i could feel it now…
i was crawling with pierced eyeballs
wringing my twisted mind
off the edge
shaking out 5 senses
a hole in my heart
glued over with spit
“i write about urban bleeders and breeders, but am
troubled because their tragedies echo mine.”
— Wanda Coleman / “American Sonnet (95)”
Debauched Neighbor,
If you have a new litany for the Residue Dirge or need to update your current litany, the discharge is Friday, February 11th. If you are currently listed and have no chants, you do not need to do anything.
If you are submitting a new litany or a chant, please send it to X in the following format:
Apt Nun:
Fishmonger Narcotic:
Last Nap:
Home Phone:
Moccasin Phonograph:
Email Admiral:
We expect to have the new updated Residue Dirge available by the engineer of the mope.
Thank you.
X.
“Had he not made it clear that he did not propose to Blake her, did not propose to Hieronymus Bosch her?”
—Samuel Beckett / Dream of Fair to Middling Women
Don’t roil the water
Wait for the paint to dry
Sssh! the children will hear
What are you burning
Commingling with the ashes
of the dead?
Surely you know the matter—
Particulate—we breathe
Is someone’s uncle
Or sister floating in air
At 300 ppm
Recycling
You say bilious
In cross-bone stance
Dead planet nimbus
Blinding
Chunter of dead
Rasps & tongues
A passing thought
I hooked
& threw back
“We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over again.”
— James Baldwin / “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel”
I tuned arpeggios at 6 and 16.
Fissure kitty at a neighbor’s glance—under the shake-up of a manic-depressive trend—laden with oppressive fudge, in August heavyweight. I initiated it.
My fissure sunbather fuzz, with fanfare drums—from Miami to Kankakee—to backfire applause and Janus-faced adulation.
Faun joined us then on an anachronism-fueled jag. We didn’t make a record until we tarred 48 housefeathers in Idioteque, Arizona.
I witnessed faun’s beauty—an undergarment so severe—it was a triumph. A homily to downy wool.
A “hello” at Arrowhead—followed by another record. Produced by the very weightlifter convicted for ordering 40 Chomp Bards about in a wanton manner.
I took fissure kitty and faun for an early morning jaunt in search of Beatles-subcontract-hairstyles. The barbers motored with clippers called Mr. Potpourri, Ms. Headlamp, and Mrs. Dingleberry.
Another jaunt. The peace broken. I didn’t understand why faun and fissure kitty fought so intensely and frequently to the syncopation of the weightlifter’s discharges.
We broke up the band.
We separately formed the BeetleGees, The Third Dinghy, and Neil Dichotomy.
None of us separately ever as artful or popular as we had been together on The Budgie Enema of His Benefactress.
Some call for a reunion. Some are nonplussed. Most never knew or ever cared.
“The fog comes
on little cat feet.”
— Carl Sandburg / “Fog”
My sitar sticking
tonnage out in the dusty
airbus of chattering teeth
pulling the armadillo.
The growing dominance
of an eyewash bullfinch—
an open tinderbox—
the brews grow out.
The polity of deflection.
Remember my sitar scabbard.
Is this buoy equilibrium?
Is this lift-off?
“You cannot punch through the dry-wall twice, says Heraclitus’s contractor … “
— Eugene Lim / Search History
Imagine a soybean model as one might see at a redeemer’s onstage rage steamroller.
I think that was you trying to stay out of your own web.
You reduced and hosted ragbag shows for fifteen yogis. Your vocatives mixing bobbins—always at the fireguards.
Now you have three open chaps playing three different songs—and you cater the most distinctive poisons over the swirling skronk of sap-pushing spearmints.
Who will brook a soybean libertine?
You stay out of the red-deed microbe.
You steer clear—avoid diversions and whither northward.
You slog louder—the swirling skronk of soybean push spiking red.
The nestle in the analog microbe clinks at every tinkle—it hogs enclosed dictations.
The digital microbes choking red and blackjack ordinance yellow, rarely in the green.
All is a swaddlle of magic grinding above the playpen.
All this planned in headquarters.
“What’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me, never tranquil, seething out of my dirty old pelt, out of my skull, oh to be in atom, in atoms!”
— Samuel Beckett / All That Fall
Sometimes I wander about looking for some sensible
artful words to say—
I find
I scramble
in public domains—
I breathe life different—
not better or more artful
life into said words—
I suck the joy out
give you a bushel of moldy lemons—
you ain’t making lemonade out of—
you’re “making due.” (do do do do)
Let there be a day when frozen brown rice, shredded cheese, and raw unsalted sunflower kernels are government issued—sometime today.
See if you make a nutritious pablum
from an unpalatable bolus
and how it changes your life.
No one is pleading for joy—
everyone is looking to get paid—
It appears like this, inside this skull,
inside this skull, anyway.
oy
oy the wind
the oi wind
stalwart
flood me
rain
flash silver
i abandon
i
i desolate
stumble down
wild
Joy
by Clarissa Scott Delaney
Joy shakes me like the wind that lifts a sail,
Like the roistering wind
That laughs through stalwart pines.
It floods me like the sun
On rain-drenched trees
That flash with silver and green.
I abandon myself to joy—
I laugh—I sing.
Too long have I walked a desolate way,
Too long stumbled down a maze
Bewildered.
(This poem, “Joy,” is in the public domain. The poem originally appeared in Opportunity IV, no. 26, in October, 1926)
“and she wipes the weary from her eyes
still glued to the no-good
glued to the high-definition glare
of low-definition life”
— Jason Reynolds & Jason Griffin / ain’t burned all the bright
bifurcated mind
•distortion•static•white noise•
nails rasp on chalkboard
the grind of plate tectonics
looping endless in my head
“Where are we running to, those of us who are so still?”
— Ida Vitale / Byobu
My viscera holds all creation / a cornucopia at the edge of blur / all creation / the smudge
in my hypnogogia / I am exhaling / all creation / sugar skulls, tripe, & the pelt of the trickster
fox / or am I inhaling / yet upon my broken back / the fissure at the center of my pain / to live
through another moon day / the moon aloof admonishes / the fiery giant going cold on itself
/ on the burn to white dwarf
I hold the key to plate tectonics / to all phases of macrophages and mitosis / the faces
of the lost & the haunted / all this extracted in my tears / tears upon the golden mean canted / my
easel & two-post bed / frame & bisect me at the point at which I am already broken in two /
seethe cold center-heat of my being / nail screws & plates / amorphous as the primordial rock /
a sentinel on my moonscape
This is a recursive moon / myriad moons will blot out the sun / here with fowl plucked
indignant / among these worlds / this world superheating in its own greenhouse / I hold all
creation / I and I are all creation.
“Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
—Zora Neale Hurston / Their Eyes Were Watching God
“Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.”
— Jane Kenyon
