thee istsfor manity reader

Détentes

There’s a tool they use to set things right.

But it won’t protect them from the bitter cold of a nighttime swim through the shark infested straits.

A tool of last resort — shaman life hacks! Tabernacle huckster butters!

And us!

We. Decked out with finger guns.

“Be a papper slapper with a doot doot doot doot do!”

Birdsongs for birdies in glam processsion of hip slapping.

“Hingum, Jingum — do do do.”

Milkweed in the shadows and other docile locations.

Détentes from a muddled past — prepaid insurgencies dropped out of Monroe’s pants into a bay of pigs —

“wheepa deepa poo pow pow!”

Whistling childhood advertising ear worms — jingling out of key — these jagged equations validate nothing but the phlegm in our souls.

“You can’t please yourself, but you might can please your soul.”

Grazin’ in the grass is where I wanna be scattering my dead father’s ashes — throwing a handful over my shoulder once, and filling fire ant monticules with the next.

Watching the magic 8 ball answer requests from another world.

“You’re a bitter man,” said Candide. “That’s because I’ve lived,” said Martin.

— Voltaire / Candide

Encomium

I walk in circles gyring — elevating ever outward until I’m circumnavigating your boundless denigration.

Deliver me — enervated — from invigoration as you deliver me from hating myself long enough to despise you.

I’ve placed myself at this longitude so that I may be bisected by your latitude of lassitude.

I’ve misplaced the keys to hegemonic misericordia.

Mercy be done because I haven’t any time left.

Deliver me again from prepositional entanglements and toothsome fricatives.

Yes yes leave my words alone.

Plangent. Agent. Of misfortune.

“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

Be now. Be here…

Ima walking superpower.

That which transfixes me becomes putty in the transom of epistemology.

Hallowed ground burials are a thing of the past.

Everything I was told as a child turned out a lie. Our parents deliver death. Our leaders add self-interest in new time dash.

A ruse cooked up to miseducated me, so I’d be chillin’ with the devil.

Ima grunt for the bone man. The bone man’s blues be coming this way.

I had a rumbling in my stomach and felt the deafening borborygmus ofda earth.

We festoon the planet with hate and breathe a virulence of violence. We gotta killing we ain’t never seen before.

Callitda bill collector blues callit hippy sigh on nippy shine.

How do a dog wax poetic wit’da poetics of ruin?

Be now. Be here…

But I wonder where the sallow in the bowels of hell appear next if I’m writing this from the cellar of the master slayer of dummy men.

Men that want what I haven’t got.

What u gonna do next?

“But the white people who saw this as their country—and only theirs—to run are right in one key way: their time is running out. They are not literally threatened by violence, much, but they are threatened by something much more powerful, a revision of who matters and who will run things in the future, which is why BLACK LIVES MATTER is the central affirmation.”

— Rebecca Solnit / “Chrome-Plated Pistols and Pink Polos: The Face of Elite Panic in the USA”

Your Ruff Collar, My Millstone

We live under the heat dome. 

I see you across the barren parklet. 
You are eating bits of soft pink babies. 

Humid.

My hair wilts.  
Your curls frizz. 

I lick the hot sauce off my fingers. 
You yell that you are an arriviste. 

I scream that I was once part of the noblesse oblige and waved banderitas.

You warble an Edith Piaf song.
I huff gas out of a brown paper bag.

You sing two registers too low. 
My viscera gurgles. I pee my pants where I stand — mud puddles form around my feet. 

Tomorrow you will sign away your inalienable rights for a used 78 rpm record of “Thee Infanticide Blues.” 
I will strum The Hits of the Borscht Belt Songbook tonight on my ukulele.

The gloaming hour.

I leave a minute after you do. 

You to your elevator shaft. 
Me to my abandoned mine. 

Dark. Wasteland.

We may meet again next year.

“Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood — a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose as terminal-stage capitalism.”

— Mark O’Connell / Notes from an Apocalypse

dangerous anthropogenic interference

“On the day the world ends…
…those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now…”

— Czeslaw Milosz / “A Song on the End of the World”

Gutty Haiku

I will work for tripe
Pepper pot is beautiful
Visceral goodness

“We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.”

— Jorge Luis Borges / The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory

Waveless Delta

I read that men who have trouble falling asleep have a twenty five percent chance of dying earlier.

I vow to never sleep again…

“Good things, when short, are twice as good.”

— Baltasar Grazian

Disjecta, Kansas

At 80 miles an hour, about two and a half hours east of Denver, she tore through the state line into Kanorado, Kansas and pumped the brakes upon sighting a half dozen state troopers lined up behind a jackknifed truck.

Thousands of Coca Cola bottles strewn about the Kansas countryside. Welcome, indeed, to the New Coke.

