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“Hubris is the besetting sin of despotisms everywhere.”

— Philip Short / Pol Pot

Etiolated

Your voice echoes through the ages — as if from the depths of dry amphora.

Pushcarts and tumbrils are full of the dregs of the failed american experiment.

A skim of cream and a puff of smoke are equal in the Inquisitor’s dream —

Spastic as a cobwebbed spindle and dry as a sheaf of faggots left in the sun during deepening drought.

We move away from each other singed by wind driven wildfires that ring ever closer.

Each minute hotter and dryer, each second etiolating the sun —

The shining city on a hill was an ill-fated Fata Morgana —

This moment desiccated like the cicada’s abandoned husk.

“I don’t know what else to do, so I write. It’s my way of seeing the world.”

— Jim Harrison

Something Chthonic 

I’m not feeling good about all that kyoodling outside. I think there are feral dogs and hyenas circling the house. Closing the circle ever tighter until they get in…

I’m cooking up something about the male gaze, about the dynamics of sexism, and the dynamics of power and being female in a world that hasn’t changed fast or far enough…

The first time lightning struck me you had just walked away after telling me about Dali’s paranoiac-critical theory. My head was swimming. No, my brain was a rain of caroming ball bearings. I fell right there in the red Georgia clay. I felt like a distended eyeball just poked out in some 1970’s Kung Fu film. You had me hooked…

I wrote about the flat head woman. My guide from Istanbul to Kathmandu. The sun, a pink-red ulcer, tacked down the cobalt sky…

Then a sojourn to Greece — a slow ferry to Poros…

Aqui estamos, I say. 

The flat head woman says, is it true what they say about Latin men? 

To which I say, never believe what they say. They always speak in tongue twisters and riddles. Nothing makes sense, much less what we’re doing. Abandon all hope of ever singing in the proper register. Too many things are written that are lies, and too many lies are told that are truths. Abandon me like I will abandon you. Do it first.

So we show up at the appointed hour. No one there. Just a cold wind blowing a garbage can lid down the street. A calico cat sniffing at a small pile of Acropolis detritus. No one. We’re alone. 

Don’t go a woolgathering, she says. 

Indulgence in idle daydreaming, say I.

(There’s actually much more, but it doesn’t appear here because we’re standing outside of the infamous rotunda of plenty and the coroner is busy “inquesting”) 

An unseen Greek chorus sings: “Something Chthonic” — don’t fazzle our muckwumpus dazzle the accretion of deletions in the sky… the wormholes in the ploversticks and pattiwhacks all die…

Upon closer inspection my uncle ingested the harvest moon and darkened the sky.  He ran through the living room with a glass full of bloody moon and a minute later the house was thrown into darkness… Greeks be damned!

The feral dogs and hyenas are now inside.

“God is circling like a vulture…”

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

what i see

“Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.”

— George Orwell / 1984

lacunae and interstices

debilitating as 1-2-3… awful as awful can be, and slightly elevated but apocryphal

after the apocalypse we walked on the littered shore of lacuna beach

no word from paramaribo pam, but a fine bread crumb trail of… well, bread crumbs

trailed off into the wreckage of a civilization unhinged and unleavened

she was germinating a fear of wheat, though one couldn’t really call her glutenous… yet

she once said: a night in suriname is equal to two weeks in french guiana

i understood nothing, but the smell of decaying sargassum was intoxicating

she was spotted at the fringe of the jungle at the interstice between life and death

made dyspeptic by the cold medications she attempted to o.d. on

but the bardo was not “taking” and her ass was festooned with deer ticks

“Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone’s disbelief.”

— August Wilson

while they’re asleep

“Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it.”

— Ray Bradbury

Just Chew

“UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.”

— Dr. Seuss / The Lorax

Corona

Cantering and rolling, rolling,
Sancho got them happy feet —
A crown makes three by the mango tree.

Riot of pink and red hibiscus —
Frippery festoons his flanks —
Sancho down one, Sancho up two.

Writhing with the unnamable —
Waiting for the ineffable —
Sancho, scythe this way’s coming…

It’s the season of the felling —
Looka that corona, Sancho,
Blistering ’round the blackening sun.

“MAY: Everyone’s equal.

JUNE: There’s always someone on top, someone at the bottom.

MAY: You don’t believe none of it?

JINE: Never did. Do what you have to do. I ain’t stupid, stuffed my pockets full of gold, I did…”

— Sarah Grochala / S-27

Sleep of Treason

I yanked myself out of REM sleep yesterday morning, and was a walking husk the rest of the day…

I’d been dreaming I was in a SmartCar jammed with five other people. We were driving through a jungle swampland when I noticed a large inflatable dayglo green snake that seemed staged around tree limbs in the canopy above.

On another giant cypress tree there’s a 20 foot long orange-yellow banded crocodile with a snake body, ambulating on tiny cartoon legs, making its way down to the passenger side windows. It opens its maw revealing a toothless interior. The sharp tang of fear is redolent in the tiny car. We are all frozen.

Then in a small house filled with the same people from the SmartCar, there is a back slapping agreement and a tap on the belly of someone in cahoots that someone in the party needs to be educated about racist terms. A tacit agreement to tell him to stop calling people that.

Someone turns the lights out, because it’s imperative that we hide, but a spotlight is shining in from darkened jungle revealing where I’m standing in the room. I can’t see through the dark windows, and I’m unable to move far enough away out of the spot light. Im unable to conceal myself. I don’t want to be taken.

I will myself to wake up and move, but I can’t break through the layers of unconsciousness even though I’m aware this is a dream. I violently try to shake off the cloaks of sleep.

I awoke to early morning light streaming in through the blinds. The bed empty.

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a
king of infinite space — were it not that I have bad dreams.”

— William Shakespeare / Hamlet

Gotta, Gonna

I’ll shake your hand like it’s 2019.

You say you’re still living like it’s the morning of November 1, 2016.

And you say:

Don’t be a chop-socky soap jockey and don’t be a hegemonic purveyor of racist tropes and insult troopers. Wha’s wrong with you, man?

Get choppin’ or clod hoppin’ like a supa hero of righteousness. Go stomp on the populist purveyors of trash talk and totalitarian pumpkin head enablers.

Can’t be quiescent, man. Can’t be that — of all things.

Gotta pick up an idea, gotta spark a ‘tude, gotta spark a fire, gotta pick up a rock. Gotta get so pissed. Then you gotta think. Put the rock in your pocket. Keep it ready.

Gotta register to vote (if u ain’t).

Gotta vote (if u r).

And gotta get ready to take out the rock again, and gotta get righteously pissed again, gotta find the matches, gotta clench the fists again…

… gotta be set if the fuckers gonna mess with the system that want to throw them up and out.

Gonna give them the benefit, one last time — that they walk away — when we shit them out like they deserve.

But keep that arm cocked and fists ready if they try the hoodwink!

“Trump’s racism—and that of his allies and enablers—has been too blatant for Americans to ignore or deny. And just as the 1850s paved the way for the revolution against slavery, Trump’s presidency has paved the way for a revolution against racism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi / “The End of Denial”