thee istsfor manity reader

Crabwise and Operose

It’s not that I operate under the impression that my vision is oppression; and it’s not that I enjoy the song that goes “buffalo and bison, bison and buffalo / canonball and rifle, rifle and canonball…” — because I do enjoy that song. But your lachrymose moods and your teary discharges leave me feeling glum and dissociative, dissociative and glum.

So I approach you crabwise and operose, operose and crabwise…

And all I can add, as the singer sang, “that’s the way the thunder rumbles… that’s the way the bee bumbles… bumbles.”

So our relation has come to its inevitable violent end. You have pelted me with rocks and garbage for the last time. You will no longer imperiously rail at me that you are “the queen of bad moods,” or “bluer than blue, in your black converse.”

I now have this overweening desire to play Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” while replaying a loop of the 30 second scene from The Exorcist where Regan abuses and bloodies her demoniac self with a crucifix, 180’s her head and says, “Do you know what she did? Your cunting daughter?”

But in your pedantic manner you insist the line is “canting daughter, canting daughter!”

You add in that lovely manner of yours, “you imbecile! I have a PhD in Comparative Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing. Canting. Canting as in affectedly pious or righteous; alternately, to talk hypocritically and sanctimoniously about something. Canting!”

Then you hiss at me like a hackle-high cat.

And you wonder why I’m leaving as an attenuated truncated lower case word person?

I’m broken. You’re broken. This country is irretrievably broken.

I’m off to Canada to find me a buffalo wrangler.

“Hug me, mother of noise.
Find me a hiding place.
I am afraid of my voice.
I do not like my face.”

— Anne Stevenson / “Television”

after the storm

animals were rescued
three weeks later
desperate townspeople
ate them
container ships lost
across the hemisphere
forlorn people victims
of hunger
nothing else
possible
no
one
redeemed

“I was going to buy a copy of The Power Of Positive Thinking, and then I thought, ‘What the hell good would that do?’”

—Ronnie Shakes

Anagnorisis

Hello, this is your captain. We’re coming to you from the equitime point of the flight with some bad news. No. It’s very bad news…

All day cooped up in here. This is the most time I’ve ever spent with this copilot, trapped in this compartment, and I ain’t calling it a cockpit, no sir… although, gab nub it, I just did there. No more.

There’s a lot of tension in here between us. The navigator is out. I took care of him. But it is this gash nab copilot that has got my goat.

Ok, well, it’s god. He’s my copilot and I’ve had enough of him.

Enough of the famine, disease, and gnarled planet; enough of petty dictators, hypersonic nuclear weapons, child sexual abuse, racism, hegemony, political malpractice, and corporate greed.

Nah, the news isn’t good here from these tight quarters — and I’m sending god off like D.B. Cooper, without the parachute or the money.

While he gave me a chance at privilege — and boy did I enjoy it, and make the market capital best of my chances — I just never understood why he shafted the 4 billion others.

That’s just not right. And now we’ve just lost about another million in less than a year to some serious batshit bug…

I apologize for my language, ladies and gentlemen. I beg your pardon.

Now if the flight crew will please clear the aisles, everyone buckle up your belts — as you can hear from that “ding” the fasten seat belt signs are on.

The flight crew will please secure the galley and this god-awful compartment exit — and it’s veritably god-awful if you know what I mean by this dead weight I’m piloting up here.

You will note that the masks will drop in front of you when I open the fuselage door — as the cabin becomes depressurized.

No worries. Don’t bother with the masks. It’ll be quicker that way.

This helpless gut bucket will be making a very quick 33,000 foot descent into the Pacific and the rest of us will sleep with the angels after we greet the fish.

Will you look at that gorgeous sunset?

That is all…

“I have felt the wind of the wing of madness.”

— Charles Baudelaire / Intimate Journals

New Land

A bit shoddy this place!

It has become an astounding melodramatic mediocrity — made all the more disappointing by what it claims to aspire to be.

