in the arboretum

Posted on May 16, 2021 by istsfor manity

Witch Alder

After eating two dozen Witch Alder bulbs … Blah blah blah … vomitus regretus … He hid from the others in the arboretum …

“Just make something, anything.”

—Austin Kleon / austinkleon.com

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never ending line

Posted on May 15, 2021 by istsfor manity

Clodomira’s Lament

She had a dour doughy face. She dredged countless bodies up in her memories. Daily humiliations relived. Ruminations leading in on themselves, self-reflexive, like an never ending line of diminishing versions of herself in a funhouse mirror. She lived a succession of glary days with an overwhelming flatness to them—sour clouds pinned to the sky. So many wrong turns without indications of success. It was time she quit it.

“Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”


— Flannery O’Connor / Wise Blood

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a nervous shadow

Posted on May 14, 2021 by istsfor manity
The Pointillist Loses His Touch

A Nervous Shadow Approaches

Vladimir and Estragon talking to Hazel Motes and Winston Smith

“I don’t have to run from anything because I don’t believe in anything.”


— Flannery O’Connor / Wise Blood

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not paid for (redux)

Posted on May 13, 2021 by istsfor manity

Buzzards on Parade

The twelfth day of the month was Copperhead Wednesday. Serpentine was the look we were going for.

Beatific upper register notes is what Maria was reaching for: Ta da la ta da la dao, was what she sang to a supper club of adoring mengeese eyeing a pair of lady rattlesnakes. Midnight. Thursday morning. Applause. Thunderous.

Savorous twistings of moonglow hairs into chignons and much dispensing with shoes and underthings. There was nothing like a cobra line dance to make it libertine-free and parsimonious-lite.

I, the author, heard someone order a chocolate stout. “Not served here,” was the reply. Vehement — something akin to buzzards on parade: wing-wide convection current surfing loafers — something free, not imagined, not paid for, not patented and surely made to disappoint.

Asseverations to “live fully and create in the midst of the desert” notwithstanding, Maria went home alone.

“Let the voices of dead poets
Ring louder in your ears
Than the screechings mouthed
In mildewed editorials.”


— Bob Kaufman / “Believe, Believe”

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took to fisticuffs

Posted on May 12, 2021 by istsfor manity

The Tuneless Ballad of Rostay Toonany and Chemo Destrapè

Clowns and claustrophobes both. Masters of microbes and microbiomes—and bonhomie. Too much probiotic nonsense squelching their wheelhouse one day, and they took to fisticuffs.

Oh, what a dastardly day for all! The day the two friends took to winging and knuckles. The magpies alighted on the witch alder to watch. The eastern cottontail hare trained their mysterious obsidian eyes on the row. The red efts and copperheads ignored each other in utter transfixion—neologisms were created for the event—so rare it was.

Rostay Toonany landed sharp jabs, but Chemo Destrapè eiger to be done with the punch-out threw a barrage of roundhouse lefts and uppercuts and dinged Rostay’s temporal lobe—bumping about in his skull—trebly charged, in a timbre of orange and reds.

The bestiary cackled, hissed, and meeped.

It was bitter day that—the day of the bust-up. But Chemo’s arms were raised forevermore in victory and infamy—the day the protozoan roared.

“Write every day. Habits are things you get for free, without requiring any special work. Set a daily word target. Make it small. 75 words a day is a novel a year.”


— Cory Doctorow

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go go go

Posted on May 11, 2021 by istsfor manity

Walk!

Walk! Go west, go east. Just go, go, go. Get up. Get out. Get moving. Peripatetic be your word. Bump! Groove. Make way and scoot along. This place will grow moss on your backside. Don’t backslide. Get moving, man. The reaper is scything at your tail. Perambulate while you are able. Go. Go. Go. Grandstand. Jump Around. Do the do. Pop up. Down with your bad self. Shimmy. Shake. Do, see, do. Gyrate. One Two Three Red Light. Red Rover Over. Duck duck goose out! Rocket up. Walk! Get on the move. Get up and go. Jog it out. Hurry up and run.

“You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike…”

— Louise Glück / “Persephone The Wanderer”

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nice marmot, man

Posted on May 10, 2021 by istsfor manity

Overheard at the Bison Watering Hole

Marmot: We don’t need no stinking Bison!


Bison 1: What’s with him?


Bison 2: Nice marmot, man.

“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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crying never stopped

Posted on May 9, 2021 by istsfor manity

(Press the play button above and below to watch my short films: mother’s insides day & your mother here…)

Manta Ray is All Right

On the eve of her first Mother’s Day she dreamt she was trapped in the supplies closet at the local elementary school.

She couldn’t find her bicycle—her means of escape—the green Manta Ray with the three speed stick shift on the crossbar.

She heard her baby crying from a distance—echoey and shrill. She couldn’t find her cell phone, and now without her bike she’d miss the Greyhound bus out of town.

There was a jostling at the closet door. She intuited it was the President of her Homeowner’s Association coming to release her to give her the New Mother of the Year Award.

The crying was deafeaning industrial noise—whirs, metallic clangs, and grinding.

The door lock clicked.

The Greyhound bus roared by crushing her Manta Ray bicycle lying in the street.

The crying never stopped.

“Mother is faceless so far up in the dark.
Just her torso glows,
and the color around her takes on the design
of a falling leaf, grey-yellow plaid.”

— Terese Svoboda / “The Root of Mother is Moth”

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hand drawn scrawls

Posted on May 8, 2021 by istsfor manity

Late Stage Pandemic Dream

Robert Smith is miming one of his early music videos. It sounds like “Fire in Cairo,” but it’s not.

He’s jangling his guitar at the end of a narrow white tiled hallway which you note has urinals along one wall, and stands-full of music magazines along the other wall.

Smith is wearing a white T-shirt with hand drawn scrawls and The Cure written on it. He dances a modified mashed potato while strumming his guitar. He then begins to do his version of The Robot, which includes some spastic movements—it’s not what you would have seen on Soul Train in the mid-1970’s, but it’s somehow endearing.

He turns away and continues dancing in front of a full length mirror.

You wish it would stop.

“Our children flock into the streets
with voices raised, their anger
a grim substitute
for song.”


— Brittney Corrigan / “Vanishing”

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rounds to make

Posted on May 7, 2021 by istsfor manity

Work

Darkness begat a child
His name was Death
He had rounds to make
Appointments to keep
And so he went to work

“You have to act as if it were possible to readically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”

— Angela Davis / from a lecture delivered at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. February 13th, 2014.

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