d
de
debt
d.e.a.
detox
detune
détente
detonate
detonator
detonation
deordination
deontological
deoxygenated
depalatalization
departmentalize
despiritualization
dada dada dada dada
death
“Dada is like your hopes: nothing
like your paradise: nothing
like your idols: nothing
like your heroes: nothing
like your artists: nothing
like your religions: nothing”
— Francis Picabia / Manifeste Cannibale Dada
got til passage recounts time
presage press o bp life
policy vs sets accounts
treble and clean
every app has its own keyboard
“I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I need it.”
— John Cage
harangued & cast out & homeless
foced to survive on wild plants
i am want & wretchedness
saw palmetto shredded
my clothes & shoes
violence spiraled
my face enough
to cause dread
discomfort
dis-ease
i am
i
“Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart … therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom, and your spouses shall commit adultery.”
— Hosea 4:11-13
The cerulean welkin rang in the plenary session of geraniums (about to feast on saltimboca) to session as the ether-tinged clouds parted. Dutch masters buggered their tulip clippings before the opening of the futures market, overseen by officers taking hedges on restart dates.
I’m a Supreme Court registered attorney, and I don’t understand any of this. The floors are being swept by gardeners on ice skates. Jelly hangs from the ceilings and splatters in irregular patterns on the floor. Marimba music pumps through the speakers imbedded in the walls at appropriate “social distancing” distances while someone plays Martin Denny tunes at 78 r.p.m. from a distant office… and all the court hearings have been cancelled.
“Use email if you want to file a writ of abstemious corpus, corpus delicti, or corpus callosum in flagrante delicto,” screeches an EBS message on my smartphone. “Don’t fret and don’t dance to ‘Mr. Bojangles’ (the Sammy Davis Jr. cover version) and take care to financially covet your neighbor’s wife’s bank statements. Please call your conduit jurisdictions and don’t kill your trustees. This has been an emergency broadcast system test. Please disregard if you’re feeling queasy.”
“I’m the uncrowned king of the insomniacs
Who still fights his ghosts with a sword,
A student of ceilings and closed doors … “
— Charles Simic / “About Myself”
squeeze
steal
sit
“We shall abolish the orgasm.”
— George Orwell / 1984
keep away ghost
of a thousand eyes
go back to hell
where you belong
ive seen your lips
move out of sequence
with the haunted
sounds you dredge up
why are you dragging
a boat about
your neck
the river
what’s left of it
tells me im too late
“Be wet
with a decent happiness.”
— Robert Creely / “The Rain”
Sitting in the radiology waiting room—double masked— with a handful of others assiduously avoiding eye contact. Staring into their phone screens, another mumbling through her mask something from the grocery list … make sure you don’t forget … the pregnant lady is called in, not quite at her pop point but fairly well along, the nurse tells her sorry about the wait. What does that portend for me? I’m almost half an hour early. The other two sitting in the darkened corner where the TV used to blare Fox News, thankfully someone put a stop to that.
The screen merely shows a bouncing logo for the MC music channel tuned in—whatever it is. Looking around the room I can assure you no one is moved or soothed by this music, but it’s an aural anodyne to trance you further into your phone screen. Everybody, save the conversationalist who coughs—and prompts a tilt of four heads in her direction. She quickly produces a cough lozenge from her capacious, yet overfull, purse—her telegraphy for: I don’t have Covid, folks, relax, just a cough (no words are exchanged, we all understand).
And here I wait, 11 minutes shy of my appointed hour, and some cheesy cover of “Drift Away” comes on the TV—the MC logo sure to ping-pong on the screen for the 3 or so minutes the song acts as a soporific. De-tune, de-stress, diminish your anxiety folks sitting waiting for potentially bad news.
Something else breaks the monotonal blandness another “waitron” walks in, and she has something of a Jamaican lilt to her inflection, and a hearty laugh when asked if she feels like if she’s going to fall. And then, oh Jesus!, America’s “I Need You” shifts onto the MC channel—No! Put me out now! Pump me full of drugs and let me coast down the delivery ramp in a patient wheelchair and straight into the dumpster out back.
Then the receptionist stretches closer to the cutout in the glass partition and says: We are running half an hour late on ultrasounds. This elicits a groan from half of those assembled here which has grown to seven “waitrons.”
And so I wait like a good “waitron.”
“Write. Start writing today. Start writing right now. Don’t write it right, just write it –and then make it right later. Give yourself the mental freedom to enjoy the process, because the process of writing is a long one. Be wary of writing rules and advice. Do it your way.”
— Tara Moss
Agh. Agh!
Don’t talk to me about bloody urine, son! There were days when I’d drink ground glass shakes and piss blood clots all day.
I’d pee bloody streams incarnate!
So go away with your complaints of I’ve got discolored urine, dad. I used to piss shards, lad.
Shards!
“How do we begin to make sense of our own complicity, however reluctant, in this nightmare? I know that I’m complicit; my hands drip crude. Hell is murky.”
— Nathaniel Rich / Losing Earth
It’s not the life of a flea tamer or flea circus operator that I strived for—but it’ll do for now.
I look down on the swaying treetops—instead I see a roiling ocean—the wind hypnotic.
A central air conditioning unit just below my balcony—it says it wishes to condition my hips. My condition will surely be one of rendition from frothy blades.
My past has become pointedly polyptotonic, and the polyptoton will morph into antanaclasis … antanaclasisism—ant, ana, clasis, ism—break, break, break this off!
An exercise in moving my hand across the page—or thumbing tippy tips on gorilla glass—becomes existential glaze.
Mark-making on empty spaces—sometimes proscribed by lines, sometimes not.
That is my life. Just saying. I’m here.
“I asked if /
I could survive knowing
that not everything has a reason,
that not everything is capable
of or interested in reason /
Nothing answered.”
— Paul Tran / “Hypothesis”
The smellfungus among us complains of unpeeled bananas—he doesn’t understand bisecting lines.
He lives in a network of uncluttered pages—waits for the flood and the clutch of the ham-fisted smile.
Read his body language—why don’t you? You haven’t done anything wrong.
I wring my hands of this.
“Now I rest
in a hammock of words, waiting
for the sun to rise again
over the horizon of the page.”
— Linda Pastan / “The Collected Poems”
thee istsfor manity reader 