thee istsfor manity reader

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

“When they give you lined paper, write the other way.”

— Ray Bradbury

Unholy Fissure / A Pivot Is Required

S. Is familiar with this visceral disquiet.  The woman with the white tray — a ghost.  Delirium tremens.  Thick fog still clogs the world outside the window.  The interstate, with its lineup of dead cars, is merely a hint of strobing yellow hazard light sop.  The television drones its Twilight Zone Marathon.  S. is stuck in the same season since last year — since the last decade — and Burgess Meredith is on yet again.

S. sinks in to the stiff mattress, furiously tapping, his thumbs unhinged pistons pumping into gorilla glass.  A sign of life.  Anything.

“It’s been six days since I fell through the crack.  I’m spiraling down again.  The crack has been widening and if I don’t do something about it — San Andreas be thy name — you unholy fucking fissure!  This is a familiar landscape, I’m never too far from my stepping through it, into it, farther and farther down — canyon-like — now in a skirl of whorling minimalist notes, repeated and repeated until I am tranced out and lost.”

S. is writing under some form of psychic automatism, for he no longer understands much of anything he had before — being so stupid in this new year.  He persists, driven like sapling in a gale under a force too great to resist.  It is some vestige of his former self, the high school English teacher, driving him forward as he once drove his gifted students.  But he is bereft of any gifts or mercies now.  S. knows he is now so derelict in intelligence, so irremediably stupid, it is all he could do to hold on and conduit.  His fingers gouge away.

“I exist in meaningless patter, in the trifling titter of expense and abuse.  I persist in this dominant issue of breaking a standard that I once pretended to.  I perform unlimited horrors on my own discernment and troubled world view.  I will disengage from timbre and search for a tone so acute it pilfers life itself.  This signifies nothing within nothing.  But Thoreau said…” and for the life of him he couldn’t remember who Thoreau was (but he had known once, of that he was sure).

“… write while the heat is in you.  ‘The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.’  And that’s why I persist with this thumb tapping.  To use what little heat warms these fingers attached to a tepid body plank of a bed.

Having lost six days now I ask myself: what’s next?  Which way do I move?  What direction?  How do I get out of this, and here I am writing again.  Is it fair enough to start like this again?  The only option really.  How did I get here again?  How do I avoid ending up here again?  I don’t think I can adequately answer the latter, but the first question must be asked always because it presupposes awareness of the situation.  And here is where I usually make the pivot, because a pivot is required.  The only other option isn’t really an option.  Is it?  No.  

So here I’ll start again, and content myself with starting again.  This is an acceptable… No, it’s a good step forward.  It had to begin somewhere.  Why not right here?”

The air conditioning unit sputters to life belching stale curtain and decades-old cigarette must through the air.  Then a shrill voice from the television breaks the spell.

(4/100)

“However, even an audience of one is not zero.”

— David Byrne

A Muzz of Voices

S. understands nothing.  He tries, squint-eyed,  to turn his brain over.  Without spark, the ignition doesn’t catch.

S. sees himself, monochromatic, on the screen of  his childhood 1974 Panasonic.  He’s talking globular in a rectangular city.  He makes connections obliquely — only in transient bursts.  He needs raiment for the soul but finds defenestrated appliances and tatters in mounds in their stead.  He walks a bray of winces in piles of miles of monticular hunger.  Nothing for the stomach and nothing for the next life.  He quanders in squandered lines of obtuseness.  A sign up ahead reads: “Squelch and Skronk, $2.99/lb.”  He makes a beeline for the whole ball of wax — a hive of astute astringency on loan — from a god lost in this corner of the universe…

He’s lost in the reticular coldness of the attenuating picture — a cathode ray tube snow (fuzz from his childhood in 1974) and a muzz of voices echoing from the exhaust vent above his head.  He’s one with the toilet seat now, one with his pins and needles thighs, and uncomfortably prescient.  

He continues his note:  … all will be needling shit this new year… Happy so and so… New Year so and so… 

“Fuck Robert Burns!” he says.  “Who the fuck is Robert Burns?” he says to his reflection in the mirror.

And some person outside the hotel room door — which is disquietingly close to the bathroom door (for hadn’t he last night passed one door where he swore he heard a fugue of wet untethered flatulence, and walking by another door heard wretched retching and moans?) — why did the man outside his door continue saying “hogmanay” this and “hogmanay” that, and just what was that infuriating accent?

