My depression is deeper
than yours.
My existentialism is darker.
You have Kierkegaard.
I have Fro Niz-nil-imbo.
My nihilism is bleakest.
I can’t imagine Sisyphus happy.
“He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
‘The horror! The horror!’ ”
— Joseph Conrad / Heart of Darkness
a mourning veil
a thin membrane
a condolence card pulped in rain
the literati daisy chain
a bottle of cloven-foot skronk
hear the krang of the washtub
the whiddle of the fiddle
a simple onetwothree wheeze
i am eye: i have a cracked rib
relatives in boston found
a runny obituary
infamously scatalogical
“Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.”
— David Markson / Vanishing Point
Ossuary hall—
A muzz of dry voices rasp—
Cold and liminal.
“The garden’s lilies have started to rot
So who is the corpse being carried from the house”
— Guillaume Apollinaire / “The Lady”
“I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.”
— Albert Camus / The Fall
Allow me to tell you—as of the who—a liturgy of finely grained righteousness cleansed, folded and articulated:
Bestial birth canals and unguents squeezed from bodies now desiccated—
Concupiscent casuistry led us to our troubles
Delineated in these lines (I found) in the margins of thee Apocrypha.
Energumens came into a world of pain, possession and black hole nothingness.
Fecund and feculent they were legion, and what you are not is
god and neither am i (a purveyor of distilled sin in pearl dust & gin)—
Humanity’s dark mirror.
“Instant Karma is gonna get you…”
Jaundiced and juiced we know
Knowledge is nothing. We have proven as much. We are eyeless—
Lenticular madness refracted; and as blind as those who drank four ounces of white wine and horse dung
Macerated into a tincture for the masses to imbibe.
Neoteric quaffs that did not quench our thirst left us bleached, and in search
Of the man who described literature as a “tissue of citations” its contexts and referents unknowable—“a
Palimpsest of the putative self”—a scratch-off ticket past attenuated the ego(s)—Id every moment of the day.
Quincunxes. I placed on your eyes for a faster journey to nowhere.
Rampikes speared on the roads—a jagged landscape without human trace.
Starlings darkened the sky and twisted about in their darkling ablutions.
Take thy clyster pipe and syringe and find a willing official orifice proficient in state sponsored press releases—
Unction administered—and nailed up to the door jambs of a recessed congress raising money for a defunct president.
Vacillate no more for we are refluxing on our American original sin—
Wandering through the Death Museum where we whisper colloquies to lives wasted in a
Xeriscaped land of ochres and sand—a land so prickly that we found nothing but portents, penitents, and penury
Yoked to a future as arid and bleak as our past.
Zoonotic and novel apocalypses are the only viable options as we ease into these closing minutes …
(or we’ll burn it all down ourselves)
“The earthly octopi are throbbing
And so very many of us have become our own gravediggers”
— Guillaume Apollinaire / “Ocean Earth”
My father disappeared into the basement in search of the wine. Lois and I stood in the vestibule staring at each other. Silence.
“Oh, darling, come here. I got some schmutz on your face,” Lois said. She ran her thumb down my cheek.
I pulled back. Effrontery, I thought. Insolent. Boldness. The SAT prep words come in handy when I wanted to call a thing what it was. “Effrontery,” I mumbled, and lowered Belle and Sebastian’s “Expectations” out of my ears.
“Look at you,” Lois said. “You’re such a beautiful young woman.” She took a step back, holding my shoulders, sizing.
“Appraising,” I hissed. I was on a jag back then—still a couple of days out from taking the test. Every word in its right place. Firmly affixed.
“Ah, you’re beautiful,” Lois said. “You are a darling. Zaftig and swarthy,” she said clasping her hands to her chest. “Your father was absolutely right—every single word about you.”
I don’t know what my father saw in this woman, but whatever it was, it was enough to bring her over for dinner. The big reveal-o-rama—ugh.
I was crashing. I needed to switch tempo, switch songs—the No Doz was seeping out through my pores into the ether. I needed upbeat, so I popped in the classic punk mix cassette and stepped back. “It’s nice to meet you, but I’ve got homework to finish before dinner.”
“Wait, doll, let’s talk a bit,” she said. She grasped my arm as I turned to head upstairs and led me to the living room just as Poly Styrene was saying—some people think little girls should be seen and not heard…
“Relent.” I practiced, sotto voce, “abandon a harsh intention…”
“Your father says you’re very talented, very musical,” she said.
Beyond the Florida room sliders I spotted little Elpidio at the edge of his roof. He was dressed in his Halloween costume again. The red nylon cape fluttering in the breeze, reflecting streaks of gold in the western sky.
Lois’s face floated into my field of view. She moved me away from the sliders and said, “let me see you properly in this light.” She removed my headphones by the wire arc.
“Don’t grab them by—”
“You know in my day I went to plenty of concerts,” she said, conducting the downbeats with the upturned headphones. “Air Supply, Styx, Celine,” she moved the hair out of my eyes.
So touchy-feely, I thought—not exactly a test word, but I had to see what was going on with little Elpidio. I turned to look, and the only thing framed in the slider was the pool, our fence line, the sloping angles of the terracotta tiles on his roof, and a wisp of cirrus pasted on the bruising sky.
“Celine?” I muttered at the tail end of my spiraling energy. “Who’s Celine?” She blotted out the backyard scene again. She had overpainted the bow on her upper lip. She’d created a straight-line gash across the edge of her philtrum. She bulldozed her upper lip in coral.
