Annihilation Haiku (7.16.20)

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

“There was just a continent without
much on it
under a sky that never cared less.”

— William E. Stafford / “At the Bomb Testing Site”

In This Hole

I live in a parallel universe of my own devising. I live most of my days in a dank cell, in the bowels of a vast complex of cells. I am allowed to write for fifteen minutes every afternoon, on the refuse recycled from the lands beyond the barrens. The pipes on the ceiling drip at all hours of the day and the walls are covered in sweat.

On occasion I hear others moaning from distant cells, but never from the cells immediately adjacent to mine. I’ve never seen any of other inmates here, only the gloved hands and truncheons of my captors. They allow me out for a day once a month. On these occassions I visit my childhood home, which is now a pile of dusty detritus and gnarled rebar. I also visit the site of my former school, which is now a massive dung heap. Really, a dung heap. A heap of dung one hundred feet long and thirty feet high now. Cattle wander about freely here since they were infected with the plague, and deemed holy beings. The inhabitants of this neighborhood have been tasked with building the dung heap into a 100 x 100 foot totem to our shantytown. The last refuge before one enters the barrens.

When I tire I sleep on a patch of rock where our library once stood. Early the next day I walk back to the complex and my cell. I love my little hole.

In this parallel world which I inhabit only the objects that become the subject of my consciousness truly exist, everything else is a ghostly simulacrum that plays on unseen film screens in theaters I don’t attend. And that I wouldn’t attend had I the capacity. And I am a capacious man, even in these lean times.

Especially in my little hole.

“So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.”

— Audre Lorde / “A Litany for Survival”

The Derelict Web

And he must hold on to the sink and stand firmly on his left leg because his right leg is useless. It doesn’t respond to his command all Henry can manage is to drag it along and he doesn’t dare stand upon it because he doesnt trust it to hold him up.

In this fashion Henry starts his day, everyday. He doesn’t know how he will go on. But he goes on, and the next bit is the worst part of every morning.

Henry?

What, already?

What does regret mean?

A metal machine skronk segues to a lower register followed by a thin glass skittering from the closet.

Nothing. Nothing but the black suit, white shirt, black tie and demon shoes. A glint catches his eye, and there in the corner a drunken spider makes it’s way across it’s derelict web toward a sidereal moth in its throes.

“Henry, you were such a good boy. So tender to the touch. Remember the day you discovered the Sassaby’s? All you said for days was, I am a sassy Sassaby. Oh, you were such a dream, Henry”

Henry rotates the bird cage, shakes it, places his ear to the felt pad on the bottom.

It’s not that Henry is on the road to perdition as much as he is in Satan’s bowels. And then it all begins again.

“Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.”

— Voltaire / “Questions sur les Miracles”

The Dream: Bushwa Bill 

The god of the godless oversees this place. 

There is no lodestar here. All is coal, bituminous and gas fires. Everyone wears a sheen of black. Coal dust and gas floats through the atmosphere. The air is sharp with the tang of petroleum and machine fluids. The ground is never dry, always a thick sludge that swallows the heels of your boots and sucks them off your feet. The food tastes of petrochemicals and your sense of taste is attenuating quickly. 

There are tendrils of perfume pin pricking the air and you follow that scent to the end of a street where the bodies are piled chest high. At the foot of the mound a boy with a tank on his back is spraying the bodies with the sweet scented aerosol. A moment of beauty among the nightingales. A twist of sobriety in a world full of drunkenness. This is what you live for in this world.

What the child does is what every child his age does. The aerosol not only kills the bacteria on the decaying bodies and counteracts the stench, but also hastens the decomposition of the bodies. There are many neighborhood dumping areas about the entrepôt — just like the Middle Ages, some say, back in the days of the death carts and plague pits. 

There was no place left to put the countless dying and recently dead, the land would tolerate no more bodies; there wasn’t any free space. There was a constant coming and going from these dumping areas. People would come with hands and arms full of family members and leave lighter, empty handed. 

The gas vents punctuate the night far into the distance. The belching stacks and fires from these vents are constant. You’re happy that what little you can see of the sky, during what passes for daylight hours these days, is not the continuous fog of your childhood. 

Of late some wisps of anemic blue sky have been spotted. The weather has cooled too. There’s been some talk of a returning atmosphere, but mostly uneducated conjecture you figure. What does anybody really know about what’s happening beyond the barrens. No one is certain. Everyone that has ventured out in recent memory has never returned, and even though you’ve given thought to it, you’ve never seriously considered it. Until now.

