Ex-Postmistress Wimple Pusher

My audit was like a badly tuned early 1970’s tempo whose piggedness and sovereign chauvinism was detuning and attenuating, and my faux chest hairs were on the ropes again moving the affiliate antihero about trying to get syntonized. I set the bookstall assault and opened my judgement to the previous day’s halibut — empty paintings all. Bad Gaugin and even worse Van Gogh. Ever heard the Dutch pronounce Van Gogh? 

Silly rabbits, we americans (writ weeny-miniscule) are, that appropriate everything for ourselves. Hegemony. Threnody. Sadness. Call for a reorganization — a dress down link just below “We’re number 1!” assumptions . . . so I wrote: 

You’re all a bunch of breeders, hucksters, and Illuminati believers. Damnation, people! Why?

Who was that dumbfounded procurator I saw? She reminded me of my ex-postmistress wimple pusher. Singing “Dominique” so aggressively . . . I spent all night talking to her at Starbuck’s and it was enough to convince me she’d be nutcase two — my second wife. 

I hated the Singing Nun. My mother played that earwig incessantly because her mother had played it to her . . . familial reciprocity . . . alas, look at me now!

What are these nubbins of accretion on my hypothalamus? I ain’t on no GLP-1 agonist. What are thee Arsonist Chemicals razing my chemical balance like some hormonal Santa Ana wind madness?

I want it to stop — this incessant druggist in my head. I want the mercenaries to stop — they are all talk, talk, talk to me now — through the yobs, through the haze, they reach out and thump me like monitoring duds. I ain’t no fuddy duddy, buddy! I ain’t wearing my pants up to my sternum. Sterno.

Sterno . . . drank sterno once and saw votary candles floating in space above the nave — disembodied faculties, like Pound’s “apparition of these faces . . . ”  my personal phantasmagoria on a wet black bouffant doo. The phantasms . . . they impinge, they intrude on my goiters and dangle, at the most inopportune angles. 

And there was poppa heating the sterno — blue flame hatlets of shame! — handing me his pick axe and asking me to use it on him at Velvet Creme Donuts. Momma in a tank top midriff and cruller stilettos singing “Under My Thumb.” And there’s momma’s second husband handkerchiefing, squeezing and scalding a voluntary scamper, yelling at all who will listen (and lots that don’t): “die, why don’t you die already? You swine, you sycophant shooting criminals!” 

Now I’m on my last nimbus, the warm glow turning dry ice, as hard working migrants are rounded up by the bathrooms. Robyn Hitchcock sings sorrows: “Madonnas of the Falangists,” and poppa goes on a Audrey Hepburn jag. And momma decries “feminists in their black and white trumpet strumpets…” 

It’s pell-mell, helter-skelter, give me shelter last call!

I flashed to Bwana Ana in her bee yoga tear-jerker garbling, her handkerchiefs pressed tightly to her Walkman (what year is this?) as if she’s trying to keep the antennae from popping out. Robyn Hitchcock is singing “I’m hearty that sickening pounding and squeaking of the bee.”

Tine has come to set it straight again. So I write: 

Time has come to set it straight again. 

So, set your tines on my thoroughfares. And read the lip reader larcenists on my spinning weathercock… N, NNW, SW, ESE, E… let me be. I’ve got to regain some ballpoint composure. Gusts and straight winds be damned! It’s all so off-kilter now. 

Stop talking to me through tines, you muckers! You mucking twits don’t exist. Stop! 

¡El sueño de la razon produce monstruos!

Later I was rereading a seedling of a Samuel Beckett trope. Waking for the third tine. Time. Tine. Time, damn it!

I couldn’t take the dives, forks be damned, the gilts wouldn’t stop talking. The gilts flamed my guilt. I turned off the tremolo — between the dearth of the nib and the surfeit of “shock and awe” in this deathsucking nation. The rumors dropped by the mischief-maker in chief that warm footing has been turned into all-out penknife kilograms at polemic bleeder rates — it was too much beauty all at once.

My inner voices sounded like the crescendo of Ligeti’s “Atmospheres.”

It’s time for bed. Instead.

What I’m Reading:

I listen to my inner voice
It calls things by their inner names

— Zan de Parry / “Banging” / Cold Dogs

deus ex duo

i. deus ex machina

the deus ex machina falls through the trapdoor into the charnel house

the deus dramatic effect lost and centrifugal with a caravaggio thud

see deus roll among the sweet vinegar panhandlers

watch deus finish the hand cream to douse the smell of blood

deus in a goddard film works the chiaoscuro / a tenebrism / petrichor

deus in bombogenesis full of piss and vinegar spews

deus scumbles the rain-doused pines works the blur

deus in a peppery flourish works against the wet season cold

deus caught in the armature of the machina / ex-officio works union scale

deus doused in dim-light garlic butter reduction topped with sea salt

deus!
dreary dubious dulcet dungeonal!

