We streamed into the stream
The water we stood in
We stood in
Only once
We eventually returned to where
We came from
A desolate windy place
We began to melt away
We were consigned
I was not sorry
We had been
In time we’ll be again
Or we won’t
“If I didn’t write to empty my mind I’d go mad”
— Lord Byron
I say:
Eidetic images
You say:
A coherent schemata
I say:
Psychic automatism
You say:
Tenebrous but noumenal
A voice over narrator says:
Clement solicitude
“You have to realize that you cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing.”
— Natalia Ginsburg
The refulgent quality of my psychopomp is only surpassed by my staring into the sun.
Psychopomp? Who the hell needs to be led in?
And I often stare into the sun. It’s the only way I know to calm down. My father required it of me when I was a young boy — he broke me early and often. He was the superintendent of our crumbling building in Camarioca after the revolution. Our homely squalor had a taste and a color: bile-yellow.
When I was a pre-teen my mother also demanded that I stare for hours at the sun. One early morning she plunged all of my father’s screwdrivers — a dozen from his tool box — into his chest; and when I say early morning I mean when it was still dark out. The talon ends of three claw hammers were embedded into his head.
None of this was traumatizing at the time. But over the past few years I find myself living inside that visionary loop multiple times daily. And here, when I say daily, I mean when it’s light out. In the dark I have other devices and literary tropes to rely on.
All these years later, I live in exile in Hialeah, as you can imagine I’m half blind. I still look into the sun out of habit, but the sun at this hyper-capitalist meridian is out of tune — a legato A minor flat 6 chord that fills me with revulsion. I want to go back to my island where the sun is in the proper key.
But for now I wait in this dollar-rama thrift shop of a philosophically bankrupt and pestilent country. At least I still have my guaguancó and my son montuno. I carry those in my heart everywhere I go.
I do like the sound of the word kookaburra but I hate the fact that’s it’s a god damned dumb-ass looking bird. It should be a god damned marsupial with a name like that. I hate it when life does that!
Life does that all the time.
And I hate inhabiting my skin. It gets to me, especially these days — it happens more and more that I find myself with some sharp implement in hand ideating about all sorts of bitter and painful ends for myself, but I can’t get anything to happen. My hands won’t conform to the images unspooling in the projection room in my head.
But, man, do I remember mother and those stare-downs with the sun. For the record, I never blinked first. I was always called away to do my chores.
Sometimes I envy how the Mongols had Caffa (I think they call it Feodosia now) and their trebuchet delights; how the Spaniards had their mastiffs for Taino ambush oneupmanship; and how deftly American colonials deployed their pox blankets.
Why can’t I get what I want?
Please, please, please let me get what I want… but I’m even off of that song, as the man who sang it is a supremacist of some sort now.
The rails— bottom and top — don’t stay in place anymore… everything that rises must converge… or so mother told me. But I found, as all frauds are eventually found out — it was really something she gleaned from a Flannery O’Connor narrative… and then she said that Hemingway rewrote the last page of The Sun Also Rises 39 times.
Apocrypha?
Sometimes I feel like a detached bathysphere.
All I have is this metaphoric gibbet and the wheel. I’m here alone. Pitched up here — 30 feet in the air, spinning a half turn with every stiff breeze…
“I can tell you what it is! It is nothing, simple hideous nothing! The final truth of all things of all things is that there is no final truth! Truth is what’s transitory. It’s human life that is real! Truth is the illusion! Life is the only substance we have! I am truth; it is God that is fiction!”
— Paddy Chayefsky / Altered States
A vibrant tuning fork in hand.
This is normally a prime time for burrowing a hole in your heart.
Almost immediately you tell me to videograph your heartache.
You claim that this crowded urban area saps your optimism
and your love for your fellow human.
Someone’s banging on the door, yelling: get out, get out.
You will slowly reopen your heart and repair the gaps, and hope for the best.
It’s still not easy to be asymptomatic.
Over the next couple of weeks before June love forlorn, love clinically
enervated, will disappear permanently.
Fuel for the broken heart.
Food for stormy weather.
“When I’m struggling with writing fiction, I turn to reading other forms: poetry or, most often, nonfiction that intensely investigates a topic unfamiliar to me.”
— Mary South
Illustration by Arthur Burdett Frost (1851–1928) from Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, published circa 1896. Public Domain.
The pelagic fish will continue to swim, and thrive when we are gone…
You! It was nothing.
No need to concern yourself with the rigors of dying.
Listen! We are under the influence of the dog-star.
We must keep careful counsel.
We die between one and three in the morning
in complicated distress.
Such is life in a plague year.
See to it that my particulars are properly disposed.
The earth will be rid of man after the sixth extinction,
and start anew…
There will be balance again.
Illustration from A Rod for Run-awayes, by Thomas Dekker, 1625. Public Domain.
“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
— Ray Bradbury
through whimsical interpretation of bunny ears
’cause it’s the middle of… this vivid story inspired by actual events
and hear their stories… striking up friendships
people fighting – and succeeding – against enormous odds
in 5 Acts, Act 1 focuses on the conversation a beautifully
written story of women’s friendships… I gave my heart to Meg
Here is my take and then you can
Work on your autobiography, and-or creative adaptations of it
sensory and information about the Verbs Story… Verbs Story.
focused on the power of visual story telling for causes
clean-up are still vivid in many people’s minds.
