thee istsfor manity reader

Mixed-Up Friends

“If you know aught then you know I am grandiloquent and will smite you in wordplay,” Loquatio said.

“You don’t know nothing, bud,” Tim countered, “and do me a favor, speak English or I’ll kick your ass out of this bar.”

From that inauspisicious beginning they became good friends. They met at noon every Wednesday. They crafted handmade books, discussed the weeks’ events, shot pool, and watched certain movies of men and farm animals.

They had a predilection for sheep movies. Especially Loquatio who developed a proclivity for sheep when he was 6 years-old and saw the beautiful lamb Gene Wilder had in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask. If there was true animal pulchritude, that hoofer had it in abundance. But Loquatio did not experience a lamb until his sophomore year in high school when he was voted the student manager of the 4H Club. It was anticlimactic, yes, but he dedicated the rest of his life to enjoying lamb beauty.

Tim loved gerbils. There was no manner in which he could have as full a relationship with one as he wished, but he enjoyed bringing them pleasure in his own digital manner. Tim burned incense and Ambien shavings, and played Carole King and Roberta Flack records, for his gerbil friends. The gerbils seemed to enjoy these nights as much as Tim did. Tim spent the better part of a dozen years doing this before marrying his twice-widowed high school sweetheart.

Tim and Loquatio. Gerbils and Lambs. Pangloss and Martin. Puck and Caliban. Mother Teresa and Ghandi. Stalin and Hitler. Barrack Obama and Andrew Jackson. Gacy and Dahmer. Sex Pistols and Johnny Mathis. Any Kardashian of your choice and Martin Luther King. You. Me.

This truly is the best of all possible worlds.

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.” 

— Jack Kerouac

trash dash: manhattan iv.

overheard in the uzbek restaurant…

wayward talk of chile and ecuador, the prime stops on the silk road, techniques of the boustrophedon, raging poppy fields, too much hash

the one-upmanship sharp…

peripatetic call and response about the tang and other merits of uzbeki beer and uruguayan women, the obscurity of radiohead and the future is billie ellish

the timbre maudlin the umka a perfect puff…

wanderlust in the south, remaking the ruins of venezuela in the image of argentina, death by clear cutting, petrodollars ruin everything, and somehow the talk turns to czars

the plov congeals in its oil…

meandering laments of the rarity of this ritual, forecasts and promises to do it more, something in the voices belies that certainty

the crash of a kazan clanging a death roll in the kitchen…

peregrinations of assiduous maths parsing a $109 bill 3 ways to the tenth of a cent, then a drunken 3 card pile up on a plastic credit rectangle… yes, let’s, more often

while a terminal point chicken is beheaded in the alley…

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.’”

— Jim Jarmusch

The Allegory of the Falling Sky

The sky was breaking into bite-sized chunks and falling on Panfilo’s front yard.  The pieces fell and accumulated into a forty foot-high pyramid that dwarfed Panfilo’s poor house.  People came from miles around to see the sky in Panfilo’s front yard and a few brave (and doubtless hungry) souls moved forward to try a cerulean chunk or two.

“It’s cool and chewy,” said Monga.

“This speckled white piece is light and fluffy, like a marshmallow,” said a rotund woman in carmine.

“Chucha, you must be chewing on a cloud!”

“Ay dios, it’s so good!” said Chucha.  Chucha kept a pair of magpies at home that constantly shit on her faux Louis XIV settee.  “You know, maybe I should give some to Pepito and Cuca; I have a feeling it might finally constipate them.”

From all around the dying province people came to eat the sky and the clouds in Panfilo’s front yard.  They ate and ate until there was one small stratocumulus nugget left.

Mishu, the feral cat, starving for days, came upon the last curious nugget.  It smelled vaguely familiar, a bit like the tuna, cockroach and catnip farrago Sister Lucrecia put out after Friday vespers.  Mishu pawed the sky chunk about in the yard.

Panfilo turned the corner in his crusty 1971 Trabant as Mishu batted the piece of cloudy sky into the yuca patch that served as the boundary line between Panfilo’s house and Comrade Dr. Sobrenada’s manicured lawn.  As Panfilo pulled into his driveway, from his weekend’s fruitless boar hunt, he caught a glimpse of the cat scurrying out from the yuca patch and over the trash cans with something in its mouth.

“God-damned cat!”

Panfilo was tired and angry – nothing exciting ever happened to him.

“It goes on day and night.  All my life I’ve never stopped thinking.  I think all writing is a disease.  You can’t stop it.”

