thee istsfor manity reader

“The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant ‘government of the people’ but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term ‘people’ to actually mean.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates / Between The World And Me

A Stiction Fiction

“You fill me with stiction.”

“Friction?”

“No. Stiction.

“Shouldn’t it be inertia?”

“No, stiction, damn it!”

“Sorry, I don’t know what that is.”

He was filled with a horror and a hate so acute at that instant that his fist automatically clenched and his arm seemed to move autonomously driving that clenched fist to an inexorable meeting with his brother’s face…

The author’s stream of thought is broken here, and a lyric, and then a deconstructed thought impinges:

Anger is an energy. The certainty of reason is a tyranny.

Speak in aphorisms. Think in signifiers. Be the signified.

And so the author continued on another string. The nascent narrative broken…

“You fill me with inertia.”
“There, that’s more like it.”
“Like what?”
“Like what I like.”

And then unable to completely gather their wits the author’s work and discipline was irretrievably disrupted, and they were done for the day.

“We live, as we dream — alone.”
— Joseph Conrad

Abecedarian: The Qua of Qui

As of the who: in a liturgy of grained righteousness cleansed, folded & articulated —

Bestiary of birth canals and unguents squeezed from bodies now desiccated;

Concupiscent casuistry led me to my troubles

Delineated in these lines in the margins of thee Apocrypha.

Energumens here, and you come into a world of pain, possession, & black hole nothingness

Fecund you are, full of so many — what you are not is

God, and neither is the author — purveyor of distilled sin in pearl dust & gin

Humanity’s dark mirror of depredation

“Instant Karma is gonna get you…”

Jaundiced and juiced we know

Knowledge is nothing. We have proven as much. We are eyeless in

Lenticular madness refracted, and blinded, as those who would drink four ounces of white wine and horse dung

Macerated and made into a tincture for the masses to imbibe.

Neoteric quaffs that did not quench our thirst and we went thirsty, and in search

Of the man who described literature as a “tissue of citations” its contexts and referents unknowable, akin to a

Palimpsest of the putative self — a coin scratch off ticket past the attenuated ego(s) — to live in the Id everyday & at night I’ll place

Quincunxes on your eyes for a faster journey to nowhere.

Rampikes dot the road here, a jagged landscape without human trace, and the sky above is filled with

Starlings that twister about appearing as unhinged tornados marking the air with darkling ablutions —

Take thy clyster pipe and syringe and find a willing orifice proficient in state sponsored press releases —

Unction administered — and nailed up to the door jambs of a vacationing congess raising money for a defunct president.

Vacillate no more for we are refluxing on our American original sin

Wandering through the Death Museum where we whisper colloquies to lives well lived in a

Xeriscaped land of ochres and sand browns — a land so prickly that we found nothing but portents, penitants, and penury

Yoked to a future as arid and bleak as our past. A new

Zoonotic apocalypse is the only viable option as we ease into these closing minutes… or we’ll burn it all down ourselves.

“… there is nothing ordinary about humanity and good sense. As we see now on both sides of the Atlantic, both traits are quite extraordinary, especially when they confront the entwined threats of biological and ideological plague.”
— Robert Zaretsky

flarfish 6 (copy&paste): limn the cathode nimbus

Nimbus F (currently in orbit) [6] has an experiment

the corresponding cathode currents are given

by hierarchical

cloud foundation laughing gas winner… and described by

two bit Cathode University tied up in the high value of sliver

limitless limits limn limned limning limns limo limos limousine …

plexuses demonstrator cathode curiously libellous fucker’s

cathode-ray tube | catholic | Catholic Church | Catholic Epistles | Catholicism …… war | limiter | limites | limiting | limitless | limit point | limn | limnetic | limnology …

The final configuration is L-shaped, lit by color-changing LED light cabinets and cove lighting and cold-cathode tubes.

NIGHTS NIGHTY NIHILS NILGAI NILGAU NILLED NIMBLE NIMBLY NIMBUS

“Reading is more important than writing.”
— Roberto Bolaño

Good Man Whizzle

Do you presage, portent, or prophesy? I need to know for I want to marry a gal from Hoboken, but my friend tells me she’s a doxy. Should I marry, good man whizzle?

Ah, my good son, what foresight. What a solid foundation you have. How stout. To seek me out. To seek out the wisdom of an old harbinger like myself. Well let me tell you what I can do for you. I can dance a jig on the corpse of callosum. I can sing a plenary session speech in Esperanto. I can even maypole the dilettante fellows of carbuncular. All that and more. But I can’t tell you a thing about your lassie, as I caught the French pox from her and it’s really attenuating my signals from the future; and it made my pizzle fall off in a sizzle in the noon day sun, son.

Oh, thank you wise man. I’ve been looking for a case of the claptrap! And how better than to trap myself in a union with this syphilitic trollop. Thanks, good man.

