thee istsfor manity reader

Your Ten Favorite Holiday Memories

1. You are playing mechanized baseball: a ball bearing is pitched out of a hole, and the bat is a pinball flipper — and fwap! The ball bearing falls into one of a series of holes marked “single, double, triple, home run, and out.” There are vastly more outs than hits. Then you move on to submarine warfare: small plastic ships float out near the horizon line as you look through your periscope: you estimate position, hit the fire button on the handle, and BOOM! Down goes das boot!

2. You are the night’s confabulation. You don a Richard Burton affectation and on occasion you break out into song and dance, Al Jolson style, viz., a good Jewish boy doing blackface or something minstrel-like. Not to worry, you’ve run this through the department of psychological sanitation, and nothing that you do or say will offend, chagrin, or impinge upon a healthy state of mind. No, in fact, you shall be put through the “so called” ringer, and as a point of further fact you are wearing an Arab strap, and it will assist you in hitting certain notes with a certain meaning. No! No cause for alarm. This is all family friendly, PG rated, and sanitized for your protection. The buzzword to listen for: gentrification, collateral damage, enhanced interrogations, debt ceiling limits… the list is long, but you know them well. So without further ado…

3. You are Claudia’s kid — conceived at that apartment she and Terry lived in above the Garden of Eden Diner in Hoboken. Yeah, remember they were doing roadie work for Yo La Tengo that year, they even opened a couple of shows for them using the name of their first band, Rasputin’s Swim.

4. You are a case of the shakes, momma made the shake n’ bake. I got the shakes, momma made the chicken fried steak. I got the shakes, momma made the whole world quake — she’s got the power you know. I got the shakes, momma said she’s going away.

5. You are the doxology of reflection in a darkened alcove. God is in the alcove. God is in the house. God is loose in there. Who let him in? Did you bait him with cerulean cookies and sugar clouds? Now God’s rummaging around. Uninvited. Unwanted. What dolts you both are.

6. You are biddable in the execrable moments before the prisoner is executed. You are Richard Burton bombast, Shakespearean affectation a notch too loud and an eyelash too wide. You are the murmuration of starlings lost in the roiling chaos in that instant before banking hard left. You are the suppurations of wounds that don’t heal three weeks out. You are the gesticulations of the man without legs as the detritus and shrapnel falls back to earth and settles on the rim of the new-formed crater. You are the child transfixed with the sky as she traces the arc of the parachute bomb’s parabola on its ecliptic. You are.

7. You are last day of November: when ladies of idle lament, and big men with boxy jackets in swimming trunks, big trunks, salute portmanteaus in the streets of Deauville. You sing, “break up to make up, that’s all we do, first you love me, then you hate me, that’s a game for fools.”

8. You are lust unbound. You just want to kiss her, “please just let me kiss you.” She wants to smash you. “I will let you smash me. Beat me with that truncheon, smash me with that truncheon.” Then she broke the spell and hissed: “disrepute!” You lodged a complaint via computer, the one on the street corner, then you had enough. You stopped.

9. You are tornado thoughts ten seconds after the weather warning has been issued.

10. You are the shrieking instrument panel on the jet spiraling earthbound.

“I like to do the opposite of everything that is making money.”

— Meg Ramey

The Cobalt

Everyone on tiny purple microdots is encouraged to call the quasar, and if you get no answer please call the event horizon.

The DMT sequence transports have been established.

All galactic envoys and space cadets are registered for a bitchin’ wow experience, man!

It’s only a thing nothing.

“Have a low overhead. Don’t live with anybody who doesn’t support your work. Very important. And read a lot. Don’t be afraid to read or of being influenced by what you read. You’re more influenced by the voice of childhood than you are by some poet you’re reading.”

— Grace Paley

Letter Never Sent

I was gas huffing one afternoon, by the train tracks near the smelter, trying to shotgun iso nitrite through my paint gun and boom — whoosh! — it hit me.

It was a wrap, and on came a visual rap of distortions through time — shit I hadn’t remembered in forever, cascading — distortion to static.

Momentarily I was up on a Brady Bunch screen: Momma, Pappa, Uncle Justus, Chelsea and Me — the other four were faceless homonculii, who despite lacking features had silver metallic paint smeared all over the bottom of their faces. Well, we had a Brady Bunch, anyway, in garish dayglo.

Letter never sent. The ideal copy.

“Ah, good taste, what a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”
— Pablo Picasso

Two Views: A Cut-Up Bedtime Story

I.

X.’s home was a shambles:

piles of amber eyes,

clouds of fleas and other debris,

the ritual heads against our legs;

red bodies were discovered –

strong and sharp –

in the refrigerator’s freezer

relying on a stethoscope,

crowbar and chisel to make a hole

beyond salvation

II.

Has anyone seen

I could eat your heart 

    for dinner

with such conviction…

you?

probably be scared

“Ask me if I’ve ever had to use
bottle caps as breadcrumbs to help
my brother find his way back home.
He never could tell the taste between
a scar and its wounding, an angel or demon.”

— Tanaya Winder / “Becoming a Ghost”

photo courtesy 100 word story.

Sangfroid I-IV

i.  The Ashen Landscape

“He’s got what?  Days left?  I don’t want to be there when he dies.”

