this is about a poet who writes bird poems — without birds appearing in said poems
mouth breathers and thirteen year old prostitutes often appear crying
artillery shots echo in the blue distance
the poet is a sketch artist of sorts defining a lust for love in a criminal world
the spindle kids appear congratulations — you made it past the needles and pokes
you’re in the fabric of gutter poets enmeshed for eternity
she’s got pumpkin voodoo on the kitchen cabinets
the word piles are dense and are never really in focus
actually this poem is about a baksheesh for a back rub… huh?
see i’ve got this knot on my latissimus dorsi — the heebie jeebies, know what i mean?
and she’s says:
So I’m going to get Tropicana juice with my father last night at 2 am at some all night grocery store on Biscayne and 79th street, and I’m thinking back about the Hustler magazine I riffled through earlier yesterday morning. I found it between the mattress and box spring, you know? And I see this photo spread and think why do people send in photographs of their turds? The magazine has a contest to find the largest turd in America and people from all over the country send in pictures of super long spiraling turds in their toilets. And I think about the technicians at Walgreen’s — what are they thinking when gathering the photos into the sleeves when a half dozen turd shots are at the end of the stack. Do they show other people at the store? What kind of person mails this to a magazine? What kind of magazine wants this?
i mumble-mouth my way out i got nothing to say
“The last definition of absence is the nonexistence or lack of. See how the of hangs there like someone about to jump off a balcony?”
… later I get flashes of grandpa with his old runners all rolled up into one giant sticky mess—balled and held together with tape…
He’d talk about the high school girls he’d “teach” Bible Study to.
They: all spouting the traumatized truths of teen-age diarists with red or pink manicured nails chipping or chewed off at the ends.
He entoning: “these sorbriquets of the new generation means what to me?” He’d say in frustration, sounding the bad imitation of counterculture nomenclature, “none of those young blondes or brunettes would get it.”
An inch long ferrule of ash growing from the nub of his Kent 100 planted in the crevice of his forefinger.
“What in tarnation?” he’d say. “They’d look at me with dilated eyes ready for something once the drugs took effect.”
Grandpa says he went to college to become a critical thinker, but he ended up doing things he didn’t think he’d do.
I, personally, don’t know what to do, playing with the jalousie window handle—spinning it this way and that—slats open, slats close, slats open, slats, close, slats open … you get the drift, and think the girls got the best of him.
Then I think: thanks for shopping at low hanging scrotum mart, and what am I supposed to do but open the front door, sheepish-like, and offer grandma a coke and a smile, ready for her comeback from gallstones and such … come again now, ya’ hear.
I hear things. I see. I hear, and don’t report a thing.
There are airs and wispy memories of foul and forced love—that isn’t love—all over this house. Which is now my house too.
So I go to my new room and I put the Runaways “Cherry Bomb” on the turntable and “Doctor Love” by Kiss on the cassette player, and play them simultaneously, and hiss obscenities at the walls—bare and pockmarked with fist and knuckle markings.
And the neighbor woman sings something in the backyard. Her rasp scratching through the jalousie slats and dusty screen.
She sings: “I don’t care what you’re talking about, noooo!” And it ain’t good, there ain’t no way to parse it—it’s pained. And she continues: “don’t shoot for craters, no…” and then it sounds like she sings: “don’t shoot the the prattles of my menstrual age…” and I don’t understand a thing now.
And I don’t think I ever did. Nothing in my life makes sense. So I expect the unexpected—and expect pain. I live those rules now. Good rules. The only rules, I realize, I’ve ever known.
I learn to argue from a point of syllogistic logic and scream at my grandfather often. His bristly hands this way and that.
Grandpa’s off his rocker, for sure. I go and find Brillo pad puffs and stuff them in his loafers. I glue Brillo pads as afro puffs on his bald head when he sleeps in his recliner—three Kent 100 butts deep in his smoky whiskey glass; and I stick a fork, as if it were an afro pick, into the fold of his wallet on the chifferobe; and I magic marker a bottle of his Aqua Velva into a bottle of Afro Sheen and leave it on his nightstand.
I want to remake him into Stevie Wonder, my favorite. I like “Living for the City” and “Don’t You Worry Bout A Thing,” all of Innervisions, really. Grandpa thinks it stinks.
I hate it here. I hate my room. I hate my house. Dare I say, I hate grandpa.
He’s always making me go buy him cartons of Kent 100’s, and insisting that I write 100-words just to round myself out, but I don’t enjoy the rounding out—especially when he grabs my backside and rubs it all soft, and the like; or when he sticks his hand in my underwear and jiggles me and says I’m becoming a big boy now.
I get a bad gassy feeling in my stomach and hardness there below, and I don’t understand none of it, other than I don’t like it at all. I understand he’s a man, and he knows the world and all, especially from the war—but it feels strange, wrong, to feel that way.
But he’ll buy me a Whaler from Burger King or get me a Hamburgler glass from Mc Donald’s and it sorta’ makes me feel better. For a while, anyway.
“How long do any of us really have before the body begins to break down and empty its mysteries into the air?”
