Janus Faced Poetaster

In preparing for being deemed expendable the Janus Faced poetaster reengaged with thee heart palpitations that had remained unfinishable in stymie style yogi times—floating in and out of consonants. 

The taloned ass called these “dust burnished ideas.” You find it hard to rest your mind—which you absently left at home. Palpitations. Heart. You shade your corpse. A sty to be continuously refingered. The sky full of long squawking breeders. In between them—cerulean redactions of love. Clouds buoyant as a retraction—but much has changed in the wren during the long gestation. 

This Felled Corroded Apparatus asks us what medicament is available? What solace? What can we assemble from these ruins? If we are impersonators and we assemble a guarantor. . . is this not unresolvable?

What I’m Reading:

If you cannot love the ugliness that comes from within you, then you cannot make art. If you go into the deepest, most base feeling inside yourself, which is the fundamental feeling that doesn’t change, then you can start writing and continue writing from there, for that is the feeling that is most fundamentally you, which maybe most calls upon to be expressed. If you hold fiercely to your vision, you will be protected. 

— Sheila Heti / Alphabetical Diaries

laurel to fig (senseless)

look mister,

play the heathen woodwind
in keeping with the fatherland
with observatories & non-permanence
with your alluringly detached gender
the cathode for the big american weapon

splinter your sphincter exerting a supernatural
inhibition over your farthings and flip-flops
a patisserie a pastiche ≠ an oblique

play the tortured poet profound
expound on the settings of the doomsday clock

your swan {lake} a security felon—
a coordinate geometry emigre

you’re the evil fingernail wreck
an atrocity exhibitionist to the stars
you’re the black bogey cylinder geographer—
charnel house outpourings served sartorial in your smatterings of deceit

i’ll redact you as a nonlinear black-and-white mercy pigtail
you tragic degenerate quail quaffer

i anoint you: scruffy the steeplejack diva!
seductively ambiguous and always ornamental

What I’m Reading:

In a time when the amount of language is rising exponentially, combined with greater access to the tools with which to manage, manipulate, and massage those words, appropriation is bound to become just another tool in the writers’ toolbox, an acceptable—and accepted—way of constructing a work of literature, even for more traditionally oriented writers.

— Kenneth Goldsmith / Uncreative Writing

/ + (soy yo autoretrato)

I am the day’s encryption /
I am nylon whir on fetid skronk /
I am must + disequilibrium /
I am growth opportunity /
I am terror in the grass /
I am green bastion in silence /
I am the shock of slice before
sanguinary /
I am bloodlust /
I am carnivore.
I am chaos +
confusion.
I am /
eye.

What I’m Reading:

The candle has blown out, and we’re left with a hall of mirrors. In fact, the Web has become a mirror for the ego of an absent but very present author. If Benjamin made writing safe for appropriation, and my own analog works have extended his project by borrowing in book-length form, then projects like Issue 1 move the discourse into the digital age, greatly broadening appropriative possibilities in scale and scope, dealing a knockout blow to notions of traditional authorship. To dismiss this as simply an “act of anarcho-flarf vandalism” is to miss the wake up call of this gesture, that the digital environment has completely changed the literary playing field, in terms of both content and authorship.

— Kenneth Goldsmith / Uncreative Writing

the skin sack (recursion)

I know not where the primordial matter in the skin sack I’m in intends to go . . .

I do know that I’m doing the best that I can.

I know despoilment. 

I know the essence of genetic complication, mental aberration, violence & determinism—and something of love.

I know (also) the smothering of love.

I know I strive to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.

I know I’ve made it this far and will continue to journey without destination.

I know that my father was a sick man. So I changed my name. The world did not need two of us ambulating about.

I know the plodding zombies sing for me . . . chick, chick, chickee!

I know the drug affixed itself to my hypothalamus in such a pathologically profound manner that all was vasovagal episodes—clunked skulls, sprained necks, fractured nose, bruised face. Now I can wear a Connie Banko macramé string bikini everywhere.

I know he didn’t really believe that everyday, in every way, he felt better, better and better. But if he said it enough and scotch taped it everywhere (bathroom mirror, steering wheel, et al.) it just might stick. 

I know it didn’t. 

I know recursion.

I know the fated mandible that works the soursop fruit into juice prefers to call it guanábana.

I know you’re everywhere that I’m not.

I know the particulate matter I breathed in today made its way 3,000 miles to the east.

I know the blood red clouds on the horizon are darkening. 

