dried blood in the air—
grey alley stink of urine—
a crisis of faith
“So I’m a cat trying to make it in the world because I’m condemned to live in the world.”
— James Baldwin, with Nikki Giovanni / A Dialogue
(press play above to watch my short film, cloud generator)
In a land where nothing of note took place—except waiting for something of note to take place—here, there lived a figure, a fixture, of feckless anagram composition. His name was Feckle.
Feckle made a black glossy box — a cloud generator. He turned it on. Then the land of Fug Fugue Fickle became the most renown on this side of the hemisphere just above that tropic and below the equator. The sea water was a bit warm, (but hell!) where wasn’t the water warm, and overlapping its previous high water marks, these days?
Anyway, everyone in the world came to love Feckle and the land of Fug Fugue Fickle. No state actors nuked it (they didn’t deign to consider it, given the abundant cumuli about after Feckle) and no republic or kingdom sought to undermine the elections in Fug Fugue Fickle.
The whole world was thankful for the clouds—for the first time in memory (history perhaps) there was some contentment in the world: old animosities sloughed away, people smiled at each other and said “hola,” fleas were sated, anagrams created themselves, and linguists decided to drop the “r” in “masonry” and from that moment on it became “masnoy.”
(Are we talking stonework or freemasonry?)
(Oh wouldn’t you like to know?)
Anyway, Feckle was so happy with this cloudy state of affairs that he fed himself into the cloud machine and became an altostratus that covered the sky over Fug Fugue Fickle. Everything in its right place.
“No ideas but in things.”
—William Carlos Williams
Electric bedroom
New witch
Add wall next to track
Wedge or arc
Change entry
Too damaged by
Change
We want to keep them at 8 foot height
Close
Metal doors
No change to living hard pain
Change vanity
Apart (we may do this ourselves)
No change to pain
“Take an object / Do something to it / Do something else to it. [Repeat.]”
— Jasper Johns / 1964 note to himself in his sketchbook
(press play above to watch the short film)
“A slit of light torn in the cliff is just enough to remind me There is only despair in the world we create.”
— Terry Tempest Williams / Erosion: Essays of Undoing
(press play above for short film)
terracotta facades
work that ignores your native intelligence
the need for redemption grows
a state prison for women on one side
a jail for men nearing release on the other
a wistful thought
a desolate corner
“Don’t force an eggplant to be happy if it looks jaded instead.”
— Sarah Urist Green / You Are an Artist
“If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.”
— Hugh Prather
“All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. This isn’t suffering. It’s erosion.”
— Chuck Palahniuk / Haunted: A Novel
“All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. All writers are pigs. Especially writers today.”
— Antonin Artaud / The Nerve Meter
“You can make a collage on a postcard and write a poem about it.”
— John Ashberry
When ironing I do most of my day’s work. I imagine I hit people with all my force—my shirts double for the people I really dislike. You text me that I have to hit the people in the groin. I text: I’m afraid they may become compulsive buyers, steal from neighbors or rummage in their garbage, maybe even shoplift at stores.
(You see, I was a rough child wearing a panda hat or a mohawk on alternate days. The painting that I stared at so much, on our bathroom wall, in my wet nudity stared back at me—purple and humid—with vampiric eyes. I was marked in myriad ways.)
My sloth is crippling. I consider a word and an image of equal weight—like weak tea and a pipe of tobacco. What I really need are heirloom glass ornaments made into piles of colored glass shards spread deep about the living room shag—and multiple band aids. I iron and stop after 14 minutes, as per CDC recommendation. And anyway, it was a lime.
“I am, on and off, an Anthropophobe. I’m afraid of people, as I am of rats and mosquitoes, afraid of the nuisance and the harm of which they are untiring agents.”
— Guido Morselli / Dissipatio H.G.
thee istsfor manity reader 