thee istsfor manity reader

found in ICA Miami elevator.

Burn the Witch

(from 30 Stories in 30 Songs)

He sat eating what he thought was the best chicken noodle soup he’d ever had.  It was chock full of carrots, translucent slivers of onions, noodles, and hearty chunks of chicken. 

“This is exquisite,” he told the waitress when she came to refill his water glass.  “And this is a small bowl?!  Unbelievable, this is a meal.”  It really was the best soup he’d ever had, he wrote in his journal.

What he couldn’t work out is just what kind of regional spin on this dish he was having. He was accustomed to having some lime with his chicken soup in tropical climes, but it was the chicken that was unusual.  It was darker than usual, even for dark meat, and a bit tougher, but quite tasty because it had been marinated so well and it had become one with the other ingredients; it seemed as if the chicken had spent the perfect amount of time stewing in the soup.  It was fantastic, this “sopa de pollo grimalkina.”

“¿Señorita, por favor,” he intoned in his best studied Spanish, “que tipo de pollo es este?”

The young waitress stood mute, staring at him as if he’d said something offensive.

“Señorita…”

She ran into the kitchen.  After a some time there were some raised voices, and a pleasant looking man came out to speak with him.  He repositioned his pants, pulling them up by his belt over his rounded stomach.  He wiped the sweat from his bald pate and ran the hands through the hair on the sides of his head.

“Señor, is everything all right with your lunch?”

“Yes, yes.  The soup is outstanding, but I think the young lady misunderstood.  I merely want to know what type of chicken this is.  Is it a rooster?  Is it a feral island species?  What is it?”

“Well, señor, thank you.  But this is a family recipe, a secret recipe that we just can’t share.  The cook, my wife, would not allow me back into the conjugal bed if she knew I told you.  It is her special recipe.”

“I see, so her family’s name must have been Grimalkina, yes?”

“Ah… um… yes, of course.  I will tell her you enjoy it very much.  I will have my daughter bring you a mojito, on the house, as you say.”

“Well, thank you.”

The man returned to the kitchen, and within a minute the young woman returned with the drink.  Quite strong, he thought.  Having the strongest mojito ever, he wrote in his journal.  This will get me shit-faced in this heat.

Upon finishing his lunch he asked to speak to the man again, and thanked him for the drink anew, and added, “compliments to the chef, tell your wife she made the best soup I have ever tasted.”

As he left, he stopped a few steps away from the restaurant in the street.  This was a “paladar” after all, he reviewed to himself; this is their home.  I bet if I looked around out back I can find the coop and see the chickens, maybe a picture with my phone…

He crept up the side of the house, walking gingerly around the boxes and buckets.  The thick pink and red hibiscus shrubs provided cover from a direct sight-line from the kitchen.  At the back of the yard he found no coop or chicken cages.  There was an odd corrugated metal garbage can that seemed ancient below a mango tree.  Some odd tufts spread around the base of the tree.  As he came nearer he shuddered, his stomach seemed to need to float out of his body through his chest.

He felt dizzy as he stood among these tufts and realized it was fur.  Fur in different colors.  He felt repulsed as he took the sticky garbage lid from the can.  He began to retch and eventually began to vomit into the can.  He vomited on what was clearly half a dozen carcasses.  Dogs?  No, Cats.

Am I swooning? he thought.  As he fell he saw the three of them coming out of the back of the house.  The man had a cleaver, his daughter had a carving knife, and the other woman, an imposing block of a human being, had a tenderizing mallet and a large pot in hands.  The last thing he heard was the tinny strains of Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch” coming from some distance.  He could not reconcile this, not here, not now.

They’re witches, he thought.  He reached for his phone, but swatted at the air instead.  He stared at the solitary stratocumulus tacked to the sky.  He felt a searing sensation reticulating sharply out from his chest, as the three heads blotted out the sky.

