thee istsfor manity reader

I’ll Never Do Another Magic Trick

Let me tell you, I was shocked. He came out of the darkness and parried and flipped the toupee off my head with that jaunty rapier. All right, I said to him, it’s marinating time and I’m going to make you regret this. I poured the juice of eight clementines on, followed by four cloves of garlic, the juice of one lemon, half a large yellow onion, a table spoon of olive oil, salt, pepper, and two table spoons of aceto balsamico. He turned wildly. Blinded. He smelled better. And now he was at my whim. I had the advantage on him.

He called me Ozymandius. And I said, behold, and look upon me… but then he yawned and struggled to get the marinade out of his eyes. I waved my hands, and passed a handkerchief across his head and voila his head disappeared, yet his hips and body struggled on in an apoplectic dance.

He was transformed into a headless Saint Vitus, and in this manner we danced on well in to the night.

This is Fall, at 2:24 pm, on 10/06/20. Jamaica Plain, MA. (6/31)

“Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you have to, but stop whining and get back to work.”

— Werner Herzog

Boogie Taps In Bangatovia

Can you tolerate the boogie taps in Bangatovia?

I can understand your need for disinformation, as you are a tendentious jerk, and your tongue lags like a bloodhound’s when you see a pomegranate. But is there really a need to go parading about when you are sick with a virulence that knows no bounds?

Must you be a whirling dervish of imbecility at every turn? Does nothing, absolutely nothing, make you stop for one moment to reflect?

I haven’t seen anything quite like you before — you are an automaton of illness, bad conception and bad vibes. What you need is a rave (circa, 1993) and lots of X. Go ahead, we’ll provide the pacifier and twirly lights.

Please, please, take a seat, and just for a moment consider what you do. Take a raved-out and zonked-out night off. Take a brief time out for rhinoceros trivia, if you prefer. Take a dump and clean out your system — a deep cleanse colonic — and maybe a modicum of intelligence will seep its way up to your brain stem.

Please stop. Please leave us alone for a day or two.

And now we return to your regularly scheduled broadcast…

This is Fall, at 10:18 am, on 10/05/20. Jamaica Plain, MA. (5/31)

“Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”

— George Orwell / 1984

Rapid Eye Phantasm

The book of the moon, la lune, jejune, da do run run run… do do do de da da da, that’s all I want to say to you…

Words run-on, days and months run-on, one day we’ll look back and see these two years (2020-2021) ran-on… I’ve got a feeling, a feeling deep inside, oh yeah…

Ev’rybody had a hard year… Ev’rybody put their foot down…

Habilité, habillement, hibernation, and Hibernian spelling, the transmuted emissions from space — “the final frontier,” according to some; “is the place,” according to another. It’s for cosmonauts, astronauts, and Major Tom who met his end floating in his tin can — that was four years ago! What else happened four years ago? Hmm…

Oh that bumptious meliorism of yours. Nothing has worked out. We are at the precipice, staring down into the void, and still you persist in your delusion. And now…

I’m inside the subway train looking out at the peloton of people crowded on the platform waiting to get in, and toward the rear of that mass, head towering above the others, is Glen Campbell dressed as Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy — all fringed out. I think to myself, too bad it isn’t Lou Reed. I’m inhabiting this world I’ve never been in before, it’s 1969! My thoughts are somehow transmitted to everyone on the subway train, and to those waiting on the platform, including Glen Campbell (as Joe Buck) still waiting to get on the train. As the doors open and the mass of people move in and out of the subway car, I dematerialize and am now hovering somewhere outside the train looking in. There’s a group of soldiers, on furlough, fully decked out in their desert camouflage and weapons inside the train. They yell in unison, “Hey, it’s Lou Reed. Lou Reed of the Velvets. VU. The Velvet Underground.”

Glen Campbell laughs good naturedly and says, no, he’s Glen Campbell — the Wichita Lineman…

The scene goes black. Nothing more heard. Nothing more seen.

