Then there was the sickness— So hot. The vault of heaven darker, Then darker still, A black sun At end. It was succeeded by the shadow Of the shadow— Spreading Nearer and nearer to the pin prick Of light Destroyed. Distant, To the west, A white effluent— Soft and yielding— Fades.
What I’m Reading:
“But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.”
Our salad days are filled with bitter herbs and intractable roots— Not so much a salad, but a melange Of weeds and thistles— Indelicate things in our mouths. Every bite a mouthful of rot and offal— Awful offal. The kakistocracy is installed in the cupboards The cups are off on a two week vacation in Marienbad. We are mystified and malnourished. Now I’ve had my wine… And you look better than you did twenty minutes ago. And you say: The sky is a massive hole tonight— My precious lucida is eating the universe: Inside-out. I can lay down and go to sleep. The lights are receding And the darkness is strangely pleasing.
What I’m Reading:
“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water buckets.”
Like a van garde avant. Like drinking tea filtered through a Russian soldier’s underwear. Like speaking through saxophone skronk. Like drying your back with nettles and swallowing a chaw of thistles. Like bored sawing through panel board. Like watching Window Water Baby Moving backwards. Like finding a nubbin of your desiccated umbilical cord pressed between two cotton balls thirty years later. Like finding a random head in your Tupperware Cake Taker. Like coming of age at 37. Like throat singing in Spanglish. Like pressing your ear close to an ambulance siren. Like walking off a pier because you hear the mermaids singing. Like, why would they be singing to you? Like, huh?
What I’m Reading:
“I write in the knowledge that there is nothing to lose by saying the difficult thing in common/uncommon ways, knowing that the beauty of a line lies in the alchemy of doubt, adrenalin and risk. Mainstream judgement of what is ‘good’ is based on elite opinion, curated over years. It is necessarily corrupt. I’d rather write an ‘ugly’ line, to such eyes.”
This is what April will look like . . . Easily digestible thoroughly detestable, or:
Make your own favorite artist inspired project:
You might glue colored papers into Sister Corita Kent style shapes and write aphoristic sentences to please your soul.
You might ink intricate line patterns and blocks on graph paper in DW’s Mountebank style and affix phrases cut-out of magazines around the figures.
You might layer words upon a short film.
You might paint a neat Ellsworth Kelly-like green blob as on the cover of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour.
You might make a book of Leanne Shapton-like images and text conflations.
You might gather pictures found at thrift / antique shops and mount them with fortune cookie fortunes affixed on the lower margin.
You might make “the easy project”—a series of atrocity exhibition pamphlets.
A: It’s my dream / S: What horror!
What I’m Reading:
“RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.”
— Sister Corita Kent / “Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules”
The moon wanes as we drop our rock into the darkness. Our rock unbroken; in dust, in mud, over spur, in sag, over scree and talus — unchanged. The rock, infrangible, rolls.
What I’m Reading:
“It’s a strange sensation to yell out: This is me! / In every place I’ve watched / caravans of sorrow— / I run like all the other men, chasing my / shadow down alleys.”
We float in a melancholy aura crying onion-eyed tears. The spires gleam like forceps extracting the sun from the sky.
II. Spheres
Pomodoro cut holes of obtuse logic from fecund metal spheres. The lawn overcome— cloud shadow spreading— recalling last night’s dream: the bottom of the well, fetid water, roiling larvae.
A: It’s my dream / S: And why don’t I care?
What I’m Reading:
“It’s just that some people can do things, and others can’t . . . It couldn’t be any simpler. People do what they can get away with.”
(Fade Out / 8 channels of noise : one channel of noise drops out every 30 seconds until there is silence)
Voiceover In Search Of A Film: Soft antennae entertainment turned minds to mush. Mush was the preferred texture of pablum eaters the world over. Overcome with cathexis via parapraxis trying to gauge the thickness of the Foley catheter.
A: Catheter? Did you say catheter?
S: Are we talking about the indwelling and suprapubic type catheters?
A: This isn’t your typical prime time fare, you know. You know it must be.
S: It must be. Isthmus B? Be you choosing Isthmus B? Isthmus of Perekop?
A: Are you insane, man? You can’t get anywhere near that today—mines, errant shells, ravenous drones on the prowl for heat signatures . . . No. New.
S: New world Isthmusesesess. (Did I just neologize?) what about the Isthmus of Panama?
A: Why has this turned into some sort of geography thing? What is this about?
S: What is anything about?
A: About 6 feet 3 inches, 224 pounds—a strapping lad!
S: You, my friend, have lost your yarbles.
A: You mean marbles?
S: What’d I say?
A: Yarbles . . . Maybe that’s the parapraxis, and this is all about quasi-urinary tract issues.
S: Hmm?
A: Where were we?
S: I think we’ve lost the plot.
A: Was there ever one?
S: One is born and then one dies.
A: Dies? What about all the other stuff in between?
S: Indeed.
A: In deed?
S: Indeed.
A: I’m sorry I have to stop here. You’ve put me in a sad state of mind.
I ate the wrong crawfish on my first float trip. It really wasn’t wrong, but eating it raw sure was. A specialized blood test found a lung fluke eating me from the inside out. I didn’t like this because women don’t generally like men with parasites in their lungs. I was scared that I’d have this fluke in my lungs for twenty years. Then a secondary infection led to the removal of fifty percent of my left lung. After six weeks I went home, I was feeling like myself. Now I drive a pick-up. I like that, it looks pretty.
What I’m Reading:
“Listen, if there is a hell, we’re in it. And if there’s a heaven, we’re already there. This is it.”
thee istsfor manity reader 