thee istsfor manity reader

What Ails You?

“Mama? What’s a welkin? Is that like a pickle?”

“No, dear. It’s the vault of the sky. The firmament, you know?”

“Is that like something permanent, Ma?

“No… It’s Satan! Satan! Satan! Satan!”

The clouds part and harp music ensues. Celestial bodies retreat to the edges, and the terminal point of the universe is revealed.

It’s merely tinsel with a corrugated cardboard backing holding this all up…

… and the choirmaster is a washed up combed-over carnival barker who loves tanning beds and all the best words. He has the best words… and all the chicks dig him, or so he says.

Ain’t we lucky to be living in the here and now?

… and now back to our episode:

“But, Mama, you made the Shake ‘n Bake without letting me help you!”

“Aw, go to bed already, you pain in the ass!”

And here are some scenes from next week’s episode…

“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”
— Allen Ginsberg

Elizabeth R. Fischer/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Rocky Mountain Laboratories

Pandemic Haiku 4

Sunlight sharp as nails
Through the hospital window
Reveals a black barb

emarys / Getty

“Humans have to realize they’re not individuals, but individual parts of the same organism, with responsibility to each other.”
— Genesis P. Orridge

Blackout Poem 02.03.14

An irritating squirrel says
To an umbrella made of stone:

“You are a conflation of an Absurdist dialectic.
You are an impossible form.”

The umbrella sprouts a stratocumulus cloud on its ferrule and floats away.

The squirrel, inspired, writes a sonnet, follows that with an ode, then a sestina.

“Write from your heart and don’t be afraid to write shitty pages. You can’t change something from nothing. Get it down on paper first, no matter what it looks like.”
—Syd Field

aposiopesis

an istsfor manity short film created from flash-cuts from more than a dozen istsfor manity short films made between 2016-2018.

“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.”
― Stan Brakhage

where b lillian french?

an istsfor manity film, 2016.

“Art is a sense of magic.”
― Stan Brakhage

Pandemic Haiku 3

Smog has cleared the sky
The crows are strangely quiet
Cicadas are mute

“The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publishers and the readers can and will come later.”
-Patricia Highsmith

Aleric’s Panegyric

I was listening to Barry White’s Greatest Hits when I got a preprogrammed hit from SM-N900V. So as the Love Unlimited Orchestra swelled to Barry’s “I love you, baby!” the Heliotrope unit beeped and a shot of SM-N900V’s love tincture hit my bloodstream.

I didn’t care that it was only the essence of Clementine coming through my cryoscreen, but Clemmie, as the artificial intelligence called SM-N900V, is all I needed of my life partner to see me through the next three hours on this sterile and dying planet.

As her essence reticulated through my nervous system, I saw her inside my retinas, smelled her in my temporal lobe, felt her in my fingertips — her chest against mine…

The overseer counted: “one minute to go!”And it was out the nearest exit in case of emergency. God damn, this blew me away!

“Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.”
— Paul Rudnick

From the Academy of American Poets:

“The result of a decision made at the UNESCO session in Paris in 1999, March 21 is designated World Poetry Day, a day for cultural organizations, schools, libraries, and publishers worldwide to celebrate the art of poetry. The day is meant to ‘support linguistic diversity through poetic expression and to offer endangered languages the opportunity to be heard within their communities.’ … On this, World Poetry Day, we hope you will please join us by participating in a special new project to offer hope to one another: Shelter in Poems.”

(April is National Poetry Month)

Thee Istsfor Manity National Poetry Month “Shelter in” poem:

The Yahweh Quas Papa speaks: 

I was made for plague times!
For the days weeks months — for the plague year!

It’s the time for auxiliary malarial canons 
and sitars. 

Thee minute for surgical mask missiles 
and tinctures of Ayahuasca. 

It’s time for stockpiled respirators 
and acid-laced fuzz boxes & distortion pedals — 

(Just stay away from the vocoder — don’t put that in your mouth!
They have Pro Tools for that now.)

Spread your misery and pestilence over me,
broadcast it worldwide.

Spread the fusty 1970s ventilators out in an arc
and count the cobwebs on the outtake valves.

It’s the moment for snake oil salesmen &
“teetotalitarianists” & insider stock traders —
and don’t call me a wog because
I take my Viyaya Anand & Asha Bosle on the 45.

Aren’t you glad someone you knew and loved
didn’t live to see this moment?

I am.

“Writing a book is like having an empty pool in the yard and every day going out and throwing in a cup of water to fill it.”
— Behtany Ball

flarfish 1: banter squantum

Bobby C. was snipping hair when

There’s a lot of banter, but if they’re not talking about you that’s good

Uber, Smurfs

didn’t make annoying banter throughout the ride

and his penchant for fingering orifices for a short time

an opportunity to build a lasting professional relationship

who will enjoy coming once a month to have a brew/glass

find an intriguing wine list and a well edited menu from

Sagamore) in Quincy, MA. Find the best rated Quincy

Coltrane banter back and forth about Squantum

Rock, we… accompaniment to the drips of our paddles

“I don’t particularly believe in writer’s block, but I do believe that we sometimes get blockheaded about the creative process… It is NOT a problem if ideas go back under for a while… I go on walks. I swim my heart out. I meditate. I paint. Ideas never die, they just change forms.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

The Mini Macros at the End of the World

I want to live in a bathysphere.

The darkness envelopes my diving bell. I’m comfortable in my bathysphere. I’d like to live in my bathysphere. I won’t leave my bathysphere.

Underwater my screams are muffled. Underwater my vision is imprecise, edges soften, blur and blend with the water. Nothing is sharp here.

The Coelacanths make life bearable in my bathysphere; their being out there in the darkness is enough to keep me in check.

I was EFT tapping to a new horizon when I was caught up in a current that took me off the edge of the world at the northwest quadrant. My ride through space was a horrible fall into the pit of of a giant cephalopod’s mouth.

Man, it blew me away.

“People would say I portray the world in a bleak way. It’s not bleak to me. I think what is bleak is when you create a veil to make the world feel better. Literature is one place we should be able to experience bleakness and brightness and anything in between. Literature should not make people feel comfortable, it should challenge the readers.”
— Yiyun Li