This is Fall, at 5:22 pm, on 10/04/20. Jamaica Plain, MA. (4/31)

“Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind,
Reality’s dark dream!”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge / “Dejection: An Ode”

Leitmotif and Preference

Midriff Manny says the leitmotif here is the man on the roof watching the spires melt across town. These aren’t aliens, these are hair replacement salesmen. The starlight from another millennia so many thousand of light years away is making you look jaundiced, especially in the three way mirror. Are you a jackal, or the son of a jackal? I am an Ethiopian volcano the stuff inside my caldera roils, but I always wished I were Patagonian, snow covered, and aloof. I prefer alpacas and their downy mildew. I also sing in higher registers and registered for the selective service when I was 18 (at my local post office).

This is Fall, at 10:26 am, on 10/03/20. Jamaica Plain, MA. (3/31)

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

— Mary Oliver / “Sometimes”

Pandemic Haiku #6

Put on the barbed crown.
The sun king is hovering;
His head is brought low.

This is Fall, at 8:40 am, on 10/02/20. Jamaica Plain, MA. (2/31)

“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.”

— Mary Oliver / “Wild Geese”

Meet The Beetles!

Briefly, gentlemen, it has come to my attention that there has been an inordinate amount of “buggery” going on between you and our beetles. This will not do.

As of tomorrow at 7:00 am all those apprehended singing plaintive love songs to our collection of Coleoptera will be suspended for a minimum of one month and lose all members privileges.

Additionally there will be no more dressing up our rhinoceros beetles in little sundresses. This is not a carnival, good sirs! We are not puppeteers, this is not the Punch and Judy caper hour. This must cease.

And whomever is painting the brown beetles dayglo blue, you must stop immediately. Now the confused flour beetles are demanding to be painted fuschia and emerald green on alternating days.

Decorum, gentlemen. We are civilized men.

And stop it, stop it, with the little tank tops on the stag beetles! We are not infants. I expect these hijinks to stop immediately, but the culprit who has “toilet-papered” all our dung beetles may continue to do so on a biweekly basis.

Civilization is progressive, and we are exceptional, gentlemen. Carry on!

“For most of us, knowledge of our world comes largely through sight, yet we look about with such unseeing eyes that we are partially blind.”

— Rachel Carson / Sense of Wonder

Highest Eminence

O, pallid bat, wombat, scarlet tanager, marmoset and all the little animals of the world that spark wars and worldwide grief… Listen! ye who visit our leaders’ dreams at night and whisper all types of destructive and inhumane council — planting the seeds of war, hyper-capitalism, oppressive totalitarianism, and oligarchical greed that passes for socialism in practice — you are on notice.

All these bad ideas are planted by the cutest life forms on planet Earth.

While Attenborough gallivants about the world, here and there, galumphing with whirring machinery in order to show us this and that, and it’s import in the world; he fails to notice what the pretty beasties are doing to our leaders every night — and by extension, what they are doing to our world. OUR world.

O, low and cavorting bestiary! We shall hunt you out by deforestation, overfishing, pollution, over-development, and wildfire. You shall stop this chimeric invasion into our sleep and equanimity.

We are man! The highest and greatest link in the Great Chain of Being… (sorry, so sorry, dear father)…

We are man! Highest and greatest eminence on the Great Chain of Being here on earth!

We bend the elements to our will — the atoms do our bidding. We will move on beyond this planet, because this is what we do. Invade. Conquer. Control. Cleanse. Fold. Assimilate!

So, Red Panda; so, chin strap penguin; so, octopus; so, ring-tailed lemur — we bring you the Anthropocene, free of charge — but it will cost you dearly.

I pity the fool-animal earwigging it’s way into our beloved leader’s ear, in the dead of night, at the hour of fog.

You shall atone!

Then we will flay you, stuff you, catalog you, and put you up on display in a musty diorama — next to the heads of our enemies. Because this is what we are expert at. Because this is what we do.

“I admit, I don’t know a love that doesn’t
destroy. Last night while we slept,
a mouse drowned in the rice pot
I left soaking in the sink. I tried
to make a metaphor out of this…”

— Diannely Antigua / “Anniversary”

Anything But That

1.
Wild dogs, squirrels, feral hogs, and bear were constant staples of our cook pots. We used them to supplement our two pounds allotment of rice each month.

