thee istsfor manity reader

Parsnip with Pomegranate Tendencies

Use this taro chip as your viaticum, the priest says.

Where am I?

In a priest driven ambulance, he says.

Good luck, the one in the passenger seat says.

What are you going to do about the primary explosion? the nurse administering my I.V. asks.

Play it as it lays, another says.

No, you did not leave anything on in the kitchen, yet another says.

So I told them: I put on my tight disco pants, and applied plenty of hairspray. I think there were invaders at the gates. I wrote as fast as I could before midnight. Then I turned into a malevolent parsnip with pomegranate tendencies. I didn’t parry her sari because she asked me nicely not to. Remember that. So I repeated it often through the night to myself. I reminded myself to use my inside voice inside my head. I didn’t have to be so loud. And I made a point of not speaking my internal monologues in front of strangers again.

Amen, the priest said.

“Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it… Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.”
— Werner Herzog

Thee All Purpose Bedtime Story

“Get your xenograft ideas away from me. Take off that stretchy, crappy underwear. I’m showering tomorrow morning. Clean. Clean pajamas. All right sleepy time for me. Nice and cold. Yes. It’s going to stay cold all night long. What? No. Sush! As it is we ate so much right before… basically within two hours of going to sleep. No. Why? Are you? You know I like it in the summer to turn the air way down at night. I’ll be asleep in twenty minutes. I know it takes you longer, but… just get under the covers and you won’t be cold. Stop! Go to sleep. Just read until you go to sleep… or put your headphones in, you always fall asleep within ten minutes that way. Maybe tomorrow morning if we wake up.”

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
— Oscar Wilde

no hay compunctions

¡coño viejos! / just enough to keep moving / thee old folks r frazzled / speaking in tongues / say things they never said in public when they minds were right / right-right / but they hearts were always hardened / puckered as weathered leather / dry as cotton on a sand drift / if you draw a venn diagram there’s an intersection between us / in the way of chromosomes / but they ain’t no true overlap / just a bunch of xx’s / dumb-ass / insane chemical xx’s /

blue / i’m blue / white / red / how similar flags look / no compunctions about leaving ‘em here to die / desiccated half buried in this desert / he anti-semite / she islamophobe / neither took a long look at theyselves / not quite the right shade / white enough to pass, tho / ‘til they opened they island mouths / oneatha’ quaint ones / babble different tongue / posture different way / not stewing right in thee great melting pot /

double double toil ‘n bubble / fire burn ‘n caldron bubble /

huddled mass shit / ya’ know / 90 miles to go / ‘til i unburden myself / & we must keep going /

never ending / but it don’t have to end this way

“many cubans say fruta bomba for papaya. mitt romney once claimed he loves papaya on miami cuban radio, unaware it means pussy. que clueless, que jokes, when we speak before we know.”
— Kyle Carrero Lopez / “(slang)uage”

flarfish 29: alow hyperbole

She had studding-sails out alow and aloft, with a light but steady breeze

Whether it’s true or mere hyperbole is not the point

those passages where the Hebrews by hyperbole ascribe

recipes in Arabic, even though the quantities mentioned are

surely poetic on her starboard side abreast the funnel

Her hull was opened up Shrunk recreant from thy mighty aid

“I have lived a shameful life.

I can’t understand how this thing called ‘human life’ is supposed to work.”
— Osamu Dazai

“The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant ‘government of the people’ but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term ‘people’ to actually mean.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates / Between The World And Me

A Stiction Fiction

“You fill me with stiction.”

“Friction?”

“No. Stiction.

“Shouldn’t it be inertia?”

“No, stiction, damn it!”

“Sorry, I don’t know what that is.”

He was filled with a horror and a hate so acute at that instant that his fist automatically clenched and his arm seemed to move autonomously driving that clenched fist to an inexorable meeting with his brother’s face…

The author’s stream of thought is broken here, and a lyric, and then a deconstructed thought impinges:

Anger is an energy. The certainty of reason is a tyranny.

Speak in aphorisms. Think in signifiers. Be the signified.

And so the author continued on another string. The nascent narrative broken…

“You fill me with inertia.”
“There, that’s more like it.”
“Like what?”
“Like what I like.”

And then unable to completely gather their wits the author’s work and discipline was irretrievably disrupted, and they were done for the day.

