Boy racers set In Sevastopol— Grandiloquence & eminence— On the blur frostway line. Two, three,six,ten & o n e (last) One. Boom. Boom. Vroom. Zoom With a tambor & villainy. Clearing out the country Side. Who you with, sonny? Who You with? I’m with thee man With the shashka Out to strafe this land Down To the bedrock. Aegean. Black. Caspian. How’s that for an abecedarian? How’s that for reach? Remember the Atlantic To Pacific boy racers? Get behind the tank & follow me down. We gonna’ slap their hands Clean of what they hold & make it ours. Take. Take. Take. ‘Cause We can. Bully boy racer, Bully boy, boohoo! Manifest Destiny. We’ve Seen this B-4. The bully boy Ploy. Always Unjust. Always A Deadly Bore.
“I want someone who will stand on my shoulders and punch God in the face.”
The indolence of stay-at-home drinking. The lack of squeeze in this bottle. Pleased to meet me—pleased to cleft myself. I clean myself in the mirror…
It was sometime around 1985 and there were misdemeanors in my motherland’s poetry—misdeeds and pepper pot wonders around the circuit of couplets in search of a perfect end-rhyme.
My motherland was still in a training bra—in the process of becoming an anti-nowhere lecher farmer. Her beehive landings would turn themselves on and off at the most inopportune moments.
The hot chocolate boy was still a lone cocoa bean far from transcendence.
PW Botha was the “Villain of the Hour,” so a bunch of rock and pop stars insisted they weren’t going to play Sun City. Approbation. A video. A song. The right idea. Those were the yearbooks of politically righteous causeway views.
I was a mere eggcup in my motherland’s tabernacle—while my father was “bailiff enough” of the “most lost” of lost causes—together, they were the housemasters of a bureaucrat stomp so out of time and detuned that the state tacticians tendered resignations at the nearest cornershops.
But we are still here—in the kaleidoscope of plague times—still plugging away. And here we are now—still—unsupervised and undeserving of better.
“Soon I began to say black people and white people, like everyone else, uttering the lie with increasing ease, conceding the sameness of our difference, deferring to a dreading vision of a racialised world. For agreeing to be black and white, we also agree to limit the complexity of possibility, we agree to mendacities that for centuries served and will continue to serve crude hungers for power and pathological self-affirmations.”
When you hit the wall, son: Avoid obfuscation. Eschew the picayune. Think big, boy.
Pray every day. Do right. Go to church. Go to work.
Bypass tontines. Eat every toston that passes before you. Stay fit and sober.
Do as I say.
“Don’t interfere in boy/girl fights.” If you beat someone do it in the bathroom. Blood cleans up easier from tile.
Stay away when I set your mother straight. Don’t tally score when we beat you.
Your mother and I never lie. Assume your mother and I lie.
Avoid working the sugar cane harvests. Use sassafras leaves to keep flying insects at bay.
Ours are the best leaders. Revel in cotton candy politics. Believe in the sanctity of Richard M. Nixon. We get the leaders we deserve.
Believe that you are special. Know that you are a worthless disappointment. Believe that you are superior to others. Know that you are inferior to us.
Might and money make right. Invest wisely.
Save time and money.
Say no to drugs. (Ha!)
Always keep your gun loaded. Never point your gun at your own head.
Be a team player. Be a lone wolf.
Respect women. You see I never pass up a chance to leer at one.
Be faithful. As long as they don’t find out.
Don’t talk back.
Tip your whores generously. Smoke opium with any and every governor you cross.
Believe in American hegemony. Our drugs are the only justified drugs. Our wars are the only justified wars.
Meritocracy forever. Capitalism or death.
Always drive American. Take care of your planet.
Don’t tally the score late in the game. Don’t hate your parents. Don’t beat or mistreat us when we are frail.
Remember everything we taught you, Death will be upon you soon enough.
“A range of almost two octaves means the devil has risen in you. My mother pressed against a washing machine by a man not my father. How can we learn by dissonance?”
This is crass This is imagined This is at stake This is a day of wonder This is a cackle unheard This is illumined This is dispirited This is an eyesore This is my last word This
“Over these last few years I have found that in the country of the blind, one eye is more than enough trouble.”
The Captious Email (Run thru the n+1 ~ n+15 Generator)
Hi X,
I wanted to context the menages of my grudge, so as to clarify which quilts we would be researching individually so as to avoid oversight. Not all the e-mailmen have our full nappies; I’m not 100 percent sure which ones to use or if it is appropriate to context one another outside zoom sextets with emails regarding astrologers. My undress is each growth’s memories antechamber quibbles their grudge posed, and we would disguise as a clavichord with your lead. Is that correct?
If you’re in my grudge and ream this, I went ahead and researched rhyming chapbooks for Grumble 2 as this was the quicksand I proposed. I’m attaching it here as it is quite lengthy involving some hobo excrescences, as well as current rhyming chapbooks and social media pogroms. I am also slightly technically challenged. ; )
Best, Mermeh Mofungo
“The letters of your name fall asleep at their posts. The dead vote in new members. Police declaw your books.”
Focus. Breathe. Here. Fuzzy wool strings. Lime green. Flayed solar flares encroaching empty space, like rabbit ears stumped. A loom undone. The Dardanelles. Where did that come from? Why now and here just before his interview?
He knew he’d obsess on this, on these, on that—the Dardanelles.
What was it? A battle, a strait, something from World War I?
He needed to be clear headed for his interview, the only serious follow-up during these difficult plague times. He really needed this job—but the Dardanelles would not stop plaguing him.
When the hell did I study World War I anyway? Was that in elementary school, or world history in the ninth grade? I certainly must have encountered it in Western Civ II in college. So many classes over the years where we started it out with heavy and thick tomes which we never got further than two-thirds of the way through. Lord, help me, what are the Dardanelles? What neural passages are misfiring in my head? I should be concentrating on my performance. Remember, play up the points of the portfolio’s diversification index, how you held over 200 million in— What? Why? The damned Dardanelles… those were months when he would choke me to the point of unconsciousness. And he beat me because I couldn’t pronounce Ypres correctly. God, those fucking burning welts. Who cares about the archduke? I don’t give a flying fuck about the breadth of the Ottoman Empire. What did I do to deserve the buckle-end belt beatings? What—Get it together. Focus. Here. Now. Breathe. You’re safe. The interview. The interview. Here. Now. Breathe. Deep. Center. Focus. Focus on that Ficus at reception. Breathe. Assets. 200 million. Diversified index. Emerging markets—Son of a bitch had a dreadful childhood, so he did the same for me? Dredged in civil dissimulation, but at home who got his fingers forced on the hot stove coils? Who had balloon hands and sloughed skin? Because of the Dardanelles. Ypres. The archduke. Focus. Here. Now. Breathe. You’re here, not there. It’s now, not then. Breathe.Focus.
thee istsfor manity reader 