deus escaped mental patient waxing ontological on black stone paths

deus relents / off stage / orders the curtain fall

deus in the jug and the red of the grapes

ii. deus ex machina pt. 2

deus in the wings, taking hits off the fog machine, directs with shakespearean aplomb

deus as the hole in the sole of your quotidian shoes in the gutter beat

deus as the syncopation of your soul in 5/4 time—a blue beat among blue notes

deus as the sun ra arkestra in hyperdrive singing “nuclear war,” it’s a motherfucker, don’t you know

deus as the writing blister on your finger— the sweetest pain you know

deus as stan brakhage bubblegum—you chew chew chew ‘til your teeth go numb

deus as the usher who stepped away from lincoln’s box at ford’s theater

deus as the antediluvian methane seeping out of thawing permafrost

deus as another opportunity missed—exchanging sharp words with the stage manager

deus as your ill-lighted and out of focus photograph

deus snickering at his blackout jape—power cable in hand next to the light board

deus closing up shop and hanging his sign—away on holiday

What I’m Reading:

. . . still, just about every memory somehow takes me back to something I don’t much want to think about . . .

— Lucy Ellmann / Ducks, Newburyport 

This Delusion

I broke as I wrote—
As I was broken I had to write
Did I write ‘cause I was broken?
Or did I break ‘cause I wrote?
The cause of the writing
Or the cause of the breaking
Always eludes me—including the writing
Including the breaking
The writing or breaking precludes either/or
Or either the writing or breaking are precluded by neither
In this delusion of breaking and writing
Writing and breaking
Ouroboros snaking . . . the writing and breaking
Breaking and writing is the delusion
And the conclusion . . .

What I’m Reading:

Americans thought they had the right to be heard. They viewed themselves important and integral and interesting, but after talking to as many as he had Billy Ray knew the opposite to be true.

— Sam Tallent / Running the Light

will you be my very short alternator?

. . . a woodshed mottling in the equatorial heat
undergoes a belittling imprecation
from a oilman stuck on dykes and derricks
he tries connecting bisecting lines at odd angles
what laughs—pratfalls aplenty—& amazing, drooling, grazing audiences bovinating in situ
multifaceted eternity fingermark threesomes
come one—come for the lack of air and grace
come all—white-test balanced & 18 percent gray cards at the door
the family will love it
(especially as we push them over the edge of the precipice)
important! read this before removing the label—
psychedelic cults listening to acid rock in black and white
(will wonders ever cease?)
vegetarian schooners aspirating cloven hoof animaloids settting sail on the hour
address any fern you wish
experimentally explore the colonization of republican (writ minuscule) erasers
non-didactic, unconventional arbiters
setting poetic mantelpieces ablaze
watch us tap our cisterns
far out!
groovy!
open pandora’s cranberry brag
you won’t be sorry . . .

What I’m Reading:

. . . less than three weeks after the March 1933 elections, the Reichstag passed an enabling law— Ermächtigungsgesetz—that empowered Hitler and his cabinet to pass and enforce laws, essentially establishing the Hitler government as a legal dictatorship.

— Timothy W. Ryback / Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power

What I’m Reading:

People talk like the things they see. After a certain age nothing is new besides death.

— Sam Tallent / Running the Light

Blurry Bluster

Blurry bluster buster bembe shoot…

Anachronism filets are plentiful this season.

Whose intrigue will take the top spot? Stop.

Stop.

Stop thinking those thoughts or you’ll end up in a vise or a straightjacket.

When did things go so off-kilter?

There’s (rarely ever) a profound break with custom / reality. 

A sickness slowly seeps in—via a small black bile aqueduct.

Then, years later, we find ourselves nose-deep in it—treading bile and taken by the current.

It starts with one small contusion—easily handled at the moment—then we’re suddenly covered in bruises.

How’d that happen?… we didn’t notice… it’s not serious, is it? It’ll pass, right?

All at once—we wake up and we’re walking hematomas!

Then it’s too late and we wilt from the weight of bad blood.

Have a look around. 

What do you see?

How did we get here?

What I’m Reading:

It has been said that the Weimar Republic died twice. It was murdered, and it committed suicide. There is little mystery to the murder. Hitler vowed to destroy democracy through the democratic process, and he did. An act of state suicide is more complicated, especially when it involves a democratic republic with a full complement of constitutional protections civil liberties, due process, press freedom, public referendum. Which leaves one wondering whether any democracy could have withstood an assault on its structures and processes by a demagogue as fiercely determined as Hitler. 

— Timothy W. Ryback / Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

. . . The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake.

— Maggie Smith / “Good Bones”

---

So now we find ourselves at an Orwellian moment, almost a Seussian one. Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something—drilling for oil and gas—that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city.

— Bill McKibben / “Donald Trump Invents an Energy Emergency” / The New Yorker

---

I write for the future

because my present is
demolished.
I fly to the future

to retrieve my
demolished present
as a legible past.

