thee istsfor manity reader

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”

And She Said…

I don’t want my pictures ending up in a thrift store or antique shop — to have someone at some future time use my image as the cornerstone for an artwork or craft project. I don’t want someone posting my pic up on the internets and writing a story like this. I don’t want someone using my image as a public domain appropriation into a mass retail “jokey” birthday card for sale at fine card shops or big box discount stores. I don’t wish to be made part of someone’s pastiche documentary art film. I do not wish to be trafficked posthumously like a copper penny slathered in virus. I don’t want to be a visual fomite — infecting someone’s nightmares. I don’t want to be sold so cheaply. I want my soul to rest, after it was partially diminished and stolen by this photograph. Just leave my image and my soul alone.

“Inspiration
is the deadliest radiation.
It never completely leaves the bones.”

— Keith S. Wilson / “Heliocentric”

Fifteen Bashings

You want Sasquatch to watch…

I’m dysphoric and elipsis-phobic

Dreaming of the drama at the diorama atop Lookout Mountain — shit no!

Trip your mama by the squelcher and palaver at the knees of Booth Tarkington and the stuff of effetism and the unruliness of the tentacles of love.

I love me a peasant man on a small quay in Santorini smacking a freshly caught octopus into the nearby rocks to soften it up — it’s been dead a while. Just how did he kill it?

Some other way than this brutal bashing?

This death of 15 bashings into the primordial Agean rocks is not a pretty way to go.

What’s a pretty way to go?
Shot to death in the future head?
Don’t know.

“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens.”

— Ray Bradbury

Yaw and Jam

To yaw and jam…
Your paradiddles and ratamacues are killing me

Don’t be here for me:
Sugar Sugar and John Barley Corn Must Die
Seriously?

In susurrations and cackles
In blood bruises and blisters

Blister in the Sun 
What fun

What the fuck is wrong with you?
With your gasping for air 

And your Exorcist tongue flickers
Stop it. 
Seriously?

This is the land of burnt popcorn
And Dr. Pepper droughts… there’s a paucity, man

Because…

… because america…

(and i ain’t talking no tin man or sister golden hair) 
surprise! 
no free is wind blowing on this highway

just strange fruit swingin’ 
in the land of of the free — to kick yer’ ass 
and the home — to pilfer ur loot…

kick out the jams (and yaw) mother———

“But what’s needed in this moment
is unmixed confession
of our nation’s sin,
deep and indefensible.”

— Nikki Grimes / “You Still Dream”

Fishy Fishy Fishy Poo

It’s not piscatorial you’re feeling. You’ve never been to sea.

It’s not enmity you’re feeling. You meditate every morning that you are: peaceful and content in every way and every day.

You’re feeling like a scarlet tanager has alighted on your brain stem — and here we stand next to a waterfall, falling out of love, and fearing the eventual dissipation of all fossil fuel.

The end of life as we know it before we got to know it.

You got it. You got it.

I bid you a tepid adieu. This was already over between us, so why kid ourselves that this really means anything to us… or to me, anyway. So green god-damned, and all of that other high school stuff.

I leave you and your piscatorial delusions with this heartfelt list:

Trout. Orange Roughy. Bass. Mahi Mahi. Salmon. Sunfish. Catfish. Clownfish. Cichlid. Cod. Angelfish. Dragonfish…

You drift off into the Marianas Trench. Your bathysphere detached.

goodbye…

“I, bastard child of the giant chandelier called the blue sky.
No one calls me the sphinx of love.”

— Shuzo Takiguchi / “The Fish’s Desire”

Yes…

You are alive.

That’s something.

“…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

— Samuel Beckett / The Unnameable

Annihilation Haiku

The mushroom cloud grows
Across the blind horizon
A dead gray snow falls

“… for the eyes of the children
of nagasaki,
for the eyes of the children
of middle passage,
for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes,
russian eyes, american eyes,
for all that remains of the children,
their eyes,
staring at us, amazed to see
the extraordinary evil in
ordinary men.”
— Lucille Clifton / “sorrow song”

Gormless Writers

— No more talk of fish.
— Let’s talk about the month long break from writing.
— Let’s not.  
— Let’s write about the month long leave from writing. 
— Let’s  not.
— Let’s consider the month long abstinence from writing.
— Let’s not.  
— Let’s…
— Let’s not. 
— Stop.  
— No need for a post-mortem. 
— Well… let’s start writing again?  
— Yes, let’s do that.  
— Haven’t we already done that by doing this?
— This here?  
— Um… yes.  
— Yes, I think we have.  It’s a start anyway now, isn’t it?  
— Yes, I suppose it is.  
— Is that what you think, too?  
— Yes. Yes, I suppose I do.  
— Well?
— There!
— We’ve done it.  
— Yes. 
— Yes. We have.
— Please pee on me…

“… writing can make you crazy and then it goes on to make you whole.”

— Belle Yang / Forget Sorrow interview

Of Joubles and Gangles

It’s a little troublesome this hankering for a jouble when there are only gangles about. It was established in the 14th century, that joubles were preferable to gangles, and so this is the way today.  

I encountered bands of brigands on my way to Holocuse, but on every occasion I was able to avoid detection and pursuit. But I did witness two other travelers being drawn and quartered on my journey. Most pitiable.

I ensconced myself behind the shrubbery of Ni, and abraded my skin to a bloody mass of striated  meat — and then I abused myself (in a biblical manner) with the blood I drew from the various parts and orifices on my body. It was blessed, enlightening, and frolicsome. I might try it again on my next journey to a marfing tournament. 

I live. I breathe. I jerk with bodily humors sanguinary. Suckage is suckage, I say. Drop me in the cesspool of thee virulent inquisition in nine word defamation. 

Don’t go to your tongue if it’s not needed. Furthermore, I don’t need a tonsure.  

And I don’t need a turn in my betrothed’s scold‘s bridle.

“Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas.  Racist ideas make white people think more of themselves which further attracts them to racist ideas.”

— Ibram X. Kendi / How To Be An Anti-Racist

Phosphene Dream

He produced phosphenes that smelled of mandarin oranges — a strange synesthetic effect that followed the orange-rimmed yellow spots that exploded in his closed-eye vision.

He thought this was an improvement on the phosphenes of his youth that smelt of rotting meats and animal carcasses, and filled his nights with monstrous nightmares.

He finally felt like an adult. He thought he’d arrived at the happiest point of his life, but he felt his brand was in peril. Only the whip smartest YouTubers and TikTok’ers could make the scene, and his phosphenes were falling behind.

So he really pressed down hard on his eyes this time and they fell into the center of his head, down his sinuses, and mysteriously into his esophagus, and through his digestive tract.

His vision was something spectacular now — 12K Supreme! It was like a Haight Ashbury psychedelic oil light show at a Grateful Dead concert, c. 1966 — every time another enzyme, bile, or gastric acid washed over his eyes making their way through this world of gastrointestinal wonder — phosphenes like he’d never seen before exploded through his eyeless head — sending bright yellow sparks out of his vacant eyeholes.

Man, it blew him away.

And when the peristalsis finally evacuated his eyes into the depths of his own rectum— the time was now! Now he knew he’d be the supreme influencer to all mankind.

He tapped out a telegraph to his mother: “Success, Mother! I’m finally in my own rectum and about to be born again!”

“The coming apart, the giant laceration across the sky, we all feel it. Look at the fire, look at it, like all the rage of all the smallest beings.”

— Dawn Lundy Martin / “Perspective is Supposed to Yield Clarity”