lacunae and interstices (redux)

debilitating as 1-2-3… awful as awful can be, and slightly elevated but apocryphal

after the apocalypse we walked on the littered shore of lacuna beach

no word from paramaribo pam, but a fine bread crumb trail of… well, bread crumbs

trailed off into the wreckage of a civilization unhinged and unleavened

she was germinating a fear of wheat, though one couldn’t really call her glutenous… yet

she once said: a night in suriname is equal to two weeks in french guiana

i understood nothing, but the smell of decaying sargassum was intoxicating

she was spotted at the fringe of the jungle at the interstice between life and death

made dyspeptic by the cold medications she attempted to o.d. on

but the bardo was not “taking” and her ass was festooned with deer ticks

What I’m Reading:

Black walnuts hitting a barn roof
Fairly rapped the morning.
          Massachusetts,
Autumn. Orioles and pumpkins.
And the crack of those round shells
Like a hardwood mallet hammering a wedge
Into the moment, splitting it ever open

— Seamus Heaney / “Black Walnuts”

Highest Eminence (redux)

O, pallid bat, wombat, scarlet tanager, marmoset and all the little animals of the world that spark wars and worldwide grief… Listen! ye who visit our leaders’ dreams at night and whisper all types of destructive and inhumane council — planting the seeds of war, hyper-capitalism, oppressive totalitarianism, and oligarchical greed that passes for socialism in practice — you are on notice.

All these bad ideas are planted by the cutest life forms on planet Earth.

While Attenborough gallivants about the world, here and there, galumphing with whirring machinery in order to show us this and that, and it’s import in the world; he fails to notice what the pretty beasties are doing to our leaders every night — and by extension, what they are doing to our world. OUR world.

O, low and cavorting bestiary! We shall hunt you out by deforestation, overfishing, pollution, over-development, and wildfire. You shall stop this chimeric invasion into our sleep and equanimity.

We are man! The highest and greatest link in the Great Chain of Being… (sorry, so sorry, dear father)

We are man! Highest and greatest eminence on the Great Chain of Being here on earth!

We bend the elements to our will — the atoms do our bidding. We will move on beyond this planet, because this is what we do. Invade. Conquer. Control. Cleanse. Fold. Assimilate!

So, Red Panda; so, chin strap penguin; so, octopus; so, ring-tailed lemur — we bring you the Anthropocene, free of charge — but it will cost you dearly.

I pity the fool-animal earwigging it’s way into our beloved leader’s ear, in the dead of night, at the hour of fog.

You shall atone!

Then we will flay you, stuff you, catalog you, and put you up on display in a musty diorama — next to the heads of our enemies. Because this is what we are expert at. Because this is what we do.

What I’m Reading:

We have named our species Homo sapiens—the wise human. But it is debatable how well we have lived up to the name.

— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

(silence)

(silence)

33 frames long
magnified
acts as a valve

national anthem plays

(fade to back)

What I’m Reading:

Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that, after two and a half centuries — about the length of the Roman republic in its glory — American democracy is disappearing.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, the universal ideas of the founding documents no longer seem to have their hold on many Americans, especially younger ones.

— George Packer / “America’s Zombie Democracy” / The Atlantic

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

. . . your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions. And we will devour you, my friend. You and all your pale empire.

— Cormac McCarthy / Cities of the Plain

I have taken to photographing
my every moment
in an attempt to locate
the place where I lost myself.

— Cynthia Cruz / “Phosphorescence”

Humans are by far the planet’s most destructive species, but we’re also the only species that has ever worked together to ensure other forms of life don’t go extinct.

— Connor Knighton / Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia to Zion Journey Through America’s  National Parks 

Make me dirt. 
Gone are the days of serenity. 
Guns are the words of humanity. 
I have no food but a thorn, 
No sport but a sigh. 

— Refaat Alareer / “O Earth (Land Day Poem)”

The Indian Empire is a despotism—benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object.

— George Orwell / Burmese Days 

The signs pointing to doing something right
and failing. Educated and I lost
my job. Bipolar and I cannot lose
my mind.

— Erica Dawson / “The Month When I Watch Joker Everyday”

Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist’s every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate.

— Omar El Akkad / One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

What I’m Listening To:

A man wants to smell like a man
To crumple a can in the palm of his hand
This is a man . . .

