thee istsfor manity reader

trash dash:  manhattan iii.

behind me a college student tried to convince a young girl to elope

the ritual of the second drink — 

demulcent for a moment — 

the argument lost it’s tune

like a good many dinners in so many illegal places

another cold night and the illusion of gin

central park forms endure speeches of electric illumination —

translate a scroll into a new language —

he sits with his arm around her

winks on the gloam

our ears swathed around music — 

plangent notes constrict the frigid night

“Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.”

—  Zadie Smith

Manos: A Slice of My Memories

(a blackout poem)

Christmas was sheer terror.

Every year as dark descended,

my mother appeared —

ghastly hands

perched at the end of the table

ancient twins:

A slice of fixed mistrust.

Father an assortment of minced medieval love

began to gradually disappear

leaving only the pale facsimile 

that ruled the table.

Both preferred the ceremonial toss

of adorned excess —

hurtling onward, tied to our past 

and to strange bonds.

“I have been writing every day of my life, seven days a week, for almost 50 years. Even Christmas Day. But I still enjoy it.”

— Michael Bond

film drama is the opium of the masses

dziga vertov’s  camera eye

has detached its retina –

click, whir –

a reddish yellow mass

of seething altered state

kino-kism: glowing

white-hot to-blue eye,

the whirring swallows the gray

incandescent sky

“… you have to allow yourself to use a voice that is unique and your own, that is not what you’ve read before. There is a certain impulse in all writers to want to please. You have to give up wanting to please.”

— Dorothy Allison

trash dash: manhattan ii.

polyphonic dream vision

sonorous in plastic tubing

limned transducers and sound scriptures

in a garden of minimal fences

sonic spaces expand

from properties shaped

of bird-like sounds

the genesis of silver clouds

and chance-based tape collages

squall of rainforest insects and birds

these are the hazy processes

at the intersections of evocative

seams and anticausal

textural resonances

helium pillows fuzz

with electronic modifications

titled: variations 1 – 53

“Do it everyday for a while,” my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things.”

— Anne Lamott

at the catholic hospice

my atheist father is tracing lines in the air

they’re shooting at us from the barricades, he says

it’s a half mile away and i felt the bullet fly by my head

the bastards are down from the sierra

che guevara, hijo de puta!

whispers float in from the hallway

followed by a lazy fly

the door slightly ajar

frames a flash of the priest i told to stay away

i watch my father’s hand trail

down to his side near the catheter that snakes

its way down to the rust colored murk

of the waste bag hanging below the bed

caña, he whispers, sugarcane

as the fly lands on his trembling hand

a desiccated death mask has emerged

all sockets and bony cheeks in

stark relief

his eyes a flurry of twitches

as he runs through the sugar cane field

the fly on the wall listens intently

ay, que oscuridad

el comercio esta cerrado

in the darkness that envelops him at midday

business is closed

a half minute later he siphons

another hard breath

the fly heads for cover

behind the blackout blinds

the man next door starts anew

on the cuban national anthem

the sixth time this hour

his voice trails off after the first verse

as his daughter turns up the volume on

one life to live

another man down the hall begs for mercy

then my father says

mama, me quiero bajar

mother, please help me down

the fly bangs repeatedly into the window

in a dizzying drone

“Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”

— Samuel Beckett

Trash Dash: Manhattan

Trash dash on a two hour meter

A ham and cheese croissant and pilfer

Your heart which has grown fibrous —

Dry and cleansed of particulate love —

Full of granular lunacy and roiling

Pathic are your howls as I leverage

My full weight on you

Heat hurt hate

“Well, while I’m here I’ll

do the work—

and what’s the work?

To ease the pain of living.

Everything else, drunken

dumbshow.”

— Allen Ginsberg / “Memory Gardens”

A Case of Writer’s Block

Clodomira couldn’t work on her novel anymore.

Her amygdala, congenitally small, blew a couple of nuclei.  That caused a fiber in her subiculum, long frayed, to brown-out.  And down the line, in quick succession, the mammillary nuclei, lateral hypothalamus, and entorhinal cortex all shorted — and finally, her prefrontal cortex went dark. 

It was then that Clodomira’s pet seahorse spoke to her:  “I order you to make biomorphic art.  Today and every day going forward.  Make me a curtain for the aquarium out of your used tampons.  I love that shade of carmine you make.”  