“Hey, wake up there. Move along.”  A soldier prods you in the shoulder blade with her truncheon.

“Oh, fuck off,” you say. “Miserable pig.”

“Oy, you!” A larger soldier approaches from an angle you did not expect. “Ey, fucker, move the fuck on.” 

A blow to your temple sends you cantering down the street. You wobble. A couple of kids playing with garbage snicker and run. The others walking by avert their eyes and move in wide arcs around the soldiers. You run back to your room, unsteady at first but then gaining momentum and resolve. You hear the soldiers laugh as you run. You’re not worth their time and energy. You decide you’re leaving tomorrow night, after your shift. You’ll venture into the barrens, anything is better than this dead place.

“William, you’re bleeding, there on the side of your head. You didn’t tangle with the police again, did you?”

You head directly for your side of the room, past the sheet hung up between you and your mother. 

“William?”

“Shut up. Shut up, please. I’ve had it with you, with the cops, with The Factory and with this god damned place. I’m going to leave. I’m heading out tomorrow after my shift. I’m going out beyond the barrens.”

You tear the sheet of its moorings. “You can have this shit hole all to yourself after tomorrow.”

The call of The Factory siren next door rattles the window. The shift is changing. Doors in the hall open and close in unison, and your mother aghast and about to speak automatically turns and leaves the room and heads for The Factory. 

You stare at your broken dirty hands, gnarled from the digging, always digging. Somewhere there must be more, something different. It can’t all be like this, you think.

“It failed. The whole world failed at it. It could have been so brilliant. How strange of you not to feel sad. 

Who knew life could be so awful.”

— Alice Birch / Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.

bushwa bill’s haiku

gas fires choke the night — 
coal and bituminous blue — 
breath of the godless

“Basically, that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.”

— Charles Bukowski

I Had Me A Wife, I Had Me Some Daughters

Massive heat dome come
Down on me — I’ve run myself
Ragged — nobody knows
What I’ve done to my family.

As the Fata Morganas shimmered away — 
I dug a hole as big as could be
Dropped them in, one by one,
In the dark maw of atavistic iniquity.

Released to the night crawlers — 
Oh, Lord, please, let them take root
By the leprous shagbark hickory —
I did unto them as they unto me.

In the dead of the morning
When the tree towers above me
I’m gonna hang myself on that gnarled branch
Of the family tree.

“…this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.”

— Adrienne Rich / “What Kind of Times Are These”

Popcorn Double Feature

Various ideas for your book:

Include a scene at the rheumy palace — 

Maybe a nonfiction setting on shipwrecked cay. 

Maybe not.

Use these words liberally:

Ablation; asperity; cassocks; chasubles;  hooded cowls; astringent; incursive; afflux; minikin; Grand Guignol; rutilant; cadge; rebus; limpid; enmity; hackles; pathoformic; sabbat; afflatus.

Write, one hundred, 100 word chapters. 

End abruptly, midway through the narrative, and append a long footnote that elucidates nothing.

Add Autocorrected Texts and Overheard Conversational Automatism.

Include two single word chapters: “Isotope” and “Gunplay” on pages 33 and 66, respectively.

Include the anecdote about the Girl Scout merit badge you were awarded for “Sailing.”

Title the work: 

Lime Automatic See Thru Three Cats Aging in the He Code Other Using Nixon No-Stow Straws

Include the anecdote about Harry and Jerry not having cottage cheese on their plates at your Sweet Sixteen BBQ. And how Stone took  the big wooden spatula and rammed it in Orpheus.

Remember people are usually pessimistic about rain.

Include the scene where you make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for every potential boyfriend on the first date. 

Include the line: “I’m a hipster.”

Don’t disappoint everyone.

No one was mad at you.

Remember what Dr. Greene said:

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic, and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

Include the words THE END.

“Optimism,” said Cacambo, “What is that?” “Alas!” replied Candide, “It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst!”

— Voltaire / Candide

Softcover Words

Read this “How to…” book
and communicate in softcover words
your hard cover deeds —

herding sheep and goats,
lying with packs of dogs,
theorizing  yersinia pestis theorems,
and puzzling though a sheaf
of sanity assassins.

Read about the coughing
and sneezing of the infected.
Eat stands of banana, malanga, and yuca.

