thee istsfor manity reader

Sisyphus Greets The New Year

Such is the manner of a new year — boulder aside…

Awake in a daze.  So much to look forward to at once, then you must deconstruct it into 365 pieces and concern yourself with just this one here.  It’s usually colder than most other days.  Earnestness is often overdone, the force of resolutions seem reasonable, even in the most overzealous cases.  The pages of the calendar, journal, etc., are barren and full of such wondrous possibility.  Despair dissipates, a bit, exiled to the peripheries for a while.  In most cases you haven’t fucked up yet, you haven’t had enough time to.  The emails taper off a bit, momentarily, the requests for donations have all but disappeared.  But soon they’ll begin again with best wishes for the upcoming struggle.  Now push.  The boulder you burden with seems momentarily lighter, easier to move.  Now concentrate.   The pitch increases quickly and you don’t wish to lose your handle.  There is danger about.

(1/100)

“Creative work is often driven by pain.”

— Cormac McCarthy

The Daily Ablution

There is a boy whose head is on fire.  

A nine year old boy who has recently dispensed with god and love because they dispensed with him.  His father beats his mother on occasion — preferably in the bathroom, because “blood comes out easier from tile.” 

And in turn his mother beats him and throttles him by the neck on occasion when the mood overtakes her.  In return the boy acts out, he behaves oddly if you will: one day he eats 30 chocolate bars from the school candy sale while hiding under his bed; another day, he scrapes all the popcorn off his bedroom ceiling in a pique; and on a number of other days, he chunters in his parents’s dialect and overfeeds his goldfish until it floats inert, belly up. 

These actions in turn earn the boy a hot rain of metal: belt buckles, from his father, who cannot stand the mess.  And in turn the boy — too old, really, to shit or pee his pants — shits and pees his pants.  This calls for a hail of slaps, broomsticks, and ashtrays from his frazzled mother.

Eventually the mother has enough and leaves the father, and drags the boy with her to live with her mother; but her heart isn’t in it — her heart is spleen shaped — it was beaten into that shape by her mother — the boy’s grandmother for those losing track.  

Let’s not lose sight of the father: he turns into a ghost and hovers about speaking in tongues.

But the boy’s head is on fire.  Remember?  Because he does not comprehend much of what is happening around him.  

Today on the school bus he is so full of the abnegation of god and the abnegation of love that he is compelled to repeatedly nod his head “NO!”  This self-abnegation pleases him so, and he begins to pick up the speed of his nods until his head is a blur:  back and forth.  “NO NO!”  And faster and faster, and it seems his head will fly off his neck. “NO NO NO!”

Then an older boy sitting behind him says: “Look at that shit head.  He looks like a blender.  Hey, blender!”  Another boy yells:  “Blenderhead!  Blenderhead!”  They sing in unison.

And the dizziness is the most joyful thing our boy has experienced: the world flying off this way and that.  The colors a swirl.  The boys and girls staring at him are a whirl…  and in a whorling moment of ecstasy our boy crashes his head into the the metal plate that frames the bus seat in front of him.  He grabs the top of the seat, and again: bang; again, bang; again, bang, bang, bang.

Some say his eyes rolled white, a girl says he was priapic.  But our boy doesn’t care, his head is on fire.  This is just where he wants to be.

Coda:

Doctor:  As you’ll see here… a cross section diagram of brain tissue appears suberose…  

This is the way your brain appears after you’ve beat your head into the metal backing frame of a school bus seat. Your head, more specifically, your brain is on fire. You see microscopic shapes floating about your field of vision; they appear as cavorting beasties flagellating about in search of the dendrites they were unmoored from, you’ll never get those brain cells back. The world is vignetting at the edges and objects leave melting traces in their wake. People appear as slugs and leave sebaceous trails as they pass. Voices sound tinny and distant and the grind of the bus is a warm industrial hum. 

The beatings, the “throttlings,” the vitriol all slough away.

This dull floating through space — untethered, yet pleasant, despite your throbbing swollen brain — is where you belong.  It’s where you want to reside, and now you’ve found your ritual, your daily ablution.

You are happy.  And YOU (yes you, dear reader) must imagine the boy happy — as you imagine Sisyphus happy — living and creating in the midst of the desert…

Happy New Year…

“Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.”

— Henry Miller

opening: the sperm switch

(cut-up poem #627)

about 15 people 

are considering

a man from the lab

fathering children 

they don’t know

and endlessly repeating 

the next generation

“Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day. It helps.”

— John Steinbeck

You Cannot Be Anything If You Want To Be Everything

In her dream she was at a garish fairground carnival under a cloudless dayglo blue sky.  She was separated from her parents.  She panicked.  She was lost in this strange loud place.  Carnies barking from the fringes — fleeting glimpses of of them as the crowd momentarily parted — snarling mouths with spittle teeth in flashes between elbows and tilting towers of cotton candy.  

