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cudding for the cuddling

Posted on October 31, 2021 by istsfor manity

Hardly Rickets’ Sanguinary Holiday

Hardly Rickets, all American life saver and literary critic, wants to save the world from itself. Wants to don the all purpose All American Halloween costume—wants to be a fungal tree growth but can’t decide between bracket, polypore, or robustus conk. So goes for all of the above, fortified with Lockheed Martin nuclear modules and Raytheon laser vaporizers—the All American all the time choice for annihilating “third world” recalcitrants:

“We invented the damned holiday as the world knows it today. We know all. We kill all, but with a conscience. Let us show you our destabilizing Latin American election modules. Or may we interest you in a nation building for oil three card monte switchermaroo? Come one, come all! Give us bodies and resources and we’ll chew you up and spit you out like so much cudding for the cuddling hours before the Day of the Dead arrives. I’m Hardly Rickets and have I got an all purpose tzompantli for you. You provide the bodies—I’ll provide the bones. Hardly Rickets is the name. I am he of Halloween fame. My drones and hellfires shower flames. Death is my one and only game. Coming to your spooked-out skies this fall.”

“Scarcely do we inhume the wreckage of our lives than we dig it up again. That is why we keep on and keep on and keep on, never progressing except in the grossest and most mundane fashion…”

— Joy Williams / Harrow

did you know

Posted on October 30, 2021 by istsfor manity

brave new defalcation rocket 2

did you know?
the year meaning died
the last alliterative
commentator complained
kin is redundant
avoid relatives

“The moon of every night is not the moon
That the first Adam saw.
The centuries
Of human wakefulness have left it brimming
With ancient tears.”

— Jorge Luis Borges / “The Moon”

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

guesstimate and plannify

Posted on October 28, 2021 by istsfor manity

Poor Clockface Bradbury

Bradbury said he didn’t need an alarm clock. I saw the phrase in passing without its context, so I’m left with this vision of a man machine with a clock face for a visage. A veritable clock tower face with bonging lower register bells coming out of speakers on the obverse side of the head. So head into fall with the idea of a Bradbury clock head sitting next to you at Starbucks; power washing his car next to yours at the d.i.y. car wash; trying on jeans at Walmart—because that’s America’s super store—because that’s where clock-faced clock heads do their denim best! Now, rack into focus on that jingoistic demoniacal guy by the tube socks—the one wearing the t-shirt that reads: your face makes me soft!—notice how he stares at clock head Bradbury. He doesn’t like his clock face, and wants to do him grievous bodily harm—because that’s the way he rolls in BIG SKY country. Watch him guesstimate and plannify in that dim fashion of his—how he’ll cook up revenge because he doesn’t like “thee other.” Yeah, somewhere in the parking lot, at the end of the quarter-mile line up of pick up trucks with them stickers that inveigle others to pray to an angry god. Yeah, there. Because America!

“And so I cement my semantics
I practice my pronunciations, I learn to say This country
After saying I love”

— Aria Aber / “America”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Drama is the Opiate of the Masses, Dream Notation, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Paranoiac-Critical, Prose Poetry, Random Sights with Signs, Writing | Leave a comment

shot by booster

Posted on October 27, 2021 by istsfor manity

*Francisco Goya: El sueño de la razon produce monstruos / The sleep of reason produces monsters, c. 1799*

Booster Shot Tanka

Man shot by booster—
Fever dreams / sleep of reason—
Cavorting beasties
Course through a body derailed:
A self-styled auto-da-fé.

“Anything a writer says about their work is outside the work, a stranger to it. It’s a different language. It’s almost an enemy of the work. Whatever transformational transmission of weird beauty and consolation the work might possess might be utterly destroyed by the writer talking about it on the side.”

— Joy Williams / Lit Hub interview

Posted in Writing | Tagged Creative Writing, Dream Notation, Paranoiac-Critical, Poetry, Post-Vaccination, Tanka, Writing | Leave a comment

your curls frizz

Posted on October 26, 2021 by istsfor manity

Your Ruff Collar, My Millstone

We live under the heat dome.

I see you across the barren parklet.
You are eating bits of soft pink flesh.

My hair wilts.
Your curls frizz.

I lick the hot sauce off my fingers.
You yell that you are an arriviste.

I scream that I was once part of the noblesse oblige and waved banderitas.

You warble an Edith Piaf song.
I huff gas out of a brown paper bag.

You sing two registers too low.
My viscera gurgles. I pee my pants where I stand — mud puddles form around my feet.

Tomorrow you will sign away your inalienable rights for a used 78 rpm record of “Thee Infanticide Blues.”
I will strum The Hits of the Borscht Belt Songbook tonight on my ukulele.

