thee istsfor manity reader

dry tongue lost (idahaiku 2)

midnight dry tongue lost —
fear seeps esto perpetua —
down the barren path

“Avoid the world, it’s just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.”

— Jack Kerouac / “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”

he hit the road (idahaiku 1)

he hit the road west
shuffle off to idaho
big sky and road blanched

“The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.”

— Annie Dillard

flarfish 32: cramoisy reptar

To reptar may every gentleman, by one eye, or disgrace

Find his rental or his campsite location around the repatriation

of CRAMOISY in his own private idaho

reptar = creep

reptar cerca literatura and draw connections between key writers

At one time people ate what was grown around them

dance-rock quartets have been scuffing up dance floors 

new wave, nu wave, no wave

also measure the impact of small presses on modernist music

built to be a feature-rich static site generator

With a sounds as exuberant as they are infectious

Jose didn’t spot the snake that was creeping through the weeds

danger, danger Will Robinson!

it’s the call of the west

“Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist.”

— Jane Smiley



Newsruption

You will no longer be bothered or financially hurt

for your role in a benches-clearing confrontation at

the place where they check all your boxes according to a photo posted to Facebook.

You will no longer be bothered or financially hurt

by a contagion — a peculiar one where a woman’s sudden

imagining of how this monster was created is upset by her husband’s

nonchalant snacking and drinking what appears to be a cup of coffee.

Don’t focus so much on whether a person fits your type or whether

every person you know has died in the past 24 hours.



“The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.”

— James Baldwin

Détentes

There’s a tool they use to set things right.

But it won’t protect them from the bitter cold of a nighttime swim through the shark infested straits.

A tool of last resort — shaman life hacks! Tabernacle huckster butters!

And us!

We. Decked out with finger guns.

“Be a papper slapper with a doot doot doot doot do!”

Birdsongs for birdies in glam processsion of hip slapping.

“Hingum, Jingum — do do do.”

Milkweed in the shadows and other docile locations.

Détentes from a muddled past — prepaid insurgencies dropped out of Monroe’s pants into a bay of pigs —

“wheepa deepa poo pow pow!”

Whistling childhood advertising ear worms — jingling out of key — these jagged equations validate nothing but the phlegm in our souls.

“You can’t please yourself, but you might can please your soul.”

Grazin’ in the grass is where I wanna be scattering my dead father’s ashes — throwing a handful over my shoulder once, and filling fire ant monticules with the next.

Watching the magic 8 ball answer requests from another world.

“You’re a bitter man,” said Candide. “That’s because I’ve lived,” said Martin.

— Voltaire / Candide

Encomium

I walk in circles gyring — elevating ever outward until I’m circumnavigating your boundless denigration.

Deliver me — enervated — from invigoration as you deliver me from hating myself long enough to despise you.

I’ve placed myself at this longitude so that I may be bisected by your latitude of lassitude.

I’ve misplaced the keys to hegemonic misericordia.

Mercy be done because I haven’t any time left.

Deliver me again from prepositional entanglements and toothsome fricatives.

Yes yes leave my words alone.

Plangent. Agent. Of misfortune.

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”

— William Faulkner

Be now. Be here…

Ima walking superpower.

That which transfixes me becomes putty in the transom of epistemology.

Hallowed ground burials are a thing of the past.

Everything I was told as a child turned out a lie. Our parents deliver death. Our leaders add self-interest in new time dash.

A ruse cooked up to miseducated me, so I’d be chillin’ with the devil.

Ima grunt for the bone man. The bone man’s blues be coming this way.

I had a rumbling in my stomach and felt the deafening borborygmus ofda earth.

We festoon the planet with hate and breathe a virulence of violence. We gotta killing we ain’t never seen before.

Callitda bill collector blues callit hippy sigh on nippy shine.

How do a dog wax poetic wit’da poetics of ruin?

Be now. Be here…

But I wonder where the sallow in the bowels of hell appear next if I’m writing this from the cellar of the master slayer of dummy men.

Men that want what I haven’t got.

What u gonna do next?

“But the white people who saw this as their country—and only theirs—to run are right in one key way: their time is running out. They are not literally threatened by violence, much, but they are threatened by something much more powerful, a revision of who matters and who will run things in the future, which is why BLACK LIVES MATTER is the central affirmation.”

— Rebecca Solnit / “Chrome-Plated Pistols and Pink Polos: The Face of Elite Panic in the USA”

Your Ruff Collar, My Millstone

We live under the heat dome. 

I see you across the barren parklet. 
You are eating bits of soft pink babies. 

Humid.

My hair wilts.  
Your curls frizz. 

I lick the hot sauce off my fingers. 
You yell that you are an arriviste. 

I scream that I was once part of the noblesse oblige and waved banderitas.

You warble an Edith Piaf song.
I huff gas out of a brown paper bag.

You sing two registers too low. 
My viscera gurgles. I pee my pants where I stand — mud puddles form around my feet. 

Tomorrow you will sign away your inalienable rights for a used 78 rpm record of “Thee Infanticide Blues.” 
I will strum The Hits of the Borscht Belt Songbook tonight on my ukulele.

The gloaming hour.

I leave a minute after you do. 

You to your elevator shaft. 
Me to my abandoned mine. 

Dark. Wasteland.

We may meet again next year.

“Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood — a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose as terminal-stage capitalism.”

— Mark O’Connell / Notes from an Apocalypse

dangerous anthropogenic interference

“On the day the world ends…
…those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now…”

— Czeslaw Milosz / “A Song on the End of the World”

Gutty Haiku

I will work for tripe
Pepper pot is beautiful
Visceral goodness

“We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.”

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