thee istsfor manity reader

Eye Past eyE

You pack a wallop, my man. In these days of monster hurricanes and unexplained pandemics what you bring to life is… well, death.

You bring a rain of misfortune, disease, and death.

Why am I so tired of this? It’s all the same everyday. You’ve become such a one note player.

Dis — ease and constant darkness punctuated by torrential rains, wildfires, droughts, straight winds, extinctions, melting polar caps, and zoonotic pandemics.

What are you bored, man? If I believed in you…

I’d kill you every day like clockwork, first thing in the morning, just to make my day bearable.

Come, come, and spread your darkness over us. You’ve already done this.

Look at this. Look! You can’t do worse…

“I think one of the best aspects of America is also one of its limitations: freedom to a fault. The insistence on doing it my way without thinking about the collective. False statements of patriotism mean nothing to me, but sacrificing for the greater good means a great deal. There has been a total lack of leadership, by a dangerous man. It’s the perfect storm.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri / “In Conversation”

the year meaning died

did you know?

the year meaning died

the last alliterative

commentator complained

kin is redundant

avoid relatives

“I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear

Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.”

— Charles Wright / “Reunion”

I Once Was Lost

He first sang a song called “Brave New Defalcation Rocket.” I had no idea what he was on about — a caterwaul that passed for singing, I suppose.

He desultorily strummed on an electric ukulele, placing his fingers randomly along the de-tuned strings on the fretboard. Everyone else in the tiny bar was transfixed.

There was a man behind a mixing board, in the corner, who worked the lights and added all manner of distorting effects to the performance — yellow, red, and blue lights swirled to the fuzzed-out ukulele. This strange man on stage had loaded up his uke with transducer pickups and he was kicking distortion pedals — flanged and phased skronks of noise panned left and right through the sound system.

A dozen people chanted, a lap dog barked by the open door. A busboy and bartender slapped each other, by turns, at the beer taps and drew blood from their noses.

Some sort of animal flesh, slathered in citrus, burned in the kitchen. Acrid smoke filled the place.

The man on stage unspooled long phlegmatic strands of spit down, and sucked them back up to the rhythm of his syncopated feet: down-up, down-down-up, down-up-down, down-up…

I tell you, it was madness — a bedlam overflowing from every corner — akin to screening a scrapped David Lynch film, scuttled on the cutting room floor, because it was too much to bear.

And the crowd sang in unison:

Dig my grave, man… the streaming darkness… oh my golly… oh my golly… gonna lay down in that dark hole… dig my grave, man… oh my golly…

At once it occurred to me — I found my people.

My searching was done.

“They say people are dreaming again,
mainly about weird weather. Tsunamis. Lava.
A friend told me she’d dreamt of hailstones
tapping at her window, but when she looked
she saw it was some people throwing teeth
at the glass.”

— Roseanne Watt / “Nightingales”

as easy as…

a deep slice
sit for 10 minutes
chill
shrink
drip

stay

“Hubris is the besetting sin of despotisms everywhere.”

— Philip Short / Pol Pot

Etiolated

Your voice echoes through the ages — as if from the depths of dry amphora.

Pushcarts and tumbrils are full of the dregs of the failed american experiment.

A skim of cream and a puff of smoke are equal in the Inquisitor’s dream —

Spastic as a cobwebbed spindle and dry as a sheaf of faggots left in the sun during deepening drought.

We move away from each other singed by wind driven wildfires that ring ever closer.

Each minute hotter and dryer, each second etiolating the sun —

The shining city on a hill was an ill-fated Fata Morgana —

This moment desiccated like the cicada’s abandoned husk.

“I don’t know what else to do, so I write. It’s my way of seeing the world.”

— Jim Harrison

Something Chthonic 

I’m not feeling good about all that kyoodling outside. I think there are feral dogs and hyenas circling the house. Closing the circle ever tighter until they get in…

I’m cooking up something about the male gaze, about the dynamics of sexism, and the dynamics of power and being female in a world that hasn’t changed fast or far enough…

The first time lightning struck me you had just walked away after telling me about Dali’s paranoiac-critical theory. My head was swimming. No, my brain was a rain of caroming ball bearings. I fell right there in the red Georgia clay. I felt like a distended eyeball just poked out in some 1970’s Kung Fu film. You had me hooked…

I wrote about the flat head woman. My guide from Istanbul to Kathmandu. The sun, a pink-red ulcer, tacked down the cobalt sky…

Then a sojourn to Greece — a slow ferry to Poros…

Aqui estamos, I say. 

The flat head woman says, is it true what they say about Latin men? 

To which I say, never believe what they say. They always speak in tongue twisters and riddles. Nothing makes sense, much less what we’re doing. Abandon all hope of ever singing in the proper register. Too many things are written that are lies, and too many lies are told that are truths. Abandon me like I will abandon you. Do it first.

So we show up at the appointed hour. No one there. Just a cold wind blowing a garbage can lid down the street. A calico cat sniffing at a small pile of Acropolis detritus. No one. We’re alone. 

Don’t go a woolgathering, she says. 

Indulgence in idle daydreaming, say I.

(There’s actually much more, but it doesn’t appear here because we’re standing outside of the infamous rotunda of plenty and the coroner is busy “inquesting”) 

An unseen Greek chorus sings: “Something Chthonic” — don’t fazzle our muckwumpus dazzle the accretion of deletions in the sky… the wormholes in the ploversticks and pattiwhacks all die…

Upon closer inspection my uncle ingested the harvest moon and darkened the sky.  He ran through the living room with a glass full of bloody moon and a minute later the house was thrown into darkness… Greeks be damned!

The feral dogs and hyenas are now inside.

“God is circling like a vulture…”

— Eduardo C. Corral / “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel”

what i see

“Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.”

— George Orwell / 1984

lacunae and interstices

debilitating as 1-2-3… awful as awful can be, and slightly elevated but apocryphal

after the apocalypse we walked on the littered shore of lacuna beach

no word from paramaribo pam, but a fine bread crumb trail of… well, bread crumbs

trailed off into the wreckage of a civilization unhinged and unleavened

she was germinating a fear of wheat, though one couldn’t really call her glutenous… yet

she once said: a night in suriname is equal to two weeks in french guiana

i understood nothing, but the smell of decaying sargassum was intoxicating

she was spotted at the fringe of the jungle at the interstice between life and death

made dyspeptic by the cold medications she attempted to o.d. on

but the bardo was not “taking” and her ass was festooned with deer ticks

“Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone’s disbelief.”

— August Wilson

while they’re asleep

“Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it.”

— Ray Bradbury

Just Chew

“UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.”

— Dr. Seuss / The Lorax