thee istsfor manity reader

Ha 14 (erasure/blot)

Before her intricate challenge
for every pen in residence
she decided to spend an hour each day
gazing at religious paintings
and began looking

aha

the ha
an extreme connected by
her close scrutiny

the ha
produced 445 constellations;
14 were made with embossing

a tiny sense
of the infinite and grace

“Women love men who love post-punk. It’s just sleazy enough to unnerve them while being completely compatible with a bourgeoise lifestyle.”

— Virginie Despentes / Vernon Subutex

The Texture of Bodies

His fragrance remained in the room when he left, and she picked up notes of Ambien and gin.

He turned into a dragon and blew smoke up his own ass: in this manner he floated away on convection currents over the next county into the tri-state area.  

She was disputatious.  She said she loved living in Bwana Johnny Time — the epoch of real mealy mouthed crying.  She said she had cramps.  The walls cared nothing of it.  She insisted and sang “Silent Night.”

He was tall with small joints and thick limbs.  His hair, tufted, was buffeted by the winds which were strong and cool this high in the atmosphere.  Before he blew smoke up his ass he washed windows without panes, and took pains in his assiduity. 

(His father once digested him during a midday snack — and since then he felt as if he were covered in a film.)

 He felt slightly dirty and smelled worse.  

She was small with oblong limbs, and royally blonde-haired down to her quadriceps.  She analyzed the filigree in the milliner’s shears and chose “deckle” as the word of the day; and cellophane was “thee” fabric.  She smelled of Lithium and a life roughly lived.  She ate only the crusts.  

His name was Funty.  Her name was Frenta.  He blessed his goldfish.  She fried hers.  “Orange Poppers!” she proclaimed.  His favorite animal was the Pileated Woodpecker.  She peeled his navels.

She texted: “the wind screams like ten thousand fiends.”

He responded: “are you writing a new poem?”

She was obsessed with the texture of his body.  His tortured male narcissism despaired.  He happily fathered a wonderful future in Hades.  He wanted to write a skeezy text in the underworld.

“Much has changed since the 1340’s, the decade the Black Death arrived in Europe, but not human nature”
— John Kelly / The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

American Scree 19 (erasure / blot poem #66)

He demons in language.
During his compositions 
not to cognition

The letters instead

The letters
kind of flashy
correspond to kind
of potential colors,
whose called for colors,

high pitched
evoke
image

lights imagery,
a whole kind of city
distanced from

emphasis on his
bold language 
of commerce.

“If this is the best of all posssible worlds, what then are the others?”
— Voltaire / Candide

raddle hose hazy (white out #35)

“A plague is a formidable enemy, and is armed with terrors that every man is not sufficiently fortified to resist or prepared to stand the shock against.”

— Daniel Defoe

Grunt ah da HogMan

Squint-eyed monochromatic
on the screen of  her childhood 
He’s talking globular in brays and winces 

A hive of astringency  
in this corner of the universe
voices echo  

Pins and needles thighs 
inner thigh billabongs 
oxbows surgically repaired 

Get away hog man 
get back to hog land 
hog man
dead end

Mutton mouth
carnival-lips agape
carny barking 
under orange / yellow wisps

Get away hog man 
get back to hog land 
hog man
dead end

“Things and their makers rule the world… For things, the country is run. Not for people. For things, America and Russia send aid; but five hundred million stay hungry.”

— Salman Rushdie / Midnight’s Children

Rue

One would ask
of the lurking white world
if it would end
in luminous water
or nearby on the wheel
a cudgel and a rock outcropping
in hand and a popcorn
ceiling phone skittering on
a dead connection.

It’s three hours since we buried our goats
in gothic rue
and there’s someone muttering
in ether and yellow cavils
in orange overalls.

I can’t decipher it
and a woman hovers about
beyond my line of sight
eyeless in the gloaming
and incontrovertible.

“The most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race neutral’ one. The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy advancing non-White Americans toward equity is ‘reverse discrimination.’”

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

Disengage From Timbre

It’s been six days since I fell through the crack.  I’m spiraling down depression way again.  The crack has been widening and if I don’t do something about it — San Andreas be thy name — you unholy fucking fissure! 

This is a familiar landscape, I’m never too far from my stepping through it, into it, farther and farther down — canyon-like — now in a skirl of whorling minimalist notes, repeated and repeated until I am tranced-out and lost.  

Having lost six days now I ask myself: what’s next?  Which way do I move?  What direction?  How do I get out of this, and here I am writing again.  Is it fair enough to start like this again?  The only option really.  How did I get here again?  How do I avoid ending up here again? 

