A recrudescence
Pours out of a dim tunnel —
Black rats hot with fleas.
“The furious revolt of the first weeks had given place to a vast despondency, not to be taken for resignation, though it was none the less a sort passive and provisional acquiescence.”
— Albert Camus / The Plague
I’m the ludic Luddite. Lovable, laughable, but don’t get me near a hammer or screwdriver.
I’m a dud. Speak to me of glittering baubles of snabbles and yarbols. No, don’t speak to me at all. I’d rather leave you by the side of the road in this treeless forest. I’d rather flee to the desert in arid isolation and speak nasally of the inequities of your life under the yoke of the supervision of a grand inquisition. Please, bless me. No, please, don’t speak to me at all.
Too tired to consider the truth in Anglican philosophies, too prim to stuff a lightbulb in my arse. I wait all day to write until the last 2 minutes of the night, before it becomes the next day — this is a thing of lethargy — a thing jejune, jocose, and jaunty. Shoot the canticle of a manticore. A testicle in a fusty icicle, a floe in the flow of doe. Reify the ether into a Bwana Johnny. Johnny Angel. How I cleave you to the hooves in the cleft palate of the clef bar and a treble note in the tremulous tumult. Fuck you, penguin! You waddle ill.
In blocks you can accomplish things simple, something foundational… it’s educational… The sybaritic rose petal funeral of plague years. The black star is metastasizing in time. The Virgin of Charity is tired, so tired, tired of tithing and gossip, “gossip and complaints… they came from next door.”
(Now this is original isn’t it? Oy!)
“I’m a black star,” he said. “No, I’m more of a warble. Really.”
And the wind picks up outside in the frantic whistling of planetary objects careening off-course. Top officials from Caracas promise that we’ll be released at daylight. If the marauding former Green Berets, working concert security just a month ago, see themselves as the new Simon Bolivars — leading an invasion force of 8 starving native corpses to be… well, let’s call that the Bay of… no, let’s not call it anything at all.
Strike a different tone — one gray and indistinct. Stand by… excerpts coming through in Esperanto: (translation) “The future is not as bright as it used to be.”
A nightmare dropped in between the construction and the traffic — and they’re working on the office next door. We need to make this person disappear before anyone realizes what’s about. I’m going to break ground after I break your heart. Then I’m going to break bread with the baker before I make him one with a cement pour and a 55 gallon barrel.
Don’t talk to me from that lime green room, or is it a particularly vivid bit of avocado green? Whatever. Don’t talk to me about 70 year old land tortoises, as I’ll crack them apart and paint these rooms… tortoise green. “Goodbye Green” and hello turtle muck. Mofo.
I’m going to imbibe heavily so I don’t have to think. I shouldn’t be drinking and taking those pills. “Transport it to your lady, why don’t you?”
“Yes, bear with me there is a little bit of water,” she says.
But somewhere near the end he chose a selection by The Selecter, “Celebrate the Bullet.” And someone heard that it was good, and that it was a worthwhile endeavor to belittle Sandra and the Sancochos. They recorded a cover of “Mami Quiero Mantecao” which el manco de Lepanto en Murcia produced. He produced the whole damn record!
Again she said, “love comes quickly.”
He said, “you’re jocose, you’re rugose! You’re a fucking hairy veinlet stuck up my craw. You giblet whore!”
“Well, I’ve never!” she said, and shot him in the face. “That suits you for calling me a giblet and a hairy veinlet!”
She waited until she could wait no more, then started to try and catch up, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to — she had to resign herself to something less than perfection, or her ideal of how her life would go from here. So she moved on. Things were not perfect, but good enough. Everything was accomplished by the time she had to vacate their old apartment. It happened that she learned something from this experience. And eventually she felt better about herself. And that is all she could hope for.
Apropos of Cinco de Mayo, though it wasn’t appropriate at all, she composed these lines in Spanish:
Las pinturas de bacalao, usando pintura hecha de bacalao cuando pintando bacalao. El bacalao con pan fue un éxito en Cuba. En Cuba eso no pasaba, chico. A ver qué me puedes decir tú que yo no viví en sangre, mi amigo, Tú aquí comiendote una malanga y aya yo comiéndome el cable. Tú a mí no me puedes decir nada, compay. Lo que yo he vivido tú ni te lo puedes imaginar. Eso era una métraca, amigo. Así vete par el carajo. Yo conocía a el Ché mi hermano, y yo sé de lo que yo hablo. Y tú hablas mucha mierda, chico. Olvídate de eso…
Whereupon she closed her journal, and went to sleep, and dreamt of vomiting all night.
“Just put the tip of the pencil on a lined paper and write one word behind the other. It always works.”
— Cesar Aira
tips for taking out the table: making killer
a.
know how to instill fear
if you manage that part
anxiety sets in
but the pros say you can roll
a pastry fill it with apples
and bake your family
as with all classic recipes
keep the bottom crust crisp
b.
ooooh
bone me
up on the furniture
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
— Natalie Goldberg
The Nude Girl and the Abbot, from The Decameron, Hans Schäufelein, before 1534. Public Domain.
at the museum of digest feminism
Boccaccio quotes have been stricken thru
the time to digress was then
sometime in the 14th century wrought
in yersinia pestis yellow and arte della lana blue
centuries before its gabardine inception
such foul humors seep thru the crack
in Boccaccio’s wall
the identifying placard in the shape
of a carmine limned lanced buboe
“Meanwhile, we’re drinking our four-dollar coffees and improving our bodies. The capitalist world has sold us all on…”
so much depends on a red
transliteration
glazed with testosterone rage beside
the white klan hood
“Fuck it, let’s see what comes out!”
a Gordon & Boccaccio conflation
“I always think of my art as political, in that it’s social. But there’s no single way to make art, or to be political. Something that looks overtly political might just be a design, and what looks like a design might be political.”