S. understood nothing.  

“Shit!” S., hamstrings cramping, limps away from the toilet — a short rivulet of urine, unloosed from his oddly pear shaped bladder, streams down his inner thigh and billabongs at the back of his surgically repaired and cranky right knee — “Why have I woken up so stupid?”  

He steps to the door and looks through the peephole and in one fluid motion bangs on the door: “get away hog man, get back to hog land, hog man! Get away.”

A wide-eyed face turns mutton chop and exits viewfinder left — revealing grandmother strabismus, carnival-lipped, mouth agape, shocks of tight red curls (something akin to afro puffs, he thinks) staring into his left peephole pupil,  and trailing “well, I never(s)…” behind, and dragging a braying three year-old down the hall toward reception.

S., trembling, adds a codicil to his note:  don’t stay on the ground floor of the Scottish Inn in Abingdon, VA again… and… 

How in the hell did I end up here?

(3/100)

“Get rid of meaning.  Your mind is a nightmare that has been eating you : now eat your mind.”

— Kathy Acker

Happy So And So, And A Stupid New Year

S. woke up dumber in the new year than he had been in the old year when he fell asleep.  This was the first time he fell asleep before midnight on a New Year’s Eve since he was a preteen, and the intellectual disparity over those few hours of sleep was astounding, many folks would later say. 

“How could someone become so stupid overnight in six short hours?” One would ask.

They were six hours of fitful sleep  —  filled with the lurking of one enormous great white shark that followed him around the world.  The sequence ended in clear tropical waters.  Even though he had no son, he ran out from the safety of the white sand beach into the beseechingly clear, luminous, water (a water whose color was so entrancing it had no name, merely a color code number: #22BED9 — on that code everyone could agree).  In he went after the son he didn’t have only to find himself at the bottom of an enormous darkening aquarium filled with rock outcroppings, and many great white sharks lying inert on the sand.  All of them waiting for the monstrous shark that appeared from the left and swam between him and the shore —  now inexplicably a half mile away…

S. awoke when his fiancé said something about how late it was — “5:45 in the god-damned  morning!”  Then something about “bagels… and crowds.”  But his fiancé died five years ago, so this could not be.

S. felt unalterably stupid — imbecilic — like the Stooge that couldn’t even make it past the first cattle call of tryouts for the “Curly Joe” spot that needed filling sometime in the late 1950’s.  

“My goodness, I’m a fucking dolt!” He said to the popcorn in the ceiling.  

S. picked up his phone, went into the bathroom and composed this note on the Werdsmith app while sitting on the cold toilet: 

Happy so and so…  New Year so and so… I’ve drawn and quartered the last day of the old year.  First, I set it in stocks and forced it to reflect on its insistence on the passage of time.  I denounced it as a heretic and forced it to abjure from the heights of the glorious strappado.  I singed it a bit on the pyre.  I rolled it on the rack.  I pilloried it, used the cudgel, prodded its eyes with a red hissing poker, beat it with the bastinado, used the Spanish boot, and finally pulled and impaled its tongue until nothing remained if it.

This will be my annus mirabilis (S. had no idea what this meant anymore, but he wrote it automatically): the one by which I’ll measure the rest of my life.  The pivot point.  There is my life before today, and my life after — this should mean something to me.

“People, die everyday…”  There is gothic organ music swelling and ebbing in the ether.  There is someone muttering “bummer” in the next room.  The smell of acrid pot is wafting in on a warm eddy of air blowing under the hotel room door.  There are ochres and yellows on the walls and an overall orange mood to the room.  Next door someone is repeating: “people, die everyday, die everyday…”  There is something important here, but I can’t decipher it — not yet — but I will. 

It’s comfortably warm now and a woman is moving about, beyond my line of sight, by the bed, with pleasant food on a white tray.  I sense it but I can’t see her.  This is an inviting place, I feel comfortable here.  But  I don’t understand why it’s a “bummer” and why someone continues to repeat: “people, die everyday, die everyday…”

(2/100)

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

Sisyphus Greets The New Year

Such is the manner of a new year — boulder aside…

Awake in a daze.  So much to look forward to at once, then you must deconstruct it into 365 pieces and concern yourself with just this one here.  It’s usually colder than most other days.  Earnestness is often overdone, the force of resolutions seem reasonable, even in the most overzealous cases.  The pages of the calendar, journal, etc., are barren and full of such wondrous possibility.  Despair dissipates, a bit, exiled to the peripheries for a while.  In most cases you haven’t fucked up yet, you haven’t had enough time to.  The emails taper off a bit, momentarily, the requests for donations have all but disappeared.  But soon they’ll begin again with best wishes for the upcoming struggle.  Now push.  The boulder you burden with seems momentarily lighter, easier to move.  Now concentrate.   The pitch increases quickly and you don’t wish to lose your handle.  There is danger about.

