thee istsfor manity reader

Corona

Cantering and rolling, rolling,
Sancho got them happy feet —
A crown makes three by the mango tree.

Riot of pink and red hibiscus —
Frippery festoons his flanks —
Sancho down one, Sancho up two.

Writhing with the unnamable —
Waiting for the ineffable —
Sancho, scythe this way’s coming…

It’s the season of the felling —
Looka that corona, Sancho,
Blistering ’round the blackening sun.

“MAY: Everyone’s equal.

JUNE: There’s always someone on top, someone at the bottom.

MAY: You don’t believe none of it?

JINE: Never did. Do what you have to do. I ain’t stupid, stuffed my pockets full of gold, I did…”

— Sarah Grochala / S-27

Sleep of Treason

I yanked myself out of REM sleep yesterday morning, and was a walking husk the rest of the day…

I’d been dreaming I was in a SmartCar jammed with five other people. We were driving through a jungle swampland when I noticed a large inflatable dayglo green snake that seemed staged around tree limbs in the canopy above.

On another giant cypress tree there’s a 20 foot long orange-yellow banded crocodile with a snake body, ambulating on tiny cartoon legs, making its way down to the passenger side windows. It opens its maw revealing a toothless interior. The sharp tang of fear is redolent in the tiny car. We are all frozen.

Then in a small house filled with the same people from the SmartCar, there is a back slapping agreement and a tap on the belly of someone in cahoots that someone in the party needs to be educated about racist terms. A tacit agreement to tell him to stop calling people that.

Someone turns the lights out, because it’s imperative that we hide, but a spotlight is shining in from darkened jungle revealing where I’m standing in the room. I can’t see through the dark windows, and I’m unable to move far enough away out of the spot light. Im unable to conceal myself. I don’t want to be taken.

I will myself to wake up and move, but I can’t break through the layers of unconsciousness even though I’m aware this is a dream. I violently try to shake off the cloaks of sleep.

I awoke to early morning light streaming in through the blinds. The bed empty.

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a
king of infinite space — were it not that I have bad dreams.”

— William Shakespeare / Hamlet

Gotta, Gonna

I’ll shake your hand like it’s 2019.

You say you’re still living like it’s the morning of November 1, 2016.

And you say:

Don’t be a chop-socky soap jockey and don’t be a hegemonic purveyor of racist tropes and insult troopers. Wha’s wrong with you, man?

Get choppin’ or clod hoppin’ like a supa hero of righteousness. Go stomp on the populist purveyors of trash talk and totalitarian pumpkin head enablers.

Can’t be quiescent, man. Can’t be that — of all things.

Gotta pick up an idea, gotta spark a ‘tude, gotta spark a fire, gotta pick up a rock. Gotta get so pissed. Then you gotta think. Put the rock in your pocket. Keep it ready.

Gotta register to vote (if u ain’t).

Gotta vote (if u r).

And gotta get ready to take out the rock again, and gotta get righteously pissed again, gotta find the matches, gotta clench the fists again…

… gotta be set if the fuckers gonna mess with the system that want to throw them up and out.

Gonna give them the benefit, one last time — that they walk away — when we shit them out like they deserve.

But keep that arm cocked and fists ready if they try the hoodwink!

“Trump’s racism—and that of his allies and enablers—has been too blatant for Americans to ignore or deny. And just as the 1850s paved the way for the revolution against slavery, Trump’s presidency has paved the way for a revolution against racism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi / “The End of Denial”

And She Said…

I don’t want my pictures ending up in a thrift store or antique shop — to have someone at some future time use my image as the cornerstone for an artwork or craft project. I don’t want someone posting my pic up on the internets and writing a story like this. I don’t want someone using my image as a public domain appropriation into a mass retail “jokey” birthday card for sale at fine card shops or big box discount stores. I don’t wish to be made part of someone’s pastiche documentary art film. I do not wish to be trafficked posthumously like a copper penny slathered in virus. I don’t want to be a visual fomite — infecting someone’s nightmares. I don’t want to be sold so cheaply. I want my soul to rest, after it was partially diminished and stolen by this photograph. Just leave my image and my soul alone.

