thee istsfor manity reader

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

Oneiric Phase Player

To take your place I place this alchemical bomblet in your sassafras soporific. In this oneiric state anything is possible so I extend my sickle sharp proboscis the seventeen feet necessary to puncture the dream bubble that is unspooling above your bed. There I inhale the flying seahorses, the cavorting beasties and fireflies in fresnel cubes.

(The sea sponges made of milk chocolate and the orange flavored tsetse flies are my favorite)

And in the one quiet moment between my inhalations, you awaken and proclaim the central tenets of manifest destiny have forever been misunderstood and the lights come on plunging the entire scene into darkness. I’m out of place.

“A dream inside a dream might not be a dream.”

—Cormac McCarthy / Cities of the Plain

Your bed is a ciborium of iniquity…

“Get rid of meaning. Your mind is a nightmare that has been eating you: now eat your mind.”

— Kathy Acker

Titular Stuff Here

It’s a ragged sort of heat. The call of the west again.

Then a discomfiting sort of rain. It’s my first day out of the house in nearly three weeks. Just 2 days ago I was fetal, on the bed, unable to sweat the thoughts away.

I found a litter of puppies feeding in the corner of the living room, and dry shit streaked on the bathroom towel. The Christmas tree is canted and some of the balls have unfurled their string covers revealing the styrofoam balls beneath. I remember the last year they had glass ornaments the piles of colored glass shards spread about the living room and the multiple band aids on my cousin’s feet. Those styrofoam balls must be 25 years old now. But it was the smell that was truly distinctive, a mix of sour broiling turkey mixed with wet dog fur, overfull litter box, and Lysol.

Someone’s cut and paste — forlorn and left out in the desert — cries out for purpose. There is no liability. There is no curse.

I considered the crow a baleful thing; it darkened my day instantly like a light speed sarcoma. My day, my year, my life was shot in that cut and paste. And in that instant I wrote this, and never wrote again.

“Why was it so unthinkable that we ourselves—not necessarily tomorrow or the next day, but eventually—follow the same well-beaten trail toward oblivion as the dodo, the black rhinoceros, the passenger pigeon . . . and all the countless other species whom we ourselves had driven from the face of the earth?”

— Mark O’Connell / Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back