(1/100)

“Creative work is often driven by pain.”

— Cormac McCarthy

The Daily Ablution

There is a boy whose head is on fire.  

A nine year old boy who has recently dispensed with god and love because they dispensed with him.  His father beats his mother on occasion — preferably in the bathroom, because “blood comes out easier from tile.” 

And in turn his mother beats him and throttles him by the neck on occasion when the mood overtakes her.  In return the boy acts out, he behaves oddly if you will: one day he eats 30 chocolate bars from the school candy sale while hiding under his bed; another day, he scrapes all the popcorn off his bedroom ceiling in a pique; and on a number of other days, he chunters in his parents’s dialect and overfeeds his goldfish until it floats inert, belly up. 

These actions in turn earn the boy a hot rain of metal: belt buckles, from his father, who cannot stand the mess.  And in turn the boy — too old, really, to shit or pee his pants — shits and pees his pants.  This calls for a hail of slaps, broomsticks, and ashtrays from his frazzled mother.

Eventually the mother has enough and leaves the father, and drags the boy with her to live with her mother; but her heart isn’t in it — her heart is spleen shaped — it was beaten into that shape by her mother — the boy’s grandmother for those losing track.  

Let’s not lose sight of the father: he turns into a ghost and hovers about speaking in tongues.

But the boy’s head is on fire.  Remember?  Because he does not comprehend much of what is happening around him.  

Today on the school bus he is so full of the abnegation of god and the abnegation of love that he is compelled to repeatedly nod his head “NO!”  This self-abnegation pleases him so, and he begins to pick up the speed of his nods until his head is a blur:  back and forth.  “NO NO!”  And faster and faster, and it seems his head will fly off his neck. “NO NO NO!”

Then an older boy sitting behind him says: “Look at that shit head.  He looks like a blender.  Hey, blender!”  Another boy yells:  “Blenderhead!  Blenderhead!”  They sing in unison.

And the dizziness is the most joyful thing our boy has experienced: the world flying off this way and that.  The colors a swirl.  The boys and girls staring at him are a whirl…  and in a whorling moment of ecstasy our boy crashes his head into the the metal plate that frames the bus seat in front of him.  He grabs the top of the seat, and again: bang; again, bang; again, bang, bang, bang.

Some say his eyes rolled white, a girl says he was priapic.  But our boy doesn’t care, his head is on fire.  This is just where he wants to be.

Coda:

Doctor:  As you’ll see here… a cross section diagram of brain tissue appears suberose…  

This is the way your brain appears after you’ve beat your head into the metal backing frame of a school bus seat. Your head, more specifically, your brain is on fire. You see microscopic shapes floating about your field of vision; they appear as cavorting beasties flagellating about in search of the dendrites they were unmoored from, you’ll never get those brain cells back. The world is vignetting at the edges and objects leave melting traces in their wake. People appear as slugs and leave sebaceous trails as they pass. Voices sound tinny and distant and the grind of the bus is a warm industrial hum. 

The beatings, the “throttlings,” the vitriol all slough away.

This dull floating through space — untethered, yet pleasant, despite your throbbing swollen brain — is where you belong.  It’s where you want to reside, and now you’ve found your ritual, your daily ablution.

You are happy.  And YOU (yes you, dear reader) must imagine the boy happy — as you imagine Sisyphus happy — living and creating in the midst of the desert…

Happy New Year…

“Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.”

— Henry Miller

opening: the sperm switch

(cut-up poem #627)

about 15 people 

are considering

a man from the lab

fathering children 

they don’t know

and endlessly repeating 

the next generation

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day. It helps.”

— John Steinbeck

You Cannot Be Anything If You Want To Be Everything

In her dream she was at a garish fairground carnival under a cloudless dayglo blue sky.  She was separated from her parents.  She panicked.  She was lost in this strange loud place.  Carnies barking from the fringes — fleeting glimpses of of them as the crowd momentarily parted — snarling mouths with spittle teeth in flashes between elbows and tilting towers of cotton candy.  

