in Sevastopol when sloth consumed me. Now I’m fagged on a stack of lighted pyre, the funeral in progress. I was the son of violence, and as begets one so highly skilled: a gun-licker & barrel-blower who shot off his own nose. My vengeance paid back
in towers of flame. A jackanapes no
mo’.
“One must have a mind of winter
The greatest lines in poetry are infinitely quotable while having no definite meaning. What is a mind of winter, and why must one have one? It doesn’t matter.”
Mary crashed. She was out of sorts after the apparition, but she recovered enough to do this on Saturday. She wrote:
07/24/21
I’m gonna remix the Shakespeare sonnet in today’s “Poem of the Day” email. I’m going to give it the cut-up, erasure, funk-o-rama dash and then continue on writing the draft of my novel. I feel good today!
on creatures we desire
creatures we desire
die,
as the y decease
t heir memory
contract s,
flame s – fuel
famine a nd lies,
foe s too cruel.
now the world’s a
spring
waste d .
Pity the world s
a grave .
Sonnet 1: From fairest creatures we desire increase by William Shakespeare
From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty’s rose might never die, But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory; But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel, Making a famine where abundance lies, Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel. Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament And only herald to the gaudy spring, Within thine own bud buriest thy content, And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding. Pity the world, or else this glutton be, To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
This was all she could manage as a migraine pierced her medulla oblongata, shot through her thalamus and corpus callosum, and shred through her limbic lobe, then reticulated and settled in her frontal lobe for the day. It would suffice.
“Don’t write out of anyone’s need except your own. Don’t try to cater to an audience you think may not be keeping up with you—find the audience who will.”
On 07.23.21 Mary was unable to write much, haunted and paralyzed by that apparition all those years ago—now making residence again somewhere deep in her mind. She had a day full of distrait, disinhibition, and discountenance—deliberate and unseen.
(these were all she did)
“His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald / “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”
this lacks a title there are no words in bold to be found here it’s disjointed and attenuated there’s distortion to static don’t panic it’s all under control thought many (but said no one ever)
this writing lacks images
no ideas but in things (said a wise man)
you will find nothing here but attrition and contrition
(you may return to your regular programming)
“If there’s one thing you can say about mankind There’s nothing kind about man You can drive out nature with a pitch fork But it always comes roaring back”
Minimalist clap trap insouciance get away from my baroque personage. Someone once said they were transpecies extraordinaire, and someone cut in and quailed: surrender your gender; then an acerbic other cut in sniping: exploiters, exploiters, exploiters while standing in gray back-alley New York. Some tinkling, and someone singing this is the day, followed by a slew of pimply-faced youths miming the lyrics and someone doing an accordionist’s job at playing as if they were in earnest. What did it mean as it flashed by, a mere whir of postulates without proofs—proofs without antecedents. And the best you can do now is remember something you read from Kierkegaard, who was too much religious, (and worse a christian, just as you had been hoodwinked into when you were too young to do anything about it) for your palate, but it was an incisive leap on his part, that century and a half ago: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” The angst-y freedom to be a serf to your lifestyle, to your politics, to your country, to your family, to your life and how you’ve lived it … and it dawns upon you in ever sharper cubist shards—it’s awful. It’s offal. It’s awful offal. Oh, take another shot of distilled teenage epistemological tripe and go back to your dark corner counting the moldy efflorescences on your shower stall. Really! No one ever.
Small sharply defined puffs— No heat, no air compressors, Gaskets, rubber seals, rubber feet— Cloud-like, a shy homunculus, Trapped beneath a 5 o’clock crowd.
“In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!”
