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three-chord chaos

Posted on March 26, 2021 by istsfor manity

Circumnavigations

Testy? Who does what to whom? This is now. Now is the only thing that’s real. What are you talking about? Why are you quavering in the light of darkening testimony? What is this? Does this make any sense? Does this seem appropriate in light of unseen circumstances? In light of circumnavigations, circumcisions, and charitable giving in the year of the buffalo? Testing again, on another day, something not so new—but new fangled and angled—Los Angeles without the pouting and disease. Miami without the vapidity and self-absorption (calm down, it’s my hometown! I know of what I squeak) Some time far from self-simulation there were simulacra crying out for liberation from the fantastic twelve—imagine 900 foot Jesus … 899 feet just won’t do! Something remotely Daliesque and grandiloquent. Stop stop the triangulation of the suicides, it all stops here, herr doctor … Here, it’s time to write by hand. Time to use the other dendrites and axons—bathe the neural synapses in luxuriant Oil of Olay and Jean Nate not to be confused with John Natty, Natty Bumppo! God-damned Natty Bumppo! A blast from a past we need not unearth. Hell freezes over. See, this is a tale, told by a post-punk, full of pus and pleurisy signifying nothing, but three-chord chaos. Does this make any sense?

“The only moral, meaningful course for a civilization facing its own end: To learn how to ask for forgiveness and to atone in some tiny measure for the devastating harm we had done to our human family and to our fellow creatures and to the beautiful earth. To live and forgive one another as best we could. And to learn how to say goodbye.”

— Sigrid Nunez / What Are You Going Through

a conflation of

Posted on March 25, 2021 by istsfor manity

Blackout Poem 020314 (redux)

An irritating squirrel says
To an umbrella made of stone:

“You are a conflation of an Absurdist dialectic.
You are an impossible form.”

The umbrella sprouts a stratocumulus cloud on its ferrule and floats away.

The squirrel, inspired, writes a sonnet, follows that with an ode, then a sestina.

“Perhaps another thing the dystopian future might bring: People suing their parents for having given them birth. Pointing as evidence to the abundance of scientific studies and warnings their parents had been given. What did you assholes think two minutes to midnight meant?”

— Sigrid Nunez / What Are You Going Through

Posted in Writing | Tagged Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

in your wake

Posted on March 24, 2021 by istsfor manity

Haiku 32421

My heart is shrapnel —
Incised, excised, in your wake —
Fragments, incomplete.

“My work is to believe in grace even though I don’t believe in God. To realize that all of my greatest fears are things that are definitely going to come true. My father will die, my mother will die, my brother will, my niece, my nephew, me.”

— Ayşe Papatya Bucak / “An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Collage, Haiku, Painting, Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

malevolence and secretions

Posted on March 23, 2021 by istsfor manity

Oblation and Obloquy

Strictly speaking I’m not saying what you think I’m talking about. You’ve got your facts correct but your theme is enjambed with my leitmotif. I’m schooling you with malevolence, and secretions waiting, in sketchy, skittery, and toothsome fashion. I’m chomping and slavering, and you seem to be missing that fact. I’m a bad mood guy. Drop your Sharpie. Don’t bring that reductive redaction act my way. I will smite you, askance of oblation, in obloquy. It won’t cost you more than a thorough humiliation in front of Carmelite nuns. But as you’ve run short of Thirteenth Century crusades, and your words dissipate before they form in the back of your throat, and you claim to need more encouragement … here, come here, step closer to this open window I have something I’d like to show you.

“They’ll declare America a carnage. They’ll call immigrants ‘animals’ and other countries ‘shitholes.’ They call themselves ‘nationalists.’ They’ll say they can make America great again. Their history will be a fiction. They will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong.”

— Jill Lepore / This America: The Case for the Nation

Posted in Writing | Tagged Experimental writing, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

get a room

Posted on March 22, 2021 by istsfor manity

Dinner and a Polemic

Do you want me to make dinner now? It seems to be what you are saying. I’m saying that the guys over there fighting about whether U.S. Girls is “rawk” enough—maybe in an indie way—but no way “traditional rock” … Why do they waste time? Why do they make these distinctions? Just enjoy the friggin’ music, guys. What’s with the polemics? There’s a pandemic still afoot—a calm before the storm—there’s racism run rampant, food shortage, debt crises of every sort, there was even a wreck — the Edmund Fitzgerald. And on you guys go about Meg Ramey’s too disco, too pop now. You remembered when it was noisy lo-fi DIY. You’re about to come to blows because you say she was better in Philadelphia in 2008, but you prefer her earlier sets from 2011. And isn’t it a shame how she ruined “Red Ford” all these years later. You guys need to relax. Get a room. Wear your god damned masks correctly, not down around your chins, and stop exhaling all this blowhard air into the atmosphere. There. Now what are your issues with Dry Cleaning again?

“We’re headed for empty-headedness,
the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada,
states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration.”

