thee istsfor manity reader

(hit play button above to watch my short film “whipping”)

Two Characters Caught in an Absurd Interregnum in Act I

Manity, a man aged 33

Hermès Terminus (H.T.), a god appearing aged 55

Two British Naval yeoman from the War of 1812

Three young sailors, ranging from preteen to age 14

A Voice

A Debauched Authorial Voice

SCENE: A walled compound. Fifteen foot tall wall composed of large white bricks upstage, the width of the proscenium.  Behind it we see a mountainous scene, composed of three massifs the width of the proscenium.  The wall obscures the horizon line. There are a few block houses in the distance upstage right. A hillock where two men stand…

Manity: Are u a god?

Hermès Terminus: Good stuff, isn’t it?

Manity: What is this we’re smoking? Hey, what gives? I don’t smoke.

Hermès Terminus: Yes, but you’ve willed this from your imagination —  or rather, your imagination thrust this out from the inchoate blackness of your subconscious — and there you go, you’re smoking a black russian.

Manity: Wha’?… Should I call you Hermès or Terminus?

Hermès Terminus: Just call me H.T.

Manity: Are you my psychopomp?

Hermès Terminus: Seriously, you believe in gods?

Manity: No.

Hermès Terminus: Who does anymore?  It’s no longer a viable vocation.  No more wonder. No more respect, or veneration.  We’re a forgotten lot.  

Manity: Why are we here in this walled area?

Hermès Terminus: It’s my place.  Welcome.  It’s also the parameters you’re dealing with now.  You know you have the utmost freedom here.  You don’t actually have to have us inhabit this walled compound.  The walls could be metaphoric.  It doesn’t have to be this way. You wrote this little tableaux.

Manity: But the opium.  I’ve never smoked opium before.

Hermès Terminus: And you still haven’t.  It’s the choice you made, or rather what piqued you’re interest, because it was said just so when someone threw out a writing prompt in that other world you inhabit.  Only you really know why we’re here, and then it might be deeply imbedded in your subconscious, so you may not be fully aware of it.

Manity: Yes, but why at this moment.  That wall.  That horizon line.  This hillock.  And what is that bizarre looking tree?

Hermès Terminus: Ah, yes, the honey locust… a wonderful specimen… but listen we’re here now because it’s merely the device to get into this story.  It sprung half-baked — or fully formed — from the font in your story place.  It’s also a good place to start without having to talk about the weather.  There ain’t no hook in starting a story talking about the relative humidity.

Manity: Two things.  I had every intention of talking to you about the barometric pressure; and I don’t like your typical linear narrative.  I was thinking about doing an anti-story… but it looks like we’ve already ended up in a play.

Hermès Terminus: Why not do an anti-play?  An absurd tragi-comedy in 3.14159 Acts.

Manity: What about 452 lines?

Hermès Terminus: Only one act?  Where did that number of lines come from?

Manity: Something of my own paranoiac-critical method… did you know that the barometric pressure is …

Hermès Terminus: Aw, no. No. No. No!  It’s still early, you can salvage the opening with a hook.  A hook!  There are time tested ways to do this.  Canonical ways.  The pedagogical-industrial ways.  The workshopped ways of doing this.  And the apotheosis of paths: market research and the test audience questionnaire.

Manity: Ack! Ack! Ack!

Hermès Terminus: Are you doing a cover of the Minutemen?

Manity: No. Never speak of audience research again or I’ll turn into a ferret.

Hermès Terminus: You mean a polecat?

In this manner the formal devolution announces itself…

A Voice: Ontologically speaking a ferret knows nothing of its being.  Its existence is not a quandary to it, it has no conception of existence.  Therefore I mercilessly throw him off the hate truck and all the locust tree thorns make a beeline for it.  Out to puncture it’s consciousness to make it aware of epistemology, ontology, and phenomenology.  But the ferret has its own plan, it’ll go along with the British impressment of sailors for no other reason than it likes a good Anglophile angle on everything it does.  And believe me: it does know.  It also knows Husserl, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre, and as the ferret prepares his thesis defense it floats with the certainty of a life well squandered and a squab well ripped to shreds for dinner.  Just don’t call him a marmot or a polecat.  That’ll get you a mouthful.

And further…

A Debauched Authorial Voice: And in this manner it all digressed, dear reader. Somewhere the ghost of Laurence Sterne wanders the long dark halls of absurd serialization, and Tristram Shandy sits at the base of a wall wondering why the world is bereft of meaning… I don’t know… do you?

Fade to Black. Distant explosions heard long after curtain falls.

“I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.”
— Samuel Beckett

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.

“Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.”
– Eudora Welty

Saturn Dreams of Eating His Children

Lucretia — 

Why did patience abandon me?  Why are you a glom on my psyche?  What can I do to rid myself of you and the children?  I never wanted children.  I caved to you and your “maternal desires.”  You never supplied me a good reason to have children other that you had “always wanted children.”  To what end, goddamnit?  You aren’t that engaged with what they do.  You either smother them or mistreat them. I won’t tolerate the beatings, psychological humiliations, and games dependent on your mood.  And as I can’t stand them what are we to do with a six, and four year-old, how did I end up here?  So I’m leaving.  I can’t stand you anymore, above all. I never wanted these kids — nor can I stand them.  I will contact you again when I’m established elsewhere — I don’t know where that is now, but I’m leaving you $130,000 in the bank. I’ve signed the deed over to you — sell the house if you wish.  I’m leaving you the car.  I paid off the note with a part of the $26,000 I withdrew from the account.  I’m starting over with a meager $20K and will provide my half for the kids when I’m set up elsewhere.  I’m done — done with you and the kids I never wanted. If I don’t do this now I fear what I’m capable of doing.

I only dream of Saturn eating his children…

Goodbye —

Thaddeus

Peter Paul Rubens, 1636. Public Domain.

Francisco Goya, c.1819-1823. Public domain.

“Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.”
— Kurt Vonnegut

two views of the ermine fringed writing room

i.

a woman recounts a tussle
with the sharp teeth
of an unhappy day

her children rented out
man by man

the night a long
angry gash
shred open

ii.

religious practices
that favor death

12 rocks and sickles
killed women

at a wedding party
this year

“Follow your weird. I really don’t think you can go wrong with this. The world is waiting for your own unique, strange, beautiful contribution, that thing that no one but you can conjure.”
— Ramona Ausubel

Equivalencies

She dances to KOKOKO! because there is nothing else in the world she would rather do.  That is all there is to it, when one’s desires collide with the past. She was a child when the rebels raided her village and hacked her parents to bits. She reveled: for her mother beat her so violently and often, and her father came nightly with unwelcome ministrations. She gladly welcomed her liberation. When the Women’s Liberation Phalanx mounted their counter attack and she was conscripted as their cook and laundress, she claimed a joy she never imagined. Now imagine the promotion. Imagine having a head filled with lightning bolts and AK-47’s. Imagine the retributions. Imagine drifting away in a recurring mushroom cloud of hiss and sulphur smell of spent artillery. Now imagine hearing equivalencies early and often.  Then you can imagine why that pounding din that KOKOKO! has shocked into existence appeals to her so. Come bring the noise, she says. And she abandons all hope on the dance floor.

“I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks

Discomfiture Disco

Discomfit the disco dancer whose boogie shoes are too much to bear.

Panfilo is a bear of a man, dark tufts sprouting from his open collar — a cornicello impossibly lost in that dark thicket of chest hair. He’s never been more alive than he is at this moment, pumping his fist in the air as Baccara do it in their video. He floats on the violin glissando. Yes, sir he can boogie.

The thundering sound system lifts him bodily somewhere stratospheric — the music coursing through every nerve and blood vessel. A sensation akin to being picked up by the scruff of the neck and transported up by his particular god and seeing all creation below him. Electric. Erotic.

Panfilo’s lone cavil: his Pierre Cardin wingtips are one-half size too small, but he had to have them for tonight — these brown 11-1/2’s with the metal emblem on the heel. “This is Studio 54, baby,” he says, as benediction, to the dancefloor.

Panfilo strokes his John Holmes-issue mustache: meticulous in it’s curation, and manicured to resemble his idol’s. Panfilo hopes his sleight of hand works — he stuffed a strategic sock in his underwear after his blow dry. But now he’s dazed in the dance. The fraud firm and forgotten as the lights swirl above him and the bubbles float down. Despite the two-hour wait at the velvet rope — he’s in. This is a life fully lived at the edge of a credit card and a rolled up Jackson. He sings loud, for everyone to hear, but he might as well be miming: “Yes sir, I can boogie… I can boogie, boogie-woogie, all night long…”

He’s at the center of the universe. The feel of his picked-out perm bouncing off his temples and shoulders sends jolts of adrenalized joy through his body. His popping hips and shoulder-jousts cry out: love me tonight!

Panfilo catches the glint of Tatiana’s lip gloss as she sweeps up dancing to him.

Tatiana loves this song. Loves how the singers pronounce “boogie-woogie” as Bela Lugosi might, with that implosive Hungarian inflection “Ay, can boogie, boogie-voogie all night long…” And she loves Panfilo’s look, and what he seems to be packing. She’s a recent fan having seen a sequence of a Holmes film at a “key party.”

“This is the best time to be alive,” Tatiana said, as she and a friend smoked a joint on a white shag carpet in Teaneck.

“Can you imagine our mothers living through this? My God,” Tatiana said, “1978 is going to be a good year!”

Tonight Tatiana’s trying something new. She read in Cosmopolitan that a dry cleaner bag rolled up in two mounds makes for realistic looking bra-stuffing. And while she’s already sweating up a storm as she approaches Panfilo she catches him sizing up her handiwork. The hint of a smile. Success.

She, too, has seen the Baccara video and she breaks into the same practiced hip-shimmy as the singers hit that “boogie-voogie” inflection point she so loves. It’s her first dance at 54.

“1978 is turning out to be a great year,” Tatiana says to Panfilo, as the DJ mixes in a new song — pitches perfectly synchronized on the downbeat.

Minutes later they’re both singing “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” to each other.

“As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.”
— Quentin Tarantino

day of the dead dream / as per instruction

toothy deadheads
sugar skulls leer at the exiled
falangist’s autoerotic
death by hanging
& the bolshevik’s ice pick
mambo

the streets of pachuca on the day of the dead

feral cats wail in diego rivera red
birds puff into frida kahlo clouds
& fill the empty spaces in air

quetzacoatl appears
headdress plumes aflame
chest pockmarked with
american bulletholes, circa 1848

his axe bearing
the head of alfredo garcia
while peckinpah hovers
staring from black bulletholes

&

in thee guadalupe hidalgo hovel
a disembodied voice reads canonical poets
in a basso profundo that peels the paint off the walls
men called jesús gather at the window
smiling the toothless smiles of the zapatistas

to the south
the subcommandante downs another brandy
defaces a pri poster
& crushes an errant sugar skull with
a mirror-shined combat boot
wondering
99 years after the revolution
if zapata ever had it this good

& why the hell trotsky came
on the day of the dead
to eat so many sugar skulls

image courtesy of icarian times.

“I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.”
— Lucille Clifton

she was scared / i talk sacred

she was scared for
me to know

said her father
said

her favorite thing
then it went wrong

and even though I talk
sacred

i used to see her father
too

“For me, the form always comes first and the story follows. In that way, I probably have more in common with poets than I do with prose writers, because the one thing I never consider is plot. There is a French writer, Nathalie Sarraute, who wrote a little book called Tropisms that I read when I was about twenty-seven and it changed my life and writing style forever. She had this theory that you can build a story around a sequence of emotional intensities rather than a traditional beginning, middle, and end. I am a person who has been arrested and hospitalized and even spent some time living in a state of psychosis under an overpass. My life has been a series of intensities and so this idea really resonated with me. The first book where I really did this was Chronology of Water. I just put those experiences in a sequence and let them be what they were. It freed me from the feeling that I needed to clean them up or make them more coherent or palatable by fitting them into a typical satisfying story arc.”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

More Speaking In Tongues

(from 30 Songs In 30 Stories) 

I. Astral Twisters

Yes, my name is Jesús. Jesús Montero. But I’m tired of being called “Jesus.”