— Reverend Fred Lane / “The Man with the Foldback Ears”

conflate

•pond-seeking sir what sadness do you heap upon my eyes / the weariness sinks into my bones / oblate & undone / repeated ingestions of your misery elide / have driven me to stress / suicide your stockbroker gig / conflate your delusions into one great drunken indifference / your shadow has overtaken me / my gannet’s billet is done for / drink of the datura thorn apple / forget•

What I’m Reading:

Let the fog’s calls
go to voicemail. Tell the fog
to eat shit, burn the fog’s letters.

— Ruth Madievsky / “Fog”

Slightly Dirty (redux)

His fragrance remained in the room when he left, and she picked up notes of Ambien and gin.

He turned into a dragon and blew smoke up his own ass: in this manner he floated away on convection currents over the next county into the tri-state area.

She was disputatious. She said she loved living in Bwana Johnny Time — the epoch of real mealy mouthed crying. She said she had cramps. The walls cared nothing of it. She insisted and sang “Silent Night.”

He was tall with small joints and thick limbs. His hair, tufted, was buffeted by the winds which were strong and cool this high in the atmosphere. Before he blew smoke up his ass he washed windows without panes, and took pains in his assiduousness. (His father once digested him during a midday snack — and since then he felt as if he were covered in a film.) He felt slightly dirty and smelled worse.

She was small with oblong limbs, and royally blonde-haired down to her quadriceps. She analyzed the filigree in the milliner’s shears and chose “deckle” as the word of the day; and cellophane was “thee” fabric. She smelled of Lithium and a life roughly lived. She ate only the crusts.

His name was Funty. Her name was Frenta. He blessed his goldfish. She fried hers. “Orange Poppers!” she proclaimed. His favorite animal was the Pileated Woodpecker. She peeled his navels.

She was obsessed with the texture of his body. His tortured male narcissism despaired. He happily fathered a wonderful future in Hades. He wanted to write a skeezy text in the underworld.

What I’m Reading:

Tragedy lurks like a wounded lynx.
Like the sea, tragedy
knows no fatigue, there is no rest in its mysteries.

— José Mármol / “The Sad Ballad of Wyckoff”

What I’m Reading:

Expect society to be defective.
Then weep when you find that it is far
more defective than you imagined.

— Ron Padgett / “How to be Perfect”

Old Residence Roe (redux)

Venn diagrammer,

Put-down fleshpot-bitten particulars, play me the warped Uriah bluffs. Shadow and hiss.

Triumph pad,

Draw me a Cossack and hatchway bursary embryos in and out on sternum ridges. Bring me the bluffs.

White taboo clown,

Password me the caviar spotlight of that old residence roe. Handbill and plumb,

Sinner ‘74 brazier,

Bring a Peckinpah rough cut, a splatter and blush. Bring me, please, the headlamp of A. Garcia. That mud don’t play until ten after four.

Mud don’t play.

Mud don’t.

What I’m Reading:

The sound of quiet. The sky
indigo, steeping
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.

— Leila Chatti / “I Went Out to Hear”

A Lap Dissolve

She’s frozen in the web of a nascent season. The season of decay at the doorstep.

Summer is dead, she says, from the elevated ramp.

I’m blue about the blues, she says. I’m sorry, it all sounds the same—just different riffs.

I’m nonplussed—in pain—my achilles is driving me batty.

(Lap Dissolve)

Streaks of antelope white face black splotch—play for a dollar on the continental divide. Scenes of a concrete dance floor nibble on a beer bottle label, then drinking paint thinner at dinner. 

A picnic cleansing in these United Stockades military truncheons on our streets. Masked men in black trucks seeding mistrust and zip-tying us behind backs leading us into damnation—or black box countries currying favor—by our foisted wrists. 

Something’s gone amiss in this already far-askew country. 

Building-sized posters of the dear leader . . . backdropped half-dozen handgun monticules arched by automatic rifles . . . row after row after row.

Wow! What a place!

What I’m Reading:

The generally acknowledged truth that the world is going to hell should remind us that we do not currently live in Hell. 

— Rivka Galchen / “Unreasonable” / The New Yorker

What I’m Reading:

I sharpened knives
All night.
To welcome you
In the brilliance of their blades . . .

— Ladmila Lazić / “Love”