thee istsfor manity reader

Tonight, Yesterday & Some Night to Come

He lives with ephemeral creatures under his feet and creatures over his head. A case in point: his thoughts diverting his elbow’s skin and the rubbing of tender footing. Sycamores make wide arm imprecations and water themselves with wines of every variety and delectation. His ambition is drained in a scruff of the neck twist, a meager remembrance of his days spent in a robe. His teeth are chattering and he’s taking an apprenticeship as a goldsmith and forge master.

“Fou!” says the Past, inserting its finger in god knows what? The lapis of Transducea?

He slogs, knee deep, in hummingbird angles, all tenuous and blur-fast. Before him shine the bones of the pitiable Condor of Shiva. Is he comforted by this knowledge that the afflatus was hard won — speaking in tongues while wearing the cloaks of invisibility? His body is taught with a dab of holy pedantry.

She heard clacking coming from the road and felt the wheel shudder to the sound of the clacking. Was there a compromised tire up front? What was making that sound? She felt the wheel shake a bit and she pulled over. The car thermometer read 98 degrees and the empty road shimmered in the distance. This is not something she could afford to do, to leave the safety of the car and expose herself to the environment or to potential marauders in wait.

You can intuit Inuit involvement in emoluments and interpretations of the imprecations indivisible by invisible increments…

And you say, “Wha?!”

To which I respond, “wa, wa, wa, wa… dirty water, dirty water… toilet bowl drinker in an age of intercepted illusions of individual freedoms. None of that for you. You drink from the toilet if you want succor.”

“I prefer succotash,” you say.

“I eat stucco at 3:30 every afternoon without fail,” she says.

I say, imperiously, (for afterall I am emperor) that “the only thing to be is the emperor of ice cream.” I trance. “Stevens,” I add.

I walk out the room, with millions of people watching her on their television screens, without the slightest knowledge of antipodal politics or wombat love.

“Wombat love!” he cries.

I was later told, that at that very instant, you arose and turned off your television wondering where had all the good times gone.

“Use your head, can’t you, use your head. You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!”

— Samuel Beckett / Endgame

Happenstance is Crapenstance

Out of the inkwell comes Yonki the heavily sedated quualude dealer. A fuzzy jewfro and pockmarked face wearing his favorite ribbed tank top fraying at the edges by his armpits.

He calls out to Lester the methadone freak standing stooped on Methadone Mile, cup at his feet hoping for spare change, “sir, mam, please…” Haunted by the community praying for his family because his pet chihuahua fell overboard on his cruise to Puerto Rico all those years ago — all has been a blur since.

If you’re brave then you’re good. You hope for equal pay and settle for mediation during record level floods upstate. At this point Yonki embeds his pic into his afro and orders a case of Franco American Sapghetti-O’s from Amazon. Everything else is well known history. So don’t be an inkhorn and lecture me on canned foods and drug dealers!

And just like that, nothing happens. Happenstance is crapenstance.

I ask Yonki: “How long have you had that incendiary hair?”

“How long have I had this incendiary hair?” says he. “As long as the air is rare? You dare to stare at this rarified commodified loss? Where have your hands gone, man?”

As in the case of a fountain — a girandole — the water radiates out from a central point… or a fulminating firework, but all I can muster is “that incendiary hair — metastasizing through mushroom cloud air. It’s not a visual I want to see but it continually impinges upon my consciousness.”

And just like that (again!) nothing happens. Happenstance is crapenstance… again.

I grieve the breeze and jack it all in and turn myself out. “I thought we had a deal,” I say. “It’s a churlishness you beggar and it’s you’re a beggar of a churl. We are now divested and devalued and pumped full of drugs… pointless, I tell you.”

Yonki says: “Your sedulousness leads to nothing but chaos and chauvinism and a bass line that seethes and some say — it’s on fire!“

If he makes a move in this line of business, then there’s no room for me. I’m tied up in impossible knots.

I offer: “Gordian!” Then I add “No, Givency by way of Guernica.”

All Yonki’s able to offer is “Bombs Away!”

And just like that — nothing happens. Happenstance is crapenstance.

