thee istsfor manity reader

Island Deluge

Tragedians are people who belong in ramekins but somehow slipped through the net and live on a Godot-like wasteland, without the gnarled tree, but with plenty of tumbleweeds constantly blowing through the landscape.

Discordant bird chatter is constant as well, yet a single bird is never seen — not the bullet sparrows alighting in bushes or hovering hummingbirds flitting about.

Somehow the tragedians are continually bombarded with bird droppings of every kind — green-white blobs here and there, alternating with a hail pellets on occasion — it’s as if they were marooned on an 18th century guano island.

The deluge never ends.

The tragedians speak in tongues, nothing even remotely comprehensible is uttered. One of these tragedians is forever wiping the waste off their jacket and making snacks of it.

Another tragedian conducts an imaginary orchestra, acknowledging an invisible audience that claps every so often as a line of phantom performers present themselves on an unseen stage, before commencing another desultory jag conducting the absent orchestra.

The remaining tragedian sits on a large rounded rock holding on to their pith helmet trying to avoid the worst of the bombardment.

As daylight fades there is one full hour of confusion before “The Internationale” plays at varying, and warped, speeds.

Then the jaundiced sun disappears and the world goes dark.

“I pay little attention to the audience. The worst thing a writer can do is give the audience what they want. The more you give them what they want or what they tell you they want, the less you are true to your muse.”

— Harlan Ellison

No Room for Nostalgia

A new month brings the promise of more longanimity and asceticism. Nothing is as safe she expects in the age of vulnerability and shame.

She liked it more when every emotional situation didn’t need a name where you could “hold” it in its “safe space.”

There is no room for nostalgia, but she has no use for these “isms” either.

She wants to crawl into a garbage can large enough to hold her and live out the rest of her days like that lady in Beckett’s Happy Days — remember, she has no room for nostalgia.

But there are bills to pay and some sort of food preparations to be made if she wants to continue on living in this hovel.

And there is the crow.

Always that crow! She inherited it from someone she cared deeply about once, but she can’t remember quite who.

The crow is tethered to the radiator and has to be fed often. And if the food isn’t placed just so, on time, the cawing is insufferable.

No room for nostalgia, but she longs for the halcyon days of pandemic when she knew what to expect — even if it was the worst.

This new post apocalypse state of being was, well… a bit on the dull side. And this noisome, pediculous crow leaves much to be desired.

“Suppose you woke
& found your shadow replaced
by a black wolf.”

— Ocean Vuong / “Torso of Air”

Primary Day in MA!

Vote, baby, vote!

“The Trump administration and corrupt and authoritarian regimes generally are enemies of fact and truth and history and witness, and people who can’t tell the difference or don’t care about what’s true and what’s not are their useful idiots.”

— Rebecca Solnit / “Twitter Conspiracies, QAnon, and the Case of the Two-Faced Mailboxes”

Thanksgiving on Zoom

The headline read: It took about 7 months for the US to top 6 million cases…

And she couldn’t think about this anymore — the selfishness, the pigishness passing for unfettered freedom, the sickness, the unnecessary death, and how it all seemed lined up to continue cycling in this manner.

She slapped herself hard. Harder than anyone had ever slapped her before, and it had happened on various occasions.

She drifted to…

… blancmange playing tennis… and splunge! — or was it a handful of Vikings in a diner chanting “Spam, spam, spam, spam…” No it was dead parrots, and a torrent of cheeses, and eventually the Spanish Inquisition — no one expects the Spanish Inquisition… and all this before the Knights of Ni, and “fishy fishy fishy fishy poo…”

… then she drifted back.

“I don’t know how this all ends,” she said to no one in particular. “It all makes me very sad.”

Then she wrote: Thanksgiving on Zoom? What is that?

“Flash fiction is like a pill: small and seemingly harmless, yet full of powerful substances that might heal, might kill—or might just alter your senses.”

— Grant Faulkner / “13 Ways of Looking at Flash Fiction”

Bade an Aubade to Bad

You must remember an aubade is a poem or piece of music appropriate to the dawn or early morning.

You must remember your rituals — your morning ablutions.

You must remember the wine colored stains on the walls of your coffin length room.

You must remember that all you need to speak, or write, are seven words every day, and then you’ve met your allotment.

You must remember silence is best after that.

You must remember: “every dawn is an apocalypse.”

“Did you know that every dawn is an apocalypse?”

— Clare Duffy / Artic Oil

jwhorwl

I’m stuck on the word you used. Why should one word “jwhorwl” be a key — the only key — to understanding the passage, and by extension the story you wrote. I wax semi-affirmative on the style, the composition, and the concept — the artifice — behind it.

But Sevastopol calls me out and says, “How can you speak about it intelligently without knowing the meaning of that word or liking that passage? Is that possible?”

You look askance at me. And I fill the air with words defending my critique, using my own stories as examples. Some energy is drained from the room…

The museum is closed, but sometimes people get in and use the restrooms near the vestibules and outer halls while the ticket takers and other staff setup at 7am.