“This is why writing workshops can be a little dangerous, it should be said; even the teachers or leaders of such workshops can be a little dangerous; this is why most of your learning should be on your own. Other people are often very sure that their opinions and their judgments are correct.”
— Lydia Davis, Essays

Disappearer

I make people disappear. Someone has to do it. The pay is just that good. Haven’t you ever wondered where all the people that disappear mysteriously go? I do too. I wonder where the kids and women — it’s mostly kids and women, there’s occasionally a man requested, but it’s mostly kids and women of a certain age they want. So I know the first part of the answer to that question of where they go. I’m one of the men responsible for taking them, we are legion. Someone has to be responsible for handling these people first. But where they end up after I pass them along? That’s as much as a mystery to me as it is to you. I wonder. I have my ideas about it.

I work alone on my end…

“The most regretful people on earth, are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
— Mary Oliver

Whig Man

Millard Fillmore greeted me on my laptop today
He was the featured article on Wikipedia today
He was the last Whig to serve as president
He seemed to have a wig on in “Fillmore in 1849”
The Brady daguerreotype
He looks a man run down as Vice President
He later ran as a nativist
A secret Know Nothing
Up from poverty
In with widow Caroline
(I did acid with Caroline)
Out with ink
And a stroke
Of compromise
And fugitive slavery
Palavering after Johnson
The impeached
Compromiser of compromises

” I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.”

— MAY SARTON

Pandemic Haiku

Febrile and tranquil

He submits to the sickness

He gives up the fight

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

— Jack Kerouac

110 Words

Even if it’s just a few desultorily drawn up words at the end of the world, on the butt end of pandemics… Why are we here anyway? What does it really matter? Well, we spend our lives constructing meaning out of meaningless things, and when we are bereft of these meaningless things we are unhappy and feel we have been robbed of something. But what if the something never meant anything… then why? All I have to do is write toward the number 100, and then that suffices for this exercise, and then I’m ten words short, then six, then two… then three over… then that’s enough at 110 words…

“I tell my students what I tell myself, write every day, even if it’s only a few lines, an image, a funny rhyme, a snatch of overheard conversation. All this is like chopped vegetables for the soup pot or witches cauldron of poems.”

— Dorianne Laux

His One Consolation

“Heh,” she says. “Heh!”

He doesn’t say much of anything. His hands are tied, but not his feet — so it’s easy for him to get up walk to the kitchen and use the scissors with a backwards grasp to cut himself free of his hand restraints while she is doing her make up. Instead of surprising her with an all out assault, he walks out into the sunshine and walks away toward the police station a mile down the road. But she strikes him down with her new car. Her car  is really more of an assault SUV — she’s certainly using it in this manner — and she quickly disposes of him. His body a mangled mess caught under the chassis. His one consolation as he was crushed , then mashed, was that he fouled up her new transmission.

“We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
— Henry James

Buzzards on Parade

The twelfth day of the month was Copperhead Wednesday. Serpentine was the look we were going for. Beatific upper register notes is what Maria was reaching for: Ta da la ta da la dao, was what she sang to a supper club of adoring mengeese eyeing a pair of lady rattlesnakes. Midnight. Thursday morning. Applause. Thunderous.

Savorous twistings of moonglow hairs into chignons and much dispensing with shoes and underthings. There was nothing like a cobra line dance to make it libertine-free and parsimonious-lite.

I, the author, heard someone order a chocolate stout. “Not served here,” was the reply. Vehement — something akin to buzzards on parade: wing-wide convection current surfing loafers — something free, not imagined, not paid for, not patented and surely made to disappoint.

Asseverations to “live fully and create in the midst of the desert” notwithstanding, Maria went home alone.

“I think the advice I wish I had learned is that there are agony days and hate days and days you just can’t turn off that “writer” voice in your head. Sometimes, you really don’t know why you’re doing this—but you keep doing it. And I think if that’s how you feel: The having to do it, that inner drive, then you ARE a writer, and then the rest is just the details of refining and homing your skills.”

— Anna Davies

My name is a wall

I’m changing my name.  Like most of us I had no hand in choosing my name, but unlike many of you my name pays homage to a bad man, and my association with him has come to an end.  Oh, it doesn’t really matter that he was a violent man, responsible for the murder-suicide that took my dear mother from me.  I’m quite a violent man myself.  Violence is always with me at the peripheries of my consciousness.  Waiting.  Always coiled and ready to strike.  Anyway, I don’t wish to dwell on that — his violence or mine — I won’t mention it again.  I’m sorry now that I did say anything.  I want to rid myself of his name because it lacks a certain euphony:

X X.

