The Tuneless Ballad of Rostay Toonany and Chemo Destrapè
Clowns and claustrophobes both. Masters of microbes and microbiomes—and bonhomie. Too much probiotic nonsense squelching their wheelhouse one day, and they took to fisticuffs.
Oh, what a dastardly day for all! The day the two friends took to winging and knuckles. The magpies alighted on the witch alder to watch. The eastern cottontail hare trained their mysterious obsidian eyes on the row. The red efts and copperheads ignored each other in utter transfixion—neologisms were created for the event—so rare it was.
Rostay Toonany landed sharp jabs, but Chemo Destrapè eiger to be done with the punch-out threw a barrage of roundhouse lefts and uppercuts and dinged Rostay’s temporal lobe—bumping about in his skull—trebly charged, in a timbre of orange and reds.
The bestiary cackled, hissed, and meeped.
It was bitter day that—the day of the bust-up. But Chemo’s arms were raised forevermore in victory and infamy—the day the protozoan roared.
“Write every day. Habits are things you get for free, without requiring any special work. Set a daily word target. Make it small. 75 words a day is a novel a year.”
Walk! Go west, go east. Just go, go, go. Get up. Get out. Get moving. Peripatetic be your word. Bump! Groove. Make way and scoot along. This place will grow moss on your backside. Don’t backslide. Get moving, man. The reaper is scything at your tail. Perambulate while you are able. Go. Go. Go. Grandstand. Jump Around. Do the do. Pop up. Down with your bad self. Shimmy. Shake. Do, see, do. Gyrate. One Two Three Red Light. Red Rover Over. Duck duck goose out! Rocket up. Walk! Get on the move. Get up and go. Jog it out. Hurry up and run.
“You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike…”
“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”
(Press the play button above and below to watch my short films: mother’s insides day & your mother here…)
Manta Ray is All Right
On the eve of her first Mother’s Day she dreamt she was trapped in the supplies closet at the local elementary school.
She couldn’t find her bicycle—her means of escape—the green Manta Ray with the three speed stick shift on the crossbar.
She heard her baby crying from a distance—echoey and shrill. She couldn’t find her cell phone, and now without her bike she’d miss the Greyhound bus out of town.
There was a jostling at the closet door. She intuited it was the President of her Homeowner’s Association coming to release her to give her the New Mother of the Year Award.
The crying was deafeaning industrial noise—whirs, metallic clangs, and grinding.
The door lock clicked.
The Greyhound bus roared by crushing her Manta Ray bicycle lying in the street.
The crying never stopped.
“Mother is faceless so far up in the dark. Just her torso glows, and the color around her takes on the design of a falling leaf, grey-yellow plaid.”
Robert Smith is miming one of his early music videos. It sounds like “Fire in Cairo,” but it’s not.
He’s jangling his guitar at the end of a narrow white tiled hallway which you note has urinals along one wall, and stands-full of music magazines along the other wall.
Smith is wearing a white T-shirt with hand drawn scrawls and The Cure written on it. He dances a modified mashed potato while strumming his guitar. He then begins to do his version of The Robot, which includes some spastic movements—it’s not what you would have seen on Soul Train in the mid-1970’s, but it’s somehow endearing.
He turns away and continues dancing in front of a full length mirror.
You wish it would stop.
“Our children flock into the streets with voices raised, their anger a grim substitute for song.”
That’s what he said! Can you believe it? The nerve. I’ve been reading Psychology Today for forty years, and he has the temerity to insinuate such a thing.
Remember how up to DSM-II—until 1973—the American Psychiatric Association asserted that homosexuality was a disease? Remember phrenology? The APA’s track record isn’t very good.
Who does that quack think he is?
This is my moment to bloom.
I am a dayglo flower!
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!”
— Emily Dickinson / “I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)”
The difficult made holy by happenstance. She was delirious, but understood she’d make the first cut soon—minutes, perhaps seconds. She recoiled imagining the pain.
The rain in Maine stayed mainly in her brain. She moved—graceless—in a fog.
The reaper was scything at her heels. She resolved to move while she was able.