And make ten thousand marks
silvery and lustrous gray —

recounting the executions carried out
by children bored of kicking
old oil drums green
and rusted brown.

“What the lawyers with the midwestern palazzo seem to think is what a lot of elite people and police seem to think: society is basically unfair, and they are willing to go to extremes to preserve that unfairness, since they’re on the winning side of it.”

— Rebecca Solnit / “Chrome-Plated Pistols and Pink Polos: The Face of Elite Panic in the USA”

Strange Circle Sheet Cakes

I says to him: “Remember to put your on mask before you go inside.”

“What?” he says, and moves violently toward me. “This is not a test. This is all you get. Why not make the best of it? Go. Go write your various things about white dwarves and red fiery giants.”

“No, just saying,” I say. “Stay healthy. Stay safe.”

He spits back: “Don’t be ridiculous I’m not nidicolous; but rather a falafel with pendulous testicles waiting for the flood to come. Latter day visionaries scream jeremiads at my prize marigolds, and the man in the moon is down with a case of botulism. Bottle that and eat it with crackers.”

Now I’ve got this umbrella furled and I slap it into my open palm to let him know I mean business if he moves any closer. (And I mean business) He eyeballs me and I tell him to cool it.

“Listen to me, buddy,” he says. “Every quinquennium… herpetology is the game. Do you know my name? I so hope I’m not envenomated… fa la la la la, let’s live for today…  I was born at the Serpentarium. I’m quite the star: bent over, twisted and decrepit beyond my years. I’ve been bitten over 130 times at last count, and I’m so full of different snake venoms that my blood is used to make numerous antivenin. My penis coils and my tongue darts out to taste the air; and my jaw comes distended when I eat now. I’m such the hissy fur… Eat your mask!”

“Huh?!” is all I could manage. Fearful, I began backing up. Trying to spot my car in the parking lot. It was a brutally hot day, and the reflected heat coming back up at me from the macadam was intense. It felt like the bottom of my chin and neck were burning.

“Hey! Come back here,” he said. He began waving his arms in strange circles and stabbing at the air. He sprang toward me and sang:

“My uke is the chip on my shoulder… The baffling thing is that it’s also the chip in my chocolate…. My koolaid acid test, my plangent awkwardness… I strive to rise up from the floor, but only managed to fall down through to my auntie’s anus and into her large intestine… it’s dark and warm in there and I didn’t  dare move...”

I turned away and ran into the lot, but he chased me down, wrapped himself around my legs and tackled me onto the frying tarmac. He was bestial. He was strong. He rolled me around and sat on my stomach. Pinned me down.

“Nothing in this world makes sense, chum,” he said. “Nothing. You never imagined this here when you left your house this morning. This is life. Don’t ever count on anything. Ever.”

“Stop,” I said. “Stop this and let me up.”

He smashed me in the mouth and loosened a bicuspid, it began to leak blood at the gumline onto the back of my throat. 

“I am Ambage Circumbendius!” he said. “I have an indirect and circular manner of making my bed each morning.” He pulled me up by the collar, nose to nose. “Good morning!”

He palmed my face and drove my head into the ground. He said, “I spread a 100 by 50 foot tarpaulin over my tiny house each morning. That’s how I make my bed. Good afternoon!” He pressed his finger into the tip of my nose. “What do you think of that?”

He pushed off me, wheeled around, and disappeared into black maw of the Costco. Unbeknownst to him, they’d already sold out of sheet cakes.

“Because America… Good, god damn, evening,” I muttered.

“New myths are needed; but that’s none of my business.”

— Salman Rushdie / Midnight’s Children

Embrace Those Demons

Listen, Walter:

Don’t fight the demons in your head; that will always be a losing proposition.  You must realize the demons are there. The demons were invited in at an impressionable age and will always live in your head. You should acknowledge the demons and realize that they will not go away; they will reside in your head as long as you have consciousness. Embrace those demons; they are part of you, and then release them every time they appear and they will eventually dissipate of their own accord. They may stop manifesting themselves as often as they do now, or they may not, but railing against them and haranguing yourself for having them with you will amount to nothing but a self imposed misery. They will always be there, or at the peripheries, and you must deal with that.

“Few days following the death of the rats
Men pass away like falling walls!…

The coming of the devil of plague
Suddenly makes the lamp dim,

Then it is blown out,
Leaving man, ghost and corpse in the dark room.”

— Shi Tao-nan / Tien Yu Chi