A dry tongue mouth in the midday sun and sweat.  She reaches for the water bottle she didn’t know she had, and there it is full of a thick pink liquid.  Then fear seeps in from her vignetting field of vision — someone is trying to poison her, and she can’t find her parents anywhere in this whirlpool vision aflame — only booming music and the sharp screams of overexcited children.  

It becomes clear to her she’ll never see her parents again.  The thirst is overwhelming but she can’t drink the pink liquid.  She knows viscerally that it is poison.  She needs a drink.  Her head is like the puck in the High Striker game — a shrill, insistent, “Step right up,” keeps looping in her ears — and someone continually pounds the mallet on her head as if he has something to prove to his cheap girlfriend.  Every strike, a deeper guttural concussion exploding deep in her brain stem.  Alarms go off.  

The first waking words she hears from the radio are: “You cannot be anything if you want to be everything.”

And this is the instant her restive head settles and the headache which has been her sole human companion for the last three days melts away.  She says to the cat purring at her side, “I know what I need to do now, Antigone.  I am going out with mother’s old typewriter, ribbons, and plenty of paper and compose lines for a living.  In this way I’ll make a new life doing what I love.  You see, Antigone?”  The cat stops purring and shifts away from her mindless, fidgety, petting.  “Yes, that’s it,” she says.

Later that afternoon, after quitting her brokerage job and leaving the managing partner mouth agape  — incredulous and alarmed that his best broker is walking away from a six figure salary, and having talked him out of a Marchman Act call — she sets up her new workspace. 

She sets up at the center of the Bowery station platform.  She places the Underwood Noiseless Portable atop two overturned milk crates — draped by an elaborate antimacassar made by her great-grandmother that retained the oiled indention of her great-grandfather’s death head —  to this she adds a low slung lawn chair.

The J and Z trains stop here and for years it has been her favorite subway stop because it hold the promise of seeing a good show on the way in.  And on the way out it is tinged with  a sense of great satisfaction of having seen a show that exceeded what she expected.  She’d seen some of her all time favorite shows at the Bowery Ballroom:  Lou Reed.  Luna’s farewell show (before they came back a decade later).  Yo La Tengo numerous times.  The Sun Ra Arkestra.  Sonny Rollins.  The Butthole Surfers.  Mission of Burma (on their comeback).  Le Tigre (no, wait, that was at  Irving Plaza…) no, not Le Tigre, but Kathleen Hanna’s other incarnation The Julie Ruin (yeah, that’s right).  They Might Be Giants.  So many great shows here.  This must be the place.

She sets up a sign that reads: “Will Compose Poems And Stories For You.”  She throws out a used beret she picked up at Goodwill.  It entrances her for a moment.  Then she quickly makes a note on her phone to get a deeper, more voluminous, hat as tossed coins might roll away onto the tracks.  

She rolls her first sheet into the Underwood in that transient confusion of the late afternoon commute.  She has arrived.

“Writing for me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”

— Isaac Asimov

Perfect Disasters

The devil is making appearances on a daily basis.  I’m making something of a Herculean effort to quash this Sisyphean impulse.  My parents come home early and discover me playing with large cockroaches while the guitar in the corner strums on its own — it vibrates wildly — as a blizzard rages on inside the fish tank.  My sister runs downstairs screaming, “Oh, look at it outside now.”

Outside there is a woman throat singing and a man is screaming “boom boom boom.”  Their son tries to crawl into the water — something more like an open sewer.  We are all fantastic failures, tremendous disasters, in fact, perfect disasters.

Then a call comes in, the man says a toddler has “gone postal.”  I tell my sister and all she  manages is, “oo la la.”  Then my parents chime in and sing, “oo la la, Sasson.”  The loud speaker behind the television announces the corporation has decided that reeducation is in order to celebrate the 33rd anniversary of our glorious leaders.  The panic siren sounds.  A message is read: 

“On January 10 use stilts to take down the lights, our enemies are watching.  Your neighbors are watching.  Three weeks left, and no one will be watching.”

Dangerous creosote sets off a wave of chimney fires throughout the city, by Saturday everyone has streamed in to the country side.  But my parents stayed at home and are singed beyond recognition.  In the attic I find a fire extinguisher full of gold Krugerrands.

I thought there might be so much more to this life, notwithstanding the legal fees and steep insurance penalties.  I will probably not go out tonight or ever again.  My sister will never go out again, none of us congealed in this aspic will ever go out again or even move.

“The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence – arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.”

— Hilary Mantel

Fall

Fall.  Fall, I say.  She doesn’t.  She stays perched on her branch.  Fall, I say.  She does not.  This ritual —  the repetition is liturgical.  A call and response in absentia.  There is no rejoinder.  There is no: and also with you.  There is only silence and the absence in her eyes.  Fall, I say again.  She looks down where I stand.  She looks away into the distance.  I look.  I see what she sees.  Nothing there.  Fall, I say.  She’s like an unhinged censer rolling away down a transept.  Fall, I say.  And she jumps.  I turn.  I step away.

“My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.”

— Cormac McCarthy

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