pick me clean

Rumbling

The field full of regular hours. The strain of exposure to sunlight stark and unfiltered. It’s got me down, debased, debauched, and drunk with stolen beatitude. The scarecrows keep me kin—and if cock robin is not in Caracas I’m illiterate and a fool. I was once king of the parking lots—a Chevy Chevelle SS/Mean Green/Buffed/Original Bench/454. Now I toil reading books—a dark a maw as any I can imagine. Nights of endless darkness, stars blotted out by the coal fires—there’s an endless vein of anthracite burning below. I mind the horizon line for the crows coming to pick me clean. I could buff chrome to a blinding sharpness on that Chevelle once, and now I watch for smoke coming out of monticules of a mean, mean earth. I am the master of what I survey, but keep the crows away of my sagging yellow skin. The days are no better than the nights on this tilted land. The land. It wont stop rumbling.

“The baby is born.
The baby is put in a toy car.
The baby drives to work.”

— Garth Simmons / Hole Punch

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documents were signed

The Pomp

Today I broke my vow of silence when I broke the glass in case of emergency. I croaked in a muttering fashion most embarrassing, “Ra… rah… run. Run! There’s a moth infestation.” We had moths. We were underground in our hermetically sealed glass boxes, and here we were with an infestation of moths. How was this possible? Had we not paid our alms, and made our ablutions in the appropriate manner? Had we not made cretinous burnt offerings—I was always against this affectation—pungent and breath-taking like good little pawns. For our troubles, for our conceits to our deity … we get moths! Was it worth breaking 137 days of silence over? Documents were signed, codicils initialed, an ascetic’s vow taken. The pomp. The sacrifice. Moths! What does this mean?

“He would open parentheses and not always find an opportune time to close them.”

— Ida Vitale / Byobu

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to stew together

Personals for Condiments (Haiku)

Curt olives desire
Unwrinkled tangy capers
To stew together.

“Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.”

— Jack Kerouac / On the Road

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lonely & destitute

Check the Groyne and Moil

Murmuring a conventional recitative
the baritone herded the baronet
heartily beneath the farmer.
Dowse the dartboard!
My dowsing rod morphed
into a calypso airgun
of uncomfortable residue.
There’s garbage in the streets.
Check the groyne and moil—
Let’s dance!

He moved chalk for a guilder
& forced his secret destiny through
the wringer. He spied a rank seduction,
a trend unseen but suggested.
The baronet swirled upward
inside a never-escaping simulation—
bereft of his destiny,
lonely & destitute—
Loaves unloved.
Unleavened
& undun.

“I strike a teenager with a baseball bat to gain blue-collar credibility.
I feel dirty reading on the toilet.”

— Ben Lerner / The Lichtenberg Figures

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teeth cracked jag

go

supplicant tongue parched

pavement wavers hot

teeth cracked jag

skull throbs

welts sear

dread

dead

sun

go

“The COVID Age: that
may be the Anthropocene’s
gift to the planet.”

—Karthika Naïr / A Different Diatance: A Renga

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in my neighborhood

I asked the future why it was not as good as it used to be.

It said it could see the diacritical marks on my words when I spoke.

I said: I saw one of Dali’s giraffes eat Magritte’s green apple.

The future said: Stop filling the air with words.

“On the eighth day of the rest of my life, I began to wonder if this was really the rest of my life or just a continuation of the same one. I had so little to go on.”

— Miranda July / “Mon Plasir”

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in the blue

drink a jug

of sunshine
straight up—
by the river
engorged with victims
down from the hills—
bodies
roiling in mud
geyser-blown

the sun—
it’s work undone—
unperturbed
in the blue
clear
above

“i’m writing these words to quench my thirst. i write alone in the hopes that i would write myself into exhaustion.”

— Truong Tran / from “begin again”

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we say nothing

Imbricate

My words imbricate your words
Your words imbricate my words
We overlap in squalls and skronks
Four boots squelching mud
A call and response
Never at repose
We squawk a fortress against understanding
We say nothing
When we say a lot

“We may only be alive when trying to make art. Only alive in the attempt.”

— Eugene Lim / Search History

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freed of meaning

cologne and ammonia

her delicate blue-veined wrongdoings
her slender handfuls of bone shards
her clubhouse lay crushed and pathetic
her lathe upon her white cheetah
her fragile fraction of cologne and ammonia
her frangible fiction coiffed in toxins
her old frayed cataract
her daughter’s prickled shank armhole
her boilers
her cowards
her tomes undusted
her snow-white petulance
her pickled discontinuities

she freed of meaning

“I woke at seven a.m. and said to myself: This is the second day of the rest of my life. It’s not one thing in particular, it’s just the sensation of being adrift. As if the boat became unmoored two days ago and I am now on a voyage.”

— Miranda July / “Mon Plasir”

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with the timpanist

Entheogens and Tongues

Jonquil at the sidebar saw them dromedary away. His rove faction was enigmatic as a godson’s, his clear obscene eye-openers showed no envy. The holyspirit left before the prologue.

“You are good, you are,” he trills in grudging, unillusioned admiration. “I applaud you. Backwards.”

flipt. flipt. flipt…

“Datura. Entheogen. Don’t begrudge.”

He was still musing upon Maria when the mean-looking black-haired woodcutter, interrupting the redevelopment’s endless remove of his boyhood’s sophistry and zigzag, suggested that it was too time consuming to go to the statuary.

The tenor became aware of the abyss of celibacy, and who was the money maker in a stationary motorway—a carbohydrate in an obstetrician’s lapwing (eggless), crying on the showman of a mandible whose nappy was not the basso profundo, the afterthought in the motorway choir.

Jonquil, the only one who had remarked the trudge of Maria’s going, was for some rebound reason, he could not have named safely or non-committally—uncommitted and unmoved. The redevelopment faction stated fretfully that the celibate and the money kissing mandible, whose nappy was not the contralto either, should not have gone away with the timpanist.

But the other woodcutter (Maria was as mean as helter-skelter) interrupted again: “Scallawags, it was bisexually so!”

“But Maria should have gone to the statuary to meet him,” the renga writer stated with displeasure.

“No, do remember, he is a sidecar factionist. The less excursion bisexuality for him the better, besides it is forbidden for them to meet privately.”

Jonquil and the basso profundo walked away—merciless of heart, yet merciful in glossolalia and holyspirit feints.

The holyspirits fizzed on the balcony.

“The girl hocked up a loogie and spit between us. ‘If I imagine Sisyphus happy I can only think it’s because he’s old and has given up. He’s content he has a job, and he likes routine. That’s the happiness of a dullard, of someone who has compromised but doesn’t even realize it, of someone with no imagination.’”

— Eugene Lim / Search History

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