thee istsfor manity reader

Fishy Fishy Fishy Poo

It’s not piscatorial you’re feeling. You’ve never been to sea.

It’s not enmity you’re feeling. You meditate every morning that you are: peaceful and content in every way and every day.

You’re feeling like a scarlet tanager has alighted on your brain stem — and here we stand next to a waterfall, falling out of love, and fearing the eventual dissipation of all fossil fuel.

The end of life as we know it before we got to know it.

You got it. You got it.

I bid you a tepid adieu. This was already over between us, so why kid ourselves that this really means anything to us… or to me, anyway. So green god-damned, and all of that other high school stuff.

I leave you and your piscatorial delusions with this heartfelt list:

Trout. Orange Roughy. Bass. Mahi Mahi. Salmon. Sunfish. Catfish. Clownfish. Cichlid. Cod. Angelfish. Dragonfish…

You drift off into the Marianas Trench. Your bathysphere detached.

goodbye…

“I, bastard child of the giant chandelier called the blue sky.
No one calls me the sphinx of love.”

— Shuzo Takiguchi / “The Fish’s Desire”

Yes…

You are alive.

That’s something.

“…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

— Samuel Beckett / The Unnameable

Annihilation Haiku

The mushroom cloud grows
Across the blind horizon
A dead gray snow falls

“… for the eyes of the children
of nagasaki,
for the eyes of the children
of middle passage,
for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes,
russian eyes, american eyes,
for all that remains of the children,
their eyes,
staring at us, amazed to see
the extraordinary evil in
ordinary men.”
— Lucille Clifton / “sorrow song”

Gormless Writers

— No more talk of fish.
— Let’s talk about the month long break from writing.
— Let’s not.  
— Let’s write about the month long leave from writing. 
— Let’s  not.
— Let’s consider the month long abstinence from writing.
— Let’s not.  
— Let’s…
— Let’s not. 
— Stop.  
— No need for a post-mortem. 
— Well… let’s start writing again?  
— Yes, let’s do that.  
— Haven’t we already done that by doing this?
— This here?  
— Um… yes.  
— Yes, I think we have.  It’s a start anyway now, isn’t it?  
— Yes, I suppose it is.  
— Is that what you think, too?  
— Yes. Yes, I suppose I do.  
— Well?
— There!
— We’ve done it.  
— Yes. 
— Yes. We have.
— Please pee on me…

“… writing can make you crazy and then it goes on to make you whole.”

— Belle Yang / Forget Sorrow interview

Of Joubles and Gangles

It’s a little troublesome this hankering for a jouble when there are only gangles about. It was established in the 14th century, that joubles were preferable to gangles, and so this is the way today.  

I encountered bands of brigands on my way to Holocuse, but on every occasion I was able to avoid detection and pursuit. But I did witness two other travelers being drawn and quartered on my journey. Most pitiable.

I ensconced myself behind the shrubbery of Ni, and abraded my skin to a bloody mass of striated  meat — and then I abused myself (in a biblical manner) with the blood I drew from the various parts and orifices on my body. It was blessed, enlightening, and frolicsome. I might try it again on my next journey to a marfing tournament. 

I live. I breathe. I jerk with bodily humors sanguinary. Suckage is suckage, I say. Drop me in the cesspool of thee virulent inquisition in nine word defamation. 

Don’t go to your tongue if it’s not needed. Furthermore, I don’t need a tonsure.  

And I don’t need a turn in my betrothed’s scold‘s bridle.

“Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas.  Racist ideas make white people think more of themselves which further attracts them to racist ideas.”

— Ibram X. Kendi / How To Be An Anti-Racist

Phosphene Dream

He produced phosphenes that smelled of mandarin oranges — a strange synesthetic effect that followed the orange-rimmed yellow spots that exploded in his closed-eye vision.

He thought this was an improvement on the phosphenes of his youth that smelt of rotting meats and animal carcasses, and filled his nights with monstrous nightmares.

He finally felt like an adult. He thought he’d arrived at the happiest point of his life, but he felt his brand was in peril. Only the whip smartest YouTubers and TikTok’ers could make the scene, and his phosphenes were falling behind.

So he really pressed down hard on his eyes this time and they fell into the center of his head, down his sinuses, and mysteriously into his esophagus, and through his digestive tract.

His vision was something spectacular now — 12K Supreme! It was like a Haight Ashbury psychedelic oil light show at a Grateful Dead concert, c. 1966 — every time another enzyme, bile, or gastric acid washed over his eyes making their way through this world of gastrointestinal wonder — phosphenes like he’d never seen before exploded through his eyeless head — sending bright yellow sparks out of his vacant eyeholes.

Man, it blew him away.

And when the peristalsis finally evacuated his eyes into the depths of his own rectum— the time was now! Now he knew he’d be the supreme influencer to all mankind.

He tapped out a telegraph to his mother: “Success, Mother! I’m finally in my own rectum and about to be born again!”

“The coming apart, the giant laceration across the sky, we all feel it. Look at the fire, look at it, like all the rage of all the smallest beings.”

— Dawn Lundy Martin / “Perspective is Supposed to Yield Clarity”

Tonight, Yesterday & Some Night to Come

He lives with ephemeral creatures under his feet and creatures over his head. A case in point: his thoughts diverting his elbow’s skin and the rubbing of tender footing. Sycamores make wide arm imprecations and water themselves with wines of every variety and delectation. His ambition is drained in a scruff of the neck twist, a meager remembrance of his days spent in a robe. His teeth are chattering and he’s taking an apprenticeship as a goldsmith and forge master.

