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pincers and gloves

Posted on February 25, 2022 by istsfor manity

**Dendritic Bolus Blues (Dream at 3:38 am)**

Instead of changing my shirt I changed my mind and requested a reverse baptism. Get the father son and the Laszlo Moholy Ghost outta’ my body. Get ‘em all outta’ my soul. Forthwith.

Can’t look back, won’t look back. Ozymandius Motors for all your autonomic pleas. Automatism at 350 horsepower ////// Wayside shangri-las and all the disjecta ejected in your superego moods during our President’s Day Sale!

You get rid of meaning by getting rid of meaning.

Start with Rasputin and work your way out from there. The peach cream turns bitter so allow me to lie down under your steamroller. Play me “Steamroller Blues” through your tinny transistor speaker and do your worst. Go.

Docket your trash—use pincers and gloves. Keep me at arm’s distance for I’ve seen a handkerchief of clouds (tzara-cumuli).

Keep me at a distance—I’ve heard a talking •Hugo Ball• head singing:

gadji beri bimba … tuffum I zimbra.

“Get rid of meaning. Your mind is a nightmare that has been eating you: now eat your mind.”

— Kathy Acker / Empire of the Senseless

Posted in Writing | Tagged Autofiction, Biomorphic Art, Blues, Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dada, Dayglo, Death, Documentation, Drama is the Opiate of the Masses, Dream Notation, Experimental writing, Fiction, Flarf, Ghosts, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Post-Apocalypse, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

what it meant

Posted on February 24, 2022 by istsfor manity

The Contractive Subtractive (redux)

There were erasures to make. He made the erasures. There were no complaints. The work was done. He moved on. When more erasures were required, he made those; and in this manner his work was accomplished, and he continued erasing. This is how it was to be alive then. This is what it meant to finish. Whatever you take from this—you must know this—this was only one of many ways of moving through life. There were alternative ways of working, and of moving through life. That much is assumed. That much is certain. When he needed more erasures, he did this:

“He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table and hurl the inkpot through the window—to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him. Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system.”

— George Orwell / 1984

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in our mouths

Posted on February 23, 2022 by istsfor manity

Central Smoke Bone

She had grown red and corpse-like below the Danish authority standard issue yellow canopy—beyond the dune and deadwood. Nearby, crusted and congealed, many rats in hazel frozen a on twig.

Bleating, and she a sheep, that sand crackled and raised in the wool course of the afternoon. The wife to pooling streaks of curly substances. I’m pre-litigating the issues glued to highlighted clauses and codicils.

A lining of corn is what I picked out—in far arcs instead of center nodules. I notice dried mud and qualities of contractual clouds of condensed water on all sides of the windows.

I sawed the far central branches—and what of the ears?

Those?

In an increasing density at the left of the central smoke bone, she said: “what an attractive calumny as the stumble chooses. What did he choose?”

I chose. Her. Intently. There.

We dove tumble blind. The rocks (later chosen) over the chin into what we consider sticking faux yellow moves in air.

Did she?

You, who watched living rings in our mouths—a technology unsparing and compared those to wire geologic plates—radioactive, venous, glowing red and white.

You found that sort of liminal feature—a leaf glowing dizzy in the eddy of a creek.

“Half light, half ideology. Each of us is impressed as pixels into an ad for democracy.
Give the people what they want, says the TV. A powerful suction effect? Extraextra-cheese?”

— Ben Lerner / Angle of Yaw

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dada, Dream Notation, Experimental writing, Flash Fiction, Ghosts, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Post-Apocalypse, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

at my dreams

Posted on February 22, 2022 by istsfor manity

chicken in a box

i jump off the bed—
cold granito floor
judders my core—
legs & spine ablaze
lower brain
doused in fire.

i dread the
conflagration in my head
as i peck away
at my dreams
like one conditioned
inside an arcade game box.

slot a quarter in the box
& the turntable
i stand upon spins—
a hatch opens where
i peck at feed.

to eat & not to eat.

so long since
anyone’s come
by & i
had a grain or two.
don’t pass me
by / i
say with shopworn eyes.
don’t walk
by / i
will u to slot a coin.

i haven’t fed
in three days—
slot some money / honey
provender’s behind the door.
be a hun / i
may be your child’s nugget some day.
walk by that pinball game
straight into my heart.

“I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.”

— Lucille Clifton

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dream Notation, Experimental writing, Fiction, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

sing and tinge

Posted on February 21, 2022 by istsfor manity

Another Language (an Erasure Poem Remixed)

You can’t see your backhand tumescence. You ridge an indemnity to a mild occlusion. You shiv gambler smocks and spectator gallantry. You sing and tinge without specie or varicose effluvia. You spree on tremor-free fibulae. What are you playing at—speaking in tools?

You speak in a larch I can understand—a riot of the auspicious. You cast about probability roadsides in magical viridian. You are the vitrine of souvenir permaculture—a solution to ponder. You wave at ticker and sunroof parades simulcast in wispy simulacra. You walk in topaz somnambulist shades.

“It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

— Jean Luc Godard

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Collage, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dada, Dream Notation, Erasure Poetry, Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Random Sights with Signs, Writing | Leave a comment

she would know

Posted on February 20, 2022 by istsfor manity

She Dollops the Not-Knows

Her bedfellow has no gnu,
She thinks her brown bomb
Has no goad.