Clodomira had only the current tampon in use, her last, but she carefully removed it and placed it on her manuscript.  In the kitchen she replaced it with a wad of Bounty — “the quicker picker upper,” she sang.  After a quick trip to the U-Totem-M, she estimated she could have three more used tampons for the biomorphic curtain by tomorrow, but then her period would end.  She resigned herself to living with writer’s block for another month until she could make the curtains the seahorse requested of her.

She wondered if she could use ketchup to trick the seahorse, but it quickly cut her off and yelled: “No, fuck you!  Don’t you know I know everything that goes on with you.  Prepare for stasis and inertia until you build the tampon curtain for me.” 

“What if I call my friends and ask them to help?”   

“No,” the seahorse said.  “It must be your blood… or the blood of Jesus.”

She looked in the White Pages to see if she could find an address for Jesus.  She found a Jesus Montero that lived a couple of towns over.  Clodomira called Jesus Montero and explained her problem.  He was willing to help her out if she would go out on a date with him.  She hesitated, then acquiesced.  They set a meeting time for seven o’clock that evening.  They would meet at the airport chapel — the Chapel of the Sacred Humors.

Seven o’clock came and went and she sat at the rear of the chapel staring at Mary and the infant Jesus cradled at her breast.  Abruptly, Mary dropped Jesus.  Jesus thunked on the floor and rolled around a bit like a coin.  

Then he stood up and said, “I’m sorry I’m late.  Mom needed me to do her a favor.  I couldn’t say no.”  Clodomira walked up front and sat at the first pew and tapped the bench signaling Jesus to sit beside her.

He sat.  She took out a syringe and said, “give me some blood.” 

He asked where they were going that evening.  She said dinner and a screening of Oliver at the Miracle Theater at 9.  He said, “groovy, far out!”  

Jesus held out his arm, and as he was doing so she took a telescopic truncheon out of her purse and beat him unconscious.  She stuck the syringe in his mainline artery and removed 40 milliliters.  She injected herself with his blood and nodded out in the blue redeeming light of Jesus.  

The seahorse came to Clodomira in the darkness and told her to prostrate herself before him in the aquarium, when she arrived home, and bleed herself in order to create the tampon curtain sooner.  “Do not tarry,” he said.

Upon regaining consciousness Clodomira replaced the passed out Jesus back into Mary’s arms but he would not stay in place.  She tried fitting him into her purse but he was too large and inflexible; she could not fold him in as he had turned to wood again.  She was stumped on what to do with Jesus now.  Then she knew.

As Clodomira left the chapel she dunked him in the font by the door.  He was momentarily submerged.  He floated back up just in time to see her cross herself as she exited the chapel.

“There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing… I am a recording instrument… I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”… Insofar as I succeed in direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function… I am not an entertainer…”

—  William S. Burroughs / Naked Lunch

The Texture of His Body

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 assiduousness. 

(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 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.

“I think inside every song there are other songs.  But I also think, inside your voice, there are other voices that you have yet to discover and that’s kind of why you are here.”

—  Tom Waits

Oh Holy Fog

The raga swirls about her bare white room creating eddies of sound that fill the corners and cover the ceiling with paprika and saffron hues.

A nebula forms around her head, orbits about and congeals into a pulsating gray nimbus.  She walks down the hall to her father’s room.

Her father is in a trance, and upon opening his eyes, he says: “What you do does not matter.  You are nothing but decaying organic components.  You mean nothing.  This, what we do, is nothing.  What you wait for in the future is nothing.  So stop.”

The floor disappears below and she falls through the void looking up just in time to see the world above go dark.  Her father above peers down behind an iris shutter closing. She falls through the black.  Arms stretch out of the darkness but can not arrest her fall.

She falls through an apocalyptic face in flames  — mouth agape — floating in space.  She intuits that the meaning of life is being revealed in this scene —  all is despair.

A blinding flash of white reveals that she’s now flying over anonymous cities and countryside.  She stutters mid-air and falls again.  She falls with great speed and gravity.  She can do nothing to arrest the fall.  She plunges to earth and hits the ground — and in this manner she wakes up gasping for air.

She’s encrusted in a film of the calamine lotion that was slathered on her in the emergency room last night.  She speaks automatically to the nurse in a torrent of words that waited a thousand years to be heard:

“You have to teach me to take the wind load.  I need a prayer room and chaplet next to me at all times, so I’ll rarely move.  I’m incubated and intubated.  My seizures are mine alone and I’d like you to respect that, under starry skies, and below level ground.  Try adapting, submarine-like, living in an abrupt sloped space.  I need my pillars back!  What is it that truly bothers you?  Do you flinch at roaches flying your way?  Does it concern you that youth culture will swallow you in the end?  Repent and stay quiet.  I fed the cat.  I was overtaken by the vapors when I opened the can of cat food:  Red Snapper Vesper Bits, it read.  God bless hair balls!  The cat walked out of the kitchen uninterested.  The fumes filled the kitchen and my revelation came to fruition.

