I’m watching paint dry—
should be doing something else.
What else can I do?
I’ll dress frogs in Sunday lace.
What’s disturbing about that?
What I’m Reading:
“If a poem is easy for me to write, I know I’m not trying hard enough. Poems are suspect when they present themselves easily.”
— Sandra Cisneros / Lit Hub’s “The Craft of Writing”
This is a digitized morning page. This is a digitized mourning phase. This is digitized mental squall. This is digitized coming to terms. This is digitized hullabaloo. This is digitized push and pull through the eye of a needle in haystack out on the fringes of the wasteland. This is digitized someone else’s neuroses filtered through semi-quavered skronk tectonics. This is digitized skronk tectonics, this. This is digitized digital manipulations via pistoning thumbs—tap tap tap tap poo. Ok, this is digitized poo. Ok, this is the pops. This is digitized digital masturbatory aleatory foo. This is digitized living in the still relatively new-new century. This is digitized raw manifold with a peculiar filter applied. This is digitized. This is. This.
What I’m Reading:
“there is no longer a tear
in space nor in myself”
— Georges Perec / “Eternity”
It’s so luminous within the light-year—
All is colorful behind time.
I confound glowing snatches beyond the
godstars
It’s full of stars!
A queue of light fleeing.
Quaking behind the seals
We sentry glittering portholes.
Behold, the blackstar is no more.
It’s so luminous within the light-year.
We, quaking egos squall before the event horizon.
Diadems of light disappear & come again—
Shrouded ecliptics an orbit away.
The treachery
of not having words—
not knowing how.
What I’m Reading:
“… the job of a poet is to explore black holes in the psyche.”
— Sandra Cisneros / Lit Hub’s “The Craft of Writing”
…the bipolarities of bipolar2 means the investiture of happy sad happy sad happy sad…means the cyclic nucleic acidic gentrification of my sadness…and the entropic dystopic myopic envisioning of my happiness…sorta’ rolla’ coasta’ o’ love hate love hate love hate love sorta’ like sorta’ dislike back to happy sad happy sad love hate and rolla’ coasta’ sum’ mo’…it gives me the heebies and the jeebies all at once in a confluence of cortisol and endorphins as a raging tsunami of yin ‘n yang alla’ tha’ time…now and then now and then now and then since i was a kid and now as an adult now and then alla’ tha’ time…and so i cope and grope and cope and grope and cope and grope…and live to see another day…until i don’t…until then let us place our shoulders to our boulders and push upward towards the heights…
What I’m Reading:
“I am living since the year began in a great mental chaos, feral as an unmade bed … there is no one who can help me unpack the suitcases in my brain.”
— Sandra Cisneros / from Lit Hub’s “The Craft of Writing”
Oh moralist, who now looks over my roommate
face-deep in the chutney of tropical camellias
to be saluted by she who has been out all nightlight-long,
to be barked at by the do-gooders in their dollar-deep pews,
Oh moralist who in your simpleton manner have laughed
at all the vomitus! In your sidereal shadow
when, keeping carefully in the shallow, the
butler steals the syrup of ipecac.
But you offer, saturnine trollop,
with eloquence in myriad dry heaves,
consolation to him whose throat is raw,
while there to sire you from a drunken breakfast
a long-haired, neurasthenic barmaid,
lousy with crabs who gifts to you doom.
Versos a la luna
By Luis Carlos López
¡Oh, luna, que hoy te asomas al tejado
de la iglesia, en la calma tropical,
para que te salude un trasnochado
y te ladren los perros de arrabal!
¡Oh, luna! . . . ¡En tu silencio te has burlado
de todo! . . . En tu silencio sideral,
viste anoche robar en despoblado
. . . ¡y el ladrón era un Juez municipal!
Mas tú ofreces, viajera saturnina,
con qué elocuencia en los espacios mudos,
consuelo al que la vida laceró,
mientras te cantan, en cualquier cantina,
neurasténicos bardos melenudos
y piojosos, que juegan dominó. . .
Verses to the Moon
(translated from Spanish by William George Williams, 1916)
Oh moon, who now look over the roof
of the church, in the tropical calm
to be saluted by him who has been out all night,
to be barked at by the dogs of the suburbs,
Oh moon who in your silence have laughed at
all things! In your sidereal silence
when, keeping carefully in the shadow, the
municipal judge steals from some den.
But you offer, saturnine traveler,
with what eloquence in mute space
consolation to him whose life is broken,
while there sing to you from a drunken brawl
long-haired, neurasthenic bards,
and lousy creatures who play dominos.
(Poems, 1916/1920, are in the public domain.)
What I’m Listening To:
“He bends his mouth up to your ear
The words won’t disappear
He’ll take your eyes out for a ride”
— The Pretty Things / “Baron Saturday”
“The new ease of our lives sometimes feels like a betrayal of those who need it more, though I know that the guilt of privilege pays no debt.”
— Melissa Febos / “Iowa Bestiary”
“. . . And as he eats my gleaming soul, I am one with him
And stare out his eyepits and I see nothing but white
And then I see nothing but fog. . . “
— Dorothea Lasky / “Monsters”
“… our most precious contribution may well be that at the time of the plague we did not flee; we did not hide; and we did not separate.”
— Dr. Jonathan Mann / Former Head of the W.H.O. Global AIDS Program
“there is a reason for the phrase a riot of colors. witness the fury of the poppies …
… let’s talk about the peony held down by the weight of the rock.”
— Lois P. Jones / “Between Fulmination and Adoration”
“The threats we face are overwhelming, way beyond the scope of our powers as individuals, or even as individual nations—and yet, as individuals, we must bear the grief of all that we know. This knowledge exacts a toll.”
—Lisa Wells / Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World
“I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that.”
— Brian Eno / “Pushing Back the Limits of Speech and Music”
“Rhyme is cheap.
So is pop.
Easy to be obese
in a land fat with rape.”
— Maureen N. McLane / “Another Day In This Here Cosmos”
What I’m Listening To:
“Fame and fortune is a stupid game and
Fame and fortune is the game I play”
— Mission of Burma / “Fame and Fortune”
Two ice-adjutants
Count and wait for the melting—
Then we’ll float away.
The elision of reason
As the desperation grows.
What I’m Reading:
“But beating back a pipeline is always a good day’s work.”
— Bill McKibben / “Score it a win!”
What I’m Reading:
“We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison”
— T.S. Eliot / “The Wasteland”
She said, I long to shape
a moon from bone.
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.”
— Ai / “Conversation”
Time off from his seedling firebomb.
A ferment.
A long liquidizer, he calls it.
He’s the provost
of powerful concussives. Cursive clash
send-off specialist for hire.
Spontaneous handicrafter and score-
keeper.
Author of sharps embedded in walls.
The outsider poet of archangel
dynamic plosives. Send you
on a one-way trip.
What I’m Reading:
“I am the target
of mysterious arrows
I myself let sling”
— Maureen N. McLane / “What’s The Matter”
thee istsfor manity reader 