“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
…sturgeon have been on earth for millions of years in the chill caspian sea…
but
i’m looking for redemption
in the butt end of comet hale-bopp
emaciated
glue-eyed to the telescope diopter
sharp-eyed for a peek of e.t.
come to take me home
to a higher source
where star trek is 24 hours a day
& star wars is now
…sturgeon are losing their scales coming apart at the seams spewing viscera this way and that…
i choose apple sauce
phenobarbital & vodka
a couple of teaspoons a couple of swigs
a couple of new black nikes
sorry about the sturgeon, su see you at the supernova, tom
i’m going beyond the event horizon
sucked into a black vortex of stars
streaking cold to the next world
into the void
into nothing
“I don’t know anyone idiotic enough to claim that you can teach someone to be a fiction writer.”
— Tobias Wolff
(hit play button above to watch my short film “whipping”)
Two Characters Caught in an Absurd Interregnum in Act I
Manity, a man aged 33
Hermès Terminus (H.T.), a god appearing aged 55
Two British Naval yeoman from the War of 1812
Three young sailors, ranging from preteen to age 14
A Voice
A Debauched Authorial Voice
SCENE: A walled compound. Fifteen foot tall wall composed of large white bricks upstage, the width of the proscenium.Behind it we see a mountainous scene, composed of three massifs the width of the proscenium.The wall obscures the horizon line. There are a few block houses in the distance upstage right. A hillock where two men stand…
Manity: Are u a god?
Hermès Terminus: Good stuff, isn’t it?
Manity: What is this we’re smoking? Hey, what gives? I don’t smoke.
Hermès Terminus: Yes, but you’ve willed this from your imagination —or rather, your imagination thrust this out from the inchoate blackness of your subconscious — and there you go, you’re smoking a black russian.
Manity: Wha’?… Should I call you Hermès or Terminus?
Hermès Terminus: Just call me H.T.
Manity: Are you my psychopomp?
Hermès Terminus: Seriously, you believe in gods?
Manity: No.
Hermès Terminus: Who does anymore?It’s no longer a viable vocation.No more wonder. No more respect, or veneration.We’re a forgotten lot.
Manity: Why are we here in this walled area?
Hermès Terminus: It’s my place.Welcome.It’s also the parameters you’re dealing with now.You know you have the utmost freedom here.You don’t actually have to have us inhabit this walled compound.The walls could be metaphoric.It doesn’t have to be this way. You wrote this little tableaux.
Manity: But the opium.I’ve never smoked opium before.
Hermès Terminus: And you still haven’t.It’s the choice you made, or rather what piqued you’re interest, because it was said just so when someone threw out a writing prompt in that other world you inhabit.Only you really know why we’re here, and then it might be deeply imbedded in your subconscious, so you may not be fully aware of it.
Manity: Yes, but why at this moment.That wall.That horizon line.This hillock.And what is that bizarre looking tree?
Hermès Terminus: Ah, yes, the honey locust… a wonderful specimen… but listen we’re here now because it’s merely the device to get into this story.It sprung half-baked — or fully formed — from the font in your story place.It’s also a good place to start without having to talk about the weather.There ain’t no hook in starting a story talking about the relative humidity.
Manity: Two things.I had every intention of talking to you about the barometric pressure; and I don’t like your typical linear narrative.I was thinking about doing an anti-story… but it looks like we’ve already ended up in a play.
Hermès Terminus: Why not do an anti-play?An absurd tragi-comedy in 3.14159 Acts.
Manity: What about 452 lines?
Hermès Terminus: Only one act?Where did that number of lines come from?
Manity: Something of my own paranoiac-critical method… did you know that the barometric pressure is …
Hermès Terminus: Aw, no. No. No. No!It’s still early, you can salvage the opening with a hook.A hook!There are time tested ways to do this.Canonical ways.The pedagogical-industrial ways.The workshopped ways of doing this.And the apotheosis of paths: market research and the test audience questionnaire.
Manity: Ack! Ack! Ack!
