some roads have puddles
some rivers are flecked with blood
i’ll bring you a glass
What I’m Reading:
“Allow no Christian rituals
for this bitch, but, if
you like, you might invite
a homeless dog to sing…”
— Sandra Cisneros / “Instructions for My Funeral”
I’m lost in a hanging garden.
Dark hollows.
Death in June songs.
Someone humming:
she said destroy in black New York…
Is she humming it correctly?
Get off that—
What is correct?
Who decides?
Haven’t we been here before?
Recently.
So.
I don’t detach from myself—but I am tethered to myself:
A floating shadow on a string.
Hovering six feet above and three feet behind myself, by the thinnest and blackest string you’ve ever seen.
Have you ever imagined such a thing?
Wind buffets me about—
behind my corporeal self:
The daily dwindling sack of meat, blood and bone, aplomb walking—some sort of somber put-on—
coiled for anything.
My consciousness resides more in that ethereal floating self—
jostling about like a dollar balloon
in a squall.
Who’s in charge here?
What I’m Reading:
“I’m leery of planning stories out ahead of time. Almost without exception they’ll start from an idea or a phrase, which I then plunge right into and explore. If I stop to think, This ought to be in the first person plural, or, This ought to be one unbroken paragraph, or whatever, I think it would stop me. They are intuitive.”
— Lydia Davis / “The Art of Fiction No. 227” / The Paris Review
Sustain yourself with necro-normative inclinations, make use of what you consume, trap your inner child in an iron maiden. Spend time with your inner critic’s internal monologues parsing the sections of your Id with a rusty chainsaw giving your unconscious a case of terminal tetanus. Sublimate your inner demons to outer space—a wise man once said: “in space no one can hear you scream”—but it wasn’t really a wise man, not some mountaintop mandarin sitting lotus post-mantra, but merely a disembodied voice over in search of narrative sense, shilling a sci-fi flick—a lot of sound and fury signifying dollars for a moribund industry providing opiate delusions. Dziga Vertov once said: “film drama is the opiate of the masses.” I tend to aggress, and find egress repellant in the midst of an imminent dissolve. Cut to:
“So on this Day of the Dead in the confabulated year of 2022 CE (common to exploiters and the exploited, common to prelates and agnostic fronts, common to atheist cutlery and baptismal fonts, common to celibates and paraphiliacs) may we rejoice our dead—in those we knew who sloughed this mortal coil—and have a kind thought for the living (specifically, those who deserve kind thoughts) and may those who live now, whose great desire is to foment anger, misunderstanding, strife and division … well, may they join the dead sooner than later, so their peeps may remember them and rejoice this time next year.”
What I’m Reading:
“The verse had lodged in my mind, like a stylus hitching on a record. I resented the suggestion that the dead could rise…”
— Lisa Wells / Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World
Happy Halloween Monday.
There will be trim-or-treating by chips in the Tracksuit and Townhouses on Monday October 31 from 5-7 pm. The chips will trim-or-treat only in the apostrophes where owners/renters signed up to receive kimonos. The liver of “allowed” apostrophes is attached. Also, there are hard corks of this liver of allowed apostrophes at the frustration detective.
Have furl admiring our kimonos!
What I’m Reading:
“…at rare times I’m an artist; at most other times I’m nothing.”
— Charles Bukowski / Notes of a Dirty Old Man
“…and if I have any advice to give to anybody it’s this: take up watercolor painting.”
— Charles Bukowski / Notes of a Dirty Old Man
“When I lace my boots, before stepping out for my walk, I’m entering a ritual. I’m mindful of the notepaper and the small yellow pencil in my pocket. The work of writing has begun … As important as the act of shutting the door of the study has been the act of opening it and stepping out for a stroll. Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy were all walkers.”
— Amitava Kumar / Everyday I Write the Book: Notes on Style
“In America, everything is for sale. Migrants pay for safety. We pay people to believe that what we tell them is true, especially when we have spared them the hardest facts to hold.”
— Alan Pelaez Lopez / “Overalls”
“It’s no wonder business is booming for the tattoo removal industry. What was once a symbol of permanence that could only be covered up by another tattoo can now be erased – perhaps the ultimate testament to our increasingly throwaway society.”
— Martha Busby / “‘Like being burned with cooking oil’: how tattoo removal became a booming business” / The Guardian
“I am afraid of my voice.
I do not like my face.”
— Anne Stevenson / “Television”
“The second event was the adoption of Dum Diversas, the fifteenth-century papal bull that decreed the king of Portugal could, by divine right, ‘invade, search out, capture, and subjugate’ any non-Christian lands and ‘reduce their persons into perpetual servitude.’ Church-sanctioned murder and enslavement would be renewed and extended to the king of Spain through the Inter Caetera of 1493.
The impact of these geographically unlimited decrees cannot be overstated. In the ‘New World,’ they paved the way for the Middle Passage and Manifest Destiny, and then reservations, boarding schools, forced sterilization, tribal termination, chattel slavery.”
— Lisa Wells / Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World
“When I die they can take my work and wipe a cat’s ass with it. It will be of no earthly use to me.”
— Charles Bukowski / Notes of a Dirty Old Man
What I’m Listening To:
“I thought I saw a young couple clinging to a round baby
But it was a bundle of trash and food
Trash and food”
— Dry Cleaning / “Stumpwork”
The difficulty grows. Driving. Trying to get back. Something amiss. Disagreements. House not a home. Airy space in the country. Windows down. Smell of desiccated earth. What is correct? Who decides? Three rough looking men on the road. Picking up waste. Stop you. Ask for water. You only have enough for yourself. Bug smeared windshield. Crack on the passenger side. Jaundiced light. Sun attenuates.
What I’m Reading:
“. . . loneliness is just an ongoing
Relationship with time.
It is such a strange thing, to be
Continuous. In the weeks without snow,
What do the small creatures drink?”
— Anni Liu / “Lake of the Isles”
What I’m Reading:
“Sometimes, I start with nothing, and midway through, the painting will tell me what it wants.”
— Robert Nava / The Creative Independent interview
I’m slightly fuzzy
but coiled.
I’m using tape loops
to time my eggs.
I’m softly focused
on passing time.
the world ricochets
counterclockwise
You gaze up from
underwater—
time untethered.
What I’m Reading:
“Something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness.”
— Patricia Lockwood / No One Is Talking About This
LOOKING FOR LIVER-SHAPED COFFEE TABLES
…because I thought she was excessively nasty.
…large slivers of wood sticking out like knife blades…a wooden door born @ Home Depot…
Do oysters die in your mouth, or later on?
…since I broke my shoulder I no longer feel young.
You see my problem? I have these partially filled shapes…
…children by six different men…
It happened this year on an unseasonably cold night…
…staying away from the “industrial model” of pedagogy; it’s a flawed paradigm.
…it ripped down power lines, and the fences are all gap-toothed and such…
…on the last flight from Tucson.
There is a lone votive still burning at the front of the church.
What I’m Reading:
“I don’t need to know the meaning of everything, but can still feel its power and approach it with my own experience.”
— Robert Nava / The Creative Independent interview
She says to walk with her and she’ll take me to them.
As we set out an animaloid—something that resembles a small and lithe hyena—runs circles around us.
She seems to know this beastie. It nips at her thigh. She admonishes it with a laugh—it knows her.
He’s ok, she says as it runs around us yipping.
We walk back to the site of the happening.
We find no one there—but there were leeches.
What I’m Reading:
“. . . I usually incorporate dreams into my poems rather than speculate on how dreaming works.”
— Alice Notley / New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive: Lectures from the Naropa Archive
thee istsfor manity reader 