thee istsfor manity reader

Strange Circle Sheet Cakes

I says to him: “Remember to put your on mask before you go inside.”

“What?” he says, and moves violently toward me. “This is not a test. This is all you get. Why not make the best of it? Go. Go write your various things about white dwarves and red fiery giants.”

“No, just saying,” I say. “Stay healthy. Stay safe.”

He spits back: “Don’t be ridiculous I’m not nidicolous; but rather a falafel with pendulous testicles waiting for the flood to come. Latter day visionaries scream jeremiads at my prize marigolds, and the man in the moon is down with a case of botulism. Bottle that and eat it with crackers.”

Now I’ve got this umbrella furled and I slap it into my open palm to let him know I mean business if he moves any closer. (And I mean business) He eyeballs me and I tell him to cool it.

“Listen to me, buddy,” he says. “Every quinquennium… herpetology is the game. Do you know my name? I so hope I’m not envenomated… fa la la la la, let’s live for today…  I was born at the Serpentarium. I’m quite the star: bent over, twisted and decrepit beyond my years. I’ve been bitten over 130 times at last count, and I’m so full of different snake venoms that my blood is used to make numerous antivenin. My penis coils and my tongue darts out to taste the air; and my jaw comes distended when I eat now. I’m such the hissy fur… Eat your mask!”

“Huh?!” is all I could manage. Fearful, I began backing up. Trying to spot my car in the parking lot. It was a brutally hot day, and the reflected heat coming back up at me from the macadam was intense. It felt like the bottom of my chin and neck were burning.

“Hey! Come back here,” he said. He began waving his arms in strange circles and stabbing at the air. He sprang toward me and sang:

“My uke is the chip on my shoulder… The baffling thing is that it’s also the chip in my chocolate…. My koolaid acid test, my plangent awkwardness… I strive to rise up from the floor, but only managed to fall down through to my auntie’s anus and into her large intestine… it’s dark and warm in there and I didn’t  dare move...”

I turned away and ran into the lot, but he chased me down, wrapped himself around my legs and tackled me onto the frying tarmac. He was bestial. He was strong. He rolled me around and sat on my stomach. Pinned me down.

“Nothing in this world makes sense, chum,” he said. “Nothing. You never imagined this here when you left your house this morning. This is life. Don’t ever count on anything. Ever.”

“Stop,” I said. “Stop this and let me up.”

He smashed me in the mouth and loosened a bicuspid, it began to leak blood at the gumline onto the back of my throat. 

“I am Ambage Circumbendius!” he said. “I have an indirect and circular manner of making my bed each morning.” He pulled me up by the collar, nose to nose. “Good morning!”

He palmed my face and drove my head into the ground. He said, “I spread a 100 by 50 foot tarpaulin over my tiny house each morning. That’s how I make my bed. Good afternoon!” He pressed his finger into the tip of my nose. “What do you think of that?”

He pushed off me, wheeled around, and disappeared into black maw of the Costco. Unbeknownst to him, they’d already sold out of sheet cakes.

“Because America… Good, god damn, evening,” I muttered.

“New myths are needed; but that’s none of my business.”

— Salman Rushdie / Midnight’s Children

Embrace Those Demons

Listen, Walter:

Don’t fight the demons in your head; that will always be a losing proposition.  You must realize the demons are there. The demons were invited in at an impressionable age and will always live in your head. You should acknowledge the demons and realize that they will not go away; they will reside in your head as long as you have consciousness. Embrace those demons; they are part of you, and then release them every time they appear and they will eventually dissipate of their own accord. They may stop manifesting themselves as often as they do now, or they may not, but railing against them and haranguing yourself for having them with you will amount to nothing but a self imposed misery. They will always be there, or at the peripheries, and you must deal with that.

“Few days following the death of the rats
Men pass away like falling walls!…

The coming of the devil of plague
Suddenly makes the lamp dim,

Then it is blown out,
Leaving man, ghost and corpse in the dark room.”

— Shi Tao-nan / Tien Yu Chi

Mr. Heartbreak

Yeah, my name’s Walter.

I’m waiting for a pourboire for my opuscule. Not anything major, mind you, but something to make me feel like putting up with this indecency of a life is worth it. I plink on this fiddle, you know.

I scavenge at the dumpster behind Subway and find the meager rations for life. I scavenge at the dumpster behind planned parenthood for protein. I scavenge everywhere for DMT and in the welter sometimes — for bloody heroin. It’s my life and its my wife.