“Sangfroid.”

“I’m cold-blooded?”

“You didn’t wish to come back to the village — to the sea?”

“I see… a Rothko — canted, a lost apocryphal work — an ashen landscape in three gradations.  My father tore out its center and revealed there’s no heart to the universe, only a corrugated armature — frozen, encased — as if the sky were stapled to the sea with liminal ice.”  

“You see wasteland?”  

“I see ghosts.  I was eleven.  My father placed the gun to his temple — then mine.  He abandoned me here.”

ii.  A Song for the Plague Year

I find my father supine on the bathroom floor, limned by a bloody halo — a pinpoint hole in his left temple.  Gorgeous.

The floor seethes and the ceiling lowers its claim upon me.  I’m extruded out of the bathtub spigot.  Suffering.  Wait.  Wait.  Suffering.  I’m in the heart of darkness.  I’m in the heart of the work now.  Shiver.  Fertile.  Gorgeous.

iii.  Molecular Organic Nano-machines

I’m at the morphine station.

I’m a soft machine inside a hard silicone husk.  I’m a warped machine rattling out flickering images: images of a gun.

I’m a soft machine in a hard exoskeleton — silicone dark inside — silicone smooth and white outside.  My memories play back on the cryoscreen. Here memories are particulate existences transformed into nano-globules (n-g.’s) that are secreted from the ferrules at the end of your iPuffer: smoky, hormonal, and projected inside and beyond your eyes.

“Please cue n-g. 173-A: the day I met my father at CBGB’s; and frame n-g. 173-B: the moment that punk rock saved my life.  Please add the blue 17 gelatin filter.”

A puff from the ferrule and the images resolve, but this memory is faulty.  The memory warps and echoes: a radiator squeals, brass electrodes buzz, my father is blood-crusted, ignored in a dusty corner, covered with mites escaping the evil heat.  Batista’s henchmen torture another… no, stop, this is not my memory but the anecdote he told me that night… 

“This is not the n.g. I requested. STOP.  STOP.  Press the eject…” 

Blood, on the tip of my tongue.  Where is it coming from?  Then a bestial din: the sound of a million cicadas’ lament before the seventeen year death — a rupture tectonically within me.  The smell of hissing green plantains dropped into overheated oil — the splattering: tinny, spastic —  and then the loss of control.

iv.  missing  STOP

im not who i was once was   STOP   aposiopesis   STOP   STOP   im a perfectionist   im obedient    get away from here    get away from that gun   STOP   STOP   STOP   dr x said im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   dont relive it    dont rehash it   and if it finds you   then embrace it    embrace the thoughts    embrace the feelings    be one with it and then release it     youre not your memories    youre not your feelings   be one with the thoughts   be one with the feelings   and then release them   STOP   

punk rock changed my life    no punk rock saved my life    the songs of the minutemen   no not that memory   STOP  STOP   dont touch him there   dont touch me stop it   put down that gun   38 snubnose    it weighs a ton    STOP   STOP   STOP    embrace this memory   embrace this emotion   im not my memories   not my emotions   STOP   aposiopesis   apoplexies   apophatic   and aphasic   STOP   STOP    dr x said    whatever happens   its ok    whatever happens is ok   im ok    whatever happens    im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   youre doing the best that you can   im doing the best that i can   STOP   STOP   STOP

“Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.”

— Francis Bacon

Havana Bouncy Ball

It’s a Havana bouncy ball… a buena Havana bouncy ball… una bola Habanera rebotante… say Havana bouncy ball!

Florence Shaw is going on and on about all manner of global cities’ bouncy balls — except Havana bouncy balls.

So thankful this month is moribund.

This is Fall at 8:22 a.m. on 11/30/20. Jamaica Plain, MA. (4/4)

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead.”
— Susan Sontag

Another found art treasure found inside a used $1.00 copy of Melville’s Moby-Dick.

“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.”

— Jane Yolen

Cease to Resist

My pantaloons are full of persistence at the edge of insistence.

This is an instance of passionate persuasion — perfectly pitted prior to priapic penitence which is pertinent to the power of poseurs in preprandial punctuality of the pepperpots, perhaps in privy council with the pastor of pap.

Perhaps.

“‘We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact,’ Tyler said. ‘So don’t fuck with us.’”

— Chuck Palahniuk / Fight Club

Billingsgate and Balderdash

You are like the tuber of calcaneous, necessary but non-articulating.

Without you there is no ambulating me…

The things you’ve said to me in your gasps and low moans:

“Starting rotation from blackbird…”

“They transferred me to room 15…”

“It’s the same to die here or there.”

Meant nothing to me at the time, but mean everything now, in this age of torn Achilles.

We’re five words short of three thousand in an existence where words don’t count for nuthin’.

I miss you my tuber of calcaneus.

I miss the hole in my head.

“Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.”

— André Breton

“A Thanksgiving Prayer” by William S. Burroughs

There’s no improving on thee Thanksgiving classic, so I’ll repost the great “Uncle Bill” as I did last Thanksgiving day — just in case you didn’t drop by last year.

Again, thank you for reading this past year, and I trust (as I imagine you do) that next year is bound to be an improvement on this one.

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

— Anne Lamott / Bird by Bird