thee istsfor manity reader

Fall

Fall.  Fall, I say.  She doesn’t.  She stays perched on her branch.  Fall, I say.  She does not.  This ritual —  the repetition is liturgical.  A call and response in absentia.  There is no rejoinder.  There is no: and also with you.  There is only silence and the absence in her eyes.  Fall, I say again.  She looks down where I stand.  She looks away into the distance.  I look.  I see what she sees.  Nothing there.  Fall, I say.  She’s like an unhinged censer rolling away down a transept.  Fall, I say.  And she jumps.  I turn.  I step away.

“You have to be willing to look stupid, to stumble down unproductive paths, and to endure bad afternoons when all your ideas are flat and sterile and derivative. If you don’t take yourself too seriously, you’ll bounce back from these lulls and be ready for the music’s next visit.”

— George Meyer

flarfish 20: ecdysis anthropocene splash

Sixth Extinction! Anthropocene!

Cry baby!

“¡Llorona!” for example, can splash water from her toilet

Amphibians, Crocs, Fauna, Wildlife Crocodile, Alligator Crocodile

“¡Buenos dias!” A Baby Elephant this morning at Sabi Sabi was the last born

it was smelling the air but it almost looked like the pachyderm supreme…

Explore F. Alvarez’s AK board in the catalog

global of ideas. | See more about Thoughts Baby monkey!

PLEASE LIKE BEFORE YOU sever your foot

And more about Deer, Mornings and Forests

It’s not the end

It is the end

“It’s not the end of the world at all,” he said. “It’s only the end for us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.”

— Nevil Shute / On The Beach

Wanderlust

I spent most of the last two days in an altered state of consciousness. Somewhat deluded, exhausted, and floating in and out of the lands of Fratish Sapish. Stop. Don’t open your Google Maps app and search it out, there is no Fratish Sapish — not on a map, anyway.

This altered state was the result of driving 45 hours straight through from Yellowstone National Park to Coral Gables, Florida, where my family used to live. I mean they still lived there, technically, but now they were all dead — all four of them — so I suppose they didn’t really live there anymore. But their bodies, their stuff, and my childhood stuff, was still there; so you see it’s a sort of gray area.

I suffered from a literate sort of wanderlust, but now life seemed world-weary and over. I was exhausted, overtaxed, and constantly slipping in and out of Fratish Sapish.

(Note: I originally called it Frapish Satish but then I Googled the name and found it was the name of a journalist. So I changed a couple of consonants… that’s how I roll)

But now I had so much to do — baleful acts of bailing out of my past. But first, and without delay, I had to get some sleep by way of Fratish Sapish. There would be plenty of time to change my name tomorrow.

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

— Albert Camus / Notebooks 1935-1942

flarfish 5: dada flarf-a-rama

Flarf poetry was an… scant garde poetry movement of the 21st century.

corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong.

the style of which he promptly dubbed “Flarf,” with… something ineffable

in Dada 3 (1918) , except that here the landscapes keep dissolving until the edges soften in 1932

in poetry – Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core is missing

The historical context to explore scientific inquiry and the

marama rama dada agdada Anus vetula dediikod Alavia bie stutter

“flarf” e.g.) And on the… home-a-rama makeshift other

futurists, dadaists, surrealists, Russian constructivists

Beat culture, Pop and the “Pictures.

Generation” drunk or sober

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”

— William Faulkner

A Hawk Checks His Waterproofs

A London man creates a call in exchange for the oft-deplored offer — characters dominated by the increasingly unhinged hawks on the banks of the Thames. Gophers ruin the soil before a Parliamentary veto on who was appointed. This act is unusual, it’s an aberration of heart.

He looked like he was only in his early thirties, a former operator of the alleged slightly larger than a half-inch square image, a painter of miniatures. Missing a course on etymology — scumbling with an unusual triangular instrument, and reconstructing his left ventricle.

A mining concern might be dangerous or impossible if you open your door to the most interesting uncertainties. Don’t you think it’s easy to worry about the future? The effects of the river on the brood of chicks on a biweekly basis. The occupation, place of origin, clan affiliation, patronage, parentage, adoption, and even physical characteristics in doubt. A gosling is a gross thing, and a hawk is checking its waterproofs.

The five-week period of the Lluvia, which means “rain,” began as it was reported. The reason behind this was people in groups – and the ornithologists missing after the semester concluded.

Gravity was inescapable. Nothing made sense.

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

— Ray Bradbury

My Day in Fratish Sapish

It was something like “together,” with the possibility of “maybe” — then it’s take a job, with the “most excellent” Thomas in Minnesota, near Bemidji, which was one of the really nice places. Then, cut to Oklahoma: a flare in English — include an afflatus (“a divine imparting of knowledge or power”). So far, going to see how many I can make, until I get bored.

These things do get boring — maybe we’ll make a fake Z. Oooo far, and wide, going to see the mahatma. I can make it, until I get bored. We’ll make a circuit of the leagues of Fratish Sapish. They just did the work that was in front of me for six and a half years. A float! Grotty and stuffed with brambles and gorse.

Somehow, people’s perceptions of essential jobs during a pandemic lead to headlines and cut-ups — and to her introduction, explaining why she likes to use collage and juxtaposition once — from which the reader can pick and choose a noose. Nothing bores me more than a moose, a flat patty, and one-long often bemused rutted hunter.

Who characterized his Presidential vote as principled… heh!

