Dearest Chunky . . .
Look, I love you but you confound me with your densities and your spherical obloquies and your polyvalent arrowheads and pesky schemes. I implore you to modulate your frequencies and impractical maths . . . your cosines are jejune.
X.
What I’m Reading:
“I realize that I am not necessarily too enchanted by acclaim. At the end of the day, the work just needs to get done.”
— Elbert Perez / The Creative Independent interview
We want a new state religion—without the state or the religion, just an extra dose of the thoughtless passion.
When I arrive at the bottom of this page there will be thunder and earth-shuddering vibration—all the way down to hell in jackhammer headphones.
Concentrate your troops in my vitrines—the clodhopping Russians are coming and they’re unbathed—the lissome Chinese are fractionizing and there are days full of post-Colombian exchanges in cider houses. Bureaucracy comes significantly later—when you read a damned book for a change. There’s a perfunctory and nutritionless American meal to eat.
You decide to desecrate the Great American Songbook by playing piano scrolls backward through a revolving cylinder in a thrift store music box. The cylinder is missing its steel teeth and comb but we both hum loudly and out of tune. You say you want to hear some of the great stories behind the songs while playing a prepared piano.
I say I’d rather hear it with a prerecorded jazz trio accompaniment—the kind you used to hear at a Sunday brunch featuring watery eggs and cigarette butts in half-consumed mimosas. And if we’re lucky we may get a dissertation on megadroughts from the waiter who holds a PhD in Hegemonic Drip Studies.
This, we decide, is a forgettable meal. This, we decide, is a grand start to a state religion.
What I’m Listening To:
“I love my country stupid and cruel
Red, white, and blue…
All you have to do is sing in the choir
Kill yourself every once in a while…”
— Wilco / “Cruel Country”
i.
I ate your bonsai tree after you trimmed it and jumped on October 28, 1929.
I practiced Iridology in the nude during alternating waning crescents of the moon during the Reagan presidency.
In 2001 I half baked ideas in a red Martha Stewart branded Dutch oven for 15 minutes at 175°.
I sculpted dozens of show ponies out of the lint in my belly button.
ii.
I dream of passed balls at the heme hour.
I lick the transmission on your 1976 Dodge Dart every morning when you’re in the shower.
The mange and bedbugs are my “bestest” friends.
I’m sleepwalking toward disaster with the rest of them.
What I’m Reading:
“A large clean room
With plenty of sunlight
And one cockroach
To tell your troubles to.”
— Charles Simic / “For Rent”
Dear Pizarro,
I’m sitting down to write at 4am for the first time in three months (thereabouts) and I’m not considering flea infested furs. If you’ll deliver a plane load of cholera infected passengers to my town in the far off reaches of the South Pacific, and if you’ll also supply a molecular biologist … well, I’ll make mine a parasitic sore that doesn’t make me intimate with sheep. Our animal friends are constantly bombarding me with microbes—and I don’t want any microbes. Why can’t you understand that? I don’t want cat scratch fever either, and I certainly don’t wish to swim in a floating floret pattern like Hernando de Soto and his murder of aquatic crows with laughing sickness—or kuru—if you’d like to be precise. There’s nothing funny here. But when I think about the Picardy sweats my knees buckle and I get the runs. So take your spirochetes and email me from the last calving ice shelf. I’ll hold the pathogens until the morning. Please delouse me thrice daily and we’ll get along like hot Myxomatosis on the spread.
Feverishly yours,
X.
WTF?
“Climate change is not a financial risk that we need to worry about. Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years?”
— Stuart Kirk / HSBC Asset Management
The shallow coast has migrated to higher elevations
We live in the time of burning landscapes
Rainforests to savannas in two easy days
The grand ice shelves in five easy pieces
We’re on finite time and nothing unspools
Like priorities heavily influenced by neglect
You speak in deeper tones when you’re shallow
It’s a conscious choice to avoid detection
Like providing soft beds for corpses
What I’m Reading:
“All measures of conservation, as well as all technologies meant to wean us from fossil fuels, are worth pursuing in the same way that doing something is always more than doing nothing.”
— Hope Jahren / The Story of More
i.
My ancestors crossed
The Sahara with rats plagued
Rich with penury
ii.
My ancestors arrived in Spain in search of an oasis that was a mirage. The oasis would appear one-half-mile ahead beyond them, and at their arrival disappear. In this way they crossed the Sahara with plague rats in their camel sacks.
At the straits they crossed on a ghost ship, the rats now rich with penury. My ancestors joined the conquest and helped build a minaret in Alhambra. There my ancient Moor forefather raped my ancient Spanish foremother in a rheumatic alleyway infested with the ghost ship’s rats that were on an ascension to the throne.
This was my bountiful bequest that arrived across centuries of impalements to the heart. Now I juggle my multitude of children, every third one floats away on a convection of air that carries them back across the Atlantic to begin the cycle once more.
iii.
We’re going to feed two people
Paradox slices—
I have Infinite feed.
Do they need to be full?
What I’m Reading:
“Locks are only amulets of inconvenience that remind us of a social contract we ultimately benefit from.”
— Jaron Lanier / You Are Not A Gadget
We made snares from long grasses,
We caught one in ten; then
We prodded a bite and
We wore them as earrings.
I pinched their their necks for dewlaps —
Their red-ringed and speckled yellow arcs.
You, transfixed, favored not color but
Their harrassed concitations.
Was it the yelp of surprise
At the first bite?
Or was it watching them wriggle by their tails, defying gravity
A St. Anthony or St. Vitus?
We heard their tails grew back, but
We lacked the patience;
We prayed to see
Our dismemberments regenerate.
What I’m Listening To:
“What if birds aren’t singing they’re screaming”
— Aldous Harding / “What if Birds…”
She delivered a dead man aboard pretending he was drunk. Otherwise, she delivered groceries ordered through an app. Though it must be said that she sometimes delivered blows to the head. The unsuspecting victims then became the next batch of sailors to be delivered up for impressment. She didn’t do any of the processing herself—she merely dropped off the victims, and on occasion delivered arithmetic books to various regional libraries.
One day she struck an unsuspecting Calculus book (like it was 1812) and sent a number of differential and multivariable maths skittering across the highway. She knew an opportunity when she struck one.
Upon exiting her impressment mobile she herself was struck, in the most integral of manners, by an errant British man-o’-war—three hundred miles off course from a breadfruit processing plant. It goes to show that calculus and impressment aren’t complementary.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled life. Thank you.
What I’m Listening To:
“Damn it, honey
When you jump up and down
Your chains almost sound like a tambourine”
— Aldous Harding / “Damn”
Have you ever felt like a one trick pony?
Have you ever seethed day in and day out?
We screamed. We protested. We sat-in.
We occupied.
We are in a persistent somnolence—
In a pathological spiral of disconnect.
I can’t know what I’m unable to perceive.
I only know this, what we do, is insane.
What I’m Reading:
“… I no
longer looked like a poet.
I had a crow’s face. Now I
know where all the dead birds go.”
— Victoria Chang / “To the Face in the Mirror”
This I learned from my father . . .
What I’m Reading:
“… all of the want and suffering in the world—all of it—arises not from the earth’s inability to produce but from our inability to share.”
— Hope Jahren / The Story of More