I know my father’s name was not really his name, but something petitioned from an imagined past. He bequeathed to me a name rich in penury.

I know truancy of will. 

I know the dark lower region that is human flailing.

I know I was scolded for lacking ambition.

I know exaltation.

I know the crack of a belt—the rise of the welt from the belt buckle hot.

I know hands forced onto a hot stove burner.

I know I often humored father, including the time I allowed him to take me to a spiritualist that cleansed my aura by laying hands, speaking in tongues, and rubbing a frozen cow’s heart down the length and breadth of my body.

I know the bounds of love.

I know the placement of a hand on a balcony railing 16 storeys above is freighted with nuance and intention.

I know the bounds of dejection.

I know my father once drove a bus full of people while stoned on LSD. He said the horizon line shifted to vertical at the apex of a bridge.

I know I believed him.

I know he died a forgetful and lonely death.

I know I intend not to follow.

I know not how this ends for all of us.

(But) I know it doesn’t end well.

What I’m Reading:

Last night I dreamt that a swan was
sucking jade-dew from my fingers. With
eyes wide open I saw thousands of little
deaths, pooling.

— Réka Nyitrai / “I asked the Night to breathe into my mouth”

some no reason

in flim fragments i move through the wounds • inside • untethered • a driving bellyache yellow • red 40 blue 2 • jaunty angel song slowed to sludgecore • sludgecore speeds to screed • a thoroughfare delocalized a silence descends • all is flat and gray • corrosive silver sky • botched cul de sacs • all is delusion and deliberate dilettantism and desperation • wheeled hatred in mantles and thistles • inebriate desires deliquesced • hairless and half-dead • once inside at this polarity nothing truly exists • we let it in • i flop into rosary circles each finger straying • wasteland and stretcher-bearers abound • this is all happening for some no reason•

What I’m Reading:

THIS IS WHAT THE END of the world always looked like. Eight lanes of freeway empty and grey in the red light of the setting sun.

— Anne de Marcken / It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over

Bring to a Boil

(before making soup)

Nothing new to act on this old but I never wait for the firestorm exercise good judgment wait for want want to want want to wait. Want to write what to write you’ve used up all your free time level the maker want marker want even though this sounds like a lot. I know much has to be done done to prove nothingness exists nonesuch and none. Exists. Exit. Exists to be done. Exacting this waiting. Exactly exacting. Existing is waiting. Waiting to be done. Done. Done to be waiting wanting to wait waiting to want to be done done with addenda I’m fine. I drank hot tea all morning. It’s boiling I’m fine.  I’m fine. Ok good go. I’ll see how I feel in an hour we don’t need anything do we we need love need to need knead need what need to wait wanting to need the need to wait. What? Addendum to need what what is it is it need is it want want kneads wait. What do you need? Nothing new to act on age begets wait want begets the firestorm judgment is good. To write. To wait. To want. To want to wait to write again. Simmer. Low.

(after making soup)

What I’m Reading:

Flutter wings flew fly away flew off flutter.

— Anne de Marcken / The Accident

A Long Quadrennial

This is not a planet you want to be on—trying to make sequins of the ineffable.

Try the bipedalon—cedar straightaways—and sprinkle my flaymakers.

This is not a planet you want to be on—layer the burrs on the willful lads and some such.

Try the bipedalon—mutton chop my sincerity whiskers—and say you love the smell.

These are plasters—cover your fledgling cuts with wonder and don’t soil yourself.

Try the bipedalon—a grand hold on your last playlist—play it out through the left speaker.

This is a warning— I screech at the superintendent holding thee syringes.

Try the bipedalon—cedilla straightaways as wrong weavers—spore at bold cedillas.

This is a scud of cretinism—be free—you thinker and imbiber of crease coalitions.

Try the bipedalon—get your backpack—get your censors fixed and your vanity documentaries filmed.

This will be a long quadrennial.

Sequester yourself in snags and scurrilousness.

What I’m Reading:

It was one of her last long essays, and she wrote it at a time when she—like many people now—was shocked, concerned for her country’s future, and wondering how best to respond. 

Americans have voted for a politics of fear, anger, and hatred, and those of us who oppose this politics are now trying to figure out how we can oppose it usefully,” she wrote. She wanted to defend her country but was wary of the potential of outrage to draw well-meaning people into vicious circles of action and reaction. “I’m looking for a place to stand, or a way to go, where the behavior of those I oppose will not control my behavior.”

— Julie Phillips / “The Way of Water: On the Quiet Power of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Activism” / Lithub.com