“Inspiration
is the deadliest radiation.
It never completely leaves the bones.”

— Keith S. Wilson / “Heliocentric”

Fifteen Bashings

You want Sasquatch to watch…

I’m dysphoric and elipsis-phobic

Dreaming of the drama at the diorama atop Lookout Mountain — shit no!

Trip your mama by the squelcher and palaver at the knees of Booth Tarkington and the stuff of effetism and the unruliness of the tentacles of love.

I love me a peasant man on a small quay in Santorini smacking a freshly caught octopus into the nearby rocks to soften it up — it’s been dead a while. Just how did he kill it?

Some other way than this brutal bashing?

This death of 15 bashings into the primordial Agean rocks is not a pretty way to go.

What’s a pretty way to go?
Shot to death in the future head?
Don’t know.

“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens.”

— Ray Bradbury

Yaw and Jam

To yaw and jam…
Your paradiddles and ratamacues are killing me

Don’t be here for me:
Sugar Sugar and John Barley Corn Must Die
Seriously?

In susurrations and cackles
In blood bruises and blisters

Blister in the Sun 
What fun

What the fuck is wrong with you?
With your gasping for air 

And your Exorcist tongue flickers
Stop it. 
Seriously?

This is the land of burnt popcorn
And Dr. Pepper droughts… there’s a paucity, man

Because…

… because america…

(and i ain’t talking no tin man or sister golden hair) 
surprise! 
no free is wind blowing on this highway

just strange fruit swingin’ 
in the land of of the free — to kick yer’ ass 
and the home — to pilfer ur loot…

kick out the jams (and yaw) mother———

“But what’s needed in this moment
is unmixed confession
of our nation’s sin,
deep and indefensible.”

— Nikki Grimes / “You Still Dream”

Fishy Fishy Fishy Poo

It’s not piscatorial you’re feeling. You’ve never been to sea.

It’s not enmity you’re feeling. You meditate every morning that you are: peaceful and content in every way and every day.

You’re feeling like a scarlet tanager has alighted on your brain stem — and here we stand next to a waterfall, falling out of love, and fearing the eventual dissipation of all fossil fuel.

The end of life as we know it before we got to know it.

You got it. You got it.

I bid you a tepid adieu. This was already over between us, so why kid ourselves that this really means anything to us… or to me, anyway. So green god-damned, and all of that other high school stuff.

I leave you and your piscatorial delusions with this heartfelt list:

Trout. Orange Roughy. Bass. Mahi Mahi. Salmon. Sunfish. Catfish. Clownfish. Cichlid. Cod. Angelfish. Dragonfish…

You drift off into the Marianas Trench. Your bathysphere detached.

goodbye…

“I, bastard child of the giant chandelier called the blue sky.
No one calls me the sphinx of love.”

— Shuzo Takiguchi / “The Fish’s Desire”

Yes…

You are alive.

That’s something.

“…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

— Samuel Beckett / The Unnameable

Annihilation Haiku

The mushroom cloud grows
Across the blind horizon
A dead gray snow falls

“… for the eyes of the children
of nagasaki,
for the eyes of the children
of middle passage,
for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes,
russian eyes, american eyes,
for all that remains of the children,
their eyes,
staring at us, amazed to see
the extraordinary evil in
ordinary men.”
— Lucille Clifton / “sorrow song”

Gormless Writers

— No more talk of fish.
— Let’s talk about the month long break from writing.
— Let’s not.  
— Let’s write about the month long leave from writing. 
— Let’s  not.
— Let’s consider the month long abstinence from writing.
— Let’s not.  
— Let’s…
— Let’s not. 
— Stop.  
— No need for a post-mortem. 
— Well… let’s start writing again?  
— Yes, let’s do that.  
— Haven’t we already done that by doing this?
— This here?  
— Um… yes.  
— Yes, I think we have.  It’s a start anyway now, isn’t it?  
— Yes, I suppose it is.  
— Is that what you think, too?  
— Yes. Yes, I suppose I do.  
— Well?
— There!
— We’ve done it.  
— Yes. 
— Yes. We have.
— Please pee on me…

“… writing can make you crazy and then it goes on to make you whole.”

— Belle Yang / Forget Sorrow interview