thee istsfor manity reader

(hit the play button and watch my film aposiopesis above)

beyond salvation

electra 

paid

bathed in green light

straddles arms akimbo

the fat man

working furiously 

on himself

no closer to heaven 

or beyond salvation

than he was this morning in

the confessional

what price redemption?

electra

bored

thinks of johnny

his name indelible on her

pendulous breast —

the      y      truncated by

stretch marks

in the dank corner

among the roaches

electra’s son

eats leaded paint flakes

tethered 

beyond salvation

“Forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.  Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.  Habit will help you finish and polish your stories.  Inspiration won’t.  Habit is persistence in practice.”  

— Octavia Butler

Abstract no. 5

I studied the core sediment samples from your heart

The records show prehistorically your heart was malice

Microscopic fossils mark displacements and loss

I found demarcations of hopes dashed — and untimely deaths —

Near the bottom — a striation — an icy section where nothing thrived

How could something come of this?

How could anything grow?

I have abandoned this study

I leave the abstract to you

“I liked my little hole, / Its window facing a brick wall.”

— Charles Simic / Hotel Insomnia

Under The Power Of Sixteen Electroshocks

Under the stingy shadow of the fruta bomba tree Belkys sat trying to pluck the sun from the sky.  She used her thumb and index finger like a forceps but she failed.  She failed again, and failed better.  She squinted hard, saw that the sun easily fit between her fingers, but try as much as she could the sun remained in the sky.

Then the moon, in its casual and soporific manner, drifted in and made easy work of it.  It did the job Belkys could not, and blanketed the sun in its infinite darkness.  

Belkys’ father stepped before her causing a secondary eclipse — the eclipse she so often dreaded.  But as the sun moved on its ecliptic, free of the smothering moon, her father was momentarily limned in a blinding fire.  He was the devilhead in a fire aureole.  

As he moved toward Belkys his wife called from the kitchen, “¡Natalio, ven acá coño, necesito tu ayuda!” 

Excuse me, dear reader, this seems to be developing in a manner that will not appeal to most, probably including you.  You see this all too baroque — and has become bilingual.  The author needs to stop and reconsider her style here.  For under the power of sixteen electroshocks everything she writes is in a fantastical style, and this… well, while this tale has heretofore failed to manifest in a didactic style, I can surely sense where she will go.  

You see, She, the author, is projecting from her own life, but she didn’t wish to write a memoir or creative non-fiction story, and then this poor bastard style is the result.  But the author’s own parents, you see, thought she was too unruly for a fifteen year-old, much too precocious with the drugs and men, mostly amphetamines she filched from her perpetually dieting grandmother — and this fixation on thirty year-old men was truly disturbing to them.  So she creates a Belkys in this fashion.  So just as her father had long given up on her, Belkys’ father gives up on her.  And just as the author’s father threw her out of the house, she throws Belkys out of her house, but adds:

after he spied Belkys with another thirty year-old man in flagrante delicto in a new 1963 red Corvair.  My goodness, he despised Corvairs — so louche, so unsafe at any speed.  

Anyway, dear reader, the father pulled Belkys out of the car and threw her onto the newly seeded lawn, and threatened the man with bodily harm and the police.  It was there, on those  riotously green seedlings in the front yard, that he gave her two choices: the despoiling streets of Miami or the Convent of the Sisters of Merciful Stigmata. 

Belkys was reeling in that disrupted coital bewilderment…

Wait.  Stop.  I apologize for the previous editorial interloper.  I, a second disembodied voice and editorial interloper, have taken control of this story.  I stopped the attempted hijacking of the original story.  I am an editor of few words and here I must present you with choices so we may create a story by committee, so that it will appeal to all concerned.  

Please circle one answer below:

Shall I combine both stories above into one well developed story:

A. Yes     B. No     C. Maybe   D. This is tiresome.  I already stopped reading…

“I think we’re creative all day long.  We have to have an appointment to have that work out on the page.  Because the creative part of us gets tired of waiting, or just gets tired.”

— Mary Oliver 

Distortion Poetics

Distortion principle no. 1: avoid distortion.

Distortion principle no. 2: defenestrate (often).

Distortion principle no. 3: degauss after every visit to either of the poles.

Distortion principle no. 4: cleanse fold and manipulate.

Distortion principle no. 5: literature is overrrated; read only pulp.

Distortion principle no. 6: there only 5 distortion principles.

“It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”

— Jean Luc Godard

Fourteen Word Summit With Yesterday

She needed fourteen words to complete her writing block.  She recapped her day thusly:

A day of sickness. Here comes sickness… baby, baby, won’t you hear my plea.  A stomach unhinged.  A head stuffed with fog.  A need for something different and not sure how to think about it or how to effectuate it.  A drone of television buzz.  Bah, it does no good!  Read, read, read all day long in delirium.  Eat a can of beans, that’ll put you right.  Blah blah and hiss…  and such is the recounting of a day not too far into a new year…

“Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!”