The gloaming hour.

I leave a minute after you do.

You to your elevator shaft.
Me to my abandoned mine.

Dark. Wasteland.

We may meet again next year.

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

— Emily Dickinson / Selected Letters

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Documentation, Drama is the Opiate of the Masses, Dream Notation, Ghosts, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Post-Apocalypse, Random Sights with Signs, Writing | Leave a comment

will work for

Posted on October 25, 2021 by istsfor manity

Gutty Haiku (redux)

I will work for tripe
Pepper pot is beautiful
Visceral goodness

“America the footsteps of your ghosts are white stones weighting my center“

— Aria Aber / “America”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Dream Notation, Haiku, Paranoiac-Critical, Poetry, Random Sights with Signs, Writing | Leave a comment

guilty breath lock

Posted on October 24, 2021 by istsfor manity

pantoum(ish) death breath

guilty bait
lock breath
death

guilty breath
lock bait
death

death lock
bait breath
guilty

breath lock
bait death
guilty

lock breath
bait guilty
death

death bait
guilty lock
breath

breath guilty lock death bait

breath bait lock death

bait breath death

death breath

death

bait

*This is fall in Jamaica Plain, MA, on 10/24/2021, at 8:30am.*

“I tend not to think about readership. Instead, I think about a reader, the person I am trying to communicate with, but I don’t have the idea that a lot of people are ever going to read anything.”

—Ada Limón / “On Making Work that Matters”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Blackout Poetry, Chance Operations, Collage, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Dream Notation, Experimental writing, Haiku, Hybrid writing, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Post-Apocalypse, Writing | Leave a comment

in my neighborhood

Posted on October 23, 2021 by istsfor manity

We choose a mantic thanksgiving—dark and steep…

We live as prelude to the mother of all bloodlettings…

We jockey frenetic prayers—glean sources—Sleep the sleep of strangers …

Ghosts in your house—Live through your eyes—live your memories…

The wizard of siren calls—calls you to gloom—cries: kiss me, kiss me, kiss me—I offend no one but you.

“In our home here by the sea we will not last much longer. The cold and the damp will certainly get us in the end, because it is no longer possible to leave … “

— Lydia Davis / “A Natural Disaster”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Cut-Up Writing, Documentation, Drama is the Opiate of the Masses, Dream Notation, Erasure Poetry, Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Random Sights with Signs, Writing | Leave a comment

do come in

Posted on October 22, 2021 by istsfor manity

Ginger Snaps

I remember Ginger brought us,
on New Year’s Eve 1980,
the Vermonters:

“lunch on you, keep the hand and suck this bony one”

you filled the point with wire and spine
button Night into Line

from a short not-quite five-year old girl
open to you and smiling on the doorstep

bearing a red cloth look
against the snowflakes falling

you delighted the look ready for
our do-come-in

We take our time warm up for the dancing, eyeing the coats, boots, scarves

four to six bricks, red flakes
the kids catch on their tongues

pleasure on a holiday night, the performance,
the concrete walls the joy the children

They call out, appear to flag,
They rally, and we descend

underground to feast
Everyone has two slices of little ones

We toast the New Year one last time.
The year opens to the girls in velvet

We could still hear their titters
where we sat Hungry from the search

The children grow
One of them sprouts in our back yard,

a farewell designed to be memorable
and for a new life in the desert

“… I am naked as a tablecloth, my nerves humming.
Close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared.”

— Frank O’Hara / “Music”

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

the ocean roaring

Posted on October 21, 2021 by istsfor manity

The Endless Not

Dear C.—

Sometimes I have the ocean roaring in my ears, in my head—not the intermittent breaks and ebbs of waves on the shore, but only the crashes—crashes, crashes, crashes—on an endless loop for minutes, hours sometimes. A stream of white noise. Vision becomes strained, as if I were only seeing clearly through the spaces in a chain link fence. But much of this is going on without my awareness—and only when it becomes suddenly silent and my vision resolves, refocuses completely, do I become aware of what has just happened. Where did those minutes or hours go? What was I doing? Was I here all along in my room, in my car, in my office, this museum—or did I go somewhere else and do other things: unconscionable things, while I was out on the waves?

Best,

“And now here I was, a first person singular. If I’d chosen a different direction, most likely I wouldn’t be here. But still—who is that in the mirror?”

— Haruki Murakami / First Person Singular

Posted in Writing | Tagged Autofiction, Chance Operations, Creative Writing, Dream Notation, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Nothing, Paranoiac-Critical, Photography, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Random Sights with Signs, Writing | Leave a comment