thee istsfor manity reader

Exiles In the Land of Kakistocracy

I.  A Conversation in the Time of Galamatias:

Our salad days are filled with bitter herbs and intractable roots —

Not so much a salad, but a melange

Of weeds and thistles —

Indelicate things in our mouths.

Every bite a mouthful of rot and offal —

Awful offal.

The kakistocracy is installed in the cupboards 

The cups are off on a two week vacation in Mosul.

We are mystified and malnourished.

Now I’ve had my wine…

And you look better than you did twenty minutes ago.

And you say:

The sky is a massive hole tonight —

My precious lucida is eating the universe:

Inside-out.

I can lay down and go to sleep.

The lights are receding

And the darkness is strangely pleasing.

II.  The Death of Tane:

Then there was the sickness —

So hot.

The vault of heaven darker —

Then darker — 

A black sun —

At end.

It was succeeded by the shadow 

Of the shadow —

Spreading —

Nearer and nearer to the pin prick 

Of light —

Destroyed.

To the west—

distant—

A white effluent

Soft and yielding

Bounds off.

III.  Passage:

Crossing guards cane a woman.

She stopped traffic —

She wore a mask stocking

She needed a cuddle —

She shook —

She hollered:

“You there, take this…”

Her eyes closed.

The wind appeared pink.

“Your mother buggered 

little boys and girls!”

“She’s a ghost,”

My mother said —

“Alone —“

As she squeezed my neck.

“Goodbye,” I cried.

IV.  Coulrophobia In The Land Kakistocracy:

Clowns are spotted in the Carolina gloaming —

Clowns with knives at the edges

Of dark woods.

I met an old man who loved

A woman who —

In whispers — 

Had recently died.

He recounted his harrowing nights

Raising his hands at

An unfamiliar country.

Without spotting an actual person — 

He spent lonely days

Encircled by clowns — 

And a stranger…

We can not discuss.

Painful moments in our pockets.

I saw groups staring up —

Untethered —

Lost —

Exiles.

They looked small in comparison with 

This Curious Refraction.

V.  A Violent Force:

Corybantic priests run —

Amuck through prickly weeds —

Bloody hands full of entrails

Chased by their sacrificial lambs and

Headless corpses — 

With empty chest cavities — 

Whose names were not happily chosen.

Among the monticules of ashes —

Lie dismembered heads

Mouths stuffed with testicles.

And the stranger —

Bright and Barren — 

Grows stronger —

Triumphant.

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. 

found in the sunday globe magazine (isabell bonapace)

hanoi bell

(a black-out poem)

when i was 8 they came from hanoi,

in the sweltering heat, women delivering babies into the night.

my mom smiled and said, “the narrow hanoi streets can’t

pronounce ‘hello’ and neon lights laugh at the tiny girl

alone

in front of a small concrete building with the warmth

of a cold night.”

children pointed at me

at the clinic i heard one ask, “why?

disappear.”

i hid my face

replaced my “otherness” with the night.

girls taunted me for relinquishing language

but i hadn’t been able to bond

and i left my mother

in this room.

notebooks

She hated blank pages like she hated the blankness of her life.

So she began by making marks – large, loose, gestural sweeps on the page. She then shifted from elongated serpentines to dense clusters of hash marks on the peripheries of the page – this reminded her of where the people who once cared about her were now in her life. She came to the middle of the page and drew one thick hyphen – this was she.  She went on this way year after year, filling thick notebooks with serpentines, hash mark clusters, and hyphens. Winters came and went with the usual snow and white brutality. Summers flourished in oppressive greens. Yet she went on. Fifty summers passed as she assiduously made her marks and filled notebooks. 

Notebooks. 

There was nothing else of use she could do. 

It seemed as it was when she was a child and jumped from the bridge into that cold river. She watched people above her moving to and from their lives. The mornings filled with a flurry of black bowlers and slate fedoras – the afternoons a long procession of pursed lips and heavy eyes. Occasionally, a flash of brilliant blue or a fleeting smile, but it was mostly gray refracted above. 

At the end she had stacked up thousands of notebooks from floor to ceiling. The notebooks filled her small apartment wall to wall. Then with this notebook she filled the last remaining slot of open space. As an opaque scrim spread itself across the sky she whispered, this is enough.

Two Views: A Cut-Up Bedtime Story

(a found and a cut-up poem)

I.

X.’s home was a shambles:

piles of amber eyes,

clouds of fleas and other debris,

the ritual heads against our legs;

red bodies were discovered –

strong and sharp –

in the refrigerator’s freezer

relying on a stethoscope,

crowbar and chisel to make a hole

beyond salvation

II.

Has anyone seen

I could eat your heart 

    for dinner

with such conviction…

you?

probably be scared

photo courtesy 100 word story.

