Where’s the action? The waves? The munitions? The minions? I don’t particularly dislike others but you might say I have an unresolved self-loathing issue ricocheting about in my cranium—and it’s rather spacious in there because I don’t make much use of the gray matter made available to me—but that loathing manifests in a distinct misanthropy. So I use my machete—early and often. I whistle while I work, hacking at ideas, ideations, idolators, and idiopathic strangeness in the venereal realm. I’m an equal opportunity serial hacker (others call me a barbarian) either way, I’m always ready, willing and … involute in my volubility. I say nothing when I say a lot. Where’s the valerian root? The moon has a moony face (apropos of nothing)—and violence continually flares at my peripheries. Welcome to the world, c. 2022 CE. What a place! What faces! What?! … huh?!
What I’m Reading:
“Holy images covered every wall of my parents’ house. Their house had the immobility of a nightmare. The first color I knew was that of horror.”
The A plane by way of A. Johnson, brought down by ritual and lack of victuals. Deadeth on arrival: thorny ocotillos and twenty minute count downs. Tomorrow I’ll learn about writing what you don’t know—what throws you. Where have you been all these haggard years? My tears in time are tin stripes running down the length of your inebriate life. You left me unsure of myself and strident and missing the glyphs of my youth. You perish-wither— periscopes down—the Monitor and Merrimack your bedmates at the bottom of the bay. Bring back the ironclads by way of IronBeer, or at least pass me a Materva because it is tomacal.
What I’m Reading:
“Every colonizer wants to be remembered — see our country whose name is a Spanish king’s name. Philip in Filipino.”
“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
— Audre Lorde / “Poetry Is Not A Luxury”
“The deluded dreams of billionaires aside, there is no Planet B.”
— António Guterres / UN Secretary General at Cop15
“These days, I’m still an ardent environmentalist, but now that means recognizing how none of us are alone. Not the wolves or oceans or trees or me. That’s the idea I’m keeping in mind this winter, as the world feels bleak and I don’t know how to deal with mass murder and terrible laws and each daily injustice. We grow our own networks to survive…”
— Sarah Mirk / “You will never be self-sufficient”
“Once I sat in rain, opened my mouth to the sky. I yearned to be changed. But each drop was a small knife.”
— Victoria Chang / “Far Along in the Story”
“I assert that poetry without politics is narcissistic & not useful to us. I also believe that everything is political-there is no neutral, safe place we can hide out in waiting for the brutality to go away.”
— Chrystos / Fire Power
“It will be about nothing. Not about love or God, But about nothing.”
— Charles Simic / “The Last Lesson”
“There are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear.”
— Audre Lorde / “Who Said It Was”
What I’m Listening To:
“When I screamed in the night I wasn’t screaming for you I was afraid of the things That you’d do Was I asking for it”
where channel interferences overlay on the overlayers multiple frequencies banding into one static ///// white noise ///// skronk you understand nothing impermanence === transience nothing to •••••••••••• nothing to grasp but skronk tectonics•
What I’m Reading:
“… ‘In a society of murderers, how can children be educated to something else?’”
“At the heart of every creation is a need to connect, even if it is to connect to no one in silent defiance or a curious desperation. The inner world is even more immense than the measured world we have created out of wants, hunger, and sometimes, need. Every word marks an act of creation, an intent, and often not a studied intent.”
rough are the exteriors its seams are where the dreams get in the interiors full of barbs protecting the sweet potato red soft monsters jelly delights bright as the blistering moon
the moon jejune?
pellucid gelid & jealous of the first ray the sun too self-sufficient self- sustaining to know a self- reflexive nature with no natural light of its own
When it came down to writing, it came to the toilet seat. She had no idea why, but images, concepts, lyrical passages flowed in torrents through her.
What magic the toilet seat?
It didn’t happen on the bus—with the furtive judgmental stares. She didn’t flow in the library—where stifled coughs emanated from carrels and sentinel towers of books. She didn’t flow anyplace else at home: not her desk (she regretted choosing the smaller city-sized one) or at the dining table (where all thoughts invariably siphoned back to the weight-related remarks from father—or “what about the kids in …” [your choice of developing 1980’s nation here]).
Every other space was an obstacle; the atmosphere an impediment; the surface too angular. It was only here on the toilet seat from 4:00 to 4:30 every morning, where the dreams unspooled again vividly, each one remembered in the finest detail (see that glint of moonlight on the shards of glass?)—it was on the toilet where imagined conversations wrote themselves, where she was thee hypnopompic amenuensis. Here all creation and worlds unimagined resolved themselves in full dimensions.
There were erasures to make. He made the erasures. There were no complaints. The work was done. He moved on. When more erasures were required, he made those; and in this manner his work was accomplished, and he continued erasing. This is how it was to be alive then. This is what it meant to finish. Whatever you take from this—you must know this—this was only one of many ways of moving through life. There were alternative ways of working, and of moving through life. That much is assumed. That much is certain. When he needed more erasures, he did this:
What I’m Reading:
“So write for yourself. If yourself is Stephen King or Colleen Hoover, congratulations. You’ll have millions of readers. That’s publishing and reading and the market. If yourself is an audience of one, congratulations are also in order. In the end, that’s what writing is really about—finding your vision and your voice, and being true to them.”
“We are not apparent in the cultural streams that establish and define American thought, art, and culture. We are not present at the table, though we appear perpetually at the table every Thanksgiving in stories told to our children in educational institutions across the country. But Natives were not there at that table. There was no table. Their heads were on stakes giving warning around the newly constructed towns by the settlers, built on Native lands.
These false narratives of Native peoples continue a story of cultural genocide.”
— Joy Harjo / Catching the Light
“I was born—don’t know the hour— Slapped on the ass And handed over crying To someone many years dead In a country no longer on a map…”
— Charles Simic / “Come Closer and Listen”
“–I dreamt I went to the doctor’s and she gave me eight minutes to live. I’d been sitting in the fucking waiting room half an hour.
(A long silence.)”
— Sarah Kane / 4.48 Psychosis
“There’s an undeniable chimp-with-a-chainsaw horrified fascination in watching him try to handle it (and, one hopes, an enduring and salutary proof of the fact that billionaires are not geniuses), but so far he has managed to turn an imperfect communications system into a dismal swamp.”
— Bill McKibben / “Organizing After Twitter” / Substack Newsletter
“Here’s the thing about writing novels, or writing anything, that should be hopeful. You can do it with teachers and classes and peers, if you need mentorship and encouragement. But you can also do it all by yourself. In the end, you do it all by yourself anyway. In the lonely hours (and writing is probably 90 to 99% lonely hours) it’s all you. Outside of having others read your work—and the business of publishing, which you shouldn’t be thinking about—all it takes to be a writer, day after day, even if you’re successful, is this:
“The bee sees a psychedelic airstrip in the mouth of the lily.
If anything can save us, it’s nothing we can do for ourselves.”
— Amanda Pecor / “If the Saviour Came Back to Boneville, Georgia”
“Poetry (and other forms of writing) can be useful as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark.”
— Joy Harjo / Catching the Light
What I’m Listening To:
“I’m so bored of thinking about men Look at the news Is it that time again Whens our chance To move on And heal I just can’t believe That shit is real”
thee istsfor manity reader 