If she could dartboard
Naked,
Under panegyric triangles
And see her impersonators roasting in the sun
She would know.

But there are no panegyric triangles
On the string,
And dispensary waves call no backwater impersonators.

“pseudo-intellectuals with suck-holes for brains
so dense even when the light goes on
they’re still in the dark”

— Wanda Coleman / “American Sonnet 3”

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bilge neurotic spewer

Posted on February 19, 2022 by istsfor manity

malefactor poetaster (flarfish #50)

cronobacter poetaster—
salmonella malefactor—
flay your cruelly blacked-out heart

one element erasmus punk
mender-eyeing milk / are u sycophant
or plagiarist 80 pages in?

criminal or felon? anti-matter skate?
hag the play / r u predator of snorts?
strike the pedestal / defame the stage

mandala manacler / u know no restraint
a phiz phosphoric / bilge neurotic spewer
of guiltless interludes / ignorant & skewed

as u scribble speaking parts for criminals & prostitutes?
catullus & horace roll about in their small-petaled tutus

“she hid pencils beneath her gown, slipped out the pink erasers, bit down the metal sleeves to pretty serrations, carved an index of incongruences into her skin. nurses kept her cuffed in gauze.”

— Justin Phillip Reed / “Borderline”

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air is burnt

Posted on February 18, 2022 by istsfor manity

**The Father: Guantanamera, 2002**

The sun cuts a slice of light into his head. The stellate light streams through the window and blinds him. His last word is ¡Guao! The bullet fragments in his Broca’s area and splits the infinitive making its way through his synapses. His face a frozen distortion. His last word unnoticed by another.

What is left of him—his locked body—falls through the air on its ineluctable path to the terrazzo floor. What remains of his consciousness seeps out with the type O negative from his ragged head. The shrapnel sizzles in that now useless brain—the organ loses its way in this world.

The cafetera hisses on the stove top as the revolver spins on the floor syncopating with the tinny transistor radio version of Guntanamera.

Fragments of his head are embedded in the valence and jalousie panes. The air is burnt cafecito and spatter.

The photographs of him and El Comandante on the wall are commingled with parts of his frontal and parietal lobes—the very lobes that once devised entertainments for dignitaries, wooed countless women, and gave voice to the orders to shoot 183 gusanos in the revolutionary reprisal squads.

“Next you will want to make a list of the materials needed to build your fence. Some people find that their fence needs to be made of wood or metal; other people prefer to make fences out of their soul-parts, or their skin. Refer back to your fence’s main purpose to deduce what materials you will need.”

—Carolyn Zaikowski / In a Dream, I Dance by Myslef, and I Collapse

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slurry of words

Posted on February 17, 2022 by istsfor manity

Skronk Tectonics

Plactivist—a disembodied word. Decontextualized. One word in bas-relief, that I heard her say, in a slurry of words not directed at me.

Plactivist—decoupled and set adrift from its word cloud. It blazed like a meteorite across the my cerebral cortex and burned up somewhere in my temporal lobe.

Plactivist—I pictured a curved sickle scaler. A shadow with giant scalers for hands floating at my dim peripheries. Only the glint of the oversized probes resolved at the edges of sight.

My head in a vise as “Ode to Joy” — Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor (opus something or other) the fourth movement (you know)—blared. The chorale full-throated. Exultant.

(And in a split screen I saw myself and Alex, the Droog—all “vised-up” too, his eyes splayed open by pincers and locked—hey, wait how did I end up in a Kubrick film? No. No matter.)

Jump cut: The plactivist filled my line of vision. Surely, a shadow, most opaque—a maw of darkness behind … is that a head mirror? What serious doctor wears a head mirror?

No. This was a plactivist. It wore a plague mask filled with cardamom, cinnamon, and durian fruit, which slid about the beak-end of the mask in counterpoint to the faraway calls to: Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.

The plactivist scaled the depth of its shadow center—darkening, deepening, its own anti-matter. It’s own anti-being—black ice incarnate.

How does one weigh one’s soul? How does one quantify one’s shadow—or the intentions of our shadows as they try to flee the pin of our feet?

And then the space lightened. Not limbo—not a clockwork—or an inner circle of hell.

I heard her say plactivist — as in “play and activist, dummy!” But no solace settled, by now my soul was in need of repair.

Then I spied my soul—occupied—as it throttled its own shadow.

“Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.”

— Ben Lerner / Angle of Yaw

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your man card

Posted on February 16, 2022 by istsfor manity

Mancard Sonnet

I need a dose of antivenin infused
blood, call out the Gadsden herpetologist.
I need to blowout my synapses. Run
the Goldwater films in reverse—where is my gun?

god’s in the tuinal—he filched the dilaudid.
Vote early, vote often, says the hip-priest.
Better dead than pink, says uncle Justus,
Drown the last river dolphin. Beef! More beef.

More beef, more clear-cuts, more carbon,
more methane, more beef.
See coastal Kansas! Unfurl the flag.
Renew your American Mancard.

(Meanwhile, in the best of all possible worlds)

No need for Civil War reenactments—
all the slave rebellions succeeded.

“Gratitude is black—
Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death.
Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.”

— Jericho Brown / “Hero”

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