You ain’t seeing what I’m seeing on the horizon of this new year.
I ain’t saying what I’m seeing on the horizon of the new year.
I ain’t writing about what I’m seeing on the horizon of the new year.
I ain’t skewing the horizon line of the new year.
I ain’t setting to skew the horizon line of the new year.
But eventually I’ll tell you, and then I’ll write about it, and then you… you will… you will skew the horizon line of the new year.
Horizons are meant to be horizontal as long as you look at the horizon in a particular way.
I ain’t looking at it in that particular way.
What I’m Reading:
“Why is it we speak of unreliable narrators, but not of unreliable readers? A reader freely judges the author, but the author is not allowed to judge the reader. Except, of course, in the Bible.”
“I couldn’t stand being seen as data: everything I did or said, everywhere I went, usable, profitable, predictive data. That invisible record, it accumulates, and you drag it around with you even though you can’t see or feel it. I couldn’t stand the idea that every little choice I’d made, however thoughtless or dumb, was now part of my history.”
— Jonathan Dee / Sugar Street
“she’s been places in her small world big butter for their american dreams”
—Nikki Wallschlaeger / “Cows in the Evening”
“So the poetry community was able to thrive even in isolation, and that was really beautiful to me. Poetry became a kind of anchor for people who were feeling completely alone and distraught, and full of anxiety and fear. But as we move forward to more public and social settings, I think it’s important to recognize that poetry will be one way to tell each other about what we’ve been through.”
— Ada Limón / “Q&A: U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón” / Poets & Writers
“When my mother was dying of breast cancer, a priest came by to tell her that the pain she was experiencing was equivalent to Christ’s on the cross. But Jesus Christ had no breasts. 36 degrees.
There’s a lot of sadomasochism inherent in the Catholic Church, witness St. Sebastian or the cannibalism of transubstantiation.”
— Bernadette Mayer / “April 18”
“Owners never want to see their hardback babies pulped. Bibliocide seems particularly painful in this fraught era of banned books. Hence, the sprouting of Little Free Libraries everywhere, and donations to public ones for resale, which enable staff to purchase new books.”
— Karen Heller / “We’re drowning in old books. But getting rid of them is heartbreaking” / The Washington Post
“Politically, I guess you could say that I’m a progressive. I firmly believe that everything in and about human society is progressing toward its end.”
— Jonathan Dee / Sugar Street
“Sometimes I just sit like this at the window and watch the darkness come. If I’m smart, I’ll put on Bach.
I’m thinking now of how far it always seems there is to go.”
— Jim Moore / “The Need Is So Great”
What I’m Listening To:
“Away, you swagpot! Lick the floor, you dog! Squeak out your dying wish, you pig!”
— György Ligeti & Michael Meschke / from Le Grand Macabre
For $20 someone phones me and spits insults, in Cuban-inflected Spanish, through my earpiece. I also invest in seed packs for vanity, narcissus, and temerity. My fingers are refracted in the water backing up in the sink. A clog formed at the center of my soul. I’m unable to plunge it or dissolve it with caustics. The acoustics of these apartments are poor, the walls porous and sound travels easily through the heat ducts and vents. This is abrasion by the light of the full moon on the television downstairs; the Ligeti anti-aria from Le Grand Macabre tamping down from the stereo upstairs; and the constant woohooing by the spectrum kid next door; the neighbor across the hall has the scents of camphor and chicken soup, and Dave Brubeck wafting down the hall; and the elevator squalls Floor 16 too loud. The clog in my soul is not dispatched with celerity. It’s not dispatched at all. The hole in my head is a constant cavil. Then, I missed the alignment of the planets last night. So I pay to have someone call me a comemierda. I eagerly and promptly answer the phone each night at 8:31.
Hello 2023
What I’m Reading:
“Stick to what you believe in because you’ll be just as wrong as everyone else.”
— Arnold Roth / The Creative Independent interview
I am the keeper of the Doomsday Clock. I know what will happen to us. I know how the world ends, but I don’t tell you. I’ll keep you in the dark. I stopped the hands on the Doomsday Clock at 11:59. When we met I thought I would turn back the hands on the clock, that I might set the pendulum in reverse. But you said our fate was sealed and it was fatal. I was drawn to that. I was afflicted. I set the works in motion once more, the cogs thunder. I have chosen this minute.
