thee istsfor manity reader

at the catholic hospice

my atheist father is tracing lines in the air

they’re shooting at us from the barricades, he says

it’s a half mile away and i felt the bullet fly by my head

the bastards are down from the sierra

che guevara, hijo de puta!

whispers float in from the hallway

followed by a lazy fly

the door slightly ajar

frames a flash of the priest i told to stay away

i watch my father’s hand trail

down to his side near the catheter that snakes

its way down to the rust colored murk

of the waste bag hanging below the bed

caña, he whispers, sugarcane

as the fly lands on his trembling hand

a desiccated death mask has emerged

all sockets and bony cheeks in

stark relief

his eyes a flurry of twitches

as he runs through the sugar cane field

the fly on the wall listens intently

ay, que oscuridad

el comercio esta cerrado

in the darkness that envelops him at midday

business is closed

a half minute later he siphons

another hard breath

the fly heads for cover

behind the blackout blinds

the man next door starts anew

on the cuban national anthem

the sixth time this hour

his voice trails off after the first verse

as his daughter turns up the volume on

one life to live

another man down the hall begs for mercy

then my father says

mama, me quiero bajar

mother, please help me down

the fly bangs repeatedly into the window

in a dizzying drone

“Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”

— Samuel Beckett

Trash Dash: Manhattan

Trash dash on a two hour meter

A ham and cheese croissant and pilfer

Your heart which has grown fibrous —

Dry and cleansed of particulate love —

Full of granular lunacy and roiling

Pathic are your howls as I leverage

My full weight on you

Heat hurt hate

“Well, while I’m here I’ll

do the work—

and what’s the work?

To ease the pain of living.

Everything else, drunken

dumbshow.”

— Allen Ginsberg / “Memory Gardens”

A Case of Writer’s Block

Clodomira couldn’t 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 the 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 the U-Totem-M, 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 wondered if she could use 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 the tampon curtain for me.” 

“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 looked in the White Pages to see if she could find an address for Jesus.  She found a Jesus Montero that lived a couple of towns over.  Clodomira called Jesus Montero and explained her problem.  He was willing to help her out if she would go out on a date with him.  She hesitated, then acquiesced.  They set a meeting time for seven o’clock that evening.  They would meet at the airport chapel — the Chapel of the Sacred Humors.

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.  

Then he 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 dinner and a screening of Oliver at the Miracle Theater at 9.  He said, “groovy, far out!”  

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

Upon regaining consciousness Clodomira replaced the passed out Jesus back 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 in as he had turned to wood again.  She was stumped on what to do with Jesus now.  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.

“There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing… I am a recording instrument… I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”… Insofar as I succeed in direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function… I am not an entertainer…”

—  William S. Burroughs / Naked Lunch

The Texture of His Body

His fragrance remained in the room when he left, and she picked up notes of Ambien and gin.

He turned into a dragon and blew smoke up his own ass: in this manner he floated away on convection currents over the next county into the tri-state area.  

She was disputatious.  She said she loved living in Bwana Johnny Time — the epoch of real mealy mouthed crying.  She said she had cramps.  The walls cared nothing of it.  She insisted and sang “Silent Night.”

He was tall with small joints and thick limbs.  His hair, tufted, was buffeted by the winds which were strong and cool this high in the atmosphere.  Before he blew smoke up his ass he washed windows without panes, and took pains in his assiduousness. 

(His father once digested him during a midday snack — and since then he felt as if he were covered in a film.)

 He felt slightly dirty and smelled worse.  

She was small with oblong limbs, and royally blonde-haired down to her quadriceps.  She analyzed the filigree in the milliner’s shears and chose “deckle” as the word of the day; and cellophane was “thee” fabric.  She smelled of Lithium and a life roughly lived.  She ate only the crusts.  

His name was Funty.  Her name was Frenta.  He blessed his goldfish.  She fried hers.  “Orange Poppers!” she proclaimed.  His favorite animal was the Pileated Woodpecker.  She peeled his navels.

She was obsessed with the texture of his body.  His tortured male narcissism despaired.  He happily fathered a wonderful future in Hades.  He wanted to write a skeezy text in the underworld.

“I think inside every song there are other songs.  But I also think, inside your voice, there are other voices that you have yet to discover and that’s kind of why you are here.”

—  Tom Waits

Oh Holy Fog

The raga swirls about her bare white room creating eddies of sound that fill the corners and cover the ceiling with paprika and saffron hues.

A nebula forms around her head, orbits about and congeals into a pulsating gray nimbus.  She walks down the hall to her father’s room.

Her father is in a trance, and upon opening his eyes, he says: “What you do does not matter.  You are nothing but decaying organic components.  You mean nothing.  This, what we do, is nothing.  What you wait for in the future is nothing.  So stop.”

The floor disappears below and she falls through the void looking up just in time to see the world above go dark.  Her father above peers down behind an iris shutter closing. She falls through the black.  Arms stretch out of the darkness but can not arrest her fall.

She falls through an apocalyptic face in flames  — mouth agape — floating in space.  She intuits that the meaning of life is being revealed in this scene —  all is despair.

A blinding flash of white reveals that she’s now flying over anonymous cities and countryside.  She stutters mid-air and falls again.  She falls with great speed and gravity.  She can do nothing to arrest the fall.  She plunges to earth and hits the ground — and in this manner she wakes up gasping for air.

She’s encrusted in a film of the calamine lotion that was slathered on her in the emergency room last night.  She speaks automatically to the nurse in a torrent of words that waited a thousand years to be heard:

“You have to teach me to take the wind load.  I need a prayer room and chaplet next to me at all times, so I’ll rarely move.  I’m incubated and intubated.  My seizures are mine alone and I’d like you to respect that, under starry skies, and below level ground.  Try adapting, submarine-like, living in an abrupt sloped space.  I need my pillars back!  What is it that truly bothers you?  Do you flinch at roaches flying your way?  Does it concern you that youth culture will swallow you in the end?  Repent and stay quiet.  I fed the cat.  I was overtaken by the vapors when I opened the can of cat food:  Red Snapper Vesper Bits, it read.  God bless hair balls!  The cat walked out of the kitchen uninterested.  The fumes filled the kitchen and my revelation came to fruition.

I became a rice weevil.

And I kept exhorting: ‘oh holy fog,’ as the fog rose up and obscured the kitchen.  Laxity.  A  laxity of mind for which the fog was a metaphor.  A purple miasma seeped in like a cloud and nothing was self evident anymore.  There was a din, a blinding light and then complete darkness.”

“Writing gave me something to do every day.”

— William Burroughs

watch one of my found cut-up films above

Lap Dissolves

Fade In:

I don’t remember going to my first movie.  I am told it was Dr. Zhivago in the Spring of 1966.  I was 2-years-old.  During the intermission my mother was asked to leave the theater because I was running in the aisles and talking to people.  Who takes a 2-year-old to a 3-hour 17-minute movie about unrequited love during the Russian Revolution?  A 24-year-old woman suffering through the unrequited love born of a revolution 40 years later and 90 miles south across the Florida Straits.  I’ve seen Dr. Zhivago a dozen times since then — unable to thaw its impenetrable winters. 

Lap Dissolve:

There were other movies in the intervening year, those memories are missing in the folds of time, but I remember in 1967, just before I turned four, I was at the movies with my parents watching A Man and A Woman.  The man and the woman onscreen were kissing in bed, there was a flash of a breast.  I was hoisted out of my seat onto my mother’s lap; her hands rose like two moons knocked out of orbit, and pressed into my eyes — a total eclipse of light.  I heard the man and the woman onscreen moaning.  It sounded like pain at first, then something else — something foreign, something sinister?  An amour fou?  My mother clamped her forearms hard to my ears; my head in a vise now.  Insensate now.  Deaf, blind, and dumb now.  Who takes a 3-year-old to a movie about unrequited love between a widower and widow?  We left midway through the movie.  I’ve yet to see this movie through.  But my mother played the soundtrack for years, every Saturday morning, while she cleaned the house.  Love still eluding her, twisting up in fine motes scattered by the feather duster — and beyond the stretch of the vacuum hose.  

Lap Dissolve:

My grandmother dropped me off at the movies a few times when I was 6.  My parents did not know our secret.  I’m not sure what she did after she dropped me off in the comforting gloom of the Tivoli Theater.  I imagined, years later, she was meeting a man, and she was “the woman” in A Man and A Woman.  She was a widow of sorts — a widow of the Cuban revolution.  I imagined the “man” was Alberto — the man she eventually married —  in Miami on a visit from California or Puerto Rico. I remember seeing The Jungle Book on one of these excursions to the Tivoli.  On another visit there was a Vincent Price double feature: The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Conqueror Worm, which I never finished seeing because she came back to pick me up midway through the movie.  Who drops off a 6-year-old by himself at the movies on a midweek mid-afternoon?   I never seen The Conqueror Worm in its entirety.  Bita’s unrequited love needed “requiting.”  I needed the movies.

Lap Dissolve:

My father and I bonded at the movies when I was 10-years-old, in the wake of his dying marriage to my mother.  We were at the movies nearly every weekend during 1973: Sleeper, Papillon, The Sting, Westworld, Live and Let Die, Day of The Jackal, at least one film a weekend, sometimes two.  But it was that double bill of The Aristocats and Song of the South I remember most vividly.  While Uncle Remus sang, “my, oh my, what a wonderful day…” my father broke out sobbing.  He said he messed up.  He said he missed us.  He said he was sorry.  He wanted to come back.  I held his hand.  I didn’t understand what was happening.  I had never seen him cry.  After a while, I said I had to go to the bathroom.  I called my mother from the safety of the phone booth in the lobby.  I told her he said he was sorry.  He was crying.  I was crying.  She had to take him back.  She said, “That a son of a bitch drug addict.  I’m going to kill him —” and hung up.  Who takes a boy to a Disney double feature and breaks down with bluebird on his shoulder?  I was isolated there in the phone booth under a flickering, failing, light.  I never wanted to see that movie again.  What else could I do now but resolve to make my own movies one day?  I swore to myself I’d never shoot a happy ending.

Fade Out

“It’s not easy to sit down every morning with next-to-nothing and try to make something appear.  But we do it because doing it beats not doing it.”

— Austin Kleon

Oye, Hermano:  Ode To My Unknown Half-Brother

Oye, hermano,

We share the stuff of life;

In us flows the destinies of madness

And abuses most sharp:

Self-abuse, self-abasement,

Self-abnegation, self-aggrandizement,

Self-atonement.

We are mad with missile crises, 

And hostage crises, deep 

In our DNA.

We are three decades apart,

But the same shipwreck disorder — 

Those same 90 miles and congenital madness — marks us.

Where are you now, hermano?

What do you do and how

Do you cope?

Have you children?  Did you

Continue the family line?  Did you

Extend the name another generation?

Does that madness still live?  Will it

Outlive us both?  As we float apart 

On our separate continents sinking.

We will be inundated

With memories of belt buckle rain storms

And searches for redemptions in chemicals and mind control…

Psychotropic — be our names —

Peaceful (I hope) — be our rejoinders —

In our separate searches for meaning.

In this madness

That has been bequeathed

To us in separate, mysterious, lives.

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those that do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

— Graham Greene

A Rare Delectation

He woke up with the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” spinning in his head.  He had this dream 1,822 times since seeing their performance on that Saturday morning in 1973.  The gold and ruddy light of it.  The smoking jacket outfits on the group.  The dancers in a sea around them popping up sharp to the rhythm and then descending to the backbeat in perfect rubbery time.  The beauty.  The sheer joy of it.  The possibilities.  He never tired of this dream.

Feel good.  Incendiary.  

The sun was up like a burning bald head.  The brightness insisted its way through the gap in the blinds and past the scrim of his eyelids.  The Soul Train Spinners had been preceded by a nightmarish episode where he was caught out on the Ustyurt plateau during a violent electrical storm.  

He was the only living thing standing for miles, and as the wind lashed down on him, and the lighting cracked the sky into splinters that imbedded themselves in the rain and came homing for him like millions of tiny needles.  

Dreadful.  Noxious.  

He feared not for himself but for the congealed beef plov which was the consistency of dried cement and while he saw the individual pieces of mutton, carrots, and rice in the kazan he couldn’t get the spoon which was intractably stuck in the inert block of food to move.  He was two weeks without food.  And as an electrical charge exploded nearby he was full of existential angst like he’d rarely, viscerally, felt before; and in that howling  — in the egregious hunger — he heard the mellifluous voice of Don Cornelius introducing the Spinners.

Recurring.  Hope. 

The opening strains of the amber guitars and percussion faded up forcing the yowling plains of the Ustyurt into a pin prick spot of light that sparked momentarily in the “O” of the Soul Train neon sign above the Spinners starting their dance routine.  And as the clopping congas, violin glissandos and horns caught momentum, he felt sated.  He was momentarily content for the 1,823rd time in his dreams. 

Today would be one of the good days.

“Celebrate writing and writers you love. Don’t go out of your way to be an asshole or devalue writing that matters to other readers. And don’t buy books on Amazon!”

— Kelly Link

cored

i went to the well and saw jesse

floating there

her eyes frozen on the concrete sky above

arms splayed at her side gently

lapping in the blackness

her eyes were stone gray

i went to the well to perform my ablutions

but jesse was floating there

she was cored

a sliver in the murk

i too feel hollow inside

a stitch of guilt

i went to the well and saw jesse

in an act of transcendence so absolute

so pure in that darkness

that i will not speak of it again

i went to the well and won’t

return

“Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.”

— Margaret Atwood

birds of prey

I.  Turbulence

As his flight boarded he finished the bottle of Malbec in the airport bathroom.  Someone brusquely shook the stall door a third time and walked away.  The sound of flushing urinals, toilets and hand dryers echoed off the tile.  He was dizzy and fell back on to the toilet, cracked the seat, and bounced off onto the wet floor.  He saw a mop bucket rolled up to the stall door. 

