Well above the crowd
Impassive glitch in the sky
What do we call you?
What I’m Reading:
“Owls peck the windows of the 21st century
as if looking for
the board members
of Exxon Mobil
who who who who who”
— Ilya Kaminsky / “I Ask That I Do Not Die”
Pasted and made agent, once again, I earned the title of Chancroid of Elfador.
I understood public relations and quickly assembled a fleet to sail to Festicularis. Never had so many sumptuous furs been made execrable by hovering over them and evacuating our bowels upon them.
The Chancellor of Quas made an appearance by summons of habeas crapus. In our midst he exhibited a prowess for combat with crabs and lice, in a manner so expert, that we allowed him to search and clean our bodies.
This was a satisfied accomplishment — maybe even an occasion for pity. We were all destined for history in the outcast country. We would certainly overtake the heathen and Papist alike.
We had the flinders of the saints.
We had them by the short hairs.
What I’m Reading:
“There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge / “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
A dusty path toward deliverance after a club on the head, a dark hour, a black age—
Quashed then regained. Diverted, re-charted, and reoriented
The crags and canyons—vertiginous—skirted. The roiling water. Up ahead the fog-smoke.
We live beneath the heat dome once a year—but the duration metastasizes—
At the terminal hour we’ll live beneath the heat dome year-round as feedback loops unspool their violence
In ineluctable gyres—followed by the exhalation of a bated agonal breath.
What I’m Reading:
“my disapproving mother tells me
nobody wants to read poems…
…no one has ever heard of such a thing as a wealthy poet…
…I decide to write the poem
to be poor and obscure
it will be a poem of defiance…”
—Laura Thiels / “Armeisenverteilungsmaschine”
Dissociative dance trance
What you wanna’ do
Nothing new under the tongue
No trip to take
No tincture to absorb into your system
Obdurate powerful maladaptive
The counterfactual is satisfactional
It’s true it’s factual everything
Is so god-damned distressing
Who filched the prelapsarian graces
Soon our avatars will arrive
Live the lives we abandon
Live in the world we have throttled
And left for dead in our stead.
What I’m Reading:
“There’s always that moment in a country’s history when it becomes obvious the earth is less manageable than previously thought.”
— Jim Shepard / “The Netherlands Live with
Water”
Catafalque tunes in mahogany time. Nothing sounds as it should. Dripping in the recessive notes of a palanquin juddering in a surreal signature. Come to think off it, father’s signature flew off the back of my report card before I handed it back to the teacher. So I quickly scrawled something in his flourish—and like the former president who liked to show off his signature as if he was showcasing his first turd (ha, look mommy a turd! ain’t I special!) I turned it in with some flair. This is when the bier construction started in the teacher’s workroom—to the whir of the circular saw. I knew I was in for it. I called for some Sun Ra in 5/8 time and was quickly given pointers on how to snap my fingers in the coolest, most detached, cool cat aplomb. Someone scatted a 12 bar blues about lying in state in a failed state. Some “banana republic” rejoinders were heard from the detention hall inmates, and we went out with a Te Deum in the key of Dada. Followed by a full minute of mushroom cloud hiss.
What I’m Reading:
“What if the guns
turn into pencils
in the hands of the soldiers
and they underline
the places on the map
as sites they must see
before they die?”
— Dunya Mikhail / “Tablets VI”
I walk in circles gyring—elevating ever outward until I’m circumnavigating your boundless denigration.
Deliver me—enervated—from invigoration as you deliver me from hating myself long enough to despise you.
I’ve placed myself at this longitude so that I may be bisected by your latitude of lassitude.
I’ve misplaced the keys to hegemonic misericordia.
Mercy be done because I haven’t any time left.
Deliver me again from prepositional entanglements and toothsome fricatives.
Yes yes leave my words alone.
Plangent. Agent. Of misfortune.
What I’m Listening To:
“There is no middle when the other side
Would rather kill than compromise”
— Wilco / “Hints”
What I’m Reading:
“Expect society to be defective. Then weep when you find
that it is far
more defective than you imagined.”
— Ron Padgett / “How to be Perfect”
What I’m Reading:
“The America I saw in the fall of 2021 was weary and battle-scarred. It’s sidewalks were cracked, it’s mailboxes bashed in.”
— David Sedaris / “Lucky-Go-Happy”
floaters in my eyes
minuscule liquidy sacs
cavorting beasties
shrank yourself and now swimming
in plain sight—in my system
What I’m Reading:
“The warming of the planet is not waiting for consensus-building.”
— Jeff Goddell / The Water Will Come
the porousness of limestone
a hatch of mayflies in june
the calf-height water
undammed and unheeded
the wall on the move
a flash of scarlet tanager
the rush of darkness
What I’m Reading:
“Here, you
can pay someone to clip off
your shadow and walk it across
the border.”
— Victoria Chang / “Marfa, Texas”