I became a rice weevil.

And I kept exhorting: ‘oh holy fog,’ as the fog rose up and obscured the kitchen.  Laxity.  A  laxity of mind for which the fog was a metaphor.  A purple miasma seeped in like a cloud and nothing was self evident anymore.  There was a din, a blinding light and then complete darkness.”

“Writing gave me something to do every day.”

— William Burroughs

watch one of my found cut-up films above

Lap Dissolves

Fade In:

I don’t remember going to my first movie.  I am told it was Dr. Zhivago in the Spring of 1966.  I was 2-years-old.  During the intermission my mother was asked to leave the theater because I was running in the aisles and talking to people.  Who takes a 2-year-old to a 3-hour 17-minute movie about unrequited love during the Russian Revolution?  A 24-year-old woman suffering through the unrequited love born of a revolution 40 years later and 90 miles south across the Florida Straits.  I’ve seen Dr. Zhivago a dozen times since then — unable to thaw its impenetrable winters. 

Lap Dissolve:

There were other movies in the intervening year, those memories are missing in the folds of time, but I remember in 1967, just before I turned four, I was at the movies with my parents watching A Man and A Woman.  The man and the woman onscreen were kissing in bed, there was a flash of a breast.  I was hoisted out of my seat onto my mother’s lap; her hands rose like two moons knocked out of orbit, and pressed into my eyes — a total eclipse of light.  I heard the man and the woman onscreen moaning.  It sounded like pain at first, then something else — something foreign, something sinister?  An amour fou?  My mother clamped her forearms hard to my ears; my head in a vise now.  Insensate now.  Deaf, blind, and dumb now.  Who takes a 3-year-old to a movie about unrequited love between a widower and widow?  We left midway through the movie.  I’ve yet to see this movie through.  But my mother played the soundtrack for years, every Saturday morning, while she cleaned the house.  Love still eluding her, twisting up in fine motes scattered by the feather duster — and beyond the stretch of the vacuum hose.  

Lap Dissolve:

My grandmother dropped me off at the movies a few times when I was 6.  My parents did not know our secret.  I’m not sure what she did after she dropped me off in the comforting gloom of the Tivoli Theater.  I imagined, years later, she was meeting a man, and she was “the woman” in A Man and A Woman.  She was a widow of sorts — a widow of the Cuban revolution.  I imagined the “man” was Alberto — the man she eventually married —  in Miami on a visit from California or Puerto Rico. I remember seeing The Jungle Book on one of these excursions to the Tivoli.  On another visit there was a Vincent Price double feature: The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Conqueror Worm, which I never finished seeing because she came back to pick me up midway through the movie.  Who drops off a 6-year-old by himself at the movies on a midweek mid-afternoon?   I never seen The Conqueror Worm in its entirety.  Bita’s unrequited love needed “requiting.”  I needed the movies.

Lap Dissolve:

My father and I bonded at the movies when I was 10-years-old, in the wake of his dying marriage to my mother.  We were at the movies nearly every weekend during 1973: Sleeper, Papillon, The Sting, Westworld, Live and Let Die, Day of The Jackal, at least one film a weekend, sometimes two.  But it was that double bill of The Aristocats and Song of the South I remember most vividly.  While Uncle Remus sang, “my, oh my, what a wonderful day…” my father broke out sobbing.  He said he messed up.  He said he missed us.  He said he was sorry.  He wanted to come back.  I held his hand.  I didn’t understand what was happening.  I had never seen him cry.  After a while, I said I had to go to the bathroom.  I called my mother from the safety of the phone booth in the lobby.  I told her he said he was sorry.  He was crying.  I was crying.  She had to take him back.  She said, “That a son of a bitch drug addict.  I’m going to kill him —” and hung up.  Who takes a boy to a Disney double feature and breaks down with bluebird on his shoulder?  I was isolated there in the phone booth under a flickering, failing, light.  I never wanted to see that movie again.  What else could I do now but resolve to make my own movies one day?  I swore to myself I’d never shoot a happy ending.

Fade Out

“It’s not easy to sit down every morning with next-to-nothing and try to make something appear.  But we do it because doing it beats not doing it.”

— Austin Kleon