The long slog through the wasteland… and then a sylph — beatific, beauteous, wanton, and salacious all at once — appears hovering over the horizon line. I’m unsure about scale I can’t tell her true size: hummingbird-like one moment a massive Venus of Wllendorf towering over me the next moment. A bloodless moment in my head and the next I’m being lifted bodily by unseen hands one at each shoulder and I’m hovering above the desert. I’m seized by a priapic tear in my pants and I’m lead by my organ through the limitless sky, until it detaches and flits off to space and I begin to fall.
“Don’t show your work to too many people, and if you do, receive their advice with a deep breath, a thanks, and then tell yourself, this is MY work, nobody else’s. Never take the advice unless it really strikes a chord, and even then, let it sit with you for a while before altering your work.”
Nothing says “thank you for cooking breakfast” like not saying “thank you,” and walking away like you expected it all along; and then not even offering to help with the washing of the dishes. “You bet. You’re welcome.” It’s great to be alive during the waning days of civilization as we knew it — the signs of the apocalypse are stark and plentiful.
2. 2006
The last time I saw my father he asked me half a dozen times who I was; he told me he used to catch fly balls from a priest that used his closed, upturned fist as a fungo bat during practice; and then he asked me to cut our scenic drive short and take him back to the assisted living facility because he had to take a serious shit.
“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
The avarice
of kings
and the palavering
of paladins
make for
the usurious
rate
of declivity
in modern
life.
If you
rescind your
common sense
as if it were
a toy
swiped
away
from a
3 year old
you’d likely
abrogate
the social
decorum
we’ve
come to
expect
of our
mighty
good
leaders.
To take your place I place this alchemical bomblet in your sassafras soporific. In this oneiric state anything is possible so I extend my sickle sharp proboscis the seventeen feet necessary to puncture the dream bubble that is unspooling above your bed. There I inhale the flying seahorses, the cavorting beasties and fireflies in fresnel cubes.
(The sea sponges made of milk chocolate and the orange flavored tsetse flies are my favorite)
And in the one quiet moment between my inhalations, you awaken and proclaim the central tenets of manifest destiny have forever been misunderstood and the lights come on plunging the entire scene into darkness. I’m out of place.
It’s a ragged sort of heat. The call of the west again.
Then a discomfiting sort of rain. It’s my first day out of the house in nearly three weeks. Just 2 days ago I was fetal, on the bed, unable to sweat the thoughts away.
I found a litter of puppies feeding in the corner of the living room, and dry shit streaked on the bathroom towel. The Christmas tree is canted and some of the balls have unfurled their string covers revealing the styrofoam balls beneath. I remember the last year they had glass ornaments the piles of colored glass shards spread about the living room and the multiple band aids on my cousin’s feet. Those styrofoam balls must be 25 years old now. But it was the smell that was truly distinctive, a mix of sour broiling turkey mixed with wet dog fur, overfull litter box, and Lysol.
Someone’s cut and paste — forlorn and left out in the desert — cries out for purpose. There is no liability. There is no curse.
I considered the crow a baleful thing; it darkened my day instantly like a light speed sarcoma. My day, my year, my life was shot in that cut and paste. And in that instant I wrote this, and never wrote again.
“Why was it so unthinkable that we ourselves—not necessarily tomorrow or the next day, but eventually—follow the same well-beaten trail toward oblivion as the dodo, the black rhinoceros, the passenger pigeon . . . and all the countless other species whom we ourselves had driven from the face of the earth?”
— Mark O’Connell / Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
1. You are playing mechanized baseball: a ball bearing is pitched out of a hole, and the bat is a pinball flipper — and fwap! The ball bearing falls into one of a series of holes marked “single, double, triple, home run, and out.” There are vastly more outs than hits. Then you move on to submarine warfare: small plastic ships float out near the horizon line as you look through your periscope: you estimate position, hit the fire button on the handle, and BOOM! Down goes das boot!
