molasses death spiral

Posted on March 1, 2021 by istsfor manity

Stuck Abecedarian

It was drenched green. The gazetteer absconded with verisimilitude and we were left in this wasteland clenching our drooping marigolds. The villain left vanilla footprints and the abecedarian was stuck on E. Something sticky dripped down our hot backs and commingled, congealed, with our sweat. We were a prize for the ants and bees, but they all disappeared earlier than expected during the sixth extinction. What did you call this again? This slow molasses death spiral? You had a term for it that I thought was so appropriate, but I forgot it. In the end what difference did it make? You said it made none.

“I’ve never liked the idea of originality, and so my whole life I’ve always written by taking other texts, inhabiting them in some way so I can do something with them.”

–Kathy Acker

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

the colors blanched

Posted on February 28, 2021 by istsfor manity

eyeless and unctuous

take my eyes
i want them not
there is nothing worth seeing in this world now
the colors blanched
everything i saw lost its definition
it all went soft

“Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.”

— Elizabeth Alexander / “Praise Song for the Day”

Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

in a vise

Posted on February 27, 2021 by istsfor manity

head in a vise

the seventeenth electroshock

a peppery taste

“So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.”

— Audre Lorde / “A Litany for Survival”

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

spastic and ekphrastic

Posted on February 26, 2021 by istsfor manity

Dollars for Dollops

Blindly devote yourself to formulary Z-074. Make triplicate copies send one to me, one to Human Resources, and one to the Department of Repressive Operations. Sing, glory be! Gloriole and halo benders and everything is ordinary until it is not. Then we’ll have to consider how I melt multiphasic multiplying the meaning of nothing this is something unseen… what doesn’t kill you makes you spastic and ekphrastic. Please don’t embarrass me in front of my secular pilgrims, they’re in a hurry and flying fast. They’re fasting at the speed of light, grasping at the site of blight. Remember the feeling you had when your teeth were removed with a mallet. Remember the pity you felt at shaving your beard with a hatchet? The nicks and the deep lacerations from running in place with shaving cream in your eye sockets and one hand in your pocket? Well, that’s what I’m feeling now.

What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent / Isabel Wilkerson (2020)

Mammoth undertaking.

Wilkerson makes the connections between the historic treatment of Black Americans and the Nazi’s treatment of Jews in the years before and during World War II; and the Indian caste system, comparing African Americans to India’s lowest caste Dalits. Wilkerson provides myriad examples and anecdotes.

The book is at its best when it’s laser focused on the issue of caste in the United States.

It’s also instructive to be reminded of how closely the Nazi’s studied, and were enthralled by, the laws and mores that guided dominant caste Americans’s treatment of Black Americans — a system that continues to dehumanize.

“Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin… Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.”

This book feels like it should be engineered into every American’s DNA.

Ebook, 02/24/21.

“It is not luxury cars and watches, country clubs and private banks, but knowing without thinking that you are one up from another based on rules not set down in paper but reinforced in most every commercial, television show, or billboard, from boardrooms to newsrooms to gated subdivisions to who gets killed first in the first half hour of a movie. This is the banality of caste.”

— Isabel Wilkerson / Caste: The Origins of our Discontents

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

there’s a scrabbling

Posted on February 25, 2021 by istsfor manity

Diminished

You were going to try to sleep but you stopped to read this.
What was that choice predicated on?
I hear murmuring coming from outside.
Shadows flit out of the window frame.
There’s a scrabbling at the window up front. Something muffled at the door.
What was that choice?
Maybe you should have taken the other option?
But here you are now.
Under assault.
Options diminished.

What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)

Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story / Chaedria LeBouvier, et al. (2019)

Four essays and a slew of personal recollections are the foundation of this exhibition catalogue. LeBouvier and Greg Tate’s essays are indispensible when reading about Basquiat, especially about his work focused on police brutality. The centerpiece in both the book and installation was “Defacement,” about the brutal beating and eventual murder of Michael Stewart, a developing artist and New York east side scenester in September of 1983.

Tate’s essay is an update of his seminal 1992 essay “Black Like B:”

“I find it impossible to discuss Basquiat’s art without talking about white supremacy, and it’s victimization of him, even and especially after death … Maybe, like his detractors, I find him easier to handle now, just another dead black genius.”

Copious plates and illustrations make this more than the typical exhibition catalogue.

Paperback, 02/22/21.

“Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching;
the touches of the disappearing, things”

— Aracelis Girmay / “Elegy”

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

on my tuneage

Posted on February 24, 2021 by istsfor manity

Sometimes Unfinished Music

Sometimes I am asked to clarify my position
and
I say I’m equidistant to roil and root.

Sometimes I am asked to qualify what I mean
and
I say this hand is love and this hand is hate.

Sometimes I wonder what all of this means
and
I say to myself: I didn’t ask to be put on this ride but I’m going to have to ride it out.

