“… the smell of steel
it’s warm it’s visceral
the smell of blood
and steel
it’s warm
if you are in a situation like that
don’t crawl inside
in the middle of the room
every person who had his phone calling
was killed…”
“As you decide which human
to put on your last ventilator,
remember there was a boat named Entropy
the day you became Persephone.
— Emily Gallacher Viall / “How to decide which human gets your last ventilator”
Today I cut a window into existence; I revived the dead. Today I layered a patina of platinum and white on the familial palimpsest; the kinetic became inert. Today the atavistic became avuncular. Today is inertia.
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
— Sylvia Plath / The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Building fictions is an addiction not easily quenched. A need, psychological and physiological that renders one a hamster inside the wheel—no stopping until you’re ejected into the corner where all the soggy piss-chips accrue. Bring pleasant talk of men and women disrobing into their pustules and scales. I have needs carbuncular and crepuscular toward the end of the day. Fill me with honey black, induce the truce of Medusa, ‘cause I want to turn quartzite and brilliantine (a little dab might fuse you!). Chuff and huff until I’m diamond sharp and lenticular, see through me the shards that elude your third eye. I went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs in my ninth year on this melting and acidifying death orb—endless amounts of psychobabble and psychotropics didn’t make a lick of difference. So salivate and join me while I play the soundtrack of my life for you: hiss, crackle, pop, skronk, white noise, metal machine whir, cacophonic bursts… SILENCE
“Those aren’t birds you
hear, just their corresponding holes in the sky.
All the bottled water isn’t fooling anyone.”
— Anselm Berrigan / “Let Us Sample Protection Together”
The air is sharp with the tang of petroleum and machine fluids.
Tendrils of perfume pin prick the air. You follow that scent to the end of a street where the bodies are piled chest high.
“So here’s my advice to anyone, in any field: when you feel you can’t make work, make work from work that is already made. Don’t duck and cover. Cover without ducking. Do it proudly. It keeps you active.”
— Questlove / Creative Quest
07/29/1990
he said i must discipline my temperament—crush my egoism.
it’s like my medulla oblongata was on sale for $1.25 at zayre’s—compare… you can’t do better than zayre—trust was power, father on the prowl—and as neptuna’s only daughter i found myself floating, holding ophelia’s hand, on the morning after.
hippies, fuckin’ hippies, he said—there was a heavy-osity in the air then—i prayed—the impatience was thick.
titian-woman thick, he said manhandling—i didn’t know who titian was (hadn’t seen the venus with the organ player yet—where did he?) i didn’t know what he was on about (when did i then?)
then i thought—oh yeah, i’ll knock your block off someday, rock’em/sock’em robot sharp—that day he looked like an extra from that movie scarecrow—gene hackman’s double, for shit’s sake—all i had to block out his musk was to obsess on that thing he said about ernie! ernest borgnine, what an actor!
and i said, yeah, give him an oscar along with fred flintstone—i got a loose bicuspid from that one.
what was missing in my life was bookish children, snowflakes, and good music. oy, the herb alpert & the tijuana brass was killing me—we were spiny monsters, sea urchin prickly—stay away or we’ll poison your life—as he poisoned mine.
yeah, i was going places! why did he keep all those empty packets of condoms in the dresser drawer? next to the revolver, the crumpled bills, and the guerlain mother gave him for his birthday the year she disappeared.
i once overheard him talking to an associate, and he was ripping off the lyrics to brandy passing them off as his own deep rumination—you see, my mistress is the sea. the sea was my life, my love, my lady—his dimwit friend (trafficker and smoker of stink-pot cigars) was impressed.
i wanted to scream—which? which sea? caspian? sargasso? azov?—but all i could manage was to hiss at them—terry riley’s in c?
bums both. or as my mother traduced in her cuban accent—yuar bumps! bumps both! monstrous all of it. all of us.
how did I get lost in that grift city of adolescence and bad magic? piecemeal, genetics, and refugee wave tectonics. his ideals—shave thy armpits and legs, slather and powder thy face—he liked lips blood red. don’t you see, he said, it’s a win-win proposition!
now this beat is technotronic not tijuana (br)ass!
i burned all his records.
