Does anyone have ballroom gabardine
to sell a gigolo?
Are you upgrading your ballpoint
gab for sundial gadgets?
Or looking for a private future?
(I’m looking for sunhat provosts
to enjoy the upcoming spring cleaning
& the summons of the new balm)
If that’s a big: NO!
then thank you and aloha—
I’ll be doing the funky Nassau
& the Dada Death.
What I’m Reading:
Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
— Ben Lerner / 10:04
a hapless haptic shadow
infinite dashed lines
funk seeps in through puncture holes
won the night and lost ourselves
gloom at the peripheries
as fireflies streak the darkness
the darkness harkens headfuls
of childhood disjecta loosed
our voices freeze in the night
sound iced in our throats
a pall of smothered silence
there are some good days
when voices of exile bray —
the start is the end
the mournful rumble we hear
widens a crack in our souls
What I’m Reading:
And these days I can no longer find any relief from my house’s infestation of men by fleeing outside because other men, distant men, men who are growing fat on their own cruelty, are making the sky collapse on our heads; every day the sky comes a bit closer, oppressive, so low in some places that it has been swallowing people up out of their lives.
— Lauren Groff / “Mother of Men”
I hear the prattle of death’s rattle as it searches for its corpse. It does not come for me tonight, but its search is in earnest. I can hear the effort in its breath and the lead its step. I’d like to address it, correct its step, elude its attention. Were there enough people in the tower you ask. I don’t know — were there?
I’d ask you to ask, but I know you’re reluctant to engage death directly. There are fifty-five mothers in there, where are they hiding death? Do they all nurse it? Who has the temerity to burp it? Thunder in the anteroom, ice in the basement, yet the casements melt and I feel rather provincial and spun into a dense web of misplaced filial piety. I voted in an elusive election and was awarded electrocution instead.
Proper elocution was de rigueur — Derrida was stuck in your escutcheon, and you forgot the keys to the crypt.
So I’ll elide my vowels for the rest of my days. My days full of short scrums and long pitches. I’d like to spend my remaining middays ordering my consonants into flotation devices — my vices tend to sink like the Kursk or the Graf Spee. I still wish to live in a bathysphere, for I have an abundance of sins at the pawn shop and you’ve got a pocket thick with cash. And here is where you proclaim your hazy thesis riddled with jocular contradictions: spatially condensed sins are best macerated in your urine specimen effusive and elusive. Thunder only happens when you’re draining and evil presses down upon us all.
Upon us all.
Now we track, and contract, the constellations — knocked out of their obstinate orbits: Look, the night sky appears to be scratching its skin off!
What I’m Reading:
Well, we’re barely a nation at all anymore, but I’m glad we’re still in space. We have to be going some place other than down the toilet.
— Octavia Butler / Parable of the Sower
Three astonishments shy of a high-strung melodrama I flickered and boasted about my existential moodiness. I was three compositions short of a wartime screenplay and much too invested in haunting atmospheres. I craved numerous occult tropes of uncanny hunger. In short, I pitched decanters of sherry at obedient patients of the supernatural. Again, I was transpecies extraordinaire with a flat rear tire — passenger side. I was aggrieved and antic, send me a fur fringed papoose as a conversation starter. I say nothing when I’ve got logorrhea.
I evolved out of an overplayed lachrymosity just to change into a tank top made of human skin — ancient vellum, not to worry, I only skin my bestest of friends on alternating thanksgivings. Give thanks for moribund cummerbund fitters, the most underappreciated vocation. I moved in that direction and met the cleanest tapeworm I ever roomed with. Take that to the tripe!
What I’m Reading:
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots trained on ‘brain rot’ content — vapid social media posts that are the equivalent of mental junk food — are worse at generating accurate information. Researchers found that chatbots given a diet of popular and sensationalist Twitter/X posts skipped steps in their reasoning process (or didn’t use reasoning at all), spat out wrong answers and demonstrated ‘dark traits’ such as psychopathy and increased levels of narcissism.
— Flora Graham / “AI gets ‘brain rot’ from social media” / Nature Briefing
I dreamt of zombies last night.
I asked you where you put them: In the garage?
You said in the closet.
I told you to move my father’s stuff over and put your stuff in there — not the zombies!
You said it was your day of the dead prerogative and quoted dialogue from Hiroshima, Mon Amour.
This is how we doomscroll our days of the dead in the Anthropocene.
What I’m Reading:
While leaders in Europe are grappling with overtourism at popular sites, tourism officials in the United States are scrambling to let the world know that the country is still open despite government shutdowns, political rhetoric, tariff wars, shootings, National Guard deployments, expensive visas, and immigration crackdowns.
— Christopher Muther / “Global tourism is surging, with one notable exception: the United States” / The Boston Globe
An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates / The Message
Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.
— Lewis Carroll / “A Boat, Beneath a Sunny Sky”
“On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29 percent more expensive than the best result for your search,” Doctorow claims. “Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen, and you’ll pay an average of 25 percent more than you would for your best match. On average, the best match is located seventeen places down in an Amazon search result.”
From the perspective of these platforms and their shareholders, you might call Stage 3 enrichification. But, for users and business customers, Doctorow writes, this is “the end-stage of enshittification, the stage at which a platform turns into a pile of shit.”