How much are you asking for it?

But it’s a half-baked soap opera! It’s an intellectual wilderness state ringed by an imbecilic dystopian society. It’s full of unsympathetic characters.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve wished those stooges a slow disembowelment by wolves, or that they be felled by tornadic detritus, swept away in the wake of a hurricane, or be incinerated in one of the dumpster fires of they’re always starting.

Goose-step Market Dystopia.

This smells of that earthy failure — like they’ve already rigged a dying system…

Nah, you can keep it.

Oy, for the new land of the Huns!

Oy!

“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

— George Orwell / 1984

“People ask me sometimes… ‘When will there be enough women on the court?’ And my answer is: ‘When there are nine.’”

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Storm’s-a-Coming

Where are the kids? Where’s the dog?

It drives my blood pressure up. I need a tunic and a tuna sandwich — make it Fuji tuna with cranberries and apples, and make the tunic combed Egyptian cotton. Stroft! I want it.

The asseverations of assonance and then the concomitant detonation of dissonance ensues — what do I do?

Well, the therapist tells me that I am not my thoughts, and then she plies me with psychopharmacological magic…

wo! wo! wo! it’s magic! never believing that’s so…

so jejune, so mon dieu, la merde… que mierda… shit…

… entropic. so sophic — that’s what this is, Charlie Tuna, it’s natural that you’re writing this because that voice telling you this is in your head and jamming up your ears…

Ah! Emergency! Emergency!

Call the Tonton Macoute. Call Col. Hogan. The Merry Pranksters. The shit is dripping off the fan blades at this point in time. I think it’s too late to bake a cake to leave out in the rain. There’s been a god damned typhoon storming outside for three days — and now you want to go-a-baking with Richard Harris? You call that singing?

Burl Ives! Blue Tail Fly / Jimmy Crack Corn! That’s singing!

(this ain’t no blackface minstrelsy, mofo!)

Later, Jimmy cracks the needle and the corn is jammed in his mainline. And Sister Ray is naked, slathered in high fructose syrup, wondering where the good time went at 11:42 in the morning outside the CVS.

It’s almost lunch, damn it — she says to Levi, the Conch Fritter Man, who is in a dank heap blocking the automatic doors with a conch shell attached to his member.

Ooh, what a good time this is…

Storm’s-a-coming!

So keep your children near and your pets on a very short leash.

“The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.”

— William Styron / Darkness Visible

Epistemic Valve

Insouciant pill pusher — writer of scrips intended to send me to oblivion, to live the life of the lotus eaters. Dr. Closer, shutter of the epistemic valve — he wants me to live the limpid life of the unsullied brain. Lamb-shackled. You translucent Mesmer of enthrallment…

Then there was talk between my cousin R, and my friend D., and me about the film I recently saw at a nightclub. R. was talking to a masculine woman, and I wanted to ask him about the lesbians in the film — with whom he was familiar.

R. jumped between me and D. — and R. tried to grab my crotch a number of times. I had to push him away.

You see I almost missed the train, but I managed to wave the engineer down by a series of complicated mirrors mounted on the cars. She stopped and I got in, only to find a bunch of young men from a military academy, which I intuited were students from Greenland — they were crowding the train.

I saw D. and sat next to him, and he told me how stoned he was, and all about the genetically modified strain he’d been smoking.

Then R., found us — D. and I were walking down a side street and we saw the shambles of a recording studio with all manner of murals on the ruined walls.

“Look it’s Muscle Shoals studio. How historic! This is where James Taylor recorded that classic album,” D. said.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” I said. “You might be thinking about Johnnie Taylor. I don’t think James Taylor recorded here.”

R. was throwing rocks at the few remaining walls— pristine white bricks with murals of steam locomotives on them.

“Anyway, we’re not in Alabama,” I said. “We seem to be in Greenland.”

“Ah, fuck, shut up!” R. said. “You’re all incongruity and anachronism spilling into other recurrent dream sequences. Or wait, was this all the same pandemic dream?”