A pair of shoes worn colorless and splattered with stains appeared next to the bucket. The door was jostled again and a voice said, “Sir, are you all right in there?  Are you o.k.?”

He tried to lift himself up using the bowl for leverage.  He grabbed for the seat, it shifted and he careened to the far side of the stall, and fell face down on a wet spot.  The wetness was colder than he expected. 

“Sir, I’m going to get airport security,” the voice said.  “Do you need medical help, sir?” The door shook brusquely.

“Coño!”  He heard as the mop bucket wheeled away underneath the door.  “Que mierda, chico,” trailed away. 

He saw a procession of suitcases clattering, and shoes, mostly sneakers, and some dress shoes, and a few open toed sandals — “somewhere sunny and warm,” he whispered. 

He struggled up and sat on the toilet.  He reeled and listed.  The seat cracked again and he teetered above the bowl.  His plane taxied down the runway.  He bounced off the sharp edge of the bowl.  He keeled in some indistinct direction.

II.  Friendly Skies

Shit, the one and only thing that’ll calm me down now is to switch to Jesus Christ Superstar on my IPod. 

I’m stuck here in seat 14F — the window — with two large ladies blocking my escape route.  I’m full of gas from the channa masala I had for breakfast and I have to take a grievous piss.  These women are talking about their church bake sale in Brunswick, Georgia.  They must have been programmed to do this precisely at this moment.  Outside the wings are vibrating wildly.  The jet motor seems as if it might fall off in this turbulence.  How could these women not be affected by the storm outside?  They’re oblivious to the plight of the airplane.  They must be automatons planted by my mother to spy on me.

We’re above an endless plateau of cirrus, and look at that wisp of crescent moon nailed to this impossibly saturated blue sky.  The moon out at noon.  Proof, and more proof, that I’m being watched.  These people are everywhere.

The two year-old behind me is screaming shrill cavils.  His parents seem inured to this spectacle.  He’s kicking my seat.  What’s wrong with this little fuck.  Why are these people doing nothing to control this bastard.  Who are these people.  Shit, they’re glaring at me. The parents, too, are plants.  They must be. 

And look at the two across the aisle.  She’s reading Cosmopolitan and he has a copy of Weekly World News open to a page that screams:  Elvis Found! Living As A Hermit In The Himalayas.  Another ruse. 

The plane is compressing in on itself.  We’ll all be crushed up here at 28,000 feet.  Maybe I can crack this window open with my elbow.  I must, I must get out of here.  I can jump out and catch hold of the wing just thirty feet behind me.  Easy.

Maybe I can take this kid out before I head out.  Yes, the pens in my backpack.  I’ll stick one into his neck and puncture his carotid artery.  Yes, yes!  Wait, where exactly on the neck is the carotid?  I’m not sure.  Fuck.  No, no, I’ll just puncture the left side of his neck under the ear and pull across the throat to the other ear.  Yes, I’m sure to hit it that way, probably twice actually. 

Wow, look how cool that looks down there.  That solid bank of cirrus has broken and now we’re over mountainous cumulus clouds, big puffy fuckers, like god-sized cotton balls.  Man, that is beautiful.  Whoa, “Pilate and Christ” this is my absolute favorite on Superstar.  Lots of give and take between the two and those horns pierce.  Fucking pierce!  Ah, shit, “Herod’s Song.”  Shit, no, this is my favorite, I think.

God damn it, kid, shut up. 

Where is it.  Not this one, I hate these pens, a back up I’ve never used.  Here.  Yes.  Why won’t this top pop off?  There.

Shut up kid.  Oh yeah, I love this line “Get out, you, king of the Jews… get out of my life.” I never pictured Josh Mostel as Herod.  He couldn’t sing for shit.

Kid, say goodbye, so fucking long.  Here.

Why’s everybody screaming?  What gives?

Wow, this blood is darker and warmer than I ever expected.

Get your hands off me, man.

Why are these people running up here?  Ow, lady let go of my balls, you fat bitch.  Who’s got their hands on my neck?  Fuck, fuck, that hurts.  Get off me, you fat fuck.  I need to get to the window and I’ll be out. 

Yes, someone has my face pressed to the window.  Just let go of my arm, asshole.  Just got to get my elbow… 

Shit.

Look at that sky.  I never thought a blue like that was possible.

“Be a good steward of your gifts.  Protect your time.  Feed your inner life.  Avoid too much noise.  Read good books, have good sentences in your ears.  Be by yourself as often as you can.  Walk.  Take the phone off the hook.  Work regular hours.”

— Jane Kenyon