(Press play above for the “Uncle Bill” Thanksgiving classic … unless you’re easily offended, in which case I suggest you move on and enjoy your holiday. Warning: adult language)
Hegemonic Extirpation Day Blues
A litter of puppies feeding in the corner of the living room. Dried shit streaked on the bathroom towels. The, too-early, Christmas tree is canted and some of the ornaments are unfurling their covers revealing the styrofoam balls beneath the loosened string. The last year they had glass ornaments the piles of colored glass shards spread throughout the living room—my cousin wore multiple band aids on his feet. Those styrofoam balls must be 25 years old now. That smell is truly remarkable—sour broiling turkey mixed with wet dog fur, overfull litter box, and Lysol. Happy, happy, joy, joy.
This is fall in Jamaica Plain, MA, on 11/25/2021, at 7:19am.
“…Westernized tentacles of Thought Colon(-ized) instinctual urges s(M)other the Matriarch’s head…”
Get it together and join up now. What are you doing for fulfillment? Do you hum “fa la la, tra lee dee” much too often, throughout the dark days, the creaking nights, and in your barren dreams?
Well, I’ve got the thoughtbot for you!
Increase the size of your pumpkin by doing nothing at all—or by doing everything you can (it doesn’t really matter)—just increase the size of your pumpkin in three … no! four easy steps:
take your pumpkin
place it in the sun
deliver us from evil
repeat
Your life will surely change because the size of your pumpkin matters. Surely it does! Show off your pumpkin with confidence, drain your carbuncles in peace, and suppurate freely. This is your life. You can make anything happen!
“we are each our own culture alive with the virus that’s waiting to unmake us”
Press play above to watch my short film: in the air (2:31).
Off-News at the Off-Chance at N+7
“I would be really sad if I didn’t write. I think I would feel really purposeless and silent and depressed if I couldn’t write. I don’t know if I would be that depressed if I couldn’t publish.”
—Ottessa Moshfegh, The Creative Independent Interview
Maple bacon cheddar pizza, I say, repeating what she just said to me.
I need a snack soon, she says.
A swoony-jazzy song plays like it’s 1967—remember the smarmy song playing in The Graduate when Bancroft is making the hard play for Hoffman—well some white bread m.o.r. tripe like that is playing in our background. But we’re both the same age, she’s only 3 months older than I am. We’re just living through a pandemic.
She stands up, unable to take it anymore and announces, snack! What snack do you want?
Before I can answer she’s walked out of the room and turning on the kitchen light.
She says, snack! What snack do I want? In a husky manner like she’s a hibernant bear just awoken.
Then comes the crackling of the plastic bag and the tinkling pretzels. I imagine the blue bag of organic pretzel twists—the pretzels falling and caroming around a small glass bowl until the scale reads 1 oz or 28 grms, depending on the setting she used—she’s a 1 oz type.
The crackling of the bag again. The clasping of the white chip clip on the bag—it might have been the black clip—and she walks into the room again. A deep guttural sort of crunching amplified in her mouth as she walks past me to the desk.
These are extra crunchy, she says, facing the laptop. The crunching continues, a gravelly molar-assisted deep crunch.
Today is the 20-month anniversary of the day Gov. Baker sent people home to work out the pandemic. That’s Massachusetts.
Everything But the Girl’s debut album, is bluetoothing through the blue Sony SRS-X33 speaker. It’s not really smarmy music, I just felt that particular conceit at the moment.
She asks why I want to know the make of the speaker.
I was researching how porn would sound through the speaker, I say. (Obviously not, folks, I was writing this!)
Huh, she says. Did you say corn or porn?
Corn porn! I say. It’s supposed to sound amazing through the speaker.
She ignores me. She knows me.
I should be working on my 50,000 word novel manuscript right now, but I’m procrastinating. I’m at 43,047 words as of 11:39 am yesterday, but I haven’t written a word on that project since then — but I have written many other words nonetheless.
(Take these for instance)
Anyway, there are only 9 days left until the artificially imposed November 30th NaNoWriMo deadline.
Like I said, I’m procrastinating.
The pretzels are consumed.
It’s time to get to work…
But I keep on writing this…
“… the girl asked me, as softly as she could: Are you a spic? And I, with a hive of words in my head, could only think to say: Yes, I am. She never spoke to me again, and as I thought of her in the outfield, the moon fell from the sky …”
What could I possibly say when you say (backhand): it’s you.
I don’t know if you’re talking twang, talking to those radicals, or if you’re addressing me.
Somehow, judging by the tonsure of your vole, I think it’s the boy racer.
You never speak in a mellifluous tongue to me—but you’re always: “hon, hon, hook-up with the racketeer.”
The flick-knives in your green irises are limned with black aureoles when you talk to Mr. Munchems.
When you speak to me your flecky eyefuls jaundice—sometimes you look possessed or malarial.
Why is that?
Why, when you speak to Mr. Clutter, do you speak in baby talk?
What dogmas a twit know of “ga ga?”
Yeah, to me you spice invective: your mother-in-law’s cupid is overripe like bag fugu fishmonger; or, please die already.
You salivate and your incursions get larger and pointier.
Do you not feel the wart in your crucible for me anymore?
“We had eaten the lobsters to forestall our own destruction, but it became clear that nothing would. I resettled myself on the sand and leaned back against you, and I closed my eyes, stroking your leg and your large right claw, and I was at rest at last.”
thee istsfor manity reader 