Hermès Terminus: Are you doing a cover of the Minutemen?
Manity: No. Never speak of audience research again or I’ll turn into a ferret.
Hermès Terminus: You mean a polecat?
In this manner the formal devolution announces itself…
A Voice: Ontologically speaking a ferret knows nothing of its being.Its existence is not a quandary to it, it has no conception of existence.Therefore I mercilessly throw him off the hate truck and all the locust tree thorns make a beeline for it.Out to puncture it’s consciousness to make it aware of epistemology, ontology, and phenomenology.But the ferret has its own plan, it’ll go along with the British impressment of sailors for no other reason than it likes a good Anglophile angle on everything it does.And believe me: it does know.It also knows Husserl, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre, and as the ferret prepares his thesis defense it floats with the certainty of a life well squandered and a squab well ripped to shreds for dinner.Just don’t call him a marmot or a polecat.That’ll get you a mouthful.
And further…
A Debauched Authorial Voice: And in this manner it all digressed, dear reader. Somewhere the ghost of Laurence Sterne wanders the long dark halls of absurd serialization, and Tristram Shandy sits at the base of a wall wondering why the world is bereft of meaning… I don’t know… do you?
Fade to Black. Distant explosions heard long after curtain falls.
“I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.”
— Samuel Beckett
She hated blank pages like she hated the blankness of her life.
So she began by making marks – large, loose, gestural sweeps on the page. She then shifted from elongated serpentines to dense clusters of hash marks on the peripheries of the page – this reminded her of where the people who once cared about her were now in her life. She came to the middle of the page and drew one thick hyphen – this was she.She went on this way year after year, filling thick notebooks with serpentines, hash mark clusters, and hyphens. Winters came and went with the usual snow and white brutality. Summers flourished in oppressive greens. Yet she went on. Fifty summers passed as she assiduously made her marks and filled notebooks.
Notebooks.
There was nothing else of use she could do.
It seemed as it was when she was a child and jumped from the bridge into that cold river. She watched people above her moving to and from their lives. The mornings filled with a flurry of black bowlers and slate fedoras – the afternoons a long procession of pursed lips and heavy eyes. Occasionally, a flash of brilliant blue or a fleeting smile, but it was mostly gray refracted above.
At the end she had stacked up thousands of notebooks from floor to ceiling. The notebooks filled her small apartment wall to wall. Then with this notebook she filled the last remaining slot of open space. As an opaque scrim spread itself across the sky she whispered, this is enough.
“Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.”
– Eudora Welty
Why did patience abandon me?Why are you a glom on my psyche?What can I do to rid myself of you and the children?I never wanted children.I caved to you and your “maternal desires.”You never supplied me a good reason to have children other that you had “always wanted children.”To what end, goddamnit?You aren’t that engaged with what they do.You either smother them or mistreat them. I won’t tolerate the beatings, psychological humiliations, and games dependent on your mood.And as I can’t stand them what are we to do with a six, and four year-old, how did I end up here?So I’m leaving.I can’t stand you anymore, above all. I never wanted these kids — nor can I stand them.I will contact you again when I’m established elsewhere — I don’t know where that is now, but I’m leaving you $130,000 in the bank. I’ve signed the deed over to you — sell the house if you wish.I’m leaving you the car.I paid off the note with a part of the $26,000 I withdrew from the account.I’m starting over with a meager $20K and will provide my half for the kids when I’m set up elsewhere.I’m done — done with you and the kids I never wanted. If I don’t do this now I fear what I’m capable of doing.
I only dream of Saturn eating his children…
Goodbye —
Thaddeus
Peter Paul Rubens, 1636. Public Domain.
Francisco Goya, c.1819-1823. Public domain.
“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
a woman recounts a tussle
with the sharp teeth
of an unhappy day
her children rented out
man by man
the night a long
angry gash
shred open
ii.
religious practices
that favor death
12 rocks and sickles
killed women
at a wedding party
this year
“Follow your weird. I really don’t think you can go wrong with this. The world is waiting for your own unique, strange, beautiful contribution, that thing that no one but you can conjure.”