After regaining speed, Maria pictured her mind was like an ancient field plowed by ox. She knew there was a word for this particular thing, she’d come across it ages ago in a Linguistics class (was it Linguistics? maybe…) but now it escaped her. Mile after mile and the idea, the picture, wouldn’t leave her in peace; all through The The’s Soul Mining and Wire’s Pink Flag, it nagged at her.

More than anything it bothered her that she felt the concept corporeally and knew it intellectually but she was unable to term it — to give it a name again — and then look it up. She pulled off to the side of the road and looked at the road atlas.

Maybe there was a public library in Brewster. She’d try it out with the reference librarian there.

Maria’s mind moved in horizontally cascading oscillations — moving from left to right, dropping a degree in latitude, and moving back from right to left.

She sensed the trepanation would dissipate these feelings, but she had failed with the previous two women, and she was oblivious as how to present herself in a manner that wouldn’t alienate the next potential victim.

The counter to this was the mind-numbing blandness of the landscape unspooling past her car windows. The colors were riveting, the saturated greens of the corn and soybean fields, in stark relief to the cerulean of the cloudless sky. Occasionally the boredom was broken up by a metastasizing of windmills stretching back toward the horizon line, or a billboard of Jesus Christ, seeming to hover above the young cornstalks, with the affirmation, “Jesus, I Trust In You!”

It was dull, but it reminded her of 1984 all over again. And the febrile desire to listen to either Coil’s Scatology or the Butthole Surfers’s Psychic…Powerless…Another Man’s Sac overtook her. She pulled over again and dug out the “1984” cassette case from the two dozen cases piled on the passenger side floor, the desperate need to hear Gibby Haynes singing “Mexican Caravan” through a bullhorn consumed her as nothing else had since the moment she decided to leave Salt Lake, and now she was out of speed.

How would she make it through the rest of this desolate and unchanging landscape? She looked up, and there to the right of her car was yet another Jesus accepting her trust — it was turning out to be a challenging morning.

And then it hit her — as she stared deep into the blank faded face of the pleading Jesus — it came tumbling out of the torrent of disjecta in her head: Boustrophedon.

“Boustrophedon! What a day to be alive,” Maria said, and shifted the car into drive.

“The way we build gods… is the way we build the apocalypse.”

— Mark O’Connell / Notes from an Apocalypse

Ginger Snaps

I remember Ginger brought us,
on New Year’s Eve 1980,
the Vermonters:

“lunch on you, keep the hand and suck this bony one”

you filled the point with wire and spine
button Night into Line

from a short not-quite five-year old girl
open to you and smiling on the doorstep

bearing a red cloth look
against the snowflakes falling

you delighted the look ready for
our do-come-in

We take our time warm up for the dancing, eyeing the coats, boots, scarves

four to six bricks, red flakes
the kids catch on their tongues

pleasure on a holiday night, the performance,
the concrete walls the joy the children

They call out, appear to flag,
They rally, and we descend

underground to feast
Everyone has two slices of little ones

We toast the New Year one last time.
The year opens to the girls in velvet

We could still hear their titters
where we sat Hungry from the search

The children grow
One of them sprouts in our back yard,

a farewell designed to be memorable
and for a new life in the desert

“I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.”

— David Foster Wallace

 Dynamation Angst

“The wind screams like ten thousand fiends.”

And I asked her if she was writing a new poem.

She said no, she was remembering a line from a long ago movie she saw as a child. She couldn’t remember the name of the movie; she remembered there was a Cyclops, sword fighting skeletons, and a woman who was turned into a blue four-armed cobra; but the thing that she remembered most was the ear splitting squeal during  a gale that the men on the ship had to contend with.

“I remember once reading that the guy who did the effects for the original Clash of the Titans made this movie too,” she said.

“Harryhausen!” I said.  I told her she must be talking about The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. I asked her if she remembered the giant two headed chick, and she said she’d forgotten all about that one.

“But why that wind screaming like 10,000 fiends line?” I said. “I don’t remember that line and I’ve seen it a few times over the years.”

“You know I have super sensitive hearing,” she said. “Haven’t you claimed I have dog hearing? That I can hear super high pitches that only dogs can hear?”

I agreed with her. She could hear modems one floor below our apartment, and unattended surge protector alarms drove her crazy.

“I thought you would have been most effected by the shrinking princess,” I said.

“Nah, that was nothing,” she said. “I don’t remember what her story was. She was the token female in the movie. Eye candy for teenage boys.”

She downed her mud-thick Turkish coffee and shuddered.

“It was that minute long high pitched scene —  with the squealing wind,” she said. “It paralyzed me with my first bout of existential dread.”

“It was already the end of the world for the people that fighter jet was likely headed toward… It was always the end of the world for someone, somewhere.”

— Mark O’Connell / Notes from an Apocalypse