There is a man taking flash photos of some of the works in this area, and as I’m coming to speak to him, he moves to another room. This is an attempt to get into another wing of the museum, but I ask him to leave. I tell him we aren’t open yet.

He continues shooting photos until I impose myself, and then I walk him out. I tell him to look at all that he can do until we open, making a sweeping gesture at the wide strip unspooling before us full of casinos and amusement parks.

I head back inside to another entrance area at the museum. Many people, much too crowded, packed in are waiting in another vestibule area — this one festooned with gothic colonnades, dozens of medieval madonna with child panels, and multiple takes on the Pietà. Even though I work at the museum there is something unspoken and the guard won’t let me in because I’m somehow not “legitimate.”

A moment later I’m somehow inside, and I know the passage to get to the other wing of the museum where I need to be— the contemporary wing — but the way is closed and now I find myself with the man I escorted out earlier…

Another man, a well dressed man, sits in the seat between us. He is handsome and you stare at his clothes and face. I engage him in conversation — he is well spoken.

Then I’m doing some sort of violence to him. I’m bloodying his face in some undefined way, but definitely bloodying it. Tearing at his hair. The man I’m beating is called in for an interview; and now I need to help him clean up so I don’t get fired.

We try to walk into a couple of men’s rooms in different halls of the museum but they’re being cleaned. The cleaning person snaps the chain brusquely across the bathroom door.

Closed For Cleaning.

We have to queue. We wait. Wait.

“If I throw myself fully into my work again, very good, but I shall always be cracked.”

— Vincent van Gogh / Letter to Theo van Gogh, May 3, 1889

Summer’s Cooked

Time to estivate is past. The nights have a coolish edge now. Dreams are especially vivid and more often remembered.

The dragonflies flit away from your outstretched hands.

The crows are louder. Their murders more numerous. They blacken the sky at noon…

“Last time I fell in a shower room
I bled like a tumbril dandy
and the hotel longed to be rid of me.”

— Les Murray / “Vertigo”

Eye Past eyE

You pack a wallop, my man. In these days of monster hurricanes and unexplained pandemics what you bring to life is… well, death.

You bring a rain of misfortune, disease, and death.

Why am I so tired of this? It’s all the same everyday. You’ve become such a one note player.

Dis — ease and constant darkness punctuated by torrential rains, wildfires, droughts, straight winds, extinctions, melting polar caps, and zoonotic pandemics.

What are you bored, man? If I believed in you…

I’d kill you every day like clockwork, first thing in the morning, just to make my day bearable.

Come, come, and spread your darkness over us. You’ve already done this.

Look at this. Look! You can’t do worse…

“I think one of the best aspects of America is also one of its limitations: freedom to a fault. The insistence on doing it my way without thinking about the collective. False statements of patriotism mean nothing to me, but sacrificing for the greater good means a great deal. There has been a total lack of leadership, by a dangerous man. It’s the perfect storm.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri / “In Conversation”

the year meaning died

did you know?

the year meaning died

the last alliterative

commentator complained

kin is redundant

avoid relatives

“I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear

Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.”

— Charles Wright / “Reunion”

I Once Was Lost

He first sang a song called “Brave New Defalcation Rocket.” I had no idea what he was on about — a caterwaul that passed for singing, I suppose.

He desultorily strummed on an electric ukulele, placing his fingers randomly along the de-tuned strings on the fretboard. Everyone else in the tiny bar was transfixed.

There was a man behind a mixing board, in the corner, who worked the lights and added all manner of distorting effects to the performance — yellow, red, and blue lights swirled to the fuzzed-out ukulele. This strange man on stage had loaded up his uke with transducer pickups and he was kicking distortion pedals — flanged and phased skronks of noise panned left and right through the sound system.

A dozen people chanted, a lap dog barked by the open door. A busboy and bartender slapped each other, by turns, at the beer taps and drew blood from their noses.

Some sort of animal flesh, slathered in citrus, burned in the kitchen. Acrid smoke filled the place.

The man on stage unspooled long phlegmatic strands of spit down, and sucked them back up to the rhythm of his syncopated feet: down-up, down-down-up, down-up-down, down-up…

I tell you, it was madness — a bedlam overflowing from every corner — akin to screening a scrapped David Lynch film, scuttled on the cutting room floor, because it was too much to bear.

And the crowd sang in unison:

Dig my grave, man… the streaming darkness… oh my golly… oh my golly… gonna lay down in that dark hole… dig my grave, man… oh my golly…

At once it occurred to me — I found my people.

My searching was done.

“They say people are dreaming again,
mainly about weird weather. Tsunamis. Lava.
A friend told me she’d dreamt of hailstones
tapping at her window, but when she looked
she saw it was some people throwing teeth
at the glass.”

— Roseanne Watt / “Nightingales”