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.”
— Abdulrazak Gurnah / Desertion
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.”
— Ben Lerner / The Lichtenberg Figures
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.
“A grief-stricken square feels acutely trapezoidal.”
— Ida Vitale / Byobu
Mimosa tree secularity hit me in the solar plexus. Ain’t no gods going around making mimosa trees and atomic bombs in the same breath. Time and space are like the lint balls I fish out of my belly button each morning—always there without the slightest idea as to why. So I sing to my octopus. I keep her in a 75-gallon tank I keep as the centerpiece of my living room. She scuttles about in her sharp salinity across from the fireplace, next to the Basquiat lithograph and the Koons tchotchke. No this ain’t no Hirst-like reproduction of an octopus in formaldehyde, though like he did with that Great White, this is an honest to goodness Briareus I call Belinda. I thought of going with a Hapalochlaena lunulata in order to make nerve toxin broth to feed to my dates, but I ditched that idea. I just drugged my dates straight out—ether in the car, Spoorloos style—and fed them to my successive dates, Bar Jonah style. I gotta tell you life is a peach in my octopus’s garden in the shade.
“The America of my experience has worshipped and nourished violence for as long as I have been on Earth.”
— James Baldwin / Nothing Personal
The field full of regular hours. The strain of exposure to sunlight stark and unfiltered. It’s got me down, debased, debauched, and drunk with stolen beatitude. The scarecrows keep me kin—and if cock robin is not in Caracas I’m illiterate and a fool. I was once king of the parking lots—a Chevy Chevelle SS/Mean Green/Buffed/Original Bench/454. Now I toil reading books—a dark a maw as any I can imagine. Nights of endless darkness, stars blotted out by the coal fires—there’s an endless vein of anthracite burning below. I mind the horizon line for the crows coming to pick me clean. I could buff chrome to a blinding sharpness on that Chevelle once, and now I watch for smoke coming out of monticules of a mean, mean earth. I am the master of what I survey, but keep the crows away of my sagging yellow skin. The days are no better than the nights on this tilted land. The land. It wont stop rumbling.
“The baby is born.
The baby is put in a toy car.
The baby drives to work.”
— Garth Simmons / Hole Punch
Today I broke my vow of silence when I broke the glass in case of emergency. I croaked in a muttering fashion most embarrassing, “Ra… rah… run. Run! There’s a moth infestation.” We had moths. We were underground in our hermetically sealed glass boxes, and here we were with an infestation of moths. How was this possible? Had we not paid our alms, and made our ablutions in the appropriate manner? Had we not made cretinous burnt offerings—I was always against this affectation—pungent and breath-taking like good little pawns. For our troubles, for our conceits to our deity … we get moths! Was it worth breaking 137 days of silence over? Documents were signed, codicils initialed, an ascetic’s vow taken. The pomp. The sacrifice. Moths! What does this mean?
“He would open parentheses and not always find an opportune time to close them.”
— Ida Vitale / Byobu
Curt olives desire
Unwrinkled tangy capers
To stew together.
“Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.”
— Jack Kerouac / On the Road
Murmuring a conventional recitative
the baritone herded the baronet
heartily beneath the farmer.
Dowse the dartboard!
My dowsing rod morphed
into a calypso airgun
of uncomfortable residue.
There’s garbage in the streets.
Check the groyne and moil—
Let’s dance!
He moved chalk for a guilder
& forced his secret destiny through
the wringer. He spied a rank seduction,
a trend unseen but suggested.
The baronet swirled upward
inside a never-escaping simulation—
bereft of his destiny,
lonely & destitute—
Loaves unloved.
Unleavened
& undun.
“I strike a teenager with a baseball bat to gain blue-collar credibility.
I feel dirty reading on the toilet.”
— Ben Lerner / The Lichtenberg Figures
supplicant tongue parched
pavement wavers hot
teeth cracked jag
skull throbs
welts sear
dread
dead
sun
go
“The COVID Age: that
may be the Anthropocene’s
gift to the planet.”
—Karthika Naïr / A Different Diatance: A Renga
“On the eighth day of the rest of my life, I began to wonder if this was really the rest of my life or just a continuation of the same one. I had so little to go on.”
— Miranda July / “Mon Plasir”