Sometimes I rail
and
Sometimes I sleep through it all

Sometimes I think in English
and
Sometimes I think in Spanish

and …

In this way I moved ever so much closer to where I thought I needed to be. What I needed to do to regain some balance in my life.

I turned on my tuneage.

I listened to John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music Series Volumes 1-3, all three records put me in the mood to do something drastic.

Especially after reading about the making of the records — now that I was weighed down with the knowledge that the heartbeats I kept hearing throughout the latter two records were the heartbeats of their dead baby.

By the time I came to the song “John & Yoko” on Unfinished Music 3, with the repeated and incessant cries of “John,” “Yoko,” and the heaving palpitations of the dead baby’s heart I started throwing books in the fireplace. I couldn’t take it.

I left the apartment and went to O’Hara’s — the Irish pub down the street on the corner of South Miami Ave and 26th Street — it was half empty and dark just the way I enjoyed it. I chose the end most stool by the rarely used back entrance, certain that I’d get some writing done.

No one would want to sit near a television with a screen saver on it, all the action was near the front where the University of Miami football game was blaring.

I ordered the Reuben Egg Rolls — not exactly the first dish one thinks of when one is thinking about Irish pub food.

That is how I got to this very point.

“If people where given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

— Taylor Branch, to Isabel Wilkerson / Caste: The Origins of our Discontents

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

more pleasant misanthrope

Posted on February 23, 2021 by istsfor manity

Wretched Hypnopompia

This morning I woke up with an angry welt on my left temple. I had a bad night’s sleep, that much is obvious. Which is odd as I’ve sleeping rather well lately.

Eris, on the other hand, sleeps poorly. Her snoring is like the rasp of the grim reaper as he inhales your dying breath. Sleep can be wretched in our bed.

And now, I have this welt and a jagged headache to boot.

I wondered for some torpid minutes about my dreams, but I couldn’t recall having dreamt again about falling through sharp crystals in the cold gloriole encrusted sky; or the one about swimming with large pelagic fish, none of them threatening, in the warm sargasso flow; nor was there the recurrence of the dream where I urinate off the edge of Uhuru Peak, only to find myself in bed in a puddle of my own urine — this dream recurs once every decade, and I now I certainly believe that I will drown sometime in the future in a pool of my own piss.

So I’m spending the hour before Eris wakes wondering about last night’s disturbing sleep, and about what awaits us all in the near future — it’s possibly nearer for me than her, but not too distant for any of us in any case. A pandemic? A war? The zombie apocalypse?

I still have some dozen colostomy bags the hospice nurse left here during mother’s decline — to that place where we dissipate before we disappear completely. I use these bags as disposable ice packs. I have one bound around my left temple now from the blow I took last night in my sleep. The headache won’t abate.

Anyway, here I sit unable to think or eat. I can’t eat because I’m having a colonoscopy later today and I’ve been ordered to fast. And I’ve been trying to write something reasonable in my journal, while my head pounds and my stomach groans. It’s damn near impossible.

My psychiatrist suggested that I keep this journal. I don’t think it helps much of anything. She plies me with pills to insure my level mood. She wants me within my “window of tolerance.” She says I have to be less intractable around others.

“If not an altogether more pleasant misanthrope?” I tell her.

But now I’m unable to write anything meaningful because Eris is half awake and wandering about the house. And this headache is cleaving my corpus callosum.

She’s now in the kitchen, filling yet another colostomy bag with ice. She’s complaining that her right wrist hurts and that her hand is swollen. She’s using the remaining gauze tape from the lancing of my thigh pustules to bind the colostomy ice bag to her knuckles.

Oh, what a wretched hypnopompia.

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal… it is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”

— Isabel Wilkerson / Caste: The Origins of our Discontents

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

is teething contagious?

Posted on February 22, 2021 by istsfor manity

wartseller banshee: or, unitary flarf #222 (re: flarfish harvest no.1 / 2021)

Banshee posted a birthday wish
Successful bidder will get a wart.

Believing it would unleash a
Truck trailer and find myself double sad

pay me with terror through the shroud
of a short puppet musical

hierarchical collection of blood by the slice
Is teething contagious?

Banana butterscotch pudding on each prawn
as seller does not dine out

“… And our fear, like a lover,
Lies with us. Wide eyes in the darkness.

