thee istsfor manity reader

(press the play button above watch my short film found feet five, as instructed below)

found feet poem (lines # 1-13)

(as per these instructions:

— Use Google Translates

1. Take original poem and translate it to Spanish
2. Take Spanish translation and translate poem to Yiddish 
3. Take Yiddish translation and translate poem to Esperanto
4. Take Esperanto translation and translate poem back to English 
5. Note the idiomatic and syntactical shifts… now forget about all that
6. Cut and paste poem into a “Cut-Up” generator
7. Take new work and parse it into lines in successive ascending number of words, e.g., start with a one word line, then a two word line, then a three word line, etc., until you run out of words. Then delete any excess words that won’t complete the ascending chronological sequence
8. Title poem
9. Attach an extant short film with some thematic similarity to poem
10. Never do this again)

(lines # 1-13)

brother

not happen

I talk bread

paintings assassin feet that

A moment of confronting the

divine live I friend Artifice imagine

my buddy did painting made selfsame you

anything have talking the boy you knew hell

live here friend from Cuba in with see The

was my did What feet was know now what feet  

about not my and me metaphysical am somewhere me boy shit

to cannot using feet That blood such that cable tell And malanga

a can’t So you happened tensile things a lot success resentment sanity eating

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

Critical Focal Acuity

(Fade In)

-Series of found moving images as the film racks out of focus

-Series of stills: long open highways receding into the horizon line; traffic jammed still; parking lots (these sequences without people in the frames)

-Series of of shots resolving into sharp critical focus: buildings from various anonymous downtowns

(Fade Out)

 – 4 seconds of clear leader

(Fade In)

-4 seconds of black leader

(Lap Dissolve)

-Asynchronous sound of obtuse observations about reality shows broadcast on the E! Network, c. 2007 / Over clear leader

-Mundane observations about obscure European celebrities / Over black leader

-Silence / Over cut-ups compiled from 33 sequences of film, all exactly 105 frames long, thrown into the air, and then assembled by chance operations

(Lap Dissolve)

-A Random Series Of Magnified Images Of Fleas

(Voice Over):

“The way that fleas become infective is due to a feature of their alimentary system—they have not only a stomach, or a ventriculus, but also a proventriculus, which acts as a valve that regulates the food that the flea is ingesting and trying to get to its stomach.”

(Lap Dissolve)

-American National Anthem plays 

-A flagless flag pole pings as the wind whips two metal swivel flag snaps on a rope into the pole.

(Voice Over):

“This concludes our broadcast day…”

(Fade to Black)

White Noise.

“Sometimes you really have to shove and grunt and sweat. Some days you go to your office and you’re the only one who shows up, none of the characters show up, and you sit there by yourself, feeling like an idiot. And some days everybody shows up ready to work. You have to show up at your office every day. If an idea comes by, you want to be there to get it in.”
— Thomas Harris

May Day of the Dead

I’m hot with fleas, gravid with scabies lice
I have a multitude of filo and corona
Viruses are best when deflected with oil
Impregnated chausibles or warm leatherette
On your burning flesh underneath your hair shirt
Wear your bird mask filled with with aromatic tips
Of posies juniper berries and popcorn jelly bellies…

I place the copper florins on your eyes
Penniless and you trimming your pencil
Thin mustache graying from so much vaginal
Yeast, so much discharge, so sebaceous 
Cyst of unknown origin, benign and sanguine 
Pluck that rosy orb of pleasure-pain…

Au bon cadavre exquis
Birdhouse and Bildungsroman fretful
Fret on the E flat note, on the plagued D train
Box-scarred, a doleful G man out of a botched 
C-section with a bloody Dial M for Murder mug…

These, and other afflictions, are yours for the chaining
Yourself to the balcony railing 16 floors up
(Mostly) out of the elements counting how many 
Filo and corona fit on the head of a pin…

And how many pins it takes to blow your mind
Ballooning and arcing on its drunk ecliptic
Across the darkening sky…

Go figure when the envoi misses the last train
On a line out of service to nowhere…

With perdition as its terminus…

“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages a sick sense of failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing.”
— John Steinbeck

black-out/cut-up #430

The most common question people
ask is who
crushes the spirit.