I don’t believe in the goodness of people. You know? Nor am I the reason others believe in the goodness of people. True that!

My father left me, disappeared, when I was a boy. I didn’t hear from him for many years, and then I found out he never lived farther than 10 miles away from me.

My mother would choke me to unconsciousness and pinch me until she raised angry welts on my skin. And by the time I reached the age of five I’d been choked and dropped on my head so often my skull welted in. Here. Here, feel here.

I grew not to trust my parents, and by extension I trust no one else. What good is there in people other than fraud, mistreatment and abuse; and for some variety add murder, rape, and abandonment.

See here. In heroin I have a friend who numbs and swaddles me in the warmth and glow of forgetfulness… here life is unencumbered by human misery and failing… here no one fails me, and I fail no one.

“Let us work without reasoning,” said Martin; “it is the only way to make life endurable.”

— Voltaire / Candide

Recrudescence (haiku / 7.5.20)

The marking of time
Shelves away this fever dream
The ichor of death

“No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.”

— Katherine Anne Porter / Pale Horse, Pale Rider

because america… (haiku / 7.4.20)

plastic army men
molten into balls of green
hot and mottled death

“Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working.”

—Rebecca Solnit

flarfish 26: kenning gatear

May you take advantage of every new day as a beginning

to leave every audience feeling Chastened by the Demons kenning in the gate

ar-rays: Since their introduction in the field of programmable fun games

close to Parker / Muchas gracias a Rafael Ni siquiera le resultaba

fácil gatear / Smartphone, smartwatch, tablet caseta del perro

Y’se in the doghouse, man!

As far as the ground is concerned, safety and cleanliness is primary

Kyra en la pierna mientras trataba de gatear colina arriba /

The rest of the horses, came back to the head and wondered

How to be your scripit doctor?

“History may not repeat itself but man always does.”

— Voltaire

Ha 14 (erasure/blot)

Before her intricate challenge
for every pen in residence
she decided to spend an hour each day
gazing at religious paintings
and began looking

aha

the ha
an extreme connected by
her close scrutiny

the ha
produced 445 constellations;
14 were made with embossing

a tiny sense
of the infinite and grace

“Women love men who love post-punk. It’s just sleazy enough to unnerve them while being completely compatible with a bourgeoise lifestyle.”

— Virginie Despentes / Vernon Subutex

The Texture of Bodies

His fragrance remained in the room when he left, and she picked up notes of Ambien and gin.

He turned into a dragon and blew smoke up his own ass: in this manner he floated away on convection currents over the next county into the tri-state area.  

She was disputatious.  She said she loved living in Bwana Johnny Time — the epoch of real mealy mouthed crying.  She said she had cramps.  The walls cared nothing of it.  She insisted and sang “Silent Night.”

He was tall with small joints and thick limbs.  His hair, tufted, was buffeted by the winds which were strong and cool this high in the atmosphere.  Before he blew smoke up his ass he washed windows without panes, and took pains in his assiduity. 

(His father once digested him during a midday snack — and since then he felt as if he were covered in a film.)

 He felt slightly dirty and smelled worse.  

She was small with oblong limbs, and royally blonde-haired down to her quadriceps.  She analyzed the filigree in the milliner’s shears and chose “deckle” as the word of the day; and cellophane was “thee” fabric.  She smelled of Lithium and a life roughly lived.  She ate only the crusts.  

His name was Funty.  Her name was Frenta.  He blessed his goldfish.  She fried hers.  “Orange Poppers!” she proclaimed.  His favorite animal was the Pileated Woodpecker.  She peeled his navels.

She texted: “the wind screams like ten thousand fiends.”

He responded: “are you writing a new poem?”

She was obsessed with the texture of his body.  His tortured male narcissism despaired.  He happily fathered a wonderful future in Hades.  He wanted to write a skeezy text in the underworld.

“Much has changed since the 1340’s, the decade the Black Death arrived in Europe, but not human nature”
— John Kelly / The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

American Scree 19 (erasure / blot poem #66)

He demons in language.
During his compositions 
not to cognition

The letters instead

The letters
kind of flashy
correspond to kind
of potential colors,
whose called for colors,

high pitched
evoke
image

lights imagery,
a whole kind of city
distanced from

emphasis on his
bold language 
of commerce.

“If this is the best of all posssible worlds, what then are the others?”
— Voltaire / Candide

raddle hose hazy (white out #35)

“A plague is a formidable enemy, and is armed with terrors that every man is not sufficiently fortified to resist or prepared to stand the shock against.”

— Daniel Defoe