paper cache
impositions
and tessellations
half-inch
by
half-inch
one
sees neither
color
or effort
in men
What I’m Reading:
“With all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it.”
— Nick Cave / “‘This song sucks’: Nick Cave responds to ChatGPT song written in style of Nick Cave” / The Guardian
select
a place
haunted
spirited
imbued
with days
stick
times
and a note
of light
and sound
shadow
someone
and arise
leave smells
textures
phone
a thought
and memory
that
sensory
pocket
talk
afterward
check
everything you
remember
try not to
remember
just observe
What I’m Reading:
“Saw sea waves
rush ashore
some angry
some afraid
of what they’ll find”
— Charles Simic / “Terror”
Hi Neighbors!
Do you know leeks?
I would lump to start a coalfield fire that meets subterraneanly on occasion and smolders . I did this when I lived in Michigan—it’s a veritable furnace! A frock composer—a $5 irrelevance to play, and then torque the 3 witch-hunts, and get your own monograph headline. And of coverage: there’s a euchre poultice—you put a quest in every tinkle and—you’re euchred, and that spirochete is distibuted too (to non-witch-hunters).
You need an outhouse divisible by 4 for the composer, so 8 or 12, etc. Feel free to remand the frizzles. Let me know if you’re interested or have quintets—or any semblance of an idea of what I’m going on about.
Sunny delight @ N+14.
What I’m Reading:
“Everybody needs a place where they’re fearless or they’d never survive, at least I wouldn’t. Sometimes I hate this world. Especially when it’s more beautiful than I can imagine.”
— Vanessa Veselka / Zazen
“Has your copay increased?
Right hip stiffened?
Has the shore risen
as you closed up the shop?
And have you put your weight
behind its glass door to keep
the ocean out? All of it?”
— Solmaz Sharif / “Self-Care”
“What has threatened to kill me is the patriarchy, not because there are men in power, but because patriarchy is an institution. Institutions have no heart. They have agendas, self-serving mythologies delivered through religion, politics, business, and every other hierarchical bastion of influence that subjugates the poor, the marginalized, the disenfranchised largely, women and children.
The patriarchy replicates itself in order to protect its interests: power in the form of control and commerce. Hoarding power is hoarding fear. Scarcity rules. Sharing power is a belief in what the next generation knows and that it will benefit a sustaining view of the future. This is an evolving consciousness that transcends the individual, and fosters the many.”
— Terry Tempest Williams / Erosion: Essays of Undoing
“my grandmother told me
never laugh at others
because the future is unknown
queer people are sacred
we must always remember”
— Manny Loley / “butterfly man tells a story”
“He saw the tents people lived in
by the park get torched, and I could smell
on him what he had seen. There were people
with bullhorns you couldn’t really hear.
There was singing along with the chanting
of all the names of those who were murdered.
He said it didn’t matter what kind of day
it was but it was ironic that it was a beautiful
summer day, the sky a swimming pool.”
— Rick Barot / “The Streets”
“… My uncle says joy
is the opposite of running
into a dagger, and I realize I am not
the most poetic family member
who has pain.”
— Karisma Price / “Castnet Seafood”
“For the greatest acts of killing take place between strangers, strangers for whom there exists this wonderful capacity for intimate connection. Think of it! Somewhere there exists a stranger waiting for you to kill him in such an honest and heartrending way. Or perhaps he will kill you, so glorious and inexplicable is life.”
— Mary Ruefle / “Camp William”
“Break this hand that refuses to admit
it’s a thousand times harder to wander from tongue to tongue
than land to land.”
— Fatemeh Shams / “Handwriting”
What I’m Listening To:
“I guess I don’t ever ask for what I want
I see male violence everywhere
Beautiful face, softness
I think ‘Big soft bed club’”
— Dry Cleaning / “Hot Penny Day”
she sloughed off the past—
this town was her place of birth,
but she not of it.
Nothing understood,
Nothing to rely upon—
She would be just fine.
What I’m Reading:
“We are eroding. We are evolving. This is my mantra. The time has come to stop seeing ourselves as saviors and instead see ourselves as human beings on a burning globe capable of acknowledging the harm we have caused.”
— Terry Tempest Williams / Erosion: Essays of Undoing
What I’m Reading:
“Because people are a nightmare. Any system predicated on the idea of innate human decency is a joke. We’re proving that now, as we have been for centuries. That hatred, that bigotry, that superstition, that deep, deep longing for petty vengeance: I can’t step outside of that. It’s in me and always has been. What you want, white man?”
— Jonathan Dee / Sugar Street
I am certain that it is the devil’s work, and the devil doesn’t speak English, so here I am studying Mandarin and I have no idea how this fortune cookie, which is written in Spanish, got here.
I’m unable to sort this out. This is playing out like a David Lynch film.
I’m lost without a clear linear narrative, upset by temporal disjunction and gratuitous jump-cuts. I have no way of disengaging from this nightmare. I’d just like to fall asleep while at the editing bay, but the David Lynch film festival continues to loop in my head — Eraserhead is the only film projected.
I want to start again, I want a do over — to get to 500 lap dissolves already!
What I’m Reading:
“Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.”
— Samuel Beckett / Waiting for Godot
eye had been given death eyes
black eyes turned inward
coruscated eyes that burn
What I’m Reading:
“Was I sleeping while others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?“
— Samuel Beckett / Waiting for Godot
A red clove beatnik
falling against the snuffs—
you delighted—look ready for
our “do-come-in.”
We take our timing, warm up for the dark, eyeing the cobblestones, boozers, scarves—
four to six bridges, red flanges—
the killjoy cathedrals on their spires.
A holograph nightingale on the plenary road—
the wallows, the judgments, the chimes, our crimes.
They call out, appear to flag,
They rampage, we descend.
They call out, appear to flame,
They rampike, we defer.
We’re underground to feelers—
Everyone has two slipknots.
We toe the New Yew for one last tincture.
The yew opens to the glares of velvet sky.
We still hear the titters
where we sit hungry from second sight.
What I’m Reading:
“Gloria Steinem says women lose power as they age
and yet the loudest voice in my head is my mother.”
— Solmaz Sharif / “Social Skills Training”
