thee istsfor manity reader

Idioteque, Montana

Philanthropy feels more like idiopathic shill-anthropy in these waning days of the anthropocene. Cleave my heart on your plow, speed the ventricle asunder, and wave the cluster of veins, arteries and capillaries over your head. Oh what a beautiful sight that is.

Are you sick? Are you binging seven hours of last year’s hit cooking show? Is your heartless chest so vacuous that echoes don’t return to you? Your voice lost and splintering in that void becoming a still small accusation pinging away through the universe.

Oh fill me with vile thoughts and spidery venom instead of inoculating me against the COVID-21? Is sars-cov7 on its way? I trust I’ll freeze in the icy winds first.

Don’t trust anything goddd tells you — he carries about an abundance of lower case “d’s” with him, just in case his white masculinity is questioned. No proselytizing to be done, just a beating about the head the with handy extra “d’s.”

Good for something nothings they be. Idioteque, Montana they sang in unison while no one was listening.

“But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”

— Albert Camus / The Plague

snow day…

“It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them—
these things we depend on,
they disappear.”

— Louise Glück / “The Night Migrations”

my heart
distills
my blood
heliotrope
looking
for a sun
a plantation
of hateful
verdigris
factors
out to
go flow
out
big
star not
too far
from
severance
runs
rampant
over my
tripartite
welcome
parse
the light
hiding
from the
guards
foiling
the crowds
out in
the rain

“My journals are not written for others, nor do I usually look at them myself, but they are a special, indispensable form of talking to myself.”

— Oliver Sacks

Tinctures

It’s the time for auxiliary malarial canons
and sitars.

Thee minute for surgical mask missiles
and tinctures of Ayahuasca.

“So this is insanity. How interesting. What happens next?”

— Jerzy Kosiński

Tergiversation

Be apostate? No!

That’s better. I’m listening to DakhaBrakha doing “Шлях.”

I hope to die in the war of pi twisty too in scupper loo to pass on grass of supper stash and this again to sassafras, sasparilla, and lingonberry ale to don a mollusk on a hillock and dippy dee doo in the dank of a screw and tarry no longer and hie don’t linger else plan for the finger.

And we get to one hundred and twenty eight the spate of the spite the sprite of dark/light trigger a bigger digger dee do then call for the fall of ginger dee doll. Come strumping about with malodorous gout and be gone don’t hie we’re all bound to die.

There sure is a lot of ocotillo around.

“My bones ascend by arsenics of sight.
Where noise is all the sound there is to hear,
Beginning in the heart I work towards light.”

— Michael McClure

Hortensia

Extremely primitive or outmoded is what he called me, as if what I say and do really matters.

I was born in Chickamaw with an archery practice arrow through my foot.

There were groups of ladies in peculiar Neo-Gothic rooms who betrayed the generals who themselves were busy with warlike appurtenances (such as throwing axes) in the morning hours before anyone’s swollen belly could complain or break open with vermiculite parasites named Hortensia.

The light was particularly bad in the rooms and coyotes could be heard waiting down the hall near the bathroom.

So get your facts correct and your ducks in the basement row because we’re waiting on that pregnant antediluvian moment when the first drop is heard.

Before the first shot is fired…

“Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. It’s all about taking in as much of what’s out there as you can, and not letting the excuses and the dreariness of some of the obligations you’ll soon be incurring narrow your lives. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

— Susan Sontag

Candent Night Terror

The long slog through the wasteland… and then a sylph — beatific, beauteous, wanton, and salacious all at once — appears hovering over the horizon line. I’m unsure about scale I can’t tell her true size: hummingbird-like one moment a massive Venus of Wllendorf towering over me the next moment. A bloodless moment in my head and the next I’m being lifted bodily by unseen hands one at each shoulder and I’m hovering above the desert. I’m seized by a priapic tear in my pants and I’m lead by my organ through the limitless sky, until it detaches and flits off to space and I begin to fall.

“Don’t show your work to too many people, and if you do, receive their advice with a deep breath, a thanks, and then tell yourself, this is MY work, nobody else’s. Never take the advice unless it really strikes a chord, and even then, let it sit with you for a while before altering your work.”

— Amanda Brainerd

Two Views of December 11

1. Today

Nothing says “thank you for cooking breakfast” like not saying “thank you,” and walking away like you expected it all along; and then not even offering to help with the washing of the dishes. “You bet. You’re welcome.” It’s great to be alive during the waning days of civilization as we knew it — the signs of the apocalypse are stark and plentiful.

2. 2006

The last time I saw my father he asked me half a dozen times who I was; he told me he used to catch fly balls from a priest that used his closed, upturned fist as a fungo bat during practice; and then he asked me to cut our scenic drive short and take him back to the assisted living facility because he had to take a serious shit.

“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”

— Chuck Palahniuk / Invisible Monsters

Rate of Declivity

The avarice
of kings
and the palavering
of paladins
make for
the usurious
rate
of declivity
in modern
life.

If you
rescind your
common sense
as if it were
a toy
swiped
away
from a
3 year old
you’d likely
abrogate
the social
decorum
we’ve
come to
expect
of our
mighty
good
leaders.

“I was a great many far cries from myself.”

— Gary Lutz

(my short film lagniappe for you, take 3 minutes out of your life)

Walls

You believe,
Calypso,

In rising seas,
In openings, closings,

In walls to protect him;
The journey no longer as important

As the destination.
We build trust,

We fall apart, Inside this temporary
Housing.  Odysseus, heavy as stone,

Maintains his sad sway — An island
Without bridge-makers in

This migrant disorder.

“If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.”
— John Cage