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”
These were the first words Garcilazo spoke when Maria finished drilling the hole in his head:
This is plundergraphia. This is Flarf. This is Newlipo. This borders on Google-sculpting. Remove me from myself and then take yourself out of my body. You’ve been inhabiting my body far too long. I need an exorcism… You… you are a trapeze artist with a fear of heights and sick with vertiginous desires, and I require nothing of you — but I want you at my disposal. I will dispose of you when I tire, but I’ve tried too often to depose you without first taking your deposition as it relates to your position in this disquisition; and yet I never inquire as to your disposition on my position…
Maria repositioned herself on the recumbent couch — really more of a settee — cradling the bloody hand drill in a wad of Bounty. And Garcilazo continued:
… reconnoitering of your superstitions and lack of interstitial indecision. I’ll decide and you’ll suppose that I’ll undertake a reconnaissance of the imposition of superstition of the implications involved with trepanation. Then I’ll help you trepan yourself, after which you will trepan me again.
“That’s a no. Not today. Not ever.,” Maria said.
***
“Trepanation is the process of removing a disc of bone from the skull. While generally regarded today as a barbaric operation exemplifying the benighted state of medical practice in medieval Europe, to its few adherents trepanation has actually solved one of the basic dichotomies of human existence: the split between mind and body. While evidence of trepanation can be dated back to 3000 B.C., its advocacy as a direct psychological shortcut to serenity is a little-discussed tangent of the psychedelic movement of the 1960’s.
The first contemporary European to drill a hole in his head for the purpose of becoming “permanently high” is Dr. Bart Hughes of the Netherlands. After three years of research into what he has termed “brainbloodvolume” and its effects on the mind. Dr. Hughes administered his own self-trepanation on January 6, 1965…
A stubborn literal-mindedness has yielded a novel if largely overlooked theory: that the third eye of ancient mystical lore is an actual hole in the human cranium.”
— Stuart Swezey, Amok Journal, 1995.
***
The following Saturday at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a few days before Garcilazo was hospitalized, this:
“I’ve never seen anything as atrocious as this. How is this art?” He seemed to be pleading with Maria to leave.
“Well, why isn’t it art?” she said, “the artist has created this as a work of art. Why do you think it’s not art?”
He turned to Maria and looked at her somberly. “Do you consider this — a great white shark in a clear tank of formaldehyde a work of art? And who is this Damien Hirst fuck, anyway?” He shifted his jacket onto his right forearm holding it as if he were an expectant waiter. His judgment would be swift and permanent. Predicated on her opinion, their relationship would either whither or move on, that’s what she intuited by his demeanor. She found his earnestness disconcerting. There was something petty and pernicious about the twist on his face.
According to his affect she was the biddable one. He, somehow, would make some pronouncement here and she’d either be out with the trash or still his sister. Nausea seeped in.
***
By the end of the week Garcilazo was malingering. He had a well known tendency to simulate symptoms when month end work was due. He’d be out of the office most of the day injecting himself with q — actually taken in this light, he was malingering in honest fashion but he was bringing it on himself. The symptoms did end up being real but he was causing his own sickness, and only at the end of each month. Did he do this to himself away from the office? No one ever found out. But over time he turned an off color, as if his skin was striated with loam and it started to slough off at the edges of his shirt cuffs. And in the full course of time, one day when Mr. Semplice went in to see him, all he found was a mound of skin on Garcilazo’s seat. Had he turned into this? Or was this his parting gift? No one at the office ever knew.
“What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often?”
— Robert Creely / “The Rain”
belt buckles rain down
the devils hail
there are appropriate ages
for beatings
oh the father of violence
red skin welts
meat tumescent
meet the father terminal lines
pillows protect the soft underbelly
urchin turned upside down
cord yanked silence
radio silence
papa was a rollin stone
deafness sharp
hot arms edge throb
the devil’s pincers
stars appear in throes
the dark choke
the black red
liminal space
“I
Have a fish nailed
To a cross
On my apartment wall
It sings to me with glassy eyes
And quotes from Kafka … “
— Throwing Muses / “Fish”