“Fou!” says the Past, inserting its finger in god knows what? The lapis of Transducea?

He slogs, knee deep, in hummingbird angles, all tenuous and blur-fast. Before him shine the bones of the pitiable Condor of Shiva. Is he comforted by this knowledge that the afflatus was hard won — speaking in tongues while wearing the cloaks of invisibility? His body is taught with a dab of holy pedantry.

She heard clacking coming from the road and felt the wheel shudder to the sound of the clacking. Was there a compromised tire up front? What was making that sound? She felt the wheel shake a bit and she pulled over. The car thermometer read 98 degrees and the empty road shimmered in the distance. This is not something she could afford to do, to leave the safety of the car and expose herself to the environment or to potential marauders in wait.

You can intuit Inuit involvement in emoluments and interpretations of the imprecations indivisible by invisible increments…

And you say, “Wha?!”

To which I respond, “wa, wa, wa, wa… dirty water, dirty water… toilet bowl drinker in an age of intercepted illusions of individual freedoms. None of that for you. You drink from the toilet if you want succor.”

“I prefer succotash,” you say.

“I eat stucco at 3:30 every afternoon without fail,” she says.

I say, imperiously, (for afterall I am emperor) that “the only thing to be is the emperor of ice cream.” I trance. “Stevens,” I add.

I walk out the room, with millions of people watching her on their television screens, without the slightest knowledge of antipodal politics or wombat love.

“Wombat love!” he cries.

I was later told, that at that very instant, you arose and turned off your television wondering where had all the good times gone.

“Use your head, can’t you, use your head. You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!”

— Samuel Beckett / Endgame

Happenstance is Crapenstance

Out of the inkwell comes Yonki the heavily sedated quualude dealer. A fuzzy jewfro and pockmarked face wearing his favorite ribbed tank top fraying at the edges by his armpits.

He calls out to Lester the methadone freak standing stooped on Methadone Mile, cup at his feet hoping for spare change, “sir, mam, please…” Haunted by the community praying for his family because his pet chihuahua fell overboard on his cruise to Puerto Rico all those years ago — all has been a blur since.

If you’re brave then you’re good. You hope for equal pay and settle for mediation during record level floods upstate. At this point Yonki embeds his pic into his afro and orders a case of Franco American Sapghetti-O’s from Amazon. Everything else is well known history. So don’t be an inkhorn and lecture me on canned foods and drug dealers!

And just like that, nothing happens. Happenstance is crapenstance.

I ask Yonki: “How long have you had that incendiary hair?”

“How long have I had this incendiary hair?” says he. “As long as the air is rare? You dare to stare at this rarified commodified loss? Where have your hands gone, man?”

As in the case of a fountain — a girandole — the water radiates out from a central point… or a fulminating firework, but all I can muster is “that incendiary hair — metastasizing through mushroom cloud air. It’s not a visual I want to see but it continually impinges upon my consciousness.”

And just like that (again!) nothing happens. Happenstance is crapenstance… again.

I grieve the breeze and jack it all in and turn myself out. “I thought we had a deal,” I say. “It’s a churlishness you beggar and it’s you’re a beggar of a churl. We are now divested and devalued and pumped full of drugs… pointless, I tell you.”

Yonki says: “Your sedulousness leads to nothing but chaos and chauvinism and a bass line that seethes and some say — it’s on fire!“

If he makes a move in this line of business, then there’s no room for me. I’m tied up in impossible knots.

I offer: “Gordian!” Then I add “No, Givency by way of Guernica.”

All Yonki’s able to offer is “Bombs Away!”

And just like that — nothing happens. Happenstance is crapenstance.

“I might die an old man
Scribbler of trash
Forgotten paper-scratcher
But I’ll tell you this
I really love to lay around on my ass
Totally watching television”

— Ron Padgett / “Poem”

flarfish 25: fanfaronade picaro

he got the call of the west

he go, he went, to idaho

when he attempted to lay hands upon others — they resisted

his choler rose —

fandango fanfaronade fantoccini fantod faradism farfel fasces

the picaresque romance

so called from the fact that the picaro 

or scamp is…

laying prayer cloths  touched to the side of lambs

to prevent the fanfaronade:

Hark! to the thunder of the drums,  the title of novelist

which he attempts to disguise his cowardice

the valentón embodies all the good times

surrounding to whom this mixture of ludicrous assumption

fancywork fand fandango picaroon picayune piccadilly piccalilli…

nothing was clear to me

he laid his hands upon my shoulders

my neck paralyzed, my sight extinguished

beneath the hanging tree

“There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.” 

― Jorge Luis Borges / The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory

idaho well ablution

i went to the well and saw jesse
floating there

her eyes frozen on the concrete sky above

arms splayed at her side gently
lapping in the blackness

her eyes were stone gray

i went to the well to perform my ablutions
but jesse was floating there
she was cored

a sliver in the murk

i too feel hollow inside
a stitch of guilt

i went to the well and saw jesse
in an act of transcendence so absolute

so pure in that darkness
that i will not speak of it again

i went to the well
and will never return

“Sometimes it seems as though some puppet-player,
A clenched claw cupping a craggy chin
Sits just beyond the border of our seeing,
Twitching the strings with slow, sardonic grin.”

— Angelina Weld Grimke / “The Puppet-Player”