thee istsfor manity reader

Origin Stories: BraveMenRun

BraveMenRun in my family
No BraveMenRun in my family
No BraveMen in my family
Dead men run in my family

men run in my family
there r no men in my family

There was an inquisitor
Who sold his bastard moor-sun —
His chains sounded like bells in the hold—
His sole tender mercy.

There was a latifundista
Who took the hands of a Taino
An eye, his wife & child, then his head —
A dearth of gold chips under a dying sun.

BraveMenRun in my family
BraveMenRun
men run in my family
there r no men in my family

There was the merchant at Sancti Spiritus
Who pressed the souls
Of African men women & children
Into nuggets of coal.

There was the doleful great-grandfather
Who abandoned my grandmother’s
Two year old soul to Carmelite Nuns
To 16 years of indentured servitude.

BraveMenRun in my family
BraveMenRun
men run in my family
there r no men in my family

There was the grandfather apparatchik
A man of the reddest ideals
Who presided over the tribunals
And went erect at the call of: ¡FUEGO!

There was grandfather mystery
He ran the fastest —
No name for his son —
No name for me.

BraveMenRun in my family
BraveMenRun
men run in my family
there r no men in my family

There was my father bipolarity
A hole in his well worn sole — he
Dove for his soul in the cracks
Of Little Havana sidewalks.

There was a stepfather, an uncle, a stand-in
All felons three:
Bookmaker, cocaine cowboy, chauvinist
Oo baby, oo baby, oo baby, please,
What a family tree!

I run from my family.

“I end my life voluntarily because I cannot continue working… I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope. Cuba will be free. I already am.”

— Reinaldo Arenas / suicide letter

Live Free and Die

The hospital beds fill up at an alarming rate
Millions travel despite warnings
You gonna stay safe?
Or insist on LIVE FREE OR DIE
Rather, LIVE FREE AND DIE
You patriot u
You tha’ coolest
You know you
U know ur family
You know selfish
(Fuck everyone else and their families)

Let’s look at the numbers…

Yeah, yea, ya: USA, U-S-A!
We’re number one
We numba’ 1
Be best, be 1

1 is the loneliest…

We’ve all gotta die someday
(Or live in long term fog some time)
Some way
It’s somewhere near the end

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang
But a whine and a shot
Of misanthropy

It sucks
To tolerate u

“I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.”

— Leo Tolstoy / Tolstoy’s Diaries

“the snow doesn’t give a soft white
damn Whom it touches”

— e.e. cummings / “XIX,” Viva

The Texture of His Body

His fragrance remained in the room when he left, and she picked up notes of Ambien and gin.

He turned into a dragon and blew smoke up his own ass: in this manner he floated away on convection currents over the next county into the tri-state area.

She was disputatious. She said she loved living in Bwana Johnny Time — the epoch of real mealy mouthed crying. She said she had cramps. The walls cared nothing of it. She insisted and sang “Silent Night.”

He was tall with small joints and thick limbs. His hair, tufted, was buffeted by the winds which were strong and cool this high in the atmosphere. Before he blew smoke up his ass he washed windows without panes, and took pains in his assiduousness.

(His father once digested him during a midday snack — and since then he felt as if he were covered in a film.)

He felt slightly dirty and smelled worse.

She was small with oblong limbs, and royally blonde-haired down to her quadriceps. She analyzed the filigree in the milliner’s shears and chose “deckle” as the word of the day; and cellophane was “thee” fabric. She smelled of Lithium and a life roughly lived. She ate only the crusts.

His name was Funty. Her name was Frenta. He blessed his goldfish. She fried hers. “Orange Poppers!” she proclaimed. His favorite animal was the Pileated Woodpecker. She peeled his navels.

She was obsessed with the texture of his body. His tortured male narcissism despaired.  He happily fathered a wonderful future in Hades. He wanted to write a skeezy text in the underworld.

“Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Idioteque, Montana

Philanthropy feels more like idiopathic shill-anthropy in these waning days of the anthropocene. Cleave my heart on your plow, speed the ventricle asunder, and wave the cluster of veins, arteries and capillaries over your head. Oh what a beautiful sight that is.

Are you sick? Are you binging seven hours of last year’s hit cooking show? Is your heartless chest so vacuous that echoes don’t return to you? Your voice lost and splintering in that void becoming a still small accusation pinging away through the universe.

Oh fill me with vile thoughts and spidery venom instead of inoculating me against the COVID-21? Is sars-cov7 on its way? I trust I’ll freeze in the icy winds first.

Don’t trust anything goddd tells you — he carries about an abundance of lower case “d’s” with him, just in case his white masculinity is questioned. No proselytizing to be done, just a beating about the head the with handy extra “d’s.”

Good for something nothings they be. Idioteque, Montana they sang in unison while no one was listening.

“But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”

— Albert Camus / The Plague

snow day…

“It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.”

— Louise Glück / “The Night Migrations”

my heart
distills
my blood
heliotrope
looking
for a sun
a plantation
of hateful
verdigris
factors
out to
go flow
out
big
star not
too far
from
severance
runs
rampant
over my
tripartite
welcome
parse
the light
hiding
from the
guards
foiling
the crowds
out in
the rain

“My journals are not written for others, nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.”

— Oliver Sacks

Tinctures

It’s the time for auxiliary malarial canons
and sitars.

Thee minute for surgical mask missiles
and tinctures of Ayahuasca.

“So this is insanity. How interesting. What happens next?”

— Jerzy Kosiński

Tergiversation

Be apostate? No!

That’s better. I’m listening to DakhaBrakha doing “Шлях.”

I hope to die in the war of pi twisty too in scupper loo to pass on grass of supper stash and this again to sassafras, sasparilla, and lingonberry ale to don a mollusk on a hillock and dippy dee doo in the dank of a screw and tarry no longer and hie don’t linger else plan for the finger.

And we get to one hundred and twenty eight the spate of the spite the sprite of dark/light trigger a bigger digger dee do then call for the fall of ginger dee doll. Come strumping about with malodorous gout and be gone don’t hie we’re all bound to die.

There sure is a lot of ocotillo around.

“My bones ascend by arsenics of sight.
Where noise is all the sound there is to hear,
Beginning in the heart I work towards light.”

— Michael McClure

Hortensia

Extremely primitive or outmoded is what he called me, as if what I say and do really matters.

I was born in Chickamaw with an archery practice arrow through my foot.

There were groups of ladies in peculiar Neo-Gothic rooms who betrayed the generals who themselves were busy with warlike appurtenances (such as throwing axes) in the morning hours before anyone’s swollen belly could complain or break open with vermiculite parasites named Hortensia.

The light was particularly bad in the rooms and coyotes could be heard waiting down the hall near the bathroom.

So get your facts correct and your ducks in the basement row because we’re waiting on that pregnant antediluvian moment when the first drop is heard.

Before the first shot is fired…

“Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. It’s all about taking in as much of what’s out there as you can, and not letting the excuses and the dreariness of some of the obligations you’ll soon be incurring narrow your lives. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

— Susan Sontag