A dry tongue mouth in the midday sun and sweat.  She reaches for the water bottle she didn’t know she had, and there it is full of a thick pink liquid.  Then fear seeps in from her vignetting field of vision — someone is trying to poison her, and she can’t find her parents anywhere in this whirlpool vision aflame — only booming music and the sharp screams of overexcited children.  

It becomes clear to her she’ll never see her parents again.  The thirst is overwhelming but she can’t drink the pink liquid.  She knows viscerally that it is poison.  She needs a drink.  Her head is like the puck in the High Striker game — a shrill, insistent, “Step right up,” keeps looping in her ears — and someone continually pounds the mallet on her head as if he has something to prove to his cheap girlfriend.  Every strike, a deeper guttural concussion exploding deep in her brain stem.  Alarms go off.  

The first waking words she hears from the radio are: “You cannot be anything if you want to be everything.”

And this is the instant her restive head settles and the headache which has been her sole human companion for the last three days melts away.  She says to the cat purring at her side, “I know what I need to do now, Antigone.  I am going out with mother’s old typewriter, ribbons, and plenty of paper and compose lines for a living.  In this way I’ll make a new life doing what I love.  You see, Antigone?”  The cat stops purring and shifts away from her mindless, fidgety, petting.  “Yes, that’s it,” she says.

Later that afternoon, after quitting her brokerage job and leaving the managing partner mouth agape  — incredulous and alarmed that his best broker is walking away from a six figure salary, and having talked him out of a Marchman Act call — she sets up her new workspace. 

She sets up at the center of the Bowery station platform.  She places the Underwood Noiseless Portable atop two overturned milk crates — draped by an elaborate antimacassar made by her great-grandmother that retained the oiled indention of her great-grandfather’s death head —  to this she adds a low slung lawn chair.

The J and Z trains stop here and for years it has been her favorite subway stop because it hold the promise of seeing a good show on the way in.  And on the way out it is tinged with  a sense of great satisfaction of having seen a show that exceeded what she expected.  She’d seen some of her all time favorite shows at the Bowery Ballroom:  Lou Reed.  Luna’s farewell show (before they came back a decade later).  Yo La Tengo numerous times.  The Sun Ra Arkestra.  Sonny Rollins.  The Butthole Surfers.  Mission of Burma (on their comeback).  Le Tigre (no, wait, that was at  Irving Plaza…) no, not Le Tigre, but Kathleen Hanna’s other incarnation The Julie Ruin (yeah, that’s right).  They Might Be Giants.  So many great shows here.  This must be the place.

She sets up a sign that reads: “Will Compose Poems And Stories For You.”  She throws out a used beret she picked up at Goodwill.  It entrances her for a moment.  Then she quickly makes a note on her phone to get a deeper, more voluminous, hat as tossed coins might roll away onto the tracks.  

She rolls her first sheet into the Underwood in that transient confusion of the late afternoon commute.  She has arrived.

“Writing for me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”

— Isaac Asimov

Perfect Disasters

The devil is making appearances on a daily basis.  I’m making something of a Herculean effort to quash this Sisyphean impulse.  My parents come home early and discover me playing with large cockroaches while the guitar in the corner strums on its own — it vibrates wildly — as a blizzard rages on inside the fish tank.  My sister runs downstairs screaming, “Oh, look at it outside now.”

Outside there is a woman throat singing and a man is screaming “boom boom boom.”  Their son tries to crawl into the water — something more like an open sewer.  We are all fantastic failures, tremendous disasters, in fact, perfect disasters.

Then a call comes in, the man says a toddler has “gone postal.”  I tell my sister and all she  manages is, “oo la la.”  Then my parents chime in and sing, “oo la la, Sasson.”  The loud speaker behind the television announces the corporation has decided that reeducation is in order to celebrate the 33rd anniversary of our glorious leaders.  The panic siren sounds.  A message is read: 

“On January 10 use stilts to take down the lights, our enemies are watching.  Your neighbors are watching.  Three weeks left, and no one will be watching.”

Dangerous creosote sets off a wave of chimney fires throughout the city, by Saturday everyone has streamed in to the country side.  But my parents stayed at home and are singed beyond recognition.  In the attic I find a fire extinguisher full of gold Krugerrands.

I thought there might be so much more to this life, notwithstanding the legal fees and steep insurance penalties.  I will probably not go out tonight or ever again.  My sister will never go out again, none of us congealed in this aspic will ever go out again or even move.

“The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence – arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.”

— Hilary Mantel

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.

“My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.”

— Cormac McCarthy