“We live, as we dream — alone.”
— Joseph Conrad

Abecedarian: The Qua of Qui

As of the who: in a liturgy of grained righteousness cleansed, folded & articulated —

Bestiary of birth canals and unguents squeezed from bodies now desiccated;

Concupiscent casuistry led me to my troubles

Delineated in these lines in the margins of thee Apocrypha.

Energumens here, and you come into a world of pain, possession, & black hole nothingness

Fecund you are, full of so many — what you are not is

God, and neither is the author — purveyor of distilled sin in pearl dust & gin

Humanity’s dark mirror of depredation

“Instant Karma is gonna get you…”

Jaundiced and juiced we know

Knowledge is nothing. We have proven as much. We are eyeless in

Lenticular madness refracted, and blinded, as those who would drink four ounces of white wine and horse dung

Macerated and made into a tincture for the masses to imbibe.

Neoteric quaffs that did not quench our thirst and we went thirsty, and in search

Of the man who described literature as a “tissue of citations” its contexts and referents unknowable, akin to a

Palimpsest of the putative self — a coin scratch off ticket past the attenuated ego(s) — to live in the Id everyday & at night I’ll place

Quincunxes on your eyes for a faster journey to nowhere.

Rampikes dot the road here, a jagged landscape without human trace, and the sky above is filled with

Starlings that twister about appearing as unhinged tornados marking the air with darkling ablutions —

Take thy clyster pipe and syringe and find a willing orifice proficient in state sponsored press releases —

Unction administered — and nailed up to the door jambs of a vacationing congess raising money for a defunct president.

Vacillate no more for we are refluxing on our American original sin

Wandering through the Death Museum where we whisper colloquies to lives well lived in a

Xeriscaped land of ochres and sand browns — a land so prickly that we found nothing but portents, penitants, and penury

Yoked to a future as arid and bleak as our past. A new

Zoonotic apocalypse is the only viable option as we ease into these closing minutes… or we’ll burn it all down ourselves.

“… there is nothing ordinary about humanity and good sense. As we see now on both sides of the Atlantic, both traits are quite extraordinary, especially when they confront the entwined threats of biological and ideological plague.”
— Robert Zaretsky

flarfish 6 (copy&paste): limn the cathode nimbus

Nimbus F (currently in orbit) [6] has an experiment

the corresponding cathode currents are given

by hierarchical

cloud foundation laughing gas winner… and described by

two bit Cathode University tied up in the high value of sliver

limitless limits limn limned limning limns limo limos limousine …

plexuses demonstrator cathode curiously libellous fucker’s

cathode-ray tube | catholic | Catholic Church | Catholic Epistles | Catholicism …… war | limiter | limites | limiting | limitless | limit point | limn | limnetic | limnology …

The final configuration is L-shaped, lit by color-changing LED light cabinets and cove lighting and cold-cathode tubes.

NIGHTS NIGHTY NIHILS NILGAI NILGAU NILLED NIMBLE NIMBLY NIMBUS

“Reading is more important than writing.”
— Roberto Bolaño

Good Man Whizzle

Do you presage, portent, or prophesy? I need to know for I want to marry a gal from Hoboken, but my friend tells me she’s a doxy. Should I marry, good man whizzle?

Ah, my good son, what foresight. What a solid foundation you have. How stout. To seek me out. To seek out the wisdom of an old harbinger like myself. Well let me tell you what I can do for you. I can dance a jig on the corpse of callosum. I can sing a plenary session speech in Esperanto. I can even maypole the dilettante fellows of carbuncular. All that and more. But I can’t tell you a thing about your lassie, as I caught the French pox from her and it’s really attenuating my signals from the future; and it made my pizzle fall off in a sizzle in the noon day sun, son.

Oh, thank you wise man. I’ve been looking for a case of the claptrap! And how better than to trap myself in a union with this syphilitic trollop. Thanks, good man.

Oh, no, wait, good son. It’s gonorrhea, not syphilis. Maybe even a dose of one of the hepatitises… I can’t remember which…

“What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he is staring out of the window.”
— Burton Rascoe

Languor

His word, his breath,
Are merely synecdoche —
Ephemeral.

Nothing is true in the true
Sense of the word.

He drifts on the Lethe,
Intoxicated by water that transforms —
A trip into languor —
And never sets foot on the other shore.

“A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention… If we’re lucky, it will be a note that reverberates and expands, one that other people will hear and understand.”
— Roxanna Robinson