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off she went

Posted on December 31, 2021 by istsfor manity

Nothing Left

Maria realized the more time passed the more one was alone, adrift, assailed. The only point was there was no point. Survive one more day, one more hour.

There was nothing left for Maria to do but go back home, back north. Everyone she cared about were in their own hermetic pods, quarantining, staying as safe as they could. This wasn’t a time to be gallivanting around the country, in the face of a noisome bug. This was not a time to be in her old home town.

She plotted and mapped, and set a course wide of the marauding bug, but soon she realized the bug was everywhere, so she drew drunken contour lines all over her map—filling the paper with lines that obliterated the underlying image of the country.

She spray painted the wall of her childhood bedroom—a room that now proved suffocating and claustrophobically small—some words she paraphrased from something she once read:

“Mr. Universe, I exist.”

And off she went.

“A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

—Stephen Crane / “A Man Said to the Universe”

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lower the lifeboats

Posted on December 30, 2021 by istsfor manity

Interlude III (Dark Water Tanka)

Lower the lifeboats—
We tread nose-deep in the plague—
Lifelines beyond us.
We roil dark water and sink.
The mermaids sing for no one.

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.”

— T.S. Eliot / “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

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of the fiends

Posted on December 29, 2021 by istsfor manity

Maria’s Nightmare Erasures

“The words are growing in the field, and they hover above the page. They’re like flowers, and I pick the ones I like. My eye is roaming all over, trying to make connections.”

— Mary Ruefle / Hyperallergic interview

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her next move

Posted on December 28, 2021 by istsfor manity

Viral Avoidance Two-Step

Maria slipped through the mangrove swamps—apropos, considering the strangeness of the inland country—all manner of bird calls but not a single bird visible.

She retraced the miles back south to her home town by the sea—but was chased out by the ever widening viral curtain, it swept out in waves from the airports, inundated the ports, and streamed in with the masses of vacationers flowing south.

Now she was certain that her hopeful attempt to visit the past was a mistake, and her family was in the throes of the viral avoidance two-step. It was a most foul dance. It was the most unfortunate of synchronicities.

The virus was traveling untrammeled via the interstates—it was flooding the country: north, south, east, west. The streets were teeming with virus. The waysides and rest stops on the road, the restaurants and inns, all points billowed with bugs. Tidal wave after tidal wave of sickness.

There was plannifying and scarifying required. She’d lay low back among the mangroves and cottonmouths, and figure out her next move.

“Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are
laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.”

— Joy Harjo / “Perhaps the World Ends Here”

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appease and applause

Posted on December 27, 2021 by istsfor manity

A Move North and Inland

Maria moved further north, and inland, away from her home town—away from the hassle of hipster hoodoo.

A transmission blared:

… don’t bring me no corner gape, nothing eager, and nothing to prance about. No soap. No soap anywhere. Here the talk is cadaverous. Here the talk is all plate glass and metal angles. Who comes here to make the beds and wash the dishes. Let’s hurry to the dark alleys of hideous intent, and chicken shacks without shoes, and full o’ blues …

It landed with a thud and black douse. Sensible things were for silly rabbits, and Maria ate him for a grand Christmas meal. The only sense was in the the insensate. Like a garden variety croton, Maria set out to festoon the town in a sensoria of senselessness. To appease and applause.

“The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.”

— Samuel Beckett / Columbia University Forum 4

in my (temporary) neighborhood

Posted on December 26, 2021 by istsfor manity

Interlude II

“The lands and waters they gave us did not belong to them to give. Under false pretenses we signed. After drugging by drink, we signed. With a mass of gunpower pointed at us, we signed. With a flotilla of war ships at our shores, we signed. We are still signing. We have found no peace in this act of signing.”

— Joy Harjo / Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems

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good vibe-osity

Posted on December 25, 2021 by istsfor manity

image: Wikipedia, Johannes Ebert and others, *Europas Sprung in die Neuzeit*, Die große Chronik-Weltgeschichte, 10 (Gütersloh: Wissen Media, 2008), p. 197.

