Thumb Tapping

On 19 January she wrote in her journal:

It’s been six days since I fell through the crack.  I’m spiraling down depression way again.  The crack has been widening and if I don’t do something to sort it out— San Andreas fault be thy name — you unholy fucking fissure!  I’m out. This is a familiar landscape, I’m never too far from stepping through it, into it, farther and farther down — canyon-like — now in a skirl of whorling minimalist notes, repeated and repeated until I am tranced out and lost.  

Having lost six days now I ask myself: what’s next?  Which way do I move?  What direction?  How do I get out of this, and here I am writing again.  Is it fair enough to start like this again?  The only option really.  How did I get here again?  How do I avoid ending up here again?  I don’t think I can adequately answer the latter, but the first question must be asked always because it presupposes awareness of the situation.  And here is where I usually make the pivot, because a pivot is required.  The only other option isn’t really an option.  Is it?  No.  

So here I’ll start again, and content myself with starting again.  This is an acceptable… No, it’s a good step forward.  It had to begin somewhere.  Why not right here?

******

The next day, the 20th, she wrote:

I exist in meaningless patter, in the trifling titter of expense and abuse.  I persist in this dominant issue of breaking a standard that I once pretended to.  I perform unlimited horrors on my own discernment and troubled world view.  I will disengage from timbre and search for a tone so acute it pilfers life itself.  This signifies nothing within nothing.  

Didn’t Thoreau say, Write while the heat is in you.  The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.  And that’s why I persist with this thumb tapping.  To use what little heat warms these fingers attached to a tepid body sitting on a cold toilet. And so I start anew.

What I’m Reading:

The primary duty is not to live but to write. I write because I’m unhappy. I write because it is a way of fighting unhappiness. If I didn’t write, I would blow my brains out, without a shadow of a doubt. 

— Mario Vargas Llosa / “The Art of Fiction No. 120” / The Paris Review

Box Breathing

I am a stuffed ghost
Without natural breath
I work on box breathing

I am a scarecrow
See me waste throughout the season
See my headpiece fritter away

Murders of crows blacken the sky
Hear the caw caw cackles
See the darkness alight

Smell the awful offal
I work my box breathing
I can’t breathe

What I’m Reading:

“Bringing children into this apocalypse is selfish and unethical.”

— Charlotte McConaghy / Wild Dark Shore

wee underhand 

tinker the keynotes of a deficiency with a wee underhand
heighten the exertion by magnitudes of ephemera
hide-and-seek the tumults of your well-worn dissolution
your distractions are treacherous — more so in their new wrappings
you evoke the predictable incompleteness of subaltern strident camouflage
and yet
you’ve become a remainder-man — anonymous and circumstantial

compulsory
inelastic
terse
attenuated
and
lost surrendering
to outrage
subterfuge

What I’m Reading:

I am damned, thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die.

— Nick Cave / The Death of Bunny Munro

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

A poem, while it can expose us to our
imagining selves, can also trick us
     into imagining
ourselves as something beyond our behaviors.

— Prageeta Sharma / “Friendment”

I kept a picture of Stalin by our bed.
My wife set it face down when we made love.
I closed my eyes and thought about the dead
gossiping on the long train to Lvov . . .

— Morri Creech / “The Marriage”

There a clock stands in front of a closed shop,
its hour not late, though the moon has come
early to mirror the white coin of its frozen face.

— Suzanne Matson / “January Poem”

Someone, somewhere, is playing 
the violin in the background 
of violence.

Before all of this, we didn’t think
too often of heaven. We wanted to fly
through clouds, not above them.

— Sara Abou Rashed / “Gaza I”

The future / is where I’m going only because / I have no choice, because time / moves in one direction, dragging / a bit of itself behind like meat.

— Maggie Smith / “The Picture Before”

it’s madness
to hate the visitation
of grackles

— Uche Nduka / “A Green Dream”

all my understanding dribbles down the chin
onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

— Renée Nicole Macklin (Renee Nicole Good) / “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs”

What I’m Listening To:

Like early Abba
I don’t give a fuh
I don’t give a fuh
I don’t give a fuh
I feel resentment in my soul
Maybe it’s time for men to clean for like, five hundred years
I’m not too concerned about that, uh

— Dry Cleaning / “My Soul / Half Pint”

Sojourn

The sign read: Gonorrhoea Biddy Broth Made Naturally.

We didn’t know what that meant. Fascination.

We checked dictionaries, schoolbooks, online encyclopedias. Nothing.

We were the idle ancestors of immoralities.

We had ambient sounds doing our bidding. We snaked and weaved to the tinny bleats.

The presumption was one of mutton minds made accessible. 

We weren’t certain of much, but we were certainly cretins.

A whiskey and a fleshpot nativity manger in fairy lights.

Spinal fluid effluvia whorls in oil.

There were grunts and effete adieus.

We had to content ourselves with the great mysteries of life and the petrochemical smell.

What I’m Reading:

If George W. Bush helped invent the concept of ‘homeland security’ in order to ‘fight the terrorists over there’ rather than here, Trump seeks to bring the war to ‘OUR hemisphere’. From Caracas to Minneapolis, legal authority and institutional power are being redirected toward an overriding end: governing populations as subjects rather than citizens.

— Nikhil Pal Singh / “Homeland Empire” / Equator

Petrichor (23 to 9)

See more ideas about black and white:
the dramatic effect of contrasting areas
pictures taken on January 14th,
when the deus ex machina fell through the trapdoor
into the charnel house.

See deus roll among the flaky
fillets doused in slightly sweet vinegar and finished with a peppery
Caravaggio touch / a tenebrism used only to obtain
a dramatic impact while chiaroscuro psychologically moves
and deus
in Renaissance style, and later in a Godard film says:

I think of buying hand cream to douse the smell of blood.

Oh! O! o! the Principal is waiting for you in his office, there is NO emotion.

Wet Season is a cold, harsh dousing of the realities of city-living
then deus is doused in garlic butter / She
panhandled and chided him all through the reduction.

deus!
dreary dubious dulcet dungeon —
escaped mental patient doused with sulphuric acid…

Viewers are once again ejoined to cover their eyes…
Turn out the lights, douse the lights,
dim the lights, turn off the lights,
switch off the lights —

Topped with sea salt, pepper and fresh thyme,
the black stone paths, the jug and the red grapes,
made by the use of force
deus
relents off-stage…

Centrifugal.

Then the scent of rain-doused pines.

Petrichor.

What I’m Reading:

Perhaps, after all, God is simply a poached egg and a yolk cooked just as it should be. Perhaps God is being fisted by the person you love most in the world, being taken apart one finger at a time until the whole of you is fucked out and pulled like a cord strung tight, white-eyed and waiting for crescendo. Perhaps God is all of that and kissing afterward, kissing most of all, sore-mouthed and messy, half asleep and trying to remember if you locked the door and if you need to set your phone alarm for seven. Perhaps God is all of that and an apology.

— Julia Armfield / Private Rites

reluctance + rigmarole

a welfare check on my chickpeas
bankruptcy pulls me from a restraint on my stoop
a clue found in my miniature espresso

my neurons are frayed
there’s a peanut in my membrane
the hangout heavy airguns are hard to beat

silt screws cut like cymbals
weaned from reluctance + rigmarole
it’s the threat of the enema that never threatens

a glob of hornet + a flicker of worm
a channel for my undesirable tendencies
i eat the burglary of my own unmediated terms

What I’m Reading:

Inside us live innumerable others;
If I think or feel, I do not know
Who is thinking or feeling.
I am only the place
Where feeling and thinking happen.

— Ricardo Reis / “219”