thee istsfor manity reader

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

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