— William Carlos Williams 

The Dry Descent or: the 2,000 Mile Walk and the Obloquy of a King, a Demigod, and the Author Himself

The Descent:

I hear a cry – the lamentation of a dying man.  I turn, strain to see.  Nothing.  I stagger half-blind on scree, collapse heavy on my backpack, my hiking poles bent useless after two thousand miles.  The cry of a loon, disparate and distant, rises from a pond far below.  I affix on a turkey vulture above, gliding lazy, on a convection of air.  The sky is a moribund blue.  My tongue cramps.  My eyes rack out of focus.  Every dehydrated move I make freezes into a painful paralysis.  I delayed, basking at the summit, and was last to start the descent.  It’s unlikely anyone is heading back up the massif this late.  And who would possibly be hiking down now?  No one will be out on the trail doing the last three miles, and three thousand foot descent, this late.  I wait unblinking.  Strangely unmoved.  It ends like this?

Sisyphus: Bah, overstated. Overdone. So baroque. Please.

Heracles: Well, you can say he made a Herculean effort to become Sisyphean.

Sisyphus: Ha!  He wishes. I’m still rolling this rock, aren’t I?  Look at him — a cramped-up, frozen heap.

Heracles: Is this how it ends?

Sisyphus: Of course not.  He’s writing this tripe, isn’t he?  It’s merely the beginning in what will obviously be more than 250 words.  He’s inserted us!  Just shut up and watch…

And so I collapsed under the weight of absurd expectations —  and the distinctly unpleasant sensation of acute renal failure from severe dehydration.  Every major muscle system in my body locked up during the preceding few hours.  The doctor in emergency told me I was an hour or two away from permanently needing dialysis, and a couple more hours from sloughing it all off… probable death.

That Mount Katahdin became this absurdly Sisyphean goal at last attained, at the tail end of six months of hiking from Georgia to Maine, was now immaterial as I was on the precipice of permanent organ failure.  Gliding on the knife’s edge of death because I wanted to — no, NEEDED to — hike the Appalachian Trail, despite never having spent, in my life, a single overnight in the backcountry before I’d started this hike.  And the absurdity of keeling over fifty feet away from Katahdin stream while trying to fill my water bottle is not lost on me… one must imagine the imbecile happy…

“Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks.  He too concludes all is well… The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.  One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

— Albert Camus / “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Che Guevara’s Bequest:  Vallegrande, Bolivia, 1967

A tinny mambo is piped from the room

spewing

sick yellow-green fluorescence.

The radiator squeals, 

brass electrodes buzz;

blood-crusted, unnoticed,

Che Guevara’s finger lies

in a dusty corner

covered with mites

escaping 

the evil heat.

“As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.”

— Aimee Bender

(click on the play button above and watch my short film peripeteia)

Some More Words To Live By

(First, you’ll find intercalated pustules of censer smoke ringed by ferrules of frankincense in your heart.  They were placed there by us.  Do not panic.)

Travel.  

And when lost abroad…

You’ll find mussels in Malmo in an impossibly dry place.  

Dresden is everything it’s cracked up to be, you’ll find Friday morning virgins there on Sunday afternoon.  

Milan is… well… Milanese — and that is inauspicious — the rain incessant and the shops shuttered.  

Don’t waste your time in Barcelona.  You’ll find the last remaining speaker of Njerep there, displaced, and waiting for the placement of the final trencadis tile at the pinnacle of Sagrada Familia. 

Avoid the French. 

In Lisbon the fog is impossibly thick and it smells of something long forgotten.  

Decamp for home from the marshes of London.  

Practice the cathecism of free markets, derivatives and tranches.  

Breathe deep the smells of amok capitalism in the morning (essence of napalm available for an additional fee).

AND sing the anthem — early and often. 

Oh, the places you’ll go!

“Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better”

— Jack Kerouac

The Arkansas Fluke

I ate the wrong crawfish on my first float trip.  It really wasn’t wrong, but eating it raw sure was.  A specialized blood test found a lung fluke eating me from the inside out.  I didn’t like this because women don’t generally like men with parasites in their lungs.  I was scared that I’d have this fluke in my lungs for twenty years.  Then a secondary infection led to the removal of fifty percent of my left lung.  After six weeks I went home, I was feeling like myself.  Now I drive a pick-up.  I like that, it looks pretty. 

“My first poem was a bolt from the blue… it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence… it filled me with soul satisfying joy.”

— William Carlos Williams

Words To Live By 

When you hit the wall, son:

Avoid obfuscation.  

Eschew the picayune.  

Think big, boy.  

Pray every day.  

Do right.  

Go to church.  

Go to work.  

Bypass tontines.  

Eat every toston that passes before you. 

Stay fit and sober.

Do as I say.

Don’t interfere in boy/girl fights.  

If you beat someone do it in the bathroom.