I don’t think I can adequately answer the latter, but the first question must be asked always because it presupposes awareness of the situation.  And here is where I usually make the pivot, because a pivot is required.  The only other option isn’t really an option.  Is it? 

No.  

So here I’ll start again, and content myself with starting again.  This is an acceptable… No, it’s a GOOD step forward.  It had to begin somewhere.  Why not right here?

Here:

I exist in meaningless patter, in the trifling titter of expense and abuse.  I persist in this dominant issue of breaking a standard that I once pretended to.  I perform unlimited horrors on my own discernment and troubled world view.  I will disengage from timbre and search for a tone so acute it pilfers life itself. 

This signifies nothing within nothing.  

But Thoreau said:  “Write while the heat is in you.  The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.” 

And that’s why I persist with this thumb tapping.  To use what little heat warms these fingers attached to a tepid body sitting on a cold toilet.

“When I’m writing, darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.”
— Anne Rice

Central Smoke Bone

She had grown red and corpse-like below the Danish authority standard issue yellowish canopy beyond the dune and deadwood. Nearby, the crusted and congealed, many rats in  hazel frozen a on twig.

Bleating, and she a sheep, that sand crackled and raised in the wool course of the afternoon.  The wife to pooling streaks of curly substances — with areas glued to highlighted clauses and codicils.

A lining of corn is what I picked out — usually in far arcs instead of center nodules. I noticed dried mud and qualities of contractual clouds of condensed water on all sides of the pace window.

I sawed the far central branches —  and what of the ears? 

Those…

In an increasing density at the left of the central smoke bone, she said: “what an attractive calumny as the stumble chooses. What does he choose?”

I chose. Her. Intently.

I dove tumble blind.  The rocks (later chosen) over the chin into what we consider sticking faux yellow moves in air. Did you? 

You, who watched living rings in our mouths of technology and compared those to wire geologic plates —  tectonic, venous, glowing yellow and white. 

You found that sort of catheter like feature —  a leaf growing dizzy  in the eddy of a creek.

“I believe that in art, the things you wouldn’t want in real life can be entertained or understood, or even seen and examined.”
— Mary Gaitskill



Doused Chiaoscuro

See more ideas about black and white:
the dramatic effect of contrasting areas
taken on February 24,
when the deus ex machina fell through the trapdoor
into the charnel house.

See deus roll among the flaky
fillets doused in slightly sweet vinegar and finished with a peppery
Caravaggio touch / a tenebrism used only to obtain
a dramatic impact while chiaroscuro psychologically moves
and deus
in Renaissance style, and later in a Godard film says:

“I think of buying hand cream to douse the smell of blood.”

Oh! O! o! the Principal is waiting for you in his office, there is NO emotion.

Wet Season is a cold, harsh dousing of the realities of city-living
then deus is doused in garlic butter / She
panhandled and chided him all through the reduction.

Viewers are once again ejoined to cover their eyes…
Turn out the lights, douse the lights,
dim the lights, turn off the lights,
switch off the lights —

deus!
dreary dubious dulcet dungeon —
escaped mental patient doused with sulphuric acid…

Topped with sea salt, pepper and fresh thyme,
the black stone paths, the jug and the red grapes,
made by the use of force
deus
relents off-stage…

Centrifugal.

Then the scent of rain-doused pines.

Petrichor.

“Do you believe in God?” I said. “God’s in prison,” he said. “What’d he do?” I said. “Everything,” he said.

— James Tate / “Desperate Talk”

flarfish 623: bilious viridity

My dysfunction is an (especially) excessive Viridity to the oak — whether thee extended
use of the term “jaundiced” — or not — 
I aspired to the bilious Lord who achieved such glory on our collective backs.

Or was it to the mingling terms she enchanted us with? Mean-spirited, suspicion, and anger…

If you are a choleric inhabitant of New Orleans (as I was during 1982-1984) and you tender your professional services to the citizens of Marietta, now tending toward the stereofluoroscopic highroad, and then casting a Coptic teamster 
of invincible strength
and author of manumission tracts — 
who brings forth this Tincture whereby he 
attained a oneness — unfussy and mannishly liberalistic and glamorized…

What is to become of us?

I inoculated her cautious objectivism with the title: A Mother’s Grateful Tribute Analysis of Urine — read backwards and then abroad 
in the free soil of Nature — it imparted a Poststructuralist meaning within meaninglessness,
and filigreed a display of new strength.

And yet nothing remains…

“I think young writers ought to be heretical.”

— Derek Walcott