— Ramona Ausubel
She dances to KOKOKO! because there is nothing else in the world she would rather do.That is all there is to it, when one’s desires collide with the past. She was a child when the rebels raided her village and hacked her parents to bits. She reveled: for her mother beat her so violently and often, and her father came nightly with unwelcome ministrations. She gladly welcomed her liberation. When the Women’s Liberation Phalanx mounted their counter attack and she was conscripted as their cook and laundress, she claimed a joy she never imagined. Now imagine the promotion. Imagine having a head filled with lightning bolts and AK-47’s. Imagine the retributions. Imagine drifting away in a recurring mushroom cloud of hiss and sulphur smell of spent artillery. Now imagine hearing equivalencies early and often.Then you can imagine why that pounding din that KOKOKO! has shocked into existence appeals to her so. Come bring the noise, she says. And she abandons all hope on the dance floor.
“I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks
Discomfit the disco dancer whose boogie shoes are too much to bear.
Panfilo is a bear of a man, dark tufts sprouting from his open collar — a cornicello impossibly lost in that dark thicket of chest hair. He’s never been more alive than he is at this moment, pumping his fist in the air as Baccara do it in their video. He floats on the violin glissando. Yes, sir he can boogie.
The thundering sound system lifts him bodily somewhere stratospheric — the music coursing through every nerve and blood vessel. A sensation akin to being picked up by the scruff of the neck and transported up by his particular god and seeing all creation below him. Electric. Erotic.
Panfilo’s lone cavil: his Pierre Cardin wingtips are one-half size too small, but he had to have them for tonight — these brown 11-1/2’s with the metal emblem on the heel. “This is Studio 54, baby,” he says, as benediction, to the dancefloor.
Panfilo strokes his John Holmes-issue mustache: meticulous in it’s curation, and manicured to resemble his idol’s. Panfilo hopes his sleight of hand works — he stuffed a strategic sock in his underwear after his blow dry. But now he’s dazed in the dance. The fraud firm and forgotten as the lights swirl above him and the bubbles float down. Despite the two-hour wait at the velvet rope — he’s in. This is a life fully lived at the edge of a credit card and a rolled up Jackson. He sings loud, for everyone to hear, but he might as well be miming: “Yes sir, I can boogie… I can boogie, boogie-woogie, all night long…”
He’s at the center of the universe. The feel of his picked-out perm bouncing off his temples and shoulders sends jolts of adrenalized joy through his body. His popping hips and shoulder-jousts cry out: love me tonight!
Panfilo catches the glint of Tatiana’s lip gloss as she sweeps up dancing to him.
Tatiana loves this song. Loves how the singers pronounce “boogie-woogie” as Bela Lugosi might, with that implosive Hungarian inflection “Ay, can boogie, boogie-voogie all night long…” And she loves Panfilo’s look, and what he seems to be packing. She’s a recent fan having seen a sequence of a Holmes film at a “key party.”
“This is the best time to be alive,” Tatiana said, as she and a friend smoked a joint on a white shag carpet in Teaneck.
“Can you imagine our mothers living through this? My God,” Tatiana said, “1978 is going to be a good year!”
Tonight Tatiana’s trying something new. She read in Cosmopolitan that a dry cleaner bag rolled up in two mounds makes for realistic looking bra-stuffing. And while she’s already sweating up a storm as she approaches Panfilo she catches him sizing up her handiwork. The hint of a smile. Success.
She, too, has seen the Baccara video and she breaks into the same practiced hip-shimmy as the singers hit that “boogie-voogie” inflection point she so loves. It’s her first dance at 54.
“1978 is turning out to be a great year,” Tatiana says to Panfilo, as the DJ mixes in a new song — pitches perfectly synchronized on the downbeat.
Minutes later they’re both singing “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” to each other.
“As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.”
— Quentin Tarantino
thee istsfor manity reader 