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

windblown

it’s not today anymore

a bruised child 

in yellow terry cloth

flew past my window

windblown          barn bits 

and green cornfield detritus

speckled the turbid sky

it opened up and spat out brittle

lightning and cow

sized hail

roiled in that dark funnel

were the bodies i planted

with the corn seed 

last spring

alight

The oscitant oscillator was stuck at the 4 o’clock position, and the fan head was feeling unruly.  But it was the constant breeze on his bald pate that got his attention.

“What the…“

The fan head was stationary but the base shook, then it wobbled violently and shattered in to five pieces.  The fan ring rolled off in a drunken arc down the hallway, the blade rotor shot out at great speed embedded itself in the wall.  The back cage remained on the base, but the front half of the cage hit him squarely on the bridge of his nose, and a rich trickle of blood was made its way down his chin, and dripped onto his new polo shirt.

“My God, what the hell?”

The electrical chord crackled at the outlet, sparked, and set the curtain ablaze.  The television was next to go.  Before he could take a step toward the extinguisher in the kitchen, the building fire alarm went off sounding like a thousand amplified cicadas.

Then sprinklers shot off in all the common areas of the building: in the hallways, the laundry room, the gym, the lobby, the nursery.  But inside his apartment the blaze went on, blocking his access to the kitchen, and eating its way through the east wing of the 22nd floor.  His only way out was the balcony.

He stepped into the now pleasant sunshine.  The fire teethed at his heels.

He climbed over the railing and alighted into that rarified air that so few inhabit.

(diagram courtesy of the carl sagan institute)

… of white dwarves and fiery red giants

I read that men who have trouble falling asleep have a twenty five percent chance of dying earlier.  I vow to never sleep again… 

Then the memory drops in again:

Violence flares out of the peripheries, where it resides at all times, in the small apartment.  Rage roils in the bathroom nearby.  There is the familiar screaming followed by a dull thud, and then the sound of what I take to be my mother ricocheting off the bathroom wall and falling into the tub.  Finally, an otherworldly caterwaul.

I will be the color pink soon enough…

The bedroom walls inhale, gibbous and red; and with every exhalation they groan a white dwarf drab.  I’ve learned the Sun is a forgery — a shrill simulacrum.

I’m in the midst of eating 40 chocolate bars — the contents of two boxes of chocolate bar bricks from the fourth grade school chocolate sale — in an altered state of consciousness.  I’m unable to sate the lower brain impulse that compels me.  I’m not hungry, far from it, I just need to keep eating to feel better somehow.  And the book that has changed my life is propped up in front of my small black and white TV, in stark relief, imbued with a cathode green nimbus.  Yesterday, I dispensed with the notion God.  I was shocked into a sense of mortality and existential void that hadn’t existed before.

I step out of my room to see the aftermath:  I see my father hiding a revolver under their bedroom mattress.  I call for my mother, but she locks the bathroom door.

I feel irradiated as if the air is scrubbing the skin off of my body.  The fibers of shag carpet reach out and lock my feet in place as the hydrogen burns around our contracting family core.

I’ve learned from the Time-Life Book of the Universe that 5 billion years from now the sun will swell in to a fiery giant and engulf most of the solar system.  The earth will be third in line for immolation.  Everything will cease to exist.  It’ll be the end of my parents, my grandmother and uncle, and everything else I care about: baseball, the Miami Dolphins, and Arlene and the Farrah Fawcett poster she gave me for Christmas exchange.

What kind of God is that?  There can’t be a God that perverse, to create us and then inexplicably destroy everything we know.  That’s insane…

… god is nothing…

The beatings, often uncontrolled and brutal, have grown in frequency, lately, as my parents’ marriage burns to its inexorable and violent end.  The welts on my arms pulse in purple and black from the belt buckle end of my father’s belt.  

The scope of it all confounds me.  It seems as the sun is exploding now in our hallway, and I am consumed.  I’m reduced to a primordial gas and float into my shriveling room.

I’m at the foot of the bed, reaching beyond the shoebox where Hank Aaron stands forever frozen, smiling, in his batting stance and somewhere near are the Oakland A’s sitting on a bleacher above the 1972 World Series Champions banner  —  and three-quarters of the league lays buried in flattened stacks under the remaining 10 chocolate bar bricks that weigh the equivalent of a one ton meteorite on the 30 empty chocolate bar wrappers.  I eat 3 more chocolate bar bricks to the point  of sickened exhaustion.  My mother’s sobbing, down the hall, punctuates every bite I take.

I spend half an hour or so daily staring at the same two pages in The Book. I’m obsessed with the four monochromatic diagrams at the bottom of pages 103 and 104.

The first diagram depicts the earth’s position in the solar system.  The second illustrates the increased activity and swelling of the sun — solar flares extending outward millions of miles.  The third diagram reveals the earth and most of the planets consumed by the expanding sun as it flares into a red giant.

The fourth reveals a dead solar system, only a dense white dwarf remains…

someone is bound to celebrate this hegemonic tragedy… why not us?

let’s give thanks for love that misses its mark.  this is one of my films (above)… and this:

is my hero, giving thanks the way we should give thanks this thanksgiving…

(please do not watch the above if you are easy to offend)

happy turkey!