The pungent smell of sulphur overtook us as the crusted ground gave out beneath us.

“The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do with it… There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do.”

— Zadie Smith / “Something To Do”

Sour

Something in the magic of the sour blueberries and yogurt made the start of the day feel somewhat violet — or should I say blue. No. Go ahead and say blew. The day blew before it really got started. She, standing there, with a mouthful of bitterness the sun being smothered by the haze of factory smoke and wildfires. There was something more acrid than usual in the air, like a sweetness that cloyed at the edge of sludge, something sickly in the burning. The sharpness in her mouth brought her back to the moment she was inhabiting — a smudged pink sunrise beyond the billowing, and the nascent thought that something was dead and rotting just beyond the perimeter fence. She swallowed the bitterness with one gulp and let out a long exhalation. Instead of feeling lighter she was leaden and off to face whatever was out there waiting.

“there’s a harmonica tattooed on my collarbone
I can feel death’s mouth on it lips wiry & hot”

— Eduardo C. Corral / “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel”

Blockhead

Relevance was not his strong suit. Assonance was a mildly strong point. And dissonance was his power alley. So he detuned his lyre and randomly plucked strings. He tuned his dulcimer to F sharp and struck it with claw hammers which were more appropriate for sheet rock installation. He retrieved his banjo from a dusty corner in the basement and pulled on the strings hard enough to feel them loosen. He opened a can of stale tennis balls and threw them at the banjo head and strings. He then found his ukulele in the closet and tore out the E and C strings and went mad strumming at the speed of Johnny Ramone on the G and A strings. He even shouted, “gabba, gabba, hey” once for nostalgia sake. In the office he took his electric guitar off its stand, plugged it in, and maximized the fuzz box and with drumsticks he did a ratamacue on the fretboard until there was a maelstrom of skronk filling the room. After a minute of this, his heart racing and the incipient pangs of a migraine squeezing the sides of his neocortex, he raised the guitar over his head and smashed his acoustic guitar to splinters in its stand — and then started on the walls. In this manner his 3/2 with 2 car became a massive heap of refuse. He was proud to take out his home before the weather got the best of him. “Hurricane that! Fire that! Flood that! Tornado that! Glacier melt that! Sea level rise that! Earthquake that! Virus that! Gas explosion that! Take that! I’m in control, Mofo!

“He said the shadows of missiles growing larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us.”

— Ocean Vuong / “Immigrant Haibun”

Port of Call: Topeka, Kansas

X: You purport to a port of call called Topeka, Kansas. Does the Navy have a port of call in Topeka? The navy has a port in a landlocked city, good sir?

Z: What about the Kansas River?

X: Ocean faring ships, my good man!

Z: It’s the cereal of villainy, man. Electronic reminders coming in on radio waves and strange pings from deep space. And if they tell me there’s a port of call in Topeka, Kansas, that’s what I want to sign up for. Why the long face, sir?

X: Because you’re clearly a mad man, and we’re not the navy, and we don’t want madmen driving our cabs or interacting with our customers.

Z: Is it fair to deprive a fare of my enthusiasm?

X: We don’t call our customers fares. And please leave.

Z: Does a leaf leave in the fall? Does a leaf levy a reliquary in antiquary times — and pinion the fruit of piñon trees in the track of alarm? Pray tell.

X: Will you leave. Get out of this office now, or I’m calling the cops.

Z: Oh the cops! Always the clap trap of the mines. The sanctuary breakers and iconoclasts. May the remnants of saints never hear what you utter in gutter times of want and despair. You are a sanctimonious pontificator of flatulence, sir. Dark auguries hang from dead trees.

Good day to you, sir!

“The world has always been chaotic. Life is unpredictable…there is no form. And making forms gives you solidity. I think that’s why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories that have beginnings, middles and ends, even when…the middle is at the beginning, and the beginning is at the end.”

— Stephen Sondheim