2. You are the night’s confabulation. You don a Richard Burton affectation and on occasion you break out into song and dance, Al Jolson style, viz., a good Jewish boy doing blackface or something minstrel-like. Not to worry, you’ve run this through the department of psychological sanitation, and nothing that you do or say will offend, chagrin, or impinge upon a healthy state of mind. No, in fact, you shall be put through the “so called” ringer, and as a point of further fact you are wearing an Arab strap, and it will assist you in hitting certain notes with a certain meaning. No! No cause for alarm. This is all family friendly, PG rated, and sanitized for your protection. The buzzword to listen for: gentrification, collateral damage, enhanced interrogations, debt ceiling limits… the list is long, but you know them well. So without further ado…
3. You are Claudia’s kid — conceived at that apartment she and Terry lived in above the Garden of Eden Diner in Hoboken. Yeah, remember they were doing roadie work for Yo La Tengo that year, they even opened a couple of shows for them using the name of their first band, Rasputin’s Swim.
4. You are a case of the shakes, momma made the shake n’ bake. I got the shakes, momma made the chicken fried steak. I got the shakes, momma made the whole world quake — she’s got the power you know. I got the shakes, momma said she’s going away.
5. You are the doxology of reflection in a darkened alcove. God is in the alcove. God is in the house. God is loose in there. Who let him in? Did you bait him with cerulean cookies and sugar clouds? Now God’s rummaging around. Uninvited. Unwanted. What dolts you both are.
6. You are biddable in the execrable moments before the prisoner is executed. You are Richard Burton bombast, Shakespearean affectation a notch too loud and an eyelash too wide. You are the murmuration of starlings lost in the roiling chaos in that instant before banking hard left. You are the suppurations of wounds that don’t heal three weeks out. You are the gesticulations of the man without legs as the detritus and shrapnel falls back to earth and settles on the rim of the new-formed crater. You are the child transfixed with the sky as she traces the arc of the parachute bomb’s parabola on its ecliptic. You are.
7. You are last day of November: when ladies of idle lament, and big men with boxy jackets in swimming trunks, big trunks, salute portmanteaus in the streets of Deauville. You sing, “break up to make up, that’s all we do, first you love me, then you hate me, that’s a game for fools.”
8. You are lust unbound. You just want to kiss her, “please just let me kiss you.” She wants to smash you. “I will let you smash me. Beat me with that truncheon, smash me with that truncheon.” Then she broke the spell and hissed: “disrepute!” You lodged a complaint via computer, the one on the street corner, then you had enough. You stopped.
9. You are tornado thoughts ten seconds after the weather warning has been issued.
10. You are the shrieking instrument panel on the jet spiraling earthbound.
“I like to do the opposite of everything that is making money.”
Everyone on tiny purple microdots is encouraged to call the quasar, and if you get no answer please call the event horizon.
The DMT sequence transports have been established.
All galactic envoys and space cadets are registered for a bitchin’ wow experience, man!
It’s only a thing nothing.
“Have a low overhead. Don’t live with anybody who doesn’t support your work. Very important. And read a lot. Don’t be afraid to read or of being influenced by what you read. You’re more influenced by the voice of childhood than you are by some poet you’re reading.”
I was gas huffing one afternoon, by the train tracks near the smelter, trying to shotgun iso nitrite through my paint gun and boom — whoosh! — it hit me.
It was a wrap, and on came a visual rap of distortions through time — shit I hadn’t remembered in forever, cascading — distortion to static.
Momentarily I was up on a Brady Bunch screen: Momma, Pappa, Uncle Justus, Chelsea and Me — the other four were faceless homonculii, who despite lacking features had silver metallic paint smeared all over the bottom of their faces. Well, we had a Brady Bunch, anyway, in garish dayglo.
Letter never sent. The ideal copy.
“Ah, good taste, what a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”
— Pablo Picasso
thee istsfor manity reader 