What I’m Reading:
“The idea that humanity can somehow triumph over what’s most awful about itself is narcissism. We’re the poison, we’re the virus, we’re the fire, and the only way to stop it is to let it run its course.”
December rush, eh? Rebarbative bedfellows, yes? Assuage the babblative, no?
You’ve got another December rush going and no guardian of the journal yet—you… you… you see… you see men hovering outside your window 15 & 1/2 storeys up—what phantasms these? What dour inflections of second sight? What third-eye astigamtismus, those shimmering Fata Morganas? Weren’t the visitations supposed to happen Christmas Eve? It’s two days after Christmas, man! Be damned masts! Confound the mast climbers! Rock the rock pigeons in their hidebound pinnacles! At the end of the year I see a procession of all the dead things seen throughout the year. What queasiness this? How quizzical. How illogically logical that this would appear before me on the day of the supernovae—on the day of multitude earthquakes—and dozens of volcano borborygmus…(or is it my stomach?) Be off visions—be off, you hovering homunculi, before I pincer you with forefinger and thumb—you pin-tailed wren (assassins). Vape elsewhere into the winds. Count the years conquests in slower measures, and hushed(!) tones, by the edge of tsunami quay—and take long steps toward the end of that miniature pier. Your eye sockets full of garter and indigo snakes compel me toward viper thoughts. This door prize of papercuts bores me in the standard modes. Note the batch and quantity—mark the name and model! Inspector 13 was here, and he hung from his neck a single use noose—17 centimeters from the ground, and he drowned in 9.5 centimeters of water. Take your excellence wherever you can find it…
Yours sincerely,
The Gibbous Red Star
What I’m Reading:
“please take a piece of me back home, each piece is anti-war and don’t pay your rent, in fact remember: property is robbery, give everybody everything…”
Scrolling down a number of superimpositions they multiply—pages of writing, collages, painting, films—audio also multiplied as reading and new noise fades in…
Also try flashlight projection of negatives or slides on wall and film it….
At the edge of decay (details: edge of pigeon…)
Multiple overlayered photos… build photo wall as u speak, cover Wooly shots with an innocent shot of childhood misconceptions
Use the writing done on Crispr Packs
Stripped down song like kg or tw
See photos in 2nd museum visit:
1. Like film “remains” very slow pans over dilapidated scenes, garbage, cultural detritus, read slowly over it
2. Like photos from “road journal” of torn pages revealing very little but enough of life story
3. Like dirt born “2nd History” rephotograph images of hoods and make them extended family, with narration hagiography over pix — and make documents or other artifacts like air mail mailers, maybe passaports etc
4. Make storyboards with pastel, cut-outs, pix, et al and animate it
5. Layer like contaminated “xy” & “stars” (no) and rephoto them as the final work
6. Repaint band aid packets for injuries suffered in childhood and equate them with the things I broke…
7. paint / sketch a real daddy doll with cut out clothes… or find a big unicorn rainbow second hand
8. Stones from different places visited and the ptsd inducing situations they mark
9. Copy and enlarge the word wall over and over until avatar of the turtle type of enlarged detritus and make wall of it
10. Tear pages out of book and paint something on it pertaining to you at Tim’s animal farm imbroglio
11. In-camera edited film: little bits and tips of crayons
What I’m Reading:
“The fantasy contented her for a vacant minute. It became the content of her life. Her fantasies were tacky home movies, not features.”
“One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;”
— Wallace Stevens / “The Snow Man”
“Every time it starts to snow, I would like to have sex. No matter if it is snowing lightly and unseriously, or snowing very seriously, well on into the night, I would like to stop whatever manifestation of life I am engaged in and have sex…”
— Mary Ruefle / “Snow”
“Out of ice us: what we’re made of came from comets, which are ice.”
— Martha Collins / “Coming Through”
“The wintry west extends his blast, And hail and rain does blaw; Or, the stormy north sends driving forth The blinding sleet and snaw…”
— Robert Burns / “Winter: A Dirge”
“As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
— Claire Keegan / Small Things Like These
“Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.”
— Wallace Stevens / “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
What I’m Listening To:
“Well I’m lookin at the snowflakes And they all look the same And the clouds are goin by me They’re playin some kind of game Well you know there’s a snowstorm”
thee istsfor manity reader 