In my mind it strikes a timbre most foul.  

“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.”
— Lord Byron

Hamburger Lady or Slug Bait?

Maria was rereading a section of Samuel Beckett’s Watt for the third time.  She turned off the television — there was a dearth of news and wild rumors continued to seep into the reporting — it was all too repetitive and too distracting to read and have that droning on simultaneously.  She was starved for new information on the second day back from her thru-hike while the ruins still lay smoldering less than a half mile away from her Battery Park apartment.  But she was growing uneasy in the same manner as she did when her father crunched about on the roof above her head in the living room.  He’d cross the length of the roof and moved in a semi-circle, near the edge, handling the aerial antenna in hopes of improving the reception on their 1972 Zenith television console which had a habit of detuning.  The attenuated signal would scare her as the images on the television first became ghostly simulacra and then transmogrified into a deafening cascade of pixels.  White noise and snow.  She set the book aside and opened her journal to yesterday’s half empty page. She drew a line just below yesterday’s entry and wrote:   09/25/2001

She needed a word of the day.  She pulled the heavy dictionary, beyond the plate with the half eaten bagel, closer and opened it to a page at random.  She looked out at the river, and tacked her finger to the left page.  Her finger landed on “penury.” No.  It was a word she was quite familiar with, that would not do.  She closed the dictionary, looked out the window again, reopened it and her finger came down with more conviction, like a drunkard’s dart thrown in frustration: “trepan.”

“Ha,” she said, “oh, perfect.  Now give me one I don’t know.”  She closed and opened the dictionary quickly scanned her finger down the page and there: “saudade.”

“Wow, that’s been years!” She had once known the word, even used it in a paper.  The word, and it’s general feeling, was only vaguely familiar now.  She remembered her Modern American Literature professor in college talking about it for some minutes during the discussion of The Sun Also Rises.  But quickly racking her brain the most salient point she could remember about the book now was that Hemingway claimed to have rewritten the last page 39 times.  It was set in Spain, wasn’t it?  But saudade is Portuguese… there was bullfighting…  She didn’t remember what it meant.  Perfect, that’s the word of the day.  She returned to her journal, and under the date wrote:

Saudade- a deep emotional state of melancholic longing for a person or thing that is absent.

1. Reread: The Sun Also Rises…

She tapered off and watched a tug make its way across the window and out. She picked up Watt again and now in silence read two pages and stopped upon reading: “… funambulistic stagger.”  She looked up funambulistic in the dictionary and wrote it down as entry number two for the day. Then she wrote:

2. Trepanation, something you forgot about… It’s so delirious, but so deleterious to the cranium, but good ‘fer ‘yer soul.

No, that certainly wasn’t it, she thought.   She scanned her bookcases, and spotted the thin yellow spine of the volume that would set her mind at ease.  She remembered the passage was about five pages into “The Wasteland,” and that while it didn’t have the import and immediacy of lines 301-302: “I can connect / Nothing with nothing”  — which were not only pithy but the lines she wrote and repeated so often a decade ago, when she was still in her early-twenties, that it became a mantra of sorts — these other lines had remained with her because of their playful sonority and archaic quality; and after all, sitting at here dining room table in the nascent year of the 21st century, they sounded completely absurd, as absurd as standing up at this moment and doing “The Charleston” might be. 

She stood abruptly, as if pulled up by a noose, the chair yawling and skittering back on the bamboo floor causing the napping cat to jump to attention.  She bent her right arm up with her index finger pointed up to the air and affecting a slight angle of her body to the right, and just as quickly she realized she had no conception of how “The Charleston” was actually danced.  She had a vague recollection of a jaunty tune that always seemed to accompany those skittish 1920’s black and white newsreels, and some ill defined movement of either leg in opposite direction, but the more she thought about it, the more the mood waned; and within some seconds the upright pointed index finger had rotated toward her head, canted sharply at a ninety degree angle as her thumb went up at perpendicular, and the jaunty flapper finger became the skeletal outline of a gun to her temple.  She turned and saw herself in the hallway mirror.  Despite spending the last six months in the sun she looked stark, hollow-eyed and sallow.  The cuticle she chewed bloody at the end of her finger appeared to her as the sight at the end of the barrel that would deliver her.