— Etheridge Knight / “Comes Now the Red Madness”

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

was never our$

Posted on February 21, 2021 by istsfor manity

get to one hundred before you get to ten, read the relegation table, tabulate the hü hüsker

something is afoot, something’s always been afoot, and lo and behold (!) after all this time something has to be done …

… but we’ll go down in fracking fissures, hoodwinked, earthquake(d), thirsty …

… frozen water water everywhere (but) not a drop to drink …

(let’s go hyperthermic admiring our handiwork)

we’ll go down like oiler rats, like rabid wildcatters (!) in a gush and a push …

and this land was never our$

(but we bum-rushed it)

$$$$
$$$
$$
$

(makes a nice wedge on its side)

i couldn’t be bothered with alternate keys, with umlaut(ed) u’s …

… ask yourself why you don’t know about the White Lion, or if you did know why you learned of it at such a late date, or at such a diminished rate …

ask yourself why (?)

we get cheated, and cheat ourselves, shipped out of our own reality

_87840710_img_3423

What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)

1266444._SX98_

Unbought and Unbossed / Shirley Chisholm (1970)

Published two years before her groundbreaking Presidential run — Shirley Chisholm was the first black woman to primary for President on a major party ticket — straight talking, like no other Congress person, Shirley Chisholm was unbought and unbossed.

If we’d had a dozen more leaders like Chisholm we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today. But the problems remain — just as she railed against status quo politics and caste 50 years ago — if anything our politics and society at large have become more dysfunctional and more prone to autocratic behavior and political unresponsiveness from our leaders.

Maybe there’s still a chance — her words ring true, and just as urgent, today:

“If it is not too late for america to be saved, the young will save it — and the blacks, the Indians , the Spanish-surnamed, the young women, and other victims of American society. They, if any, will become the conscience that the country has lacked. They will try to force it to practice what it has preached.”

I wish I could have cast a vote for Chisholm back in the day, or have been of age when she was still in our socio-political zeitgeist. It’s an unadorned, straightforward, righteous read — and still vital — all these years later.

Ebook, 02/20/21.

“In the end, anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.”

— Shirley Chisholm / Unbought and Unbossed

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

purr kitty rollover

Posted on February 20, 2021 by istsfor manity

Overheard at the Dominant Group Status Threat Conference

Chankas and sassafras… I shit on the new year… You cause sensation, ugh… Tributaries of terpitude, moral and otherwise, is thankfully sullen and dullard… Yeah, I shopped at Sears junior bazaar… Falstaff the malt liquor?… Elsie the cow… Learn how to swim at the YMCA… Remember the Campfire Girls?… Deliver a white room in a purr purr kitty rollover… There’s always one late comer, you know… Buford and the pussycats… Hilly faced numbskulls and attached silly string wikki wachee watchers, nothing is intransigent until it’s it’s no longer transitive… I’m walking over here… I’m dying over here… Out act you?… Chew more scenery than who?… I’d rather be living in a cave… Nobody gets too much heaven no more… I’m getting vaccinated when my turn comes around… Moving to Las Vegas…

What I’m Reading, or: What I Just Finished Reading (a continuing series)

****

41081373._SX98_

Girl, Woman, Other / Bernadine Evaristo (2019)

Evaristo pulls off one of the greatest denouements I’ve ever experienced in this kaleidoscopic and virtuosic novel. It’s with good reason she shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments.

Very gratifying to experience the scope of this novel and be satisfied that one has learned or experienced as much of each character, and they are manifold, as is possible — in essence much like holding a mirror up to the cast of characters that walk in and out of our lives in the course of a lifetime.

Once I settled into the rhythm and language of the novel I was hooked and hard to put down. Very well done.

Ebook, 02/17/21.

****

4261811._SX98_

Blueschild Baby / George Cain (1970)

Even though this 1970 novel was rereleased in 2018, I’d never heard of it until I encountered James Baldwin singing its praises to Nikki Giovanni in A Dialogue (1973) just a couple of weeks ago. If Baldwin thought so highly about the book I felt I had to seek it out.

Blueschild Baby is a sucker punch to the gut and the frontal lobe. Wow!

It is criminal that this book isn’t better known, more widely read, and canonical. It’s reminiscent of the best of Toomer, Wright, Algren, Ellison, Burroughs, Baldwin, and Denis Johnson all at once. This should be one of the cornerstones of addiction / counterculture literature. It is simultaneously disturbing, surreal, poetic, and intensely gritty.

It’s about the intersection of existential angst, otherness, and addiction: “Know now how artificial my desperation is. All my problems are created by the time and place I live in.”

Cain is unmatched in his ability to command poetic language, vernacular, and a complex synthesis:

“Awareness is your crime, for once you become aware, you cannot help reacting in a manner contrary to the system that oppresses you. Very few commit crime because they enjoy doing so. They do what they have to. So many leaders are convicts. Awareness is a crime and sanity the only insanity, they are such rare qualities these days, they go unrecognized for what they are and are seen only as deviate from the madness that is normalcy.”

Cain’s personal story, which I researched after reading this book, was the basis of this novel. Tragically, he never wrote another novel, despite living until 2010, due to the continuing struggle with substance abuse.

Ebook, 02/19/21.

“But the anger is in all of us, needing only time or incident to blossom. Fear has done what countless leaders couldn’t, rallied us together. Like a riot in a penitentiary, there is no middle ground or neutrals, color of skin determines what side you’re on. No longer is there choice or free will.”

George Cain / Blueschild Baby

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment