thee istsfor manity reader

At The Distraction Attraction

The carny barks:

Come  inside and see gnats and gadflies swarming about the heads of philosophers! Come, you, now! Come and see annoyance and obstructions to happiness! Come inside and watch a man tear down his little blocks mere moments after constructing them. Come see devices of personal torture: paradigms, rationalizations, constructs, obfuscations and simulacra sure to depress and confound! Come one, come all; it’s free!

  And she says:

Hey, I’m standing here speaking. I’m pontificating on life and how to live it according to the gospels of my cretinous retinue, here… but all you do is whirl a dervish and speak in tongues. What I’m saying is important here. I’m trying to add value to his life. If you do what I say life will be good and you will want to live it. So now listen:

It’s important to keep it going, even if it means inserting a place holder to expand upon later. That is what this is, this little excursion to distraction. 

It is a vilipend of sorts!  

I have in that past denigrated all of this, but now it’s a worthy act — worthy of being placed here.

Don’t play with your balls in public. You come off a low class and unkempt fool. I don’t care that you’re a doctor or a fireman with syphilis!

To which I say:

I’m on my mindful way. I’m becoming confident and content again, and quickly aware of my mindless behavior. I’m trying to stay “good” to myself without making myself recoil in new age horror. It’s a start. It’s good.

To which the carny barker says:

Paducah is roiling now, and I’m thoroughly enervated. 

Then she says to me:

Kentucky? What do we do now?  Maybe have some quiche?  Call the doctor? Shoot a speedball? I’m feeling icky. Fuck this!

I say to the carny:

Amicus opacus, I’ll call you!

I wander as lonely as you do, but you are anathema to my peeps. You block my peeps from the sun. You are my sunshine. You make me happy when I’m suicidal, please don’t take my sunshine to Manitoba on the back of a 1975 El Camino.

(The carny is nonplussed)

And I say to her:

Our salad days were filled with bitter herbs and intractable roots, not so much a salad as a buffet of weeds. Intractable and indelicate things in our mouths.

Every mouthful a swig of rot and offal. Awful offal. The bawds of euphony were happily entrenched in the cupboards and the cups were on a two week vacation at a Trump resort.  I’m mystified by this all and quite malnourished.

The carny barks:

Let me tell you about the anthropocene age— 

She barks back:

I challenge you to look chalky and wan. We’ll wage a hunger strike in absentia. We’ll lay waste to a tofurkey loaf while no one is watching said tofurkey in the phylactery factory lunch room. Snivel and drivel, you! We’ve got you by the short hairs!

She says to me:

Quit your salivatin’ you sententious whippersnapper. You palavering jerk-o’!
You have this whigmaleerie in your head…
of pixies and unicorns…
let me tell you the 900-foot Jesus statue—

The carny barks:

The Christ the Redeemer statue in Sao—

She wheels at him:

Shut the fuck up, Einstein! 

Then at me:

That statue is going to take a dump — a loose stool dump, down the side of the sugarloaf. 

The carny barks at the midway:

Ladies and gentlemen, we have just passed 800 kidney stones this month! Please refrain from smoking inside the exhibition halls and you’ll be fine… and the Cubans and Jews won’t be hurt. 

It’s a sham and a crying shame this consumption. Generally, we try to avoid topics like this, but I just had to speak up. I just had to fill the air with words. Although there is really no accounting for taste, or any parallels here,  I do see a parallelogram making its way up to the dais now, and maybe it will explain what is happening…

Hey you, please avoid the quadrilaterals, they’re tawdry and nouveau riche. Thank you!

A sonorous voice over says:

Someway to fill the blankness.
Someway to pass the blackness. 
This thing is that thing.

I say:

Yeah! 

(All outstanding suggestions were ignored)

“I take inspiration from anywhere I can get it. Lately, it has come from watching films from the past… Looking at films makes me feel to think, if that makes any sense.”
— Kim Gordon

Paulus Fürst, Plague Doctor, c. 1656. Public Domain.

my plague chasuble

(worn over my hair shirt)
is impregnated with wise blood to keep foul
humors and miasmas at bay
the vapors out
& thee ethers at ethereal atmospheres
hot with distemper

my beak of special aromatics —
posies / popcorn jelly bellies / & loose change
tinkling at the tip
(full of copper florins & obols)
with “A penny for the Old Guy”

dire companions to the low black galero —
thee new pestis cardinal
by way of hazel motes —
wide-brim

i’m freshly dressed
& arrived from the levant
by way of candia

“nobody with a good car needs to be justified!”
is thee new catch phrase for the plague year

odd times for and odd man…

“The world will provide you with every imaginable obstacle, but the one most difficult to overcome will be the lack of faith in yourself. Leave it to others to have doubts about you.”
— Callie Khouri

Pandemic Haiku 5

A recrudescence 
Pours out of a dim tunnel — 
Black rats hot with fleas.

“The furious revolt of the first weeks had given place to a vast despondency, not to be taken for resignation, though it was none the less a sort passive and provisional acquiescence.”
— Albert Camus / The Plague

Shoot A Canticle

I’m the ludic Luddite. Lovable, laughable, but don’t get me near a hammer or screwdriver.

I’m a dud. Speak to me of glittering baubles of snabbles and yarbols. No, don’t speak to me at all. I’d rather leave you by the side of the road in this treeless forest. I’d rather flee to the desert in arid isolation and speak nasally of the inequities of your life under the yoke of the supervision of a grand inquisition. Please, bless me. No, please, don’t speak to me at all.

Too tired to consider the truth in Anglican philosophies, too prim to stuff a lightbulb in my arse. I wait all day to write until the last 2 minutes of the night, before it becomes the next day — this is a thing of lethargy — a thing jejune, jocose, and jaunty. Shoot the  canticle of a manticore. A testicle in a fusty icicle, a floe in the flow of doe. Reify the ether into a Bwana Johnny. Johnny Angel. How I cleave you to the hooves in the cleft palate of the clef bar and a treble note in the tremulous tumult. Fuck you, penguin! You waddle ill.

In blocks you can accomplish things simple, something foundational… it’s educational… The sybaritic rose petal funeral of plague years. The black star is metastasizing in time. The Virgin of Charity is tired, so tired, tired of tithing and gossip,  “gossip and complaints… they came from next door.”

(Now this is original isn’t it? Oy!)

“I’m a black star,” he said. “No, I’m more of a warble. Really.”

And the wind picks up outside in the frantic whistling of planetary objects careening off-course. Top officials from Caracas promise that we’ll be released at daylight. If the marauding former Green Berets, working concert security just a month ago, see themselves as the new Simon Bolivars — leading an invasion force of 8 starving native corpses to be… well, let’s call that the Bay of… no, let’s not call it anything at all. 

Strike a different tone —  one gray and indistinct. Stand by… excerpts coming through in Esperanto: (translation) “The future is not as bright as it used to be.”

A nightmare dropped in between the construction and the traffic —  and they’re working on the office next door. We need to make this person disappear before anyone realizes what’s about. I’m going to break ground after I break your heart. Then I’m going to break bread with the baker before I make him one with a cement pour and a 55 gallon barrel. 

Don’t talk to me from that lime green room, or is it a particularly vivid bit of avocado green? Whatever. Don’t talk to me about 70 year old land tortoises, as I’ll crack them apart and paint these rooms… tortoise green. “Goodbye Green” and hello turtle muck. Mofo. 

I’m going to imbibe heavily so I don’t have to think. I shouldn’t be drinking and taking those pills. “Transport it to your lady, why don’t you?”

“Yes, bear with me there is a little bit of water,” she says.

But somewhere near the end he chose a selection by The Selecter, “Celebrate the Bullet.”  And someone heard that it was good, and that it was a worthwhile endeavor to belittle Sandra and the Sancochos. They recorded a cover of “Mami Quiero Mantecao” which el manco de Lepanto en Murcia produced.  He produced the whole damn record!

Again she said, “love comes quickly.” 

He said, “you’re jocose, you’re rugose! You’re a fucking hairy veinlet stuck up my craw. You giblet whore!” 

“Well, I’ve never!” she said, and shot him in the face. “That suits you for calling me a giblet and a hairy veinlet!”

She waited until she could wait no more, then started to try and catch up, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to — she had to resign herself to something less than perfection, or her ideal of how her life would go from here. So she moved on. Things were not perfect, but good enough. Everything was accomplished by the time she had to vacate their old apartment. It happened that she learned something from this experience. And eventually she felt better about herself. And that is all she could hope for.

Apropos of Cinco de Mayo, though it wasn’t appropriate at all, she composed these lines in Spanish:

Las pinturas de bacalao, usando pintura hecha de bacalao cuando pintando bacalao. El bacalao con pan fue un éxito en Cuba. En Cuba eso no pasaba, chico. A ver qué me puedes decir tú que yo no viví en sangre, mi amigo, Tú aquí comiendote una malanga y aya yo comiéndome el cable. Tú a mí no me puedes decir nada, compay. Lo que yo he vivido tú ni te lo puedes imaginar. Eso era una métraca,  amigo. Así vete par el carajo. Yo conocía a el Ché mi hermano, y yo sé de lo que yo hablo. Y tú hablas mucha mierda, chico.  Olvídate de eso…

Whereupon she closed her journal, and went to sleep, and dreamt of vomiting all night.

“Just put the tip of the pencil on a lined paper and write one word behind the other. It always works.”
— Cesar Aira

pie time at the beat circus (black-out / cut & paste poem #505)

tips for taking out the table: making killer

a.
know how to instill fear
if you manage that part

anxiety sets in

but the pros say you can roll
a pastry fill it with apples

and bake your family

as with all classic recipes
keep the bottom crust crisp

b.
ooooh
bone me
up on the furniture

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
— Natalie Goldberg

The Nude Girl and the Abbot, from The Decameron, Hans Schäufelein, before 1534. Public Domain.

black matte spray collimate

at the museum of digest feminism
Boccaccio quotes have been stricken thru

the time to digress was then
sometime in the 14th century wrought

in yersinia pestis yellow and arte della lana blue
centuries before its gabardine inception

such foul humors seep thru the crack
in Boccaccio’s wall

the identifying placard in the shape
of a carmine limned lanced buboe

“Meanwhile, we’re drinking our four-dollar coffees and improving our bodies. The capitalist world has sold us all on…”

so much depends on a red
transliteration

glazed with testosterone rage beside
the white klan hood

“Fuck it, let’s see what comes out!”
a Gordon & Boccaccio conflation

“I always think of my art as political, in that it’s social. But there’s no single way to make art, or to be political. Something that looks overtly political might just be a design, and what looks like a design might be political.”
— Kim Gordon

(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