?

I insist
on sacred texts,
holy stuff.

parents

my experience
shown
“Yes”

“No one cares if you write, so you’d better. NO ONE in your family wants you to write a memoir, but do it anyway. You own EVERYTHING that happened to you. Bird by Bird. Shitty first drafts. Butt in chair.”
— Anne Lamott

flarfish 12: orientalia locust

Orientalia. In Memoriam “to go about leaping (said of the locust)” 

Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament

.”The Greek Sources of Islamic Scientific Illustrations,” archaeologic

black. Black walnut. See Walnut, black. Bottom lands …

Cotton, climate, and camels in early Islamic Iran:

A moment in:

the common locust. There are, however, other locusts, one of them

In Northern Ghana reads “Planning before work protects you 

from regret to eat up; food was locusts and wild honey and kuamlisa

 Thus the Lord God showed me: Behold, the larva of a locust. 

And he said, the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses …

He described how he saw locusts clinging to the windows.

“Read everything. If you haven’t read everything, you’ll never be able to write anything.”
— Lev Grossman

case #57

if i jaywalked
would you wax lyric and macrophagic?

a stay at home order is extended until 5/18
you never stop writing even when you’re not writing
viral loads and virtual loafs
you don’t post when there’s another temporary stop gap to appease the toadies for liberty (or death)
open carry intelligence instead of an AR
i’m so stroft says one while caterwauling
flatten the curve of the indiscriminately stupid and unempathic
torpor to tumult
got the responsibility for our nation’s top security
they’ve given me a number and taken away my name…

(a lap dissolve here)… 

17 years and 2,494 dim mornings
repressed memories in red velvet capes
the rise and fall of unburied fictions
jactitation down by the river
they come back for blood and betrayal

(a keyboard solo here)…

the word cocky is bandied about
in small claims court
the past 15 years there’s been a steady resurgence of
diminished people — myopic
they come back 
astounding anonymous
apple-polishing the master’s
recordings

(a look in the mirror here)…

if i jaywalked
would you cytokine storm and wane?

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
— Stephen King

some lines on youth

fucking landscaping company with their jet engine leaf blowers and such… one too many one too blew… fly me in the morning, ‘cause you certainly don’t blow me… you sewer jack, you scum pellet… what’s a scum pellet?  don’t know but I like the sound of it… and of listening to devo’s blockhead circa fall 1979… while turning off 24th street heading to a’s house… fucking strange, and stranger still… that mother that yet instills disgust in me and a tremendously negative animus: acrid, incendiary and hateful… fucking german shepherd… dumbass muscle bound dickhead brother… nazi youth younger sister…

oh, what a fucking joy! what a fucking way to spend your 16th year…

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
— Ernest Hemingway 

bitchsplosion

“Diluent,” he said at the wall. 

Then: “Offing.  Fealty.  Procrustean.”  The wall said nothing.  It remained stolid in its sentry like “Reflection Gray” satin finish.

Finish.  Finnish.

Finnish:  The wall itself was not, but some fraction of a compound, some iota of primordial matter remained in its provenance, and one might surmise that it had some atavistic connection to something Finnish, maybe even to Finland.

But now, it just stared back at him.

He stared back, and after a paint break and having shouted the vocabulary words from a dictionary app at the wall he tried a couple of his own words:

“Cunctation,” he said to the wall.

“Belligerence, you fuck!” he said two minutes later.

The day grew bright and hot outside the open window.  The cicadas roared.

“Bitchsplosion,” he said to the wall.

On that instance the wall snapped, and allowed an overburdened stud to crack in two;  from which a piece of stucco dislodged from the cracked ceiling and fell on his head blinding him for an instant.

The freshly laden paint brush slipped from his hand and he teetered —  a smaller but no less weighty piece of stucco fell on him next and sent him reeling.

He fell onto the paintbrush handle which speared and twisted through his groin.   He was emasculated.  There in his living room.

He felt a brief moment of elation.  Free at last.

The sensation of wetting his pants flooded his synapses, a picosecond before the pain hit.

The cicadas were quiet.