— Lynn Emmanuel / “Out of Metropolis”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Dry Cleaning, Experimental writing, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Microfiction, Music Video, U.S. Girls, Writing | Leave a comment

horizon line stitched

Posted on March 19, 2021 by istsfor manity

The Desolate Places

I.
Sole lox lunchbox
Bite full o’ soul
Tar by the shoreline
Bisected by sandbank
Oil derricks ablaze
Gas flames in the ozone grey

II.
Stamp your heel in the sand
The tar ball forms a toothy edge
Blasted by seagulls drunk
On gas fumes thicken
the horizon line stitched by a tanker
To sky and sea
A uniform wash of concrete
At the end of sight

III.
Site specific
And septic like the weak
The week you crushed black ants
And drooped them into the Pre-K
Pea soup and followed with lead
Flakes shingling off the window
Sills silly and smeared black
And white and black
Back to Mighty Mouse blaring
In the desolate spaces

“No one should go into debt to study creative writing. It’s simply not worth it. Do not think of it as an investment in yourself that you’ll be able to recoup later on. This is not medical school.”

— Ann Patchett

Posted in Writing | Tagged Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

only divisible by

Posted on March 18, 2021 by istsfor manity

It’s only divisible by itself.

I don’t understand.
Help me understand.
Why won’t you help me understand?

“Friluftsliv Nei
Saying that you’re going to go for a walk in the crisp, wintry fresh air and then it suddenly being nighttime without you even having put on pants.”
— Susanna Wolff / “Beyond Hygge”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Experimental writing, Writing | Leave a comment

bay leaf bazaars

Posted on March 17, 2021 by istsfor manity

it’s here

the modified claim
it should say zero
file an amended excuse for lethargy

i’m subverting the judge’s luncheon by torpedo

you laugh like a wimple wearing super coquette

leave me alone in my misery and lack of awareness

such a misanthrope
nothing surpasses this
other than fey incels
or psychopaths

go away mental illness
go back to your cool places—
the dark bat caves—
and bay leaf bazaars

i finger a pair of ears in my pockets

hold on, son, you say—
are those your grandfathers ears?

(silence)

because if it was good enough for grandad,
it’s good enough for me

the meatloaf gives
me burps

you click your heels and sing
fuckity fuck, fucking fuck

remember the modified claim …

it should say zero

“There’s nothing worse than having someone hand your fears to you gift-wrapped.”

— Betina Gonzalez / American Delirium

Posted in Writing | Tagged Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Silence, Writing | Leave a comment

nude boogie woogie

Posted on March 16, 2021 by istsfor manity

That Ability to Coexist

(After Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland)

“The last free place in America is a parking spot.”

Sell-o-rama!

Are you fascinated by the blurring
Of class lines?
You need not file yellowed papers
In triplicate.
You don’t need.
We don’t need.

We don’t need no stinking badges!

Everyone’s angling for a pay day.
We don’t offer much in the way of culture,
But we have skin like burnished leather.

We got a nude boogie woogie pianist.
We got men in codpieces
And bare asses.
We got women in coconut bras.
Sometimes wifi, sometimes cable TV.

We have:
Telephone pole size saguaros,
Kangaroo rats and roving packs
Of coyotes.

We got landscaped tattoos—
Salty Spiral Jetty
Surrounded Pink Islands
Stony Sheepfolds

It’s an indifferent human
Festival in camel costumes—
Come and sink
Into obscurity.

“The capitalists don’t want anyone living off their economic grid.”

— Jessica Bruder / Nomadland

Posted in Writing | Tagged Hybrid writing, Nomadland, Nonfiction, Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

a foreboding step

Posted on March 15, 2021 by istsfor manity

Circumlocution

The snow turns to slush,
Overnight a sheath of ice,
A foreboding step.

A death threat in Denmark
Over the telephone and emails
The children should all be killed
Using a bolt pistol then skinned
And fed to the lions to prevent
Inbreeding and scientific knowledge.

The part of the sea,
Wet, failing to flood upstream
East of the river.

Losing Again as Overflow
The river burst upstream, the latest bout,
Places the water east of this week.
Part of the sea, wet since 1766,
Has been under criticism
For failing to visit the flood.

Black capped chickadee,
Dead, fell from the barren oak
Frozen on the grass.

(02.13.14)
-make a connection/word for foot noting the sections in Belkys

(02.14.14)
-the letters in a book leave the pages and blind and become lodged in the throat of the man who is reading it

(02.15.14)
-here comes a headache in my lower brain

I’ve come untethered
Three days lost and out of sorts
Now the correction

Sitting on the train
The snow blows blinding outside
Heavy wet and sad

The Wailers’ singles
Provide the syncopation
Propelling the day

The evil power of sixteen electroshocks,
Pluck the sun from the sky
In a casual soporific manner.
The moon in its infinite darkness
Is a devil on an aureole
Limned in a blinding fire.

On the balcony
In yellow afternoon light
A thrush in the snow

Pink skies cede to blue,
Melted snow transformed to ice,
Anticipation.

Placed in the security bin,
No problem, thank you.
Serving compliments, complaints and suggestions:
E as in Edward, please listen carefully catch and check.

I will work for tripe
Pepper pot is beautiful
Visceral goodness

(audio intercept)
That is awesome, the guy in the gray
Cuff him and zip it
I saw you guys intertwined
We’re trying to drink and have a good time
No tolerance, you three are going to jail
As the night wears on
A man possibly intoxicated, no teeth,
Is trying to go home but there are only remnants
Of trash and we call it a successful weekend.

My mother’s birthday
Brings me to Miami heat,
A long tepid trip.

West, the dream maker bicycles.
For all ages, a unique paradise
Only one mile by sought after
Fingertips.

“Nations, to make sense of themselves, need some kind of agreed-upon past. They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will.”