I stepped aside looked over little Elpidio’s hedges. Nothing.
“Oh my God. Celine. Dion, honey!” She blocked out the view again. “Surely you’ve heard of Celine Dion, darling.” There was a wisp of a hair at the center of Lois’s beauty mark just beyond the reach of her lipstick.
“Ok. What are you listening to?” She placed the headphones upside-down on her ears, so the metal arc framed the bottom of her face. I had a whirlpool vision of a dunk-tank clown—but her framed face appeared to be the actual target. I so wanted to bash it back just then.
“Agh! Maria, what is this?” She pulled the headphones off her ears—one of the foam pads was stuck in a tangle of curls. “Oy, Maria, what is this noise?” She moved away struggling with the headphone.
Little Elpidio appeared beyond the rise of his roof and walked down the south slope and jumped.
“Maria, help me get this off—”
“Wha?” I turned to find her fumbling double fisted with one of the headphone foam pads in her hair. The headphones dangled and twisted in the dead air below her forearm. “Huh? X-Ray Spex,” I said.
“What is she screaming, hun?”
“Oh bondage up yours. Oh bondage no more,” I said.
She pulled the foam pad out of that dark tousle. I looked into the gloaming just in time to see little Elpidio take another header off the edge.
“All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.”
— Elizabeth Alexander / “Praise Song for the Day”
La lune jejune (y perturbada)
Ghosts clogging the liminal spaces
Ethers from an agonal breath
Sleep descends
Heavy
Abyssal in lisle-like sheen
Barbaric (without the pantaloons)
“I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”
— John Keats / Letter to George & Thomas Keats
In the dust motes of the sea—
In the rains of seeds—
The germ of everything,
A death blow averted.
“When you paused for a poem
it could reshape the day
you had just been living.”
— Naomi Shihab Nye / “Every day as a wide field, every page”
i am an american—the imprimatur of power, panache and a modicum of common sense —
the mighty illegitimate master of meretriciousness—
if i break ground here there is annunciation and caffeinenated twaddle—
would you pass the elephantine hours of derision with me?
can you accustom yourself to my stalwart dependability—the sort of love-in-a-bucket that takes 250 years to baste?
are we recording this?
listen, i grew up in dirt, eating tossed scraps of bread off the sawdust floors—i battled for everything i have—
i was expert at sleight of hand and the misdirection poot—
did someone break wind?
the simple reason the world stays afloat, albeit not a simplistic reason, is because it’s freighted with so much love—
and because i keep that beacon above water
excuse me, it’s time for the high porcelain and plastic throne—
i’m apophatic and apoplectic—
i have a proclivity for uncivil civility—
so let’s break here and hail onto me—
the greatest of all time—a shining city upon …
hold that, what’s this? someone is drilling at my head—there’s too much sin and too much din for me to…
just do as i say, not as i do and you can ride on my coattails—
we’re making the world safe for capitalism!
“We’re from here, he said. We’re Americans. The soldier looked straight through him, and it occurred to me then that in this country it has never really mattered what you are, only what you’re not.”
—Omar El Akkad / “Riverbed”
Queen Travis declaims that feculence has nothing to do in this affair. She says:
“I was bequeathed a third rate hand me down in consignment and inquisitiveness—a loan from dog. I’ve got the scrabble tiles blues—a compulsion to put handfuls of tiles in my mouth, and store them there until we stop clear cutting the world’s forests. There’s a depth to the sky that terrifies me—there’s something biding its time behind that quaint cerulean facade. So keep calm, but get ready for love, because the blackness of space is manifest in our every gesture.”
She tilts her head up from her privy papers, sniffs at the air, flares a nostril, continues:
“I’ve got stockyard pictographs of trestle beam investitures. Get all of these words out of my head, Doctor Ambassador—my thoughts no longer serve me but trip me up at difficult moments. Platitudes will get you everywhere—speak in riddles and baffles. If you, my subjects, dig trenches in cement—it’s hard work—I’ll extract the juice of yet grown fruit from the air. But don’t ask me to be clear for clarity’s sake, it doesn’t become me.”
Fanfare. Gentle applause. Fanfare.
In strides Whit Fictions, fresh from America. He bullhorns, apropos of nothing, without invitation:
“What dribble! Talk about disjunction and linearity. I want my plastic rat, and I want to put an end to Sunday morning pleasantness. It’s all sound and drury until someone gets hurt. It’s dribble in the middle of each waking hour—and let’s take it outside because the making of treaties is provincial. You, your excellence, at the top of the great chain of being, think it’s too quaint for a bully type like me? Why are you asking for a ride? You think this is Lennon-McCartney territory, sister? Well, sis, it’s not. This is it, this is mythical shit. I pray twice hourly for the day of eagles and hegemony. You, there, singing your Deep Purple refrain from “Hush”— sweet jeez, do I hate that song! For the time being take thy ferrules and place them round your pinky fingers, and chop off the slag ends. Stay calm. As you were, and all that. I am lord of the swill bucket!”
One could say there was much rejoicing—but why lie? Decrees, treaties, agreements and promises were broken. Rationalizations were stoked, and everyone walked away to their corners promising to tend their gardens. Naked and afraid.
“One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people—
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
God Blessed America for me.”
— Woody Guthrie / “This Land Is Your Land”
thee istsfor manity reader 