The cat mewed and wrapped itself around her ankle for a moment, and in that instant she snapped out of the reverie.  She looked at the bloody cuticle, stuck the tip of her finger in her mouth and sucked the blood off.  She bent down to pet the cat with her left hand and patted it gently away on the rump, whispering “good girl,” and went to extract the T.S. Eliot from the bookcase.

Back at her journal she wrote:

2a. Ok, while it isn’t “I can connect / Nothing with nothing;” just about all of “The Hollow Men,” or the opening to “Prucfrock,” I should be able to remember:

O O O O that Shakespearean Rag — 

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

What shall I do now? What shall I do?

(Lines 128-131)

She stood again and shuffled her feet laterally and wiggled her index finger at the sky.  The sky her former god recently vacated.  She imagined this is what “The Charleston” might be, at the very least it matched the music jangling in her head.

“Trepanation,” she said to the cat. “Trepanation,” she said to New Jersey sitting heavy atop the river in the window.  From that moment forward she never gave it a second’s second thought.  She retrieved a thick red marker and scrawled TREPANATION across the next two empty pages of her journal.

***

Garcilazo learned of it, and moved forward, immediately buying the drill and telling Maria his plans and instructing her on how to help him.  He set the date for later that week.  She would come over, they would have drinks to relax, and she would drill the quarter of an inch hole into his pate at precisely midnight.  His birthday.

He hadn’t so much lived these 32 years in a daydream as much as he felt that there had always been a scrim between him and the world.  Everything was seen and felt at a slight remove. His emotions and his thoughts always disengaged, unable to moor with what was real or intended in this world.  He saw how others acted, and he didn’t feel that way.  He heard what others said and never thought in that manner.  Learning that trepanation removed the filter between one’s true experience of reality and filled one with love was all he needed to hear.

She on the other hand needed a good deal of convincing.  Yes, she wanted to help him; but drilling into his head, in his living room, without so much as a local anesthetic was more than she could understand.  But she was aware of the bleak life he had lived and she could not deny him.  He asked her to bring the Throbbing Gristle records, because he wanted to play their music while they did the trepanation.  

“Thanks for turning me on to them,” he told her.  “We’ll probably play ‘Slug Bait,’ ‘Hamburger Lady,’ or ‘Discipline’ real loud over the drilling. Good thing I’m out in the country. I’ve got tequila. I think we’re set.”

 “Sometimes I want to suck on a beautiful word. To lick it clean.” 
— Urs Allemann

Waxing Indecisive

I.

“You think grave digging is something to be embarrassed about? Everybody needs a grave digger, son.”

“I believe you father, but in these times of pestilence I feel overburdened. While the other kids play kick the skull at the green, here I am burying the dead. It’s quite dull and difficult work in these pits.”

“Listen, son. I buried Yorick yesterday, and that distracted pain in the ass prince was here waxing alexandrine and indecisive. He is difficult, but son we’re among kings and princess, it’s not all lower class rot and rigor we deal with.”

The fissile rocks burst against the grain.  Clouds swathed the moon in a green cast.  The grave digger’s son decides to go into tax accountancy, another steady, but cleaner, job.

II.

Not alone. I’ll see you in the morning. 
I’m hearing this for the first time. 
Tell me something you heard when you were injured like an animal missing a limb.
Does it need to be a seven part story?
No but if it’s made of sinew and crag I’d enjoy it more.
A rabid coyote has been here at night while we sleep.
Listen, your father was not a starfish. Your sister was not a line of enjambed poetry.
If we don’t get to choose when we are transfigured,
Are we allowed to choose when we are transmogrified?
We only get to choose if we go into tax accountancy or grave digging.
They’re both very steady jobs.
The steadiest.

“I write for myself and strangers.” 
― Gertrude Stein