A black hole lives here.
It pulls all energy and hope
In, merely to obliterate it all.
There is no waste,
There is no byproduct,
There is no is.
This is September.
“He has left his shaving brush
on top of the cabinet with doors of glass
that is merging with a cloud
— Louis Simpson / “Magritte Shaving”
The victims were not drawn from the elites. The earliest surviving epistle asks: What of compassion? During the time of plague: What of abnegation?
The outsider is to blame for the epidemic… expulsion, exodus… divine agency…
The Oracle’s response was for a call of bones. Bones? Human bone. Recover the bones of Hesiod.
In the face of pestilential adversity call societies to bind together. The summer heat brings severe pestilence… prepare to honor thy gods.
The gods are called upon when a pestilence is particularly severe — a special intercession is necessary if we are completely overcome with superstitious dread.
Yet the flautist is ambivalent. Pagan entertainment to appease the gods is failed invective for those that are deaf and unseeing.
Syntax and meaning are useless.
Nothing means something.
Consult the sibylline books and hold a thanksgiving feast.
Wait! was that a cough?
“The US is again at a point where an average of more than 2,000 people die of Covid-19 every day”
— CNN.com headline, 22 September 2021
I was made for plague times!
For the days weeks months — for the plague year!
It’s the time for auxiliary malarial canons
and sitars.
Thee minute for surgical mask missiles
and tinctures of Ayahuasca.
It’s time for stockpiled respirators
and acid-laced fuzz boxes & distortion pedals —
(Just stay away from the vocoder — don’t put that in your mouth! They have Pro Tools for that now.)
Spread your misery and pestilence over me,
broadcast it worldwide.
Spread the fusty 1970s ventilators out in an arc
and count the cobwebs on the outtake valves.
It’s the moment for snake oil salesmen &
“teetotalitarianists” & insider stock traders —
and don’t call me a wog because
I take my Viyaya Anand & Asha Bosle on the 45.
Aren’t you glad someone you knew and loved
didn’t live to see this moment?
I am.
“Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?”
— Elizabeth Alexander / “Praise Song for the Day”
I make people disappear. Someone has to do it. The pay is excellent. Haven’t you ever wondered where all the people that disappear mysteriously go? I do too. I wonder where the kids and women — it’s mostly kids and women, there’s occasionally a man requested, but it’s mostly kids and women of a certain age they want—where do they end up? So I know the first part of the answer to that question of where they go. I’m one of the men responsible for taking them, we are legion. Someone has to be responsible for handling these people first—but where they end up after I pass them along?—that’s as much as a mystery to me as it is to you. I wonder. I have my ideas about it.
I work alone on my end.
“Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre / Existentialism
stop. xxxxxxx gap.
here is a stop gap measure
for the continuing plague
xxx. xxx. xxx.
“You see again how far away
every thing is from every other thing.”
— Louise Glück / “Telescope”
every transformation requires choice, effort, action
tiger expressed herself in the most uncompromising way and chose to eat little piglet’s ear
piglet offered up his knuckles and she had those too
piglet struggled about, a bloody mess, but in good cheer
you’re warped now, tiger said, i think i’ll finish you before you bleed on this fine shag carpet
come here, hog, tiger said with the most lascivious snarl heard in ages
you know what happened next
“I’ll miss you deer,
but I choose my head
& carry it out of doors:
a bucket of eels
to set loose
in the dark, December sea.”
— Aracelis Girmay / “Self-Portrait as the Snake’s Skin”
Whimper wimple woman, he said. This ain’t Asgard. He held a fork upright in his right hand—a knife in his left.
I want to strangle you blue, she said. I’d like to see your eyes bulge and the thick rope of artery throb out on your neck. She placed the maple syrup next to his pancakes as she said this.
I want to feel the spittle spray in my eyes as you squirm with the terrible realization of what is happening to you, she added, walking away.
You realize this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a firm throttle, he said. He emptied the bottle of syrup onto his pancakes. It over-spilled the plate and metastasized out in a sluggard flare.
It means nothing—but for the bad can do to some stranger. Like they was family, she said.
“You said we are all violent.
It’s about finding the way out
that does the least damage.”
— Kimberly Casey / “Golden Hour”
Mother ate the moon
Turned out the sky
She stormed inside
Opened her mouth
Out came a string
Of seven planets
Dinner was thrown
Into darkness
“Those were the days when a human being was something to be aspired to.”
— Joy Williams / Harrow
Tuesday: Happy Face
I trap my shadow.
I pin it by footpad to the concrete.
I crush it.
Last night’s mark,
A happy face not yet faded,
Smiles on the interior of my wrist.
Happiness wanes
At the terminal point
Of the imagined slice.
Wednesday: Fruiting Zen Magnolia
Have you ever seen the effrontery
Of the magnolia fruit?
Before it bursts open, it appears as engorged
Labia pressed shut in a modest pink blaze.
Is it Magnolia acuminata or Magnolia
Zenii whose fruit discomfits me,
On a desultory Wednesday
Morning, in my mourning black shoes?
It unsheathes itself in delirium —
An effulgence of unhooded clitorises!
They burn my face
Engorged with life.
A wild orgiastic sight
In a moment so unsettling,
So thoroughly disorienting,
A tectonic change of mood:
Precise.
Carnal.
Life.
And they sat—as though paralysis preceding death
Had nailed them there. The track bent south.
I saw her pulsing crotch … the lice rooted in that baby’s hair.”
—Louise Glück / “The Chicago Train”
polyphonic dream vision
sonorous in plastic tubing
limned transducers and sound scriptures
in a garden of minimal fences
sonic spaces expand
from properties shaped
of bird-like sounds
the genesis of silver clouds
and chance-based tape collages
squall of rainforest insects and birds
these are the hazy processes
at the intersections of evocative
seams and anticausal
textural resonances
helium pillows fuzz
with electronic modifications
titled: variations 1 – 53
“Right now, there are children playing on the shore.
There are children lying in hospital beds.
There are children trusting us.
Who will tell them what we’ve done.”
— Michael Sims / “Who Will Tell Them?”
thee istsfor manity reader 