2.
“I brought everything but that. I deny the existence of that. I would bring anything but that thing,” she said.

3.
So if you’ve got a family of four you’re spending $1000, just on entrance fees.

4.
“Maquis- Resistance groups. Maquis ( World War II), predominantly rural French guerrilla groups… The network of rural bases operated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea prior to the Cambodian Civil War…”

5.
Luna moths were another treat I learned to eat, with its wings removed and roasted over an open fire it made for the perfect bite.

6.
I imagine all this through the mind of a sick, desocialized, and dissociative woman, who lost her family. Her children taken by the state. Her husband accidentally decapitated at work. Her only remaining family burned to death in a wildfire.

7.
When we came upon the carcass of a moose we thought it a godsend. And we all ate the better pieces that had not been scavenged or turned to rot. It was after that day that we eventually all became sick and most of our party perished.

8.
Just as he was dying, I set a mangy dog to disemboweling him, so the last thing he felt and saw were the teeth of a ravenous cur at his intestines.

9.
We staggered along, one wet day after another, we learned to control our hunger. We had to keep moving to make our monthly rice pick-ups. We barely had time for concerted hunting. If we came upon something we quickly killed it and slogged along.

10.
She, in time, became untethered and violent. She fantasized of fixing his larynx in some way so he couldn’t scream any more. Perhaps tie him up and deprive him of food and water until he wasted away, sharp and angular, into a bony effigy.

11.
We made a desperate attempt to make the food cache before it was removed by the enemy. We succumbed slowly, one or two of us a day. At the end of two weeks only Cruz and I were left alive, but we were in a very bad way and then you found us near death at the banks of the river.

12.
The newly moved-in family next door with an over abundance of everything doesn’t sit right with her. The neighbor child was overly loud, had ADHD, and couldn’t control himself.

13.
The tall man, dressed in black, sitting in the first row, removed his mask and said, “So this is how a loving god looks over his children?”

“… in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,
and dreams do not lie.”

— Mary Oliver / “Rage”

(misfire?)

Even though I’ll be in the red, I’ll be under. Your footfall sounds like a peg leg stamping. Tap into your urethra with a rusty catheter and maybe you’ll strike oil. If you’re diligent, you’ll be indigent. If you read a dull book about Pol Pot it doesn’t diminish the sheen of his hair. I once wished I could use Afro sheen. I thought I might be able to stick a pic in my hair, now I buzz it to the skull. If you were a carpenter and I was a baby would you nail me to a tiny crucifix? Would you marry me anyway? Why do these neurons fire (misfire?) certain troublesome memories at random? Why are my axons so warped? What was that about?

I wish it didn’t sound like an outboard motor was running in my bathroom.

Then you harp:

“A volunteer committee of resident adult ‘Friendly Goblins’ will deliver candy (all pre-wrapped) to every apartment that signs up for a visit.  The Goblins (1 or 2 per visit) will admire your child’s costume and laugh, shriek or ooh-and-ahh as appropriate.  The Goblins, of course, will be wearing masks and will remain at a social distance from members of your household.”

“Seriously?”

“I’d rather listen to Victoria Williams sing ‘Boogieman.'”

“Ah, go on and file your $750 tax return, and write off your coif to the tune of $70,000. You twit!”

“You fill me with inertia!”

“Soon the volunteers will arrive
and they’ll take the body,
including the wings
to the landfill.”

— Julio Pazos Barrera / “Pegasus Autopsy”

pacific

wico wico wico wico dice el grillo and you become sleepy you can’t shake off the somnolence it feels so comfortable to close your eyes something akin to sexual gratification it’s all you desire for the next hour or two the waves the crickets the gentle but insistent brine in the air the wind-up noise and the wind blown posture of the grasses bowing in the breeze the outstretched wings of a seagull floating on a current of air pri pri pri pri pri another insect in harmony with the cricket qui qui qui qui the leveling of your consciousness close your eyes welcome oblivion

“Journeys of discovery are not something you start doing, but something you gradually stop doing.”

— Erling Kagge / Walking: One Step At A Time