Everyday the kids at school harass me for miracles: “hover in the air, walk across the lap pool, turn the dissection frogs into loaves of bread — into fish!”

Today, in Home Room, I tell Mrs. Furflick that I will no longer stand for this “Jesus-ness” thing. She tells me to enjoy the attention: “Life is short. Embrace your ‘Jesus-ness’ while it lasts.” She tells me to perform my first miracle of the day, “get into your seat in time for morning bell.” 

But I don’t want to embrace my “Jesus-ness.”  Why didn’t they name me Elpidio or Eusebio? Why not Tadeo? Thaddeus is a perfectly good name. 

I confront my parents over the dinner table — after the yuca frita. I implore them to rename me. They should do it legally, or “I’ll run away,” I say.

Papi, with his airs of finality, says “No” in a manner that causes the Leonid meteor showers to change course. Mami offers “Judas” as an alternative. My sister says I should be sold to the gypsies. None of this will do. 

My brother says, change your name to Velvet Underground. I say, “what about D. Boon? You know, punk rock saved my life.” Silence.

I then offer Fidel as an alternative. A chorus of diabolic “NO’s!” sloughs the popcorn off the ceiling into a hail of antediluvian flakes about the table. 

My brother says the Velvet Underground had a cool song called “Jesus.” Then my sister says change your name to Tragic Mulatto, they have the coolest Jesus song, called “900 Foot Jesus.”  To which my mother rejoins, “899 feet just won’t do!”

I tell them the Minutemen have a cool song called “Jesus and Tequila.” Silence. 

My father puts an end to it, either I keep Jesús or he’ll crucify me in the backyard. “Under the bestial dog star Sirius,” he says.

Here my brother starts to whisper, “crucify him, crucify him.” My sister joins in, “crucify him, crucify him.” Mother: “crucify him, crucify him.” My father counterpoints in basso profundo: “we have no king but Caesar!” The chant deafens. They descend on me. Down the street the houses quake. Windows crack. The heavens convulse. 

The moon, untethered, falls into our pool — hissing — the size of a marble. 

Planks are ripped from the now gap-toothed fence. I raise my head to the night — the bicycle chain heavy around my forehead — their hasty crown of thorns — cuts the bridge of my nose. Blood. My debauched cross pitches north. 

I see the Ursas. There is Polaris. 

A whippoorwill spits its urgent call from a denuded oak. The night pulses cold. Orion’s armpit burns out as Betelgeuse flares into supernova. 

II. A Case of Writer’s Block

Clodomira spasmed. Unable to concentrate, she could not 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 my 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 Duane Reade 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 considered using 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 me the tampon curtain.” 

“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 searched Google hoping to find an address for Jesus.  She found a Jesús Montero that lived in Bergenfield, New Jersey.  Clodomira called Jesús Montero and explained her problem.  He would help her out if she went out on a date with him.  “Swipe right on me, baby,” he said.  She hesitated, then acquiesced.  They set a meeting for 7 p.m., a couple of blocks over from Bellevue, at the Chapel of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

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.  

Jesus 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 a couple of slices at Rocky’s Pizzeria and a screening of Eraserhead at the IFC.  “Epic!” he said.

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 when she arrived home she was to prostrate herself before him in the aquarium. And she was to bleed herself in order to create the tampon curtain sooner.  “Do not tarry,” he said.

Upon regaining consciousness Clodomira tried to replace Jesus 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 as he had turned to wood again.  She was stumped on what to do with Jesus. 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.

“The important thing is not what we write, but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously: everything is inclined to flux and change nowadays and modern literature, to be valid, must express that flux”
— JAMES JOYCE

tips

(blackout poem #73)

tips from 3 point flats

beware

cut your kids
& invite people
into their clothes
the beds they slept in
their car seats

never give details
& avoid mechanics

dont dream
its been done too often

dont love

readers cant
take this

“Write every day without fail, even if it’s only for half an hour, even if you’re savagely hung over and your grandmother has just fallen out of a third-story window.”
— Tom Robbins