— Samuel Beckett / Endgame

Parenthetically

A god lost in his bathroom finds a door…

(to the outside? No)

He finds the door to the next life.

He burns: “get back, get back to that nebula!”

Not The Steerage Type

Steerage is so queer.  The smells of others assault my tender sensibilities.  Why can’t they recognize the class of person that I am?  My hope is to make them all see how I belong at the top of the pyramid of being.  This may be steerage, but really I am not the least bit the steerage type.  Oh, you may spot me in the Stieglitz picture in the future and say to yourself — well, surely that’s the captain or some other important crew member out of uniform who happened to walk into the frame, but no, rest assured it is me — my qualities obvious to the naked eye.  See me and know you are not looking at a steerage personage it is me transubstantiated through time showing you the qualities of a truly refined man…

“Don’t get it right, get it written.”

— Lee Child

making the scene: 1974 curls in nudie pix

his left pupil,

untethered,

a fugue childhood of monticule hunger

on loan,

uncomfortably,

wide-eyed face in cathode ray fuzz

hell-shock door,

unlocked,

“fuck away from the exhaust vent above”

a hive of,

undone,

winces and infuriating accents

hog moans,

unloosed,

some person needles and brays

a retching,

unspooled,

squanders of a man and urine spatters outside

seen: prescient limps in the viewfinder

scene: transient muzz of voices trailing

“When they give you lined paper, write the other way.”

— Ray Bradbury

Unholy Fissure / A Pivot Is Required

S. Is familiar with this visceral disquiet.  The woman with the white tray — a ghost.  Delirium tremens.  Thick fog still clogs the world outside the window.  The interstate, with its lineup of dead cars, is merely a hint of strobing yellow hazard light sop.  The television drones its Twilight Zone Marathon.  S. is stuck in the same season since last year — since the last decade — and Burgess Meredith is on yet again.

S. sinks in to the stiff mattress, furiously tapping, his thumbs unhinged pistons pumping into gorilla glass.  A sign of life.  Anything.

“It’s been six days since I fell through the crack.  I’m spiraling down again.  The crack has been widening and if I don’t do something about it — San Andreas be thy name — you unholy fucking fissure!  This is a familiar landscape, I’m never too far from my stepping through it, into it, farther and farther down — canyon-like — now in a skirl of whorling minimalist notes, repeated and repeated until I am tranced out and lost.”

S. is writing under some form of psychic automatism, for he no longer understands much of anything he had before — being so stupid in this new year.  He persists, driven like sapling in a gale under a force too great to resist.  It is some vestige of his former self, the high school English teacher, driving him forward as he once drove his gifted students.  But he is bereft of any gifts or mercies now.  S. knows he is now so derelict in intelligence, so irremediably stupid, it is all he could do to hold on and conduit.  His fingers gouge away.

“I exist in meaningless patter, in the trifling titter of expense and abuse.  I persist in this dominant issue of breaking a standard that I once pretended to.  I perform unlimited horrors on my own discernment and troubled world view.  I will disengage from timbre and search for a tone so acute it pilfers life itself.  This signifies nothing within nothing.  But Thoreau said…” and for the life of him he couldn’t remember who Thoreau was (but he had known once, of that he was sure).

“… write while the heat is in you.  ‘The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.’  And that’s why I persist with this thumb tapping.  To use what little heat warms these fingers attached to a tepid body plank of a bed.

Having lost six days now I ask myself: what’s next?  Which way do I move?  What direction?  How do I get out of this, and here I am writing again.  Is it fair enough to start like this again?  The only option really.  How did I get here again?  How do I avoid ending up here again?  I don’t think I can adequately answer the latter, but the first question must be asked always because it presupposes awareness of the situation.  And here is where I usually make the pivot, because a pivot is required.  The only other option isn’t really an option.  Is it?  No.  

So here I’ll start again, and content myself with starting again.  This is an acceptable… No, it’s a good step forward.  It had to begin somewhere.  Why not right here?”

The air conditioning unit sputters to life belching stale curtain and decades-old cigarette must through the air.  Then a shrill voice from the television breaks the spell.

(4/100)

“However, even an audience of one is not zero.”

— David Byrne

A Muzz of Voices

S. understands nothing.  He tries, squint-eyed,  to turn his brain over.  Without spark, the ignition doesn’t catch.

S. sees himself, monochromatic, on the screen of  his childhood 1974 Panasonic.  He’s talking globular in a rectangular city.  He makes connections obliquely — only in transient bursts.  He needs raiment for the soul but finds defenestrated appliances and tatters in mounds in their stead.  He walks a bray of winces in piles of miles of monticular hunger.  Nothing for the stomach and nothing for the next life.  He quanders in squandered lines of obtuseness.  A sign up ahead reads: “Squelch and Skronk, $2.99/lb.”  He makes a beeline for the whole ball of wax — a hive of astute astringency on loan — from a god lost in this corner of the universe…

He’s lost in the reticular coldness of the attenuating picture — a cathode ray tube snow (fuzz from his childhood in 1974) and a muzz of voices echoing from the exhaust vent above his head.  He’s one with the toilet seat now, one with his pins and needles thighs, and uncomfortably prescient.  