A Grand Idea

Well, it didn’t snow in the south on Christmas, and certainly not in Maria’s home town by the sea.

Now, the only thing Maria wanted for Christmas was a plague doctor’s mask—with a bonafide beak protuberance for aromatics—and an ankle length black leather cloak, and the wide flat hat.

Oh, the places she could roam!

She looked under the tree and found a small box tagged with her name. She ripped the wrapping off and saw N-95 printed on the box.

Maybe next year, she said.

If there is a next year, said Mr. Munchems.

Mr. Munchems, you can be such a bore, she said to her rabbit.

Listen, Maria, you can’t always get what you want, Mr. Munchems said between nibbles of dandelion greens, but you take what you need, and pass the love along.

But Mr. Munchems, she said, in this world that seems so bereft of love and good will, what is there to take but bad vibes?

What year do you think this is kid, 1969? Bad vibes? Mr. Munchems said. You do what you can. You get ‘bad vibes’ and you turn them into … uh … uh, lemonade … yeah, lemonade!

Mr. Munchems, I think you’re nuts, Maria said. You’ve been eating to many mushrooms.

Listen, kid. Just try and make the world a little bit better place than you found it. Start here at home. Then your neighborhood. Then your home town. Concentric circles, kid. Just circle out in ever-widening ‘good-vibe-osity!’

Maria struck with a grand idea …

That night the family enjoyed a most good-humored meal—Rabbit Terrine.

A very merry to all, and to all a good bite!

“You don’t write to make friends.”

— Joy Williams

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get a woman

Posted on December 24, 2021 by istsfor manity

Why Not?

Maria thought it should snow in the south—in her home town, just for one day.

After all, hadn’t Mrs. Claus superseded the Heat Miser’s restrictions and gone straight to Mother Nature to get the override for a white Christmas down south?

Maria thought Miami needed a good blanketing in something pure—a good dousing of snow before the ice disappeared from earth all together. Climate scientists were now speculating that there would be an ice-free earth sometime before 2050.

Why not?

A matriarchal pact was cobbled out with Mother Nature—the Miser brothers were an afterthought.

If you need something done—and done right—get a woman for the job.

And it was done.

Why not?

“Oh, Cassandra, for Heaven’s sake let us devise a method by which men may bear children! It is our only chance.”

— Virginia Woolf / “A Society”

best we can

Posted on December 23, 2021 by istsfor manity

Underlying Conditions

Maria awoke with a fitful start.

She palmed her phone and furiously tapped an email to the reindeer:

Dear ‘Deer,

Stay home this year.

Santa has underlying conditions: a 35 BMI, high blood pressure, a touch of asthma, and according to my calculations—he’s well over 65 years of age.

Tell the elves, for social distance sake, to take the workshop outdoors—plus, it’s temperate now in the North Pole.

Then she pictured how climate change might have altered the tundra into a swamp—the taiga was a wonderful breeding place for all the beasties of the Culicidae.

Oh, this Christmas could suck! She wrote. But even the mosquitoes deserve a blood meal or two. Let’s take it outdoors and do the best we can.

Then she went back to bed to sleep it off. She wished to sleep through the plague and wake up when it had vanished.

Instead, she had nightmares of skiing down scree fields through veils of plaguey mosquitoes.

“And in short, I was afraid.”

— T.S. Eliot / “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

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word piles high

Posted on December 22, 2021 by istsfor manity

Interlude I (Palimpsest Thick)

She wrote in minuscule
Handwriting—
On a cuneiform roll

She cut and pasted silly
Putty—
In canted abandon

She printed the word
Anocracy—
A word unknown

She layered a palimpsest
Thick—
With self-inflicted pain

She built the word piles
High—
She tried.

She failed.
She failed again.
She failed better.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
— Samuel Beckett / Worstward Ho!

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