“Writing is a best friend. I meet up with it every day thinking, hi, I love you. This meeting up might look like journaling or reading but it’s writing… Then, sometimes, I am surprised by my resistance to writing. I realize it’s because of what’s on my mind: Will anyone notice? Will I be loved? Does anyone love me? And only when I find myself attached to any of these kinds of ideas over my friendship with writing am I imagining myself as ‘stuck.“
— Emerson Whitney
comb ragged mass of cloud: fracto-nimbus, fracto-stratus
enamel formicary inhabitant ant — formidable awesome
However, there is one thing that they are particularly
vulnerable to: dangerous, difficult, a day of distress and of anguish
she and her husband are tired of vitamins not stored in human bodies
what plants exhale at night carbondioxide and Ganymede is the
largest moon and a nimbus hangs over half the sky,
enshrouding the mountains
“If I don’t have an idea of what to write next I stay away from my desk. I try to only sit down when I feel an urge to write. I need to keep moving to catch new ideas.”
— Samanta Schweblin
(click play above and watch my short film your mother here…)
thank her
if u r able
today…
(click play above and watch my short film mother’s insides day…)
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
— Maya Angelou
The carny barks:
Come inside and see gnats and gadflies swarming about the heads of philosophers! Come, you, now! Come and see annoyance and obstructions to happiness! Come inside and watch a man tear down his little blocks mere moments after constructing them. Come see devices of personal torture: paradigms, rationalizations, constructs, obfuscations and simulacra sure to depress and confound! Come one, come all; it’s free!
And she says:
Hey, I’m standing here speaking. I’m pontificating on life and how to live it according to the gospels of my cretinous retinue, here… but all you do is whirl a dervish and speak in tongues. What I’m saying is important here. I’m trying to add value to his life. If you do what I say life will be good and you will want to live it. So now listen:
It’s important to keep it going, even if it means inserting a place holder to expand upon later. That is what this is, this little excursion to distraction.
It is a vilipend of sorts!
I have in that past denigrated all of this, but now it’s a worthy act — worthy of being placed here.
Don’t play with your balls in public. You come off a low class and unkempt fool. I don’t care that you’re a doctor or a fireman with syphilis!
To which I say:
I’m on my mindful way. I’m becoming confident and content again, and quickly aware of my mindless behavior. I’m trying to stay “good” to myself without making myself recoil in new age horror. It’s a start. It’s good.
To which the carny barker says:
Paducah is roiling now, and I’m thoroughly enervated.
Then she says to me:
Kentucky? What do we do now? Maybe have some quiche? Call the doctor? Shoot a speedball? I’m feeling icky. Fuck this!
I say to the carny:
Amicus opacus, I’ll call you!
I wander as lonely as you do, but you are anathema to my peeps. You block my peeps from the sun. You are my sunshine. You make me happy when I’m suicidal, please don’t take my sunshine to Manitoba on the back of a 1975 El Camino.
(The carny is nonplussed)
And I say to her:
Our salad days were filled with bitter herbs and intractable roots, not so much a salad as a buffet of weeds. Intractable and indelicate things in our mouths.
Every mouthful a swig of rot and offal. Awful offal. The bawds of euphony were happily entrenched in the cupboards and the cups were on a two week vacation at a Trump resort. I’m mystified by this all and quite malnourished.
The carny barks:
Let me tell you about the anthropocene age—
She barks back:
I challenge you to look chalky and wan. We’ll wage a hunger strike in absentia. We’ll lay waste to a tofurkey loaf while no one is watching said tofurkey in the phylactery factory lunch room. Snivel and drivel, you! We’ve got you by the short hairs!
She says to me:
Quit your salivatin’ you sententious whippersnapper. You palavering jerk-o’!
You have this whigmaleerie in your head…
of pixies and unicorns…
let me tell you the 900-foot Jesus statue—
The carny barks:
The Christ the Redeemer statue in Sao—
She wheels at him:
Shut the fuck up, Einstein!
Then at me:
That statue is going to take a dump — a loose stool dump, down the side of the sugarloaf.
The carny barks at the midway:
Ladies and gentlemen, we have just passed 800 kidney stones this month! Please refrain from smoking inside the exhibition halls and you’ll be fine… and the Cubans and Jews won’t be hurt.
It’s a sham and a crying shame this consumption. Generally, we try to avoid topics like this, but I just had to speak up. I just had to fill the air with words. Although there is really no accounting for taste, or any parallels here, I do see a parallelogram making its way up to the dais now, and maybe it will explain what is happening…
Hey you, please avoid the quadrilaterals, they’re tawdry and nouveau riche. Thank you!
A sonorous voice over says:
Someway to fill the blankness.
Someway to pass the blackness.
This thing is that thing.
I say:
Yeah!
(All outstanding suggestions were ignored)
“I take inspiration from anywhere I can get it. Lately, it has come from watching films from the past… Looking at films makes me feel to think, if that makes any sense.”
— Kim Gordon
Paulus Fürst, Plague Doctor, c. 1656. Public Domain.
(worn over my hair shirt)
is impregnated with wise blood to keep foul
humors and miasmas at bay
the vapors out
& thee ethers at ethereal atmospheres
hot with distemper
my beak of special aromatics —
posies / popcorn jelly bellies / & loose change
tinkling at the tip
(full of copper florins & obols)
with “A penny for the Old Guy”
dire companions to the low black galero —
thee new pestis cardinal
by way of hazel motes —
wide-brim
i’m freshly dressed
& arrived from the levant
by way of candia
“nobody with a good car needs to be justified!”
is thee new catch phrase for the plague year
odd times for and odd man…
“The world will provide you with every imaginable obstacle, but the one most difficult to overcome will be the lack of faith in yourself. Leave it to others to have doubts about you.”
— Callie Khouri
thee istsfor manity reader 