— Fady Joudah / “[…]” / […]: Poems

---

I still lived alone in those days. The man who’d helped me make the baby had left to find his way into the television. Specks of skins of selves he’d been in other years still lay around me on the air; and, as such, I’d breathe him in. I pulled his long hair from the sink pipes. 

— Blake Butler / Scorch Atlas

---

I remembered my father before he disappeared. The more years passed, the more my memories of him faded. They lost their colour and texture. Their gap like a missing tooth. You kept running your tongue over what wasn’t there anymore.

— Babak Lakghomi / South

---

As we approach the ultimate bad sequel, a second Trump Administration, post-apocalyptic dramas marked by pandemics (“The Last of Us,” “Station Eleven”), environmental catastrophe (“Snowpiercer,” “The End”), and the erosion of reproductive rights (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Furiosa”) have continued to proliferate. Many of them draw on decades-old source material that has taken on new relevance. When such works are successful, they are often described as “prescient” or “prophetic,” as though their creators saw the future and described it in art; when they are heavy-handed or make you want to look away, you might call them “too real.” But a better indication of a dystopia’s success may be that its world is at once alien and unsettlingly plausible.

— Daniel A. Gross / “Are We Living in a Dystopia?” / The New Yorker

---

. . . Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

— Maggie Smith / “Good Bones”

What I’m Listening To:

Switch over, switch off
Switch over, switch off
Switch off, switch off, switch off,
switch off

— Horsegirl / “Switch Over”

A Slap Not / A Slip Knot

Panic and go to the mountain
Climb the mic and a stick in Russia
The shove was it
To my mind C was on loan
An amusement park loon on loan
I’m stuck counting stars
Then I’m onto counting grains of sand in the Negev
You don’t expect penguins in the Dead Sea

A big win
A slap not
A slip knot

I’m going in Miami way
Air strikes sometime between the poultry and the venison courses
So hop on the death wagon and strike that key
I’m a little over this holiday in Cambodia

Jello Biafra or Tomata du Plenty?

You misled us all on the show
The schema was shot and all you
Have is this emotional smegma
Put on your magma culottes and let’s call it
A day in yellow green fluorescence…

What I’m Reading:

But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home.

— Kōbō Abe / The Woman in the Dunes

Writing Us into Existence (redux)

I.

He took off his shoes and the right pinkie was exposed — nude, malformed, and smelling like Limburger from six feet away. A couple of wiry hairs arcing over the sock. She, on the other hand, was at the bookshelf pulling out a book about genital piercings, entitled American Primitives, out of a shelf filled with the best selling titles about effective extortion techniques, labiaplasty, and breast augmentation plastic surgery mishaps. At the rear of the study lay their son on a lazy boy recliner snoring like an opossum with a severed tail—the disembodied tail still involuntarily twitching under the light of the bold wolf super moon on U.S. 1—the Saab’s driver long gone and oblivious.

The son lays there, mouth agape, drool pooling in the cleft of his chin. The whites of his eyes revealed beneath the slits of his fluttering eyelids. The dark circles around his eyes, not yet diminished, accentuating the ‘possum affect. His half erect penis beginning to show because he drank a liter of water two hours ago and forgot to drape a sofa cushion on his groin.

II.

Your skin looks like shagbark. You look like a shameless twat hung by the toes. Who hangs by their toes?

“Did someone hang you there, or did you do that yourself?” His son doesn’t hear the question.

“I don’t remember this movie,” she says dropping the book. And I say this isn’t a movie, dear. Someone is writing us into existence and I’m kinda bored by it. Hey, you’re kinda cute. Well this kinda cute ain’t around. And something about happy loving couples not being friends of mine… oh, he must be listening to Joe Jackson. You follow it? Nah, I really don’t care; I just don’t want to be a character here anymore. I’d rather go back into that inchoate place ‘o blackness and stasis. I’d like snail tacos and drag races. Oh, what are you watching some feature length cartoon, from a secondary angle, full of rice and stew and red wine? Yes. Oh well, it’ll stop soon enough after 100 words. Look at the length of this. He’ll check to see if it’s north of 100 words and stop. You’ll see. Pari passu delivering Centurias he arrived.

III.

English is my second language, but my Spanish, although mostly atrophied, remains stubbornly attached like the original skin that hangs on to the anole’s back after molting. Everything seems processed in Spanish first before the protean firing into English. My neurons work overtime, and therefore all the wiring in my head never ceases working. The machinery overtaxed and always at the edge of a breakdown.

IV.

The fug in this house sticks to you. The persimmons on the table spin when you look at them, and when I look at them they levitate and circle into a gyre that moves from room to room looking for the energy that’ll stop them from moving. From movement to stasis is the natural order, and it seeks the natural order. You look at them again and the fruits drive themselves into the living room wall, creating a starburst pattern unseen in this millennium.

What I’m Reading:

See these? They’re sunflower seeds. Put them in your pocket. That way, when you die, at least something will grow.

— Igort / Ukrainian woman to Russian soldier on Day 4 of the invasion / How War Begins: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Invasion