Please remain standing:
An alternative alliterative
Attraction awaits asseverations
Axiomatic at an approximate
Assignation as anticipated.
(Three full minutes of WHITE noise)
Now … on with your life as usual.
“Nothing is more real than nothing.”
— Samuel Beckett / Malone Dies
from empty bedchambers
the former leader speaks
a cloacal flow
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez / Memories of My Melancholy Whores
She was crowned Queen of the Universe
The Anti-Christ teetered at the edge of the balance beam
on the cusp of spacetime
A crowd gathered on the accretion disk keen
for a victor
The supergiant elliptical galaxy IC 1101 was unmoved—
filled with the inertia of 3 billion white dwarfs
“I don’t have a method. All I do is read a lot, think a lot, and rewrite constantly. It’s not a scientific thing.”
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez / Conversations with Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Two crows on the rail
One seethes, quails, a fish in beak
A portent unsought
“For the shape of loneliness is a hole
Without any edges, finally
The entire universe whistles through it.”
— Patricia Goedicke / “Though It Looks Like a Throat It Is Not”
if i jaywalked
would you wax lyric and macrophagic?
a stay at home order is extended
you never stop writing even when you’re not writing
viral loads and virtual loafs
you don’t post when there’s another temporary stop gap to appease the toadies for liberty (or death)
open carry intelligence instead of an AR
i’m so stroft says one while caterwauling
flatten the curve of the indiscriminately stupid and unempathic
torpor to tumult
got the responsibility for our nation’s top security
they’ve given me a number and taken away my name…
(a lap dissolve here)…
17 years and 2,494 dim mornings
repressed memories in red velvet capes
the rise and fall of unburied fictions
jactitation down by the river
they come back for blood and betrayal
(a keyboard solo here)…
the word cocky is bandied about
in small claims court
the past 15 years there’s been a steady resurgence of
diminished people — myopic
they come back
astounding anonymous
apple-polishing the master’s
recordings
(a look in the mirror here)…
if i jaywalked
would you cytokine storm and wane?
“For the shape of loneliness is a hole
With teeth on either side.”
— Patricia Goedicke / “Though It Looks Like a Throat It Is Not”
She said to herself: Thanks for renting a space in this life. Despite the scrofulous and desiccate in life you stayed around to witness the swirling swallows above, and their reflected pantomime in the water below—a whirlwind of life all about you. Now get some sleep and start all over again tomorrow. Your boulder always awaits you.
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. … One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
— Albert Camus / The Myth of Sisyphus
The smoke trees blared their summer green. There was deliberation in her fibrillation. Her heart fluttered like an insensate butterfly—heliotropic, yet abjured to the sun. The world is my pistil, she said—a fluttering cavorting beastie—a moment of proboscis licking nectar drinking. She was forever cofounded by synecdoche and metonymy; and what was metric or metronomic. To the regular clatter of unceasing chatter, the voices in her head crescendoed into a din of metal machine music—and in a mere 23 hours she was home in the northern city again, apparently having brought the southern clime with her. Days of 90-degree weather gerrymandered her senses into discrete ultra-heterodox salamander shapes. Her olfactory was a red eft. Her haptic a hell-bender. No one was offended and no one complained. She would get to the decompression over the coming days. For now there was only exhaustion and an empty psychic tank to refill—and an unstable budgie to contend with.
“This day, in which sad prayers come spilling out of his hands, is too hot.”
— Lee Young-ju / “Heat Wave”
“And the eggs, they’re always cheaper
The day after Easter
And I know, oh, I know
It must be hard to pass ’em by”
— Squid / “Documentary Filmmaker”
It seemed to her she was always leaving, or someone was leaving her. Her father disappeared one day when she was ten. Her mother disappeared into a fog of alcohol and mental illness the next year—and now it was her turn to leave her hometown for the last time.
She vowed to never return to the southern city or the moribund southern state. She’d had enough of the oppressive memories, ghosts tugging at her, and retrograde autocrats. She was off.
In the rear view she spotted the rag and bone man kicking the St. Jude statue again, a fitting sight in the high-key sunrise that limned the horizon line in golden-red and turquoise. The bay, a vacant dying sea, would soon flood the shoreline.
“This will all be underwater soon,” the man screamed at her exhaust.
“Good riddance,” she said to the strains of the Butthole Surfers “Moving to Florida.”
“Bye-bye,” she hissed, turned the stereo up and drove north.
“Healing this uncivil war, especially within our own families, is not about changing our minds or even our hearts but first creating a space where we can meet unarmed. Here, an opening can occur. We are not abandoning our principles, but expanding our points of view.”
— Terry Tempest Williams / 7 April 2021, The Boston Globe
A tinny mambo is piped from the room
spewing
sick yellow-green fluorescence.
The radiator squeals,
brass electrodes buzz;
blood-crusted, unnoticed,
Che Guevara’s finger lies
in a dusty corner
covered with mites
escaping
the evil heat.
“We’re investing, as a country, $81 billion a year in the incarceration system. What if we invested that money into the education system instead?”
—Ilyasah Shabazz / “There’s No American History Without Black History. It’s Time To Rewrite The History Books.”