— Kim Gordon
(press the play button above watch my short film found feet five, as instructed below)
(as per these instructions:
— Use Google Translates
brother
not happen
I talk bread
paintings assassin feet that
A moment of confronting the
divine live I friend Artifice imagine
my buddy did painting made selfsame you
anything have talking the boy you knew hell
live here friend from Cuba in with see The
was my did What feet was know now what feet
about not my and me metaphysical am somewhere me boy shit
to cannot using feet That blood such that cable tell And malanga
a can’t So you happened tensile things a lot success resentment sanity eating
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
— Zora Neale Hurston
(Fade In)
-Series of found moving images as the film racks out of focus
-Series of stills: long open highways receding into the horizon line; traffic jammed still; parking lots (these sequences without people in the frames)
-Series of of shots resolving into sharp critical focus: buildings from various anonymous downtowns
(Fade Out)
– 4 seconds of clear leader
(Fade In)
-4 seconds of black leader
(Lap Dissolve)
-Asynchronous sound of obtuse observations about reality shows broadcast on the E! Network, c. 2007 / Over clear leader
-Mundane observations about obscure European celebrities / Over black leader
-Silence / Over cut-ups compiled from 33 sequences of film, all exactly 105 frames long, thrown into the air, and then assembled by chance operations
(Lap Dissolve)
-A Random Series Of Magnified Images Of Fleas
(Voice Over):
“The way that fleas become infective is due to a feature of their alimentary system—they have not only a stomach, or a ventriculus, but also a proventriculus, which acts as a valve that regulates the food that the flea is ingesting and trying to get to its stomach.”
(Lap Dissolve)
-American National Anthem plays
-A flagless flag pole pings as the wind whips two metal swivel flag snaps on a rope into the pole.
(Voice Over):
“This concludes our broadcast day…”
(Fade to Black)
White Noise.
“Sometimes you really have to shove and grunt and sweat. Some days you go to your office and you’re the only one who shows up, none of the characters show up, and you sit there by yourself, feeling like an idiot. And some days everybody shows up ready to work. You have to show up at your office every day. If an idea comes by, you want to be there to get it in.”
— Thomas Harris
I’m hot with fleas, gravid with scabies lice
I have a multitude of filo and corona
Viruses are best when deflected with oil
Impregnated chausibles or warm leatherette
On your burning flesh underneath your hair shirt
Wear your bird mask filled with with aromatic tips
Of posies juniper berries and popcorn jelly bellies…
I place the copper florins on your eyes
Penniless and you trimming your pencil
Thin mustache graying from so much vaginal
Yeast, so much discharge, so sebaceous
Cyst of unknown origin, benign and sanguine
Pluck that rosy orb of pleasure-pain…
Au bon cadavre exquis
Birdhouse and Bildungsroman fretful
Fret on the E flat note, on the plagued D train
Box-scarred, a doleful G man out of a botched
C-section with a bloody Dial M for Murder mug…
These, and other afflictions, are yours for the chaining
Yourself to the balcony railing 16 floors up
(Mostly) out of the elements counting how many
Filo and corona fit on the head of a pin…
And how many pins it takes to blow your mind
Ballooning and arcing on its drunk ecliptic
Across the darkening sky…
Go figure when the envoi misses the last train
On a line out of service to nowhere…
With perdition as its terminus…
“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing.”
— John Steinbeck
The most common question people
ask is who
crushes the spirit.
?
I insist
on sacred texts,
holy stuff.
parents
my experience
shown
“Yes”
“No one cares if you write, so you’d better. NO ONE in your family wants you to write a memoir, but do it anyway. You own EVERYTHING that happened to you. Bird by Bird. Shitty first drafts. Butt in chair.”
— Anne Lamott
Orientalia. In Memoriam “to go about leaping (said of the locust)”
Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament
.”The Greek Sources of Islamic Scientific Illustrations,” archaeologic
black. Black walnut. See Walnut, black. Bottom lands …
Cotton, climate, and camels in early Islamic Iran:
A moment in:
the common locust. There are, however, other locusts, one of them
In Northern Ghana reads “Planning before work protects you
from regret to eat up; food was locusts and wild honey and kuamlisa
Thus the Lord God showed me: Behold, the larva of a locust.
And he said, the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses …
He described how he saw locusts clinging to the windows.
“Read everything. If you haven’t read everything, you’ll never be able to write anything.”
— Lev Grossman
if i jaywalked
would you wax lyric and macrophagic?
a stay at home order is extended until 5/18
you never stop writing even when you’re not writing
viral loads and virtual loafs
you don’t post when there’s another temporary stop gap to appease the toadies for liberty (or death)
open carry intelligence instead of an AR
i’m so stroft says one while caterwauling
flatten the curve of the indiscriminately stupid and unempathic
torpor to tumult
got the responsibility for our nation’s top security
they’ve given me a number and taken away my name…
(a lap dissolve here)…
17 years and 2,494 dim mornings
repressed memories in red velvet capes
the rise and fall of unburied fictions
jactitation down by the river
they come back for blood and betrayal
(a keyboard solo here)…
the word cocky is bandied about
in small claims court
the past 15 years there’s been a steady resurgence of
diminished people — myopic
they come back
astounding anonymous
apple-polishing the master’s
recordings
(a look in the mirror here)…
if i jaywalked
would you cytokine storm and wane?
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
— Stephen King
thee istsfor manity reader 