“I might die an old man
Scribbler of trash
Forgotten paper-scratcher
But I’ll tell you this
I really love to lay around on my ass
Totally watching television”

— Ron Padgett / “Poem”

flarfish 25: fanfaronade picaro

he got the call of the west

he go, he went, to idaho

when he attempted to lay hands upon others — they resisted

his choler rose —

fandango fanfaronade fantoccini fantod faradism farfel fasces

the picaresque romance

so called from the fact that the picaro 

or scamp is…

laying prayer cloths  touched to the side of lambs

to prevent the fanfaronade:

Hark! to the thunder of the drums,  the title of novelist

which he attempts to disguise his cowardice

the valentón embodies all the good times

surrounding to whom this mixture of ludicrous assumption

fancywork fand fandango picaroon picayune piccadilly piccalilli…

nothing was clear to me

he laid his hands upon my shoulders

my neck paralyzed, my sight extinguished

beneath the hanging tree

“There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.” 

― Jorge Luis Borges / The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory

idaho well ablution

i went to the well and saw jesse
floating there

her eyes frozen on the concrete sky above

arms splayed at her side gently
lapping in the blackness

her eyes were stone gray

i went to the well to perform my ablutions
but jesse was floating there
she was cored

a sliver in the murk

i too feel hollow inside
a stitch of guilt

i went to the well and saw jesse
in an act of transcendence so absolute

so pure in that darkness
that i will not speak of it again

i went to the well
and will never return

“Sometimes it seems as though some puppet-player,
A clenched claw cupping a craggy chin
Sits just beyond the border of our seeing,
Twitching the strings with slow, sardonic grin.”

— Angelina Weld Grimke / “The Puppet-Player”

dry tongue lost (idahaiku 2)

midnight dry tongue lost —
fear seeps esto perpetua —
down the barren path

“Avoid the world, it’s just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.”

— Jack Kerouac / “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”

he hit the road (idahaiku 1)

he hit the road west
shuffle off to idaho
big sky and road blanched

“The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.”

— Annie Dillard

flarfish 32: cramoisy reptar

To reptar may every gentleman, by one eye, or disgrace

Find his rental or his campsite location around the repatriation

of CRAMOISY in his own private idaho

reptar = creep

reptar cerca literatura and draw connections between key writers

At one time people ate what was grown around them

dance-rock quartets have been scuffing up dance floors 

new wave, nu wave, no wave

also measure the impact of small presses on modernist music

built to be a feature-rich static site generator

With a sounds as exuberant as they are infectious

Jose didn’t spot the snake that was creeping through the weeds

danger, danger Will Robinson!

it’s the call of the west

“Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist.”

— Jane Smiley



Newsruption

You will no longer be bothered or financially hurt

for your role in a benches-clearing confrontation at

the place where they check all your boxes according to a photo posted to Facebook.

You will no longer be bothered or financially hurt

by a contagion — a peculiar one where a woman’s sudden

imagining of how this monster was created is upset by her husband’s

nonchalant snacking and drinking what appears to be a cup of coffee.

Don’t focus so much on whether a person fits your type or whether

every person you know has died in the past 24 hours.



“The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.”

— James Baldwin

Détentes

There’s a tool they use to set things right.

But it won’t protect them from the bitter cold of a nighttime swim through the shark infested straits.

A tool of last resort — shaman life hacks! Tabernacle huckster butters!

And us!

We. Decked out with finger guns.

“Be a papper slapper with a doot doot doot doot do!”

Birdsongs for birdies in glam processsion of hip slapping.

“Hingum, Jingum — do do do.”

Milkweed in the shadows and other docile locations.

Détentes from a muddled past — prepaid insurgencies dropped out of Monroe’s pants into a bay of pigs —

“wheepa deepa poo pow pow!”

Whistling childhood advertising ear worms — jingling out of key — these jagged equations validate nothing but the phlegm in our souls.

“You can’t please yourself, but you might can please your soul.”

Grazin’ in the grass is where I wanna be scattering my dead father’s ashes — throwing a handful over my shoulder once, and filling fire ant monticules with the next.

Watching the magic 8 ball answer requests from another world.

“You’re a bitter man,” said Candide. “That’s because I’ve lived,” said Martin.

— Voltaire / Candide

Encomium

I walk in circles gyring — elevating ever outward until I’m circumnavigating your boundless denigration.

Deliver me — enervated — from invigoration as you deliver me from hating myself long enough to despise you.

I’ve placed myself at this longitude so that I may be bisected by your latitude of lassitude.

I’ve misplaced the keys to hegemonic misericordia.

Mercy be done because I haven’t any time left.

Deliver me again from prepositional entanglements and toothsome fricatives.

Yes yes leave my words alone.

Plangent. Agent. Of misfortune.

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”

— William Faulkner