He continues his note:  … all will be needling shit this new year… Happy so and so… New Year so and so… 

“Fuck Robert Burns!” he says.  “Who the fuck is Robert Burns?” he says to his reflection in the mirror.

And some person outside the hotel room door — which is disquietingly close to the bathroom door (for hadn’t he last night passed one door where he swore he heard a fugue of wet untethered flatulence, and walking by another door heard wretched retching and moans?) — why did the man outside his door continue saying “hogmanay” this and “hogmanay” that, and just what was that infuriating accent?

S. understood nothing.  

“Shit!” S., hamstrings cramping, limps away from the toilet — a short rivulet of urine, unloosed from his oddly pear shaped bladder, streams down his inner thigh and billabongs at the back of his surgically repaired and cranky right knee — “Why have I woken up so stupid?”  

He steps to the door and looks through the peephole and in one fluid motion bangs on the door: “get away hog man, get back to hog land, hog man! Get away.”

A wide-eyed face turns mutton chop and exits viewfinder left — revealing grandmother strabismus, carnival-lipped, mouth agape, shocks of tight red curls (something akin to afro puffs, he thinks) staring into his left peephole pupil,  and trailing “well, I never(s)…” behind, and dragging a braying three year-old down the hall toward reception.

S., trembling, adds a codicil to his note:  don’t stay on the ground floor of the Scottish Inn in Abingdon, VA again… and… 

How in the hell did I end up here?

(3/100)

“Get rid of meaning.  Your mind is a nightmare that has been eating you : now eat your mind.”

— Kathy Acker

Happy So And So, And A Stupid New Year

S. woke up dumber in the new year than he had been in the old year when he fell asleep.  This was the first time he fell asleep before midnight on a New Year’s Eve since he was a preteen, and the intellectual disparity over those few hours of sleep was astounding, many folks would later say. 

“How could someone become so stupid overnight in six short hours?” One would ask.

They were six hours of fitful sleep  —  filled with the lurking of one enormous great white shark that followed him around the world.  The sequence ended in clear tropical waters.  Even though he had no son, he ran out from the safety of the white sand beach into the beseechingly clear, luminous, water (a water whose color was so entrancing it had no name, merely a color code number: #22BED9 — on that code everyone could agree).  In he went after the son he didn’t have only to find himself at the bottom of an enormous darkening aquarium filled with rock outcroppings, and many great white sharks lying inert on the sand.  All of them waiting for the monstrous shark that appeared from the left and swam between him and the shore —  now inexplicably a half mile away…

S. awoke when his fiancé said something about how late it was — “5:45 in the god-damned  morning!”  Then something about “bagels… and crowds.”  But his fiancé died five years ago, so this could not be.

S. felt unalterably stupid — imbecilic — like the Stooge that couldn’t even make it past the first cattle call of tryouts for the “Curly Joe” spot that needed filling sometime in the late 1950’s.  

“My goodness, I’m a fucking dolt!” He said to the popcorn in the ceiling.  

S. picked up his phone, went into the bathroom and composed this note on the Werdsmith app while sitting on the cold toilet: 

Happy so and so…  New Year so and so… I’ve drawn and quartered the last day of the old year.  First, I set it in stocks and forced it to reflect on its insistence on the passage of time.  I denounced it as a heretic and forced it to abjure from the heights of the glorious strappado.  I singed it a bit on the pyre.  I rolled it on the rack.  I pilloried it, used the cudgel, prodded its eyes with a red hissing poker, beat it with the bastinado, used the Spanish boot, and finally pulled and impaled its tongue until nothing remained if it.

This will be my annus mirabilis (S. had no idea what this meant anymore, but he wrote it automatically): the one by which I’ll measure the rest of my life.  The pivot point.  There is my life before today, and my life after — this should mean something to me.

“People, die everyday…”  There is gothic organ music swelling and ebbing in the ether.  There is someone muttering “bummer” in the next room.  The smell of acrid pot is wafting in on a warm eddy of air blowing under the hotel room door.  There are ochres and yellows on the walls and an overall orange mood to the room.  Next door someone is repeating: “people, die everyday, die everyday…”  There is something important here, but I can’t decipher it — not yet — but I will. 

It’s comfortably warm now and a woman is moving about, beyond my line of sight, by the bed, with pleasant food on a white tray.  I sense it but I can’t see her.  This is an inviting place, I feel comfortable here.  But  I don’t understand why it’s a “bummer” and why someone continues to repeat: “people, die everyday, die everyday…”

(2/100)

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

— Kurt Vonnegut