“Life is not always explained…”

— Annie DeWitt

flarfish 27: vaticination la luciernaga

On two occasions, in fact, your face

is particularly emphasized: similar to

Foretell the future of us:

firecracker: petardo

firedepartment: bomberos

firefly: luciérnaga

firelight: luz del Vaticano

At Vatican South July comes into focus accelerated

A splendid and macabre garden

Fortell the future…

in Russia:

Garshin, Korolenko, Chekhov and He plays, too, at A new construction

that as an army of (insatiables) brilliant, magnificent, nobles:

sumptuous as fireflies: luminant,

Effulgent

illuminating a distant, wide bard

And lunar.

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”

— May Sarton / Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mearmaids Singing

Fox in a Cul-de-Sac

Fade in:

Fusty living room. Crepuscular light.

Loud swelling radio chatter, multiple frequencies: reports of war, a horse race, cricket scores, market updates, easy listening music, someone reciting maths.

A woman affecting classical statue poses. A man sitting on an easy chair reading a newspaper.

W: What did the news have to say today, dear?

M: There were poems received from cyberspace. They popped up for two seconds and were cantilevered out of sight to another spot for later reckoning.

W: What? What are you on about, dear?

M: The poems came at the seating of the regent… underneath her rococo underpants… there was gaseous effluvia…

W: Are you ok, dear? Are you not feeling yourself?

M: Oh, the court was stoic while the noxious twankery spread through the room. But who was keeping count, the farceurs? They were arrivistes!

W: My goodness you’re running a fever.

M: Leave me be! Where was the Count? Oh yeah, mounted on the lady in waiting.

W: My god! What are you on about?

M: Oh, yes! Wading in the darkness behind the draperies! How to gruntle her highness — with her head in a sling — when like a fox in a cul de sac she’s hounded — penned in like a boar between arches — to the end of the line she dons her monocle without that paterfamilias aplomb! She croons! She croons a Bing Crosby scat-a-tat bo-see-do.

W: Nevil! Sit down! Put that back—

M: Oh, do make some sense?! You flatten my patience with that utter garble of yarbol warbles. Please, please, please let me get what I want—

W: What on earth do you want? Sit down, and put that back in your drawers!

M: Some sense from you! A semblance of balance — a discernible emprise! Don’t be a silly wicket, spewing snubberdigibblets of nonsense and frou frou foo!

W: Nevil! Pants back on!

M: Don’t be a slugabed, you say! Oh, don’t be a sluggard… Or! You’re a braggart all drugged up with words… well, I’m free to walk about without pants, without fear of brigandage and without your loquacious bagpipes of babble!

W: Stop.

M: Won’t stop.

W: No, stop.

M: I won’t.

W: Well. Don’t.

Fade out.

“It’s a job. It’s not a hobby. You don’t write the way you build a model airplane. You have to sit down and work, to schedule your time and stick to it. Even if it’s just for an hour or so each day, you have to get a babysitter and make the time. If you’re going to make writing succeed you have to approach it as a job.”

— Rosellen Brown

The Eyeball Kid

The voice of Spice, the synthetic marijuana, told him to go and surrender himself to the firefighters down the street — then it was the voice of god that echoed down the hallway.

The living room fern transmogrified into a green anole that bit its own tail in half.  The smaller tip began to speak in Aramaic — not that he knew Aramaic, but somehow he intuited it was Aramaic.

The tail said, “I have a gun.  I will kill you if you don’t turn yourself over to the firemen across the street.  Go now, man.  Go!  Go, before I smite you.  Go and repent.”

The tail writhed and grew in to a gherkin that glowed in the blue redeeming light of Jesus.  He vomited the Bengali lentils and brown rice he had at lunch.  He felt lighter, better now.

He felt compelled to pee on the ficus bonsai on the coffee table, despite the perfectly clean bathroom down the hall.  It was Dolores’s day to clean on Wednesday, and it had been freshly cleaned this morning. But he peed on the ficus nonetheless.

He walked across the street to the firehouse and kneeled before the firefighters.  He begged forgiveness and eternal fealty to all things firefighter related.  The firefighters were surprised in the midst of a late afternoon lunch after a gnarly five alarm wildcat at noon.

“The hand of God compels me,” he cried. “Please!”

As the fire chief came sliding down the pole, Eusebio thought he saw the son of God descending from the heavens…

“Mornings, afternoons, nights… Any time can work. For me it is less so about the time of the day and more about my state of mind. I need to feel balanced and awake. I don’t mean to say that I don’t have an everyday routine. I try to work every day from 9 to 14. But, when an idea traps me I will work on it for the rest of the day. On public transport, in waiting rooms, on planes… sometimes I can even take notes in the restroom in the middle of a party. Writing wherever and whenever I want is my rebel commonplace. It could sound a little dumb, but I love it.”

— Samanta Schweblin

“The idol Moloch with seven chambers or chapels”, from Johann Lund’s Die Alten Jüdischen Heiligthümer (1738. Public Domain)

making the scene: 1974 curls in nudie pix

his left pupil,
untethered,
a fugue childhood of monticule hunger

on loan,
uncomfortably,
wide-eyed face in cathode ray fuzz

hell-shock door,
unlocked,
“fuck away from the exhaust vent above”

a hive of,
undone,
winces and infuriating accents

hog moans,
unloosed,
some person needles and brays

a retching,
unspooled,
squanders of a man and urine spatters outside

seen: prescient limps in the viewfinder
scene: transient muzz of voices trailing

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
…The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

— W.B. Yeats / “The Second Coming”