my heart distills my blood
heliotrope
looking for a sun
a plantation of hateful
verdigris
factors out to flow
out big star not too far
severance
runs rampant over
my tripartite welcome
parse
the light hiding from guards
foiling the crowds
out
in the rain
i care
less
each passing year
What I’m Reading:
“ : when water undresses into tar sands / and to one long tune acacia trees dance some / as in alder reach / anything is worth the rain …”
— Jake Skeets / “Anthropocenic”
This isn’t your house. You don’t belong here. You can’t come in here anytime you want and go in that room. The Muscovy duck eggs have failed to hatch — a marten’s been at them and taken some whole. My precious ducks: I feed them and chase them away as the whim overtakes me. My storks — not to return through the hole in my roof. My squirrels, running along the base of the house, imbibing their 32 grams of protein in their muscle milk. All is one raw manifold coming at me without pause, without distinction. I could have been in the shower when the ceiling collapsed. I couldn’t go to the funeral as it conflated with the unveiling. My daughter-in-law is my son; my son is my daughter; my daughter: the executioner. The executioner absconded with my ducks. Life is a proto-groats quorum forum. Life is full of strangeness and parthenogenesis.
What I’m Reading:
“The hug, the pit of the stomach, salivation—
I convince the horse
There are pleasures in being human.”
— Sandra McPherson / “Night Vision”
… midway through a 20-mile bike ride…
What I’m Reading:
“Castrated socks. (Her name was words)
Anemia cells. your expression is also like the legs of a sparrow.”
— Yi Sang / “Au Magasin de Nouveautes”
“The chicken truck passes with its load of small-brained misery.”
— Kim Addonizio / “Kansas, 4 a.m.”
“I am vulture-heavy. My stories are caskets filled with black feathers…”
— Diane Seuss / “Folk Song”
“Whenever I come across, say, a rat or a fox, and I meet its eyes, I can sense a whole cosmos behind them,”
— Olga Tokarczuk / “The Art of Fiction” / Paris Review
“april is the cruelest month etc. what remains?
brian jones bones. jim morrison’s friend.
jimi hendrix bandana. sweatband angel.
the starched collar of baudelaire.
the sculptured cap of voltaire.”
— Patti Smith / “picasso laughing”
“Now it is back, it is back much worse – this is in America. It is back so much worse than it was in the 80s. Because it’s become political.”
— Judy Blume / “Judy Blume: book banning now much worse in US than in 1980s” / The Guardian
“How did you go wrong? With only blind faith
& a dead star left in your eyes, where’s North
America?”
— Yusef Komunyakaa / “Night of the Armadillo”
“Why does this trembling
pull us?
A: Beneath the surface we are one.”
— Toi Derricotte / “Black Boys Play the Classics”
What I’m Listening To:
“But they say, ‘Write what you know’
Don’t know much at all”
— Urika Spacek / “Accidental Momentary Blur”
“This is now. The last war on drugs was a war on fructification. It was fruit batty, it was fatty bruit. I fructified of the crucifix cross and I crossed my own path when I got there. I got there when the darkness overtook me and I wrote a novel without writing a novel word. I chose something golden that sunk my Atocha. I fructified in Dar Es Salam. I drive without opening my eyes on a a left turns. I sleep inside a mosquito infested tent. Tent on an assemblage of extracted teeth and pull nothing but the difficult out of a hat while rabbit munch grasses obliviously in the hallway. I pass summer away with the spring in your step and winter in the fog of your soulless fall. I scarify my soul in the humorless sun of a long night in a clean well lighted place which is a bullet ridden cafe in Lesotho during a monsoon month of dust and quiet whippoorwills. I prune leafy trees leafless, hot with fleas fleecing your sister’s sake. You said, “I got mine and you’ll be fine.” I said, “summer is sister’s fate in her shizophrenic haze in the strength of a weakness in her occipital lobe.” You say my comedy was sublimely written, like it was written in Sumerian script in a Mandarin world. I said, “ it’s analogue to a lime habit.” To which you plead, “let’s go to a limehouse,” moving your fingers in such a way that the air warps in pink swirls around your head and lights alternate in yellow and blue hues in your open mouth. The words you create signify tranches of truncheons and luncheons on the grass half naked in Roman reclines. A bottle of wine stoppered ordering the sky and a jaunty basket opened to the prying June moon jejune. Then you produce wildebeest and hyenas from your bloomer pockets — pantaloons full of cavorting beasties. I produce a floral array of helium filled hydrangeas from my waistcoat pocket while a Berlin zeppelin flies drunken circles above us. The man from the Maldives stands and announces the sinking of the Diego Garcia Islands. I sing the song of hegemony of the albatrosses and pelagic birds that abdicated when the penguins became kings of the universe.”
What I’m Reading:
“The world is currently on track for a rise of at least 2.5C. Based on what we have experienced so far, that would deliver death and destruction far greater than already suffered.”
— Damian Carrington / “Revealed: how climate breakdown is supercharging toll of extreme weather” / The Guardian
I scarify my soul in the humorless moon of a long night in a clean well lighted place—which is a bullet ridden cafe in Lesotho during a monsoon month of dust and quiet whippoorwills.
I prune leafy trees leafless, hot with fleas, fleecing your sister’s sake.
You said, “I got mine and you’ll be fine.”
I said, “summer is sister’s fate in her shizophrenic haze in the strength of a weakness in her occipital lobe.”
You say my comedy was sublimely written, like it was written in Sumerian script in a Mandarin world.
What I’m Reading:
“Here all is strange.”
— Samuel Beckett / Happy Days
What I’m Reading:
“You look around and they are teaching CREATIVE WRITING at some university. Now they think they know how to WRITE and they are going to tell others how to. This is a sickness: they have accepted themselves. It’s unbelievable that they can do this.”
— Charles Bukowski / On Writing
What I’m Reading:
“As a child, when I closed my eyes to pray I saw a hissing wall of TV snow. The tighter I closed them, the harder it hissed.”
— Jennifer N. Knox / “Prayer of the Shy Forest”
out of focal acuity
paired with bad breaker service
albino squirrels prevail
maps and legends
tupelo honey and soft shell crabs
east-south-east of sopchoppy
mudhoney delights
What I heard today:
“I didn’t know you were a mortician!”
— Peter / ACA Traveller
What I’m Reading:
“Voice of the shopping bags
whirled in the wind
like a small quarry
between its claws
to play with.”
— Luis Muñoz / “Oh!”