Oh, no, wait, good son. It’s gonorrhea, not syphilis. Maybe even a dose of one of the hepatitises… I can’t remember which…

“What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he is staring out of the window.”
— Burton Rascoe

Languor

His word, his breath,
Are merely synecdoche —
Ephemeral.

Nothing is true in the true
Sense of the word.

He drifts on the Lethe,
Intoxicated by water that transforms —
A trip into languor —
And never sets foot on the other shore.

“A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention… If we’re lucky, it will be a note that reverberates and expands, one that other people will hear and understand.”
— Roxanna Robinson

flarfish 28: atigrado phellem

He loves to throw himself on the red cushion, play with the mouse

In the ’60s as a custom color, so it’s rarely found in vintage models today.

Another house loves it … Seasonal advance: Duvets with white

Tim Burns’ tabby cat had gone with Ethel, the landlady, to

The elaborate fabric structure & juxtaposed areas of satin and satin

a set of dog breeds whose physical constitution makes them very adept

I think the vein is very marked in this, and it mixes a lot with crunchy food

“…mess, mess, mess, mess, art. It looks like it won’t pull together… but you have to trust that it will.”
— Sarah Sze

Habeas Crapus

Pasted and made agent, once again, I earned the title of Chancroid of Elfador. I understood public relations and quickly assembled a fleet to sail to Festicularis. Never had so many sumptuous furs been made execrable by laying upon them and evacuating our bowels upon them. The Chancellor of Quas made an appearance by summons of habeas crapus. In our midst he exhibited a prowess for combat with crabs and lice, in a manner so expert, that we allowed him to search and clean our bodies. This was a satisfied accomplishment — maybe even an occasion for pity. We were all destined for history in the outcast country. We would certainly overtake the heathen and Papist alike. We had the flinders of the saints. We had them by the short hairs.

“The most important thing is you can’t write what you wouldn’t read for pleasure… You need to write what you would read if you expect anybody else to read it.”
— Nora Roberts

flarfish 31: rampike myrmidon

Along the crest of the ridge, among the rampikes,

a villain nabob: a bigwig myrmidon: a faithful follower 22 figures

silhouetted dark and large against the sunrise, moved a great herd

cyclopean: massive gorgon: a monster rampike: a dead tree reflex:

unthinking behavior of caribou, feeding as they went. Charles

moves north of there and kills him with the Iron Sword rampant

rampart ramping rampion rampole ramrods ramsons ramtil

Meditation vallecular Scot, his prepositionally quarrelsome rebate:

nubbliest and elasmobranches dental and repulsive Billie

unmoors their rampike concatenating or re-export tails

Richardo soothing remixing their social chancroid blindfolded.

“Having picked flowers, knowing they’d die,
you understand the urge to pluck
the exotic, the beautiful—any diversion
from fear, which is in itself a disease.”
— Richard Levine / “Sheltered in Place”

Thee Entoptic Entopic Entropic

Fleeting soft monsters and fretting rock lobsters juddering — an entopic graphomania projected inside my eyelids:

Today we awoke to pulverulent streets around our neighborhood. A construction crew broke a water main two blocks away.  Many children were carried away in the ensuing flood. 

She enjoyed that.  She’d trade a dusty street for fewer kids every time.  

Now I’m waiting for the postdeluvian flood. I move forward and remove the branks from her head.  Despite the split tongue she begins to regale me — the logorrhea commences:

“Lots to say about the showy shrubby flower, a botanical bawd of bedlam — as if Behemoth or Balam themselves were speaking… the only good band is a jangly guitar band… there’s no business like blood business… she stabbed him in the neck, desirous of proving his theorem…. he listed to the right, feebly waved at the steak knife jutting out from his throat, and fell “face-on” into his bowl of lye hominy… the restaurant patrons burst into applause with shouts of ‘brava, brava!…’”

“I’m a warrior momma, and I say that trucks aren’t what they used to be when I used to steamroll over sheep a few times a year… I had a cowcatcher on the grill, god damnit… they’re built of tin now… they’re useless… we used to be great…”

“I’ve got the end of the tour psychosis blues… chortles and snorts… and I’m not missing whiners or trembly insignificant little men who fancy themselves dabsters of hipsterism with their bushy beards… nobody brings me the head of Holofernes anymore… now that Salome is hooking down on Biscayne Boulevard and 79th street… I’m bored with hedonism, and by extension life… so either it’s a shot to the head or an Ursuline nunnery for me tomorrow… bring on the demoniacs…”

There was a click and a whir, and another film unspooled before me: a flashing comet streaked across the darkness down to a pin prick… followed by 10,000 days of silent black  film leader.

“Dark and light, dark and light, dark and light. That was how I had been taught to view the world.”
— Geraldine Brooks / Year of Wonders