“… I was a good
ununderstood, a wrist
of bent light, undressing
alone an even quieter violence.”
— Vanessa Angelica Villarreal / “I Was a Good Wife”
He woke up with the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” ear-wigging his head. He had this dream 1,822 times since seeing the performance one Saturday morning in 1973. The gold and ruddy light of it. The smoking jackets the group wore. The dancers—a sea roiling around them popping up sharp to the rhythm and then descending to the backbeat—in perfect rubbery syncopation. The beauty. The sheer joy of it. The possibilities. He never tired of this dream.
Feel good. Incendiary.
The sun was up like a burning bald head. The brightness insisted its way through the gap in the blinds and past the scrim of his eyelids. The Soul Train Spinners had been preceded by a nightmarish episode where he was caught out on the Ustyurt plateau during a violent electrical storm.
He was the only living thing standing for miles—the wind lashed down on him, lighting cracked the sky into splinters that imbedded themselves in the rain and came homing for him like a million tiny needles.
Dreadful. Noxious.
He feared not for himself but for the congealed beef plov—which was the consistency of dried cement—the individual pieces of mutton, carrots, and rice in the kazan frozen; he couldn’t get the spoon which was intractably stuck in the inert block of food to move. He was two weeks without food. An electrical charge exploded nearby sending a shock of existential angst he’d never felt before retuculating through his body. In that instant—in that howling and aggrieved hunger—he heard the mellifluous voice of Don Cornelius introducing the Spinners … a thunderous welcome …
Recurring. Hope.
The opening chords of the amber guitar and percussion faded up forcing the yowling plains of the Ustyurt into a pin prick spot of light that sparked momentarily in the “O” of the Soul Train neon sign above the Spinners as they grooved into their choreography—the clopping congas, violin glissandos and horns caught momentum—he felt sated. He was momentarily content for the 1,823rd time in his dreams.
Today would be one of the good days.
“All led to this, to this gloaming where a middleaged man sits masturbating his snout, waiting for the first dawn to break.”
— Samuel Beckett / Watt
in Sevastopol when sloth consumed me.
Now I’m fagged on a stack
of lighted pyre, the funeral
in progress. I was the son of violence,
and as begets one so highly skilled:
a gun-licker & barrel-blower
who shot off his own nose.
My vengeance paid back
in towers of flame.
A jackanapes no
mo’.
“One must have a mind of winter
The greatest lines in poetry are infinitely quotable while having no definite meaning. What is a mind of winter, and why must one have one? It doesn’t matter.”
— Elisa Gabbert / “What Poetry Is”
“Unblock Party: When you’re having trouble thinking of new ideas, go to one of your old ideas and rework it.”
— Questlove / Creative Quest
the midday sun fades
a grey mist blurs the green hills
the world disappears
“Your best days are sometimes those when you end up with less on the page than when you started.”
— Hilary Mantel / “How Writers Learn to Trust Themselves”
Mary crashed. She was out of sorts after the apparition, but she recovered enough to do this on Saturday. She wrote:
07/24/21
I’m gonna remix the Shakespeare sonnet in today’s “Poem of the Day” email. I’m going to give it the cut-up, erasure, funk-o-rama dash and then continue on writing the draft of my novel. I feel good today!
on creatures we desire
creatures we desire
die,
as the y decease
t heir memory
contract s,
flame s – fuel
famine a nd lies,
foe s too cruel.
now the world’s a
spring
waste d .
Pity the world s
a grave .
Sonnet 1: From fairest creatures we desire increase by William Shakespeare
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory;
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
This was all she could manage as a migraine pierced her medulla oblongata, shot through her thalamus and corpus callosum, and shred through her limbic lobe, then reticulated and settled in her frontal lobe for the day. It would suffice.
“Don’t write out of anyone’s need except your own. Don’t try to cater to an audience you think may not be keeping up with you—find the audience who will.”
— Hilary Mantel / Mantel Pieces
thee istsfor manity reader 