I heard that before, somewhere— it resonated. A chord struck—atonal & dissonant.
A wound—a pickaxe stymie, a hurricane hole in homogeneity. Monosyllabic trickle & tone.
Where you going—where you been?
I’ll find a planetarium to bathe in— nothing more to say.
What I’m Reading:
“How does it feel to be dead? I say. You touch my knees with your blue fingers. And when you open your mouth, a ball of yellow light falls to the floor and burns a hole through it.”
His fragrance remained in the room when he left, and she picked up notes of Ambien and gin.
He turned into a dragon and blew smoke up his own ass: in this manner he floated away on convection currents over the next county into the tri-state area.
She was disputatious. She said she loved living in Bwana Johnny Time — the epoch of real mealy mouthed crying. She said she had cramps. The walls cared nothing of it. She insisted and sang “Silent Night.”
He was tall with small joints and thick limbs. His hair, tufted, was buffeted by the winds which were strong and cool this high in the atmosphere. Before he blew smoke up his ass he washed windows without panes, and took pains in his assiduousness. (His father once digested him during a midday snack — and since then he felt as if he were covered in a film.) He felt slightly dirty and smelled worse.
She was small with oblong limbs, and royally blonde-haired down to her quadriceps. She analyzed the filigree in the milliner’s shears and chose “deckle” as the word of the day; and cellophane was “thee” fabric. She smelled of Lithium and a life roughly lived. She ate only the crusts.
His name was Funty. Her name was Frenta. He blessed his goldfish. She fried hers. “Orange Poppers!” she proclaimed. His favorite animal was the Pileated Woodpecker. She peeled his navels.
She was obsessed with the texture of his body. His tortured male narcissism despaired. He happily fathered a wonderful future in Hades. He wanted to write a skeezy text in the underworld.
“The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.”
— bell hooks / Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
“Crows, crows, crows, crows then the slow flapaway over the hill and the dead oak is naked”
— Ed Ochester / “Fall”
“Mark my words. The war on inflation is about to get ugly – especially if the people who are drafted into it are mainly average working people and the working poor rather than top corporate executives and major investors.”
— Robert Reich / Substack Newsletter
“mayhem doesn’t mean what we think it means, mayhem”
— Bernadette Mayer / “Marroon, Muckle & Me”
“Chickens died or struggled to lay eggs, pigs were hosed down by fire trucks to keep them cool and Sichuan’s famed pandas lay on blocks of ice. People hoisted food to their apartments using buckets and ropes because the power blackouts had left elevators idled. Some simply fled to underground tunnels to stay cool.”
— Matthew Bossons / “What My Family and I Saw When We Were Trapped in China’s Heat Wave”
“To have an ahistorical world — to forget the past — can be dangerous. Paradoxically, it can make society less able to perceive and respond to change. The modern American relationship with history is inconsistent and fractured.”
— Madeline Ostrander / At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth
“Reading it will make you want to burn the world down or at least shoplift a thong from Victoria’s Secret.”
— Tea Hacic-Vlahovic, on Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School / Lithub.com
What I’m Listening To:
“In your eyes, I see the weight Of the planets And it’s sucking me out”
We’re above an endless plateau of cirrus. Look at that wisp of crescent moon nailed to this impossibly saturated blue sky. The moon out at noon. Proof, and more proof, that I’m being watched.
The wolf ponders the caribou and presidium of both frogs and finches.
All creation conceptually pressed together like dried flukes onto grainy pilgrims carrying the resolve of photochemical interventionists.
Two photorealists connect and diverge as the narrative’s historical, artistic and scientific linearities are placed upon one another with enlightening translucence. But nothing truly connects.
Through the fog and supervolcanic water vapor saturating the stratosphere we see finches, cane toads, and poison dart aristocracies working wing by haunch at their various outposts across the world.
It’s all visible from this height. And this must suffice.
What I’m Reading:
“The acceptance of disastrous fires and other such crises is hard, I think, for a society like ours that has such trouble relinquishing control … The denial of climate change has always been partly fed by an unwillingness to let go: if you acknowledge that the atmosphere has limits, then you must also place limits on human desires.”
— Madeline Ostrander / At Home on an Unruly Planet
Once again he applies murderous fillings to his ding-dongs as his antagonists in an old feud fail and fall—one after the next.
Life is gentle waxing suspense to him, but ultimately an infusion of toasted morning treats wins the day, and he’s ready to go, go, go.
Does this read like a report from an official legation after a tawdry jet-set romp? It ain’t.
He’s an up-and-coming caudillo quoting amphibians and sexing tadpoles outside of his posted office hours: this one’s female, this one’s male… (you get the drift).
This next part is tedious so we’ll skip it.
Then the camper vans arrive and stretchers bearing strumpets and gigolos make an endless procession out of the fire and into the west wing of his villa—a trifle thing overlooking the eastern expanse of the Laptev Sea. (Nothing really to see here, but his all the same.)
Initially, the villa oozes with entitlement and extra Y chromosomes—this provide him a silo of serenity, but he’s often homicidal. Proof is in the outlandish taxidermy room and festooned along on numerous walls in his villa.
Outside his wing, however, he chomps on an effusion of waning ploys. Ultimately, it takes the cruelty of his schoolteachers—“how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”—to snap him out of the strongman trance.
It comes to him in an instant—I’ll annex everything I see. Every whim, every ill-fitting idea that suits me, I’ll bring to fruition. Because I am. Because I exist, I get to have everything I imagine realized. If I think it is—it IS.
I’m just that special. That extra Y guy! Ain’t it great to be me? Ain’t life grand?
(and the rest of us, we all, swoon … ain’t life grand?)
image: p. remer
What I’m Reading:
“Cultures of domination attack self-esteem, replacing it with a notion that we derive our sense of being from dominion over another. Patriarchal masculinity teaches men that their sense of self and identity, their reason for being, resides in their capacity to dominate others.”
— bell hooks / Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Reminiscent of a walking mature apocalypse—between tugs and kisses—few audiences have experienced this level of patriarchy and cake. Nutritive as cyanide. Planetary caskets put to use at an alarming rate. Off-site training of fiends and brooding strangers. It’ll drive the masses to sploot like overheated squirrels.
Through the Onion Trends. Though the mesh of higher forefingers and bureaucratic systems consistently locked in hegemonic melodrama and wanton death. Google misanthropy and ye shall see!
He’s a trilogy of quatrains in pentagonal packets told in lyric couplets.
(I miss my right arm—my finches have eloped with said appendage—in its stead all I have is this onion. Each successive layer an eggshell of penury.)
Unfortunately, the petrichor now smells like Ayn Rand, a Coke, and a runcible smile.
What I’m Reading:
“The heartbeat of our alternative vision is still a fundamental and necessary truth: there can be no love when there is domination.”
— bell hooks / Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
her strength seeps through newly installed calm she calls “ohm” to distinguish tuber from field— her namesake breaking into a smokestack obscure
he’s a pianist with psychological funds pitting an inconvenienced perch against the hook— no fish more foul in his mind but the forlorn mermaid in the fens
the maid does not sing for either one of them busy fending off poseidon’s sweaty mitts— she’s slightly claustrophobic & smokestacks nor pianists her concern
there is one pivotal element in this gordian knot none of this matters—there is no meaning here— but the one you project
What I’m Reading:
“… right or wrong, you will think what you need to think so that you can get by. So find some reason here.”
thee istsfor manity reader 