“His lips are brought down and his head again, yes, the gulls were there. They never miss an evening. They are grey slush in the spewing meatus of the sewer … It is the placenta of the departed, the red rigor of post-partum.”
— Samuel Beckett / Dream of Fair to Middling Women
wish you were here, the insects are legion (maine version)
The dust, the arid heat, the vexillologists. None of that made any sense there. It was a tropical rainforest last year when we booked, and the defoliation and climate change left the place a barrens. What gives?
And why were there 120 vexillologists installed at dozens of tables festooned with swatches of fabrics, encyclopedic books, drawing pads and markers out there in that wasteland? There were also the carcasses of the old denizens — piles of bones of howler monkeys, tamarins, marmosets, every imaginable bird of paradise, jaguars, tapirs, and so many more. Everything that once lived there was now a discrete pile of bones, generally undisturbed, each life reduced to its own monticule of what once was, but the insects were legion.
Nothing escaped, and yet there we were as death tourists — gawkers of our future.
But why the flag people? I couldn’t figure it out.
“Why are they here, dear?” I said to my husband. He was embroiled in the flag drama, and as usual he ignored me.
Then an eminence at the central table rose and screamed, “I’ve got it. I’ve got it,” then correcting himself said, “No, we have it,” he said making a sweeping gesture to the rest of the table full of white haired men.
“We’ll undertake the usual scholarly investigations and we’ll produce a paper with the title: ‘A Review of the Changing Proportions of Rectangular Flags since Medieval Times, and Some Suggestions for the Future.’”
There was one full minute of confusion and discussion at all the assembled tables. And then the men at the head of each table said, “Harrumph. Yes!” in a precise counterclockwise uncoiling of their support outward until arriving at the outermost, and largest table, where a younger contingent of vexillologists were gathered.
Their representative said: “Fuck you. Nay! You got us into this bind, and we’ll be damned if we let you finally drive us over the cliff as we teeter at the precipice. All you’ve been useful at up to this juncture is winning at the war of attrition. Look around. This was a verdant jungle last year and now it’s a clear cut wasteland. You were part of the leadership that got us here, and we don’t trust your tired ideas, your platitudes and your do as we say, not do as we do approach. You’re fraudulent, and you’re mostly tired old people having lived out your life in profligacy and now bequeath us this sinking ship.
We say fuck you, and fuck the horses you rode in on. We’re starting our own thing in diametrical opposition to this dead horse flog of yours. In fact, we’ve added a codicil to our manifesto, we insist that you die already because resources are scant and once we’ve banded together in a larger group — for there are more of us than there are of you, and as life would have it, there are pleasingly less of your lot everyday — we’re going to see to it that you do die before your appointed time. You’ve fucked this up so much already. We don’t need the extra dead weight!”
And with that spittle-filled pronouncement the newly minted “red vexillologists” marched off into the dunes that were once verdant foothills to form a cadre of revolutionary guerillas.
“Oh, well that’s interesting,” I said to my husband. “You know since this ecotourism thing didn’t pan out like we thought, why don’t we just fly to Maine tomorrow — it’s already dry there — and there remain a few puddles of fetid water where the beach once was, and you know how much I enjoy a nude beach, dear. And voila, here we are. Isn’t it just gorgeous here?”
“I feel like that’s something that sometimes gets lost in our culture, where everything’s about building a brand before you even have an established creative process. Please, don’t be a poet unless the number one thing you like to do is write poems. And read poems.”
— Ada Limón / In conversation with T. Cole Rachel, The Creative Independent
Fall. Fall, I say. She doesn’t. She stays perched on her branch. Fall, I say. She does not. This ritual—the repetition is liturgical. A call and response in absentia. There is no rejoinder. There is no: and also with you. There is only silence and the absence in her eyes. Fall, I say again. She looks down where I stand. She looks away into the distance. I look. I see what she sees. Nothing there. Fall, I say. She’s like an unhinged censer rolling away down a transept. Fall, I say. And she jumps. I turn. I step away.
“And then suddenly the life would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.”
thee istsfor manity reader 