
even the sun is a transient thing
it will engulf half its own planets
in 5 billion years
what is your worry now?
there is something stranger than knowledge
there is ritual and belief
a dry voice remains a dry voice
a hollow head remains a hollow head
this matters not
find solace where you can get it
What I’m Reading:
“I sang the way I still talk.
Every song was the worst way I could think of to ask for what I did not yet know how not to want.”
— Garielle Lutz / “Their Sizes Run Differently”
he cries little bits of her heart
at a pivotal point in a pair
of boxes full of higher figures
where all thoughts of airsickness
rockets up the throat
infundia : infused
sollozaba : sobbed
truhán : rogue
aborrecido : abhorred
sayete : a short frock or skirt
say what you mean to say—
say: the first time my mom
checked my hymen
was when I was 13 years old
this accomplished nothing
but creating fear and doubt
this : esto
abhorred : aborrecido
scratched : rasguñada
i’m angry : estoy enojada
cuerpo directivo y docente : governing and teaching body
What I’m Reading:
“From time to time I show up in myself just long enough for people to know they are not in the room alone. Usually, these are people who expect something from me a near future, a not-too-distant future … Everything I say is to the best of my knowledge and next to nothing. It comes nowhere close.”
— Garielle Lutz / “Devotions”
thee istsfor manity reader 