Title these oracular (modular) keywords and trending torts, intensely focused on micro-modal matters of textuality beyond sexuality.
Let’s talk Altered Nymph Ridge.
I can take the transmission of AI sextets (think Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes) and, after stripping it of its networked identifiers and contracts, it’s immediately indexed by my Mr. Microphone and Maestro Calixto, and entered backing-up into the stasis of the Manco de Lepanto. My local ecology being truly international.
Now, say I take that same transmission and upload a corduroy Joycean download of two plaits on a plate Beckett-style, in opposite settings of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, something like tykes who spend their time honeybee warping and wrapping wax effigies of Murder Hornets—each marked accordingly and left untouched in congealed fondue. Goo goo goo joob.
(Get the drift?)
See how my theft sits untouched on a PC while the newscasters subsidy untold chapters of Breaking News without subtext or textural charm.
Remain sovereign and unchanged. Un-harnessed. Un-harassed while the code in