“Don’t write it right, just write it—and then make it right later.”
— Tara Moss

Sangfroid I-IV

i.  The Ashen Landscape

“He’s got what?  Days left?  I don’t want to be there when he dies.”

“Sangfroid.”

“I’m cold-blooded?”

“You didn’t wish to come back to the village — to the sea?”

“I see… a Rothko — canted, a lost apocryphal work — an ashen landscape in three gradations.  My father tore out its center and revealed there’s no heart to the universe, only a corrugated armature — frozen, encased — as if the sky were stapled to the sea with liminal ice.”

“You see wasteland?”

“I see ghosts.  I was eleven.  My father placed the gun to his temple — then mine.  He abandoned me here.”

ii.  A Song for the Plague Year

I find my father supine on the bathroom floor, limned by a bloody halo — a pinpoint hole in his left temple.  Gorgeous.

The floor seethes and the ceiling lowers its claim upon me.  I’m extruded out of the bathtub spigot.  Suffering.  Wait.  Wait.  Suffering.  I’m in the heart of darkness.  I’m in the heart of the work now.  Shiver.  Fertile.  Gorgeous.

iii.  Molecular Organic Nano-machines

I’m at the morphine station.

I’m a soft machine inside a hard silicone husk.  I’m a warped machine rattling out flickering images: images of a gun.

I’m a soft machine in a hard exoskeleton — silicone dark inside — silicone smooth and white outside.  My memories play back on the cryoscreen. Here memories are particulate existences transformed into nano-globules (n-g.’s) that are secreted from the ferrules at the end of your iPuffer: smoky, hormonal, and projected inside and beyond your eyes.

“Please cue n-g. 173-A: the day I met my father at CBGB’s; and frame n-g. 173-B: the moment that punk rock saved my life.  Please add the blue 17 gelatin filter.”

A puff from the ferrule and the images resolve, but this memory is faulty.  The memory warps and echoes: a radiator squeals, brass electrodes buzz, my father is blood-crusted, ignored in a dusty corner, covered with mites escaping the evil heat.  Batista’s henchmen torture another… no, stop, this is not my memory but the anecdote he told me that night…

“This is not the n.g. I requested. STOP.  STOP.  Press the eject…”

Blood, on the tip of my tongue.  Where is it coming from?  Then a bestial din: the sound of a million cicadas’ lament before the seventeen year death — a rupture tectonically within me.  The smell of hissing green plantains dropped into overheated oil — the splattering: tinny, spastic —  and then the loss of control.

iv.  missing  STOP

im not who i was once was   STOP   aposiopesis   STOP   STOP   im a perfectionist   im obedient    get away from here    get away from that gun   STOP   STOP   STOP   dr x said im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   dont relive it    dont rehash it   and if it finds you   then embrace it    embrace the thoughts    embrace the feelings    be one with it and then release it     youre not your memories    youre not your feelings   be one with the thoughts   be one with the feelings   and then release them   STOP   

punk rock changed my life    no punk rock saved my life    the songs of the minutemen   no not that memory   STOP  STOP   dont touch him there   dont touch me stop it   put down that gun   38 snubnose    it weighs a ton    STOP   STOP   STOP    embrace this memory   embrace this emotion   im not my memories   not my emotions   STOP   aposiopesis   apoplexies   apophatic   and aphasic   STOP   STOP    dr x said    whatever happens   its ok    whatever happens is ok   im ok    whatever happens    im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   youre doing the best that you can   im doing the best that i can   STOP   STOP   STOP

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”
— Kurt Vonnegut

flarfish 17: innervate coze

(Spanish to Persian to English translation version)

Even including the building inervacijos
This is very important evidence that the potential impact of gravitational loads,
Thesis paper joyless. Unpredictable and immeasurable
The new goal was to express their coze
Our research circle of conditions Coze
Although after stimulation to the heart inervacijos
Wendall immaterialising pileated your articles and Agreements
Brett Circean chubbiest, and estimated their gelatinous set
Is likely to be that while inervacijos heart looks
After the injection of potassium bromide there is no
Marcela right-wing jet, innervan defense loses it beyond recognition.

“In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul.”
— Albert Camus