— Greg Rosalsky / “A theory why the internet is going down the toilet” / npr
Parties passionate for
power Crashed No words were binding No
oaths reconciled When the plague
broke us We broke each other
— Rosanna Warren / “They set about wasting the land”
Each of these steps has elements of military theatrics and cosplay authoritarianism, but the more the White House insists on the trappings of war—the troop deployments, the “warrior ethos” grooming, the emergency legal powers—the more it risks nudging us toward an actual one.
— Benjamin Wallace-Wells / “Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the ‘War from Within’ “ / The New Yorker
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there.
— Mahmoud Darwish / “I Belong There”
The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates / The Message
What I’m Listening To:
Baby’s on fire
Better throw her in the water
Look at her laughing
Like a heifer to the slaughter
Baby’s on fire
And all the laughing boys are bitching
Waiting for photos
Oh the plot is so bewitching
— Brian Eno / “Baby’s On Fire”
Sustain yourself with necro-normative inclinations, make use of what you consume, trap your inner child in an iron maiden. Spend time with your inner critic’s internal monologues parsing the sections of your Id with a rusty chainsaw giving your unconscious a case of terminal tetanus. Sublimate your inner demons to outer space—a wise man once said: “in space no one can hear you scream”—but it wasn’t really a wise man, not some mountaintop mandarin sitting lotus post-mantra, but merely a disembodied voice over in search of narrative sense, shilling a sci-fi flick—a lot of sound and fury signifying dollars for a moribund industry providing opiate delusions. Dziga Vertov once said: “film drama is the opiate of the masses.” I tend to aggress, and find egress repellant in the midst of an imminent dissolve.
Cut to:
So on this Day of the Dead in the confabulated year of 2025 CE (common to exploiters and the exploited, common to prelates and agnostic fronts, common to atheist cutlery and baptismal fonts, common to celibates and paraphiliacs) may we rejoice our dead—in those we knew who sloughed this mortal coil—and have a kind thought for the living (specifically, those who deserve kind thoughts) and may those who live now, whose great desire is to foment anger, misunderstanding, strife and division … well, may they join the dead sooner than later, so their peeps may remember them and rejoice this time next year.
What I’m Reading:
Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
— Federico Garcia Lorca / “City That Does Not Sleep”
a welfare check on my chickpeas
a moral bankruptcy pulls me
from a restraint on my stoop
a clue found in my miniature espresso
rasp—my neurons are frayed
while packing peanuts + PFAS dilute my membranes
thumb-actuated airguns are hard to beat
silt screws cut like symbols (or is it cymbals?)
weaned from reluctance + rigmarole merchants
it’s the threat of the enema that never threatens
that threatens incessantly
a glob of hornet + a flicker of worm
a channel for my undesirable tendencies
i eat the burglary of unmediated terms
What I’m Reading:
The whole Third Term Project isn’t actually about Trump. The people behind it know he will likely be dead or enfeebled by 2029. It is about them, the vastly unpopular group around Trump, wanting to grift us forever without elections.
— Timothy Snyder / Bluesky post
Feeling particularly frisky and having been born in foul moonlight amidst the rancor of heat and the solitary investiture of a love shorn largesse — and because of this tainted spite — he bears a maggot face full of youthful miscarriage. A little awkward. A little stagy. Full of concocted melodrama and a derangement that recalled O’Connor’s Misfit: No pleasure but meanness. It’s no real pleasure in life. . .
Huh?
Despite your emerging self, despite your arc of transcendence, you fear there may be something to that bit of causticorioum. You bind your feet and clench you teeth and fling yourself at the open window. Your defenestration keeps you youthful looking — never mind the Botox. Your wish for a properly dramatic soundtrack to your speeding descent is fulfilled with shards from twelve-tone symphonies, something abortional from Berg or Webern — or better yet, both superimposed and played at once. This echoes from the left corner of the sky.
Oh, the sky.
Oh, the street.
Here’s the top of a cab.
Headlong. Accordionesque.
A suppuration of madras lentils or a dal makhani — or better yet, both superimposed and manifesting (curiously) at once.
This is the movement of fear.
What I’m Reading:
All it took was for a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power, and then pay for their innocent choice.
— Hugh Howey / Shift
I’m the pit of a floating wreck. Decked in dreck and delivered with the deckle of dynastic disjuncture — stop me from breeding before this sickness festoons another dead end generation. A wireless conflict limned shows phrenological depressions — your skull is a paradise of the longing for extinction. I’m superstitious of cemetery intimacies and apparitions with no soils or tactile imposition on this earth. Find me a day of the dead sugar skull phylactery factory for my arms feel naked and uninhibited and my hands uncontrolled specters at the chopping block of reason. Once I witnessed humanity acting humanely — just that once. Since then it’s reliquary aplomb, nuclear options, and dayglo charnel enemas. What a wonderful world. I stand in the shadows, that’s where I look best. Your peculiar gait suits me — a shuffle of consternation. You appear lost. I’m distinguished by my lack of intellect and abundance of orifices. Aren’t we two of a perfect pair?
What I’m Reading:
When you’re born into this world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.
— Stephen Markley / The Deluge
thee istsfor manity reader 