Blood cleans up easier from tile.

Stay away when I set your mother straight.

Don’t tally score when we beat you.

Your mother and I never lie.

Assume your mother and I lie.

Avoid working the sugar cane harvests.

Use sassafras leaves to keep flying insects at bay.

Ours are the best leaders.

Revel in cotton candy politics.

Believe in the sanctity of Richard M. Nixon.

We get the leaders we deserve.

Believe that you are special.

Know that you are a worthless disappointment.

Believe that you are superior to others.

Know that you are inferior to us.

Might and money make right. 

Invest wisely.

(tho u smoke, snort, drop, and shoot it away?)

Save time and money.  

(tho u r profligate?)

Say no to drugs. 

(tho u use?)

Always keep your gun loaded.

Never point your gun at your own head.

(tho u say u do?)

Be a team player.

Be a lone wolf.

Respect women.

(tho i c u leer at them?)

Be faithful.

(tho i c u with women other than my mother?)

Don’t talk back.

Tip your whores generously.

Smoke opium with any governor you cross.

Believe in American hegemony.

Our drugs are the only justified drugs.

Our wars are the only justified wars.

Meritocracy forever.

Capitalism or death.

Always drive American.

Take care of your planet.

Don’t tally the score late in the game.

Don’t hate your parents.

Don’t beat or mistreat us when we are frail.

Remember everything we taught you.

Death will be upon you soon enough.

“I keep writing largely because I get a satisfaction from it which can’t be duplicated elsewhere.  It fills the moments which otherwise are either terrifying or depressed.”

— William Carlos Williams

Tuesday / Wednesday 

Tuesday: Happy Face

I trap my shadow.  

I pin it by footpad to the concrete.  

I crush it.  

Last night’s mark, 

A happy face not yet faded, 

Smiles on the interior of my wrist.  

Happiness wanes

At the terminal point 

Of the imagined slice.

Wednesday: Fruiting Zen Magnolia

Have you ever seen the effrontery

Of the magnolia fruit?

Before it bursts open, it appears as engorged 

Labia pressed shut in a modest pink blaze.

Is it Magnolia acuminata or Magnolia

Zenii whose fruit discomfits me,

On a desultory Wednesday 

Morning, in my mourning black shoes?

It unsheathes itself in delirium —

An effulgence of unhooded clitorises!

They burn my face 

Engorged with life. 

A wild orgiastic sight 

In a moment so unsettling, 

So thoroughly disorienting, 

A tectonic change of mood: 

Precise.

Carnal.  

Life.

“I’ve written stuff amidst hideous suffering, and it was a way not to be so stuck in the hideous suffering, though it was hard, but also, hard is not impossible, and I didn’t sign up with the expectation that it would be easy.”

— Rebecca Solnit

Four Postcards

09/11/2002

Nightmare and pain.  Couldn’t take the city anymore.  

I moved to Pittsburgh hoping to get away from today. 

What I was thinking?!  TV drones on & on.  It happened in PA too.  

Spent the day at the Warhol museum.  Couldn’t enjoy a thing — 

especially the Velvet Underground installation. 

Remember the first time we heard White Light / White Heat 

on CBGB’s jukebox? 

Anyway, think I’m losing it, visions flood in all the time. 

Know you love Basquiat… so here…

CALL! 

X.

09/11/2004

Can’t believe you live without a phone! 

One call a month when you get in to Fairbanks?

Little Diomede?!  Please! 

What do you think about the Throbbing Gristle reunion? 

I’ll send you a copy of TG NOW. 

It’s not any better here.  Miami is shallow shit. 

The sun is useless.  The meds are useless.  I’m useless. 

It’s like god damned GODOT!  The more I wait and try 

to move on, the less I’m able.  

PLEASE VISIT.   Miss you. 

X.

09/11/2012

Had a fierce argument with Kristin last night 

about which Sonic Youth album is the best. 

Really?! As if…

Fucked up and messy.  Later she starts in again & 

pulls her Ruger out of her underwear! Bitch!

I’m driving her crazy.  I’m lost. 

Boston SUCKS!  The snow is relentless, the nightmares 

relentless, even when awake — that impossibly blue sky,

the fire clouds, that gaping maw, the pyroclastic cloud 

swallowing me whole.  FUCKING Relentless. 

My fault.  On edge. 

LOVE.

X.

9-11-13

jesus came last night – today i tell god face to face what a fuck he is 

remember that baraka line – only god that bald headed faggot is responsible

stuck on the gw bridge for hours  can’t text u hope u get this 

cant get to the wtc site  wish id never been there 

traffics dead metal machine music in my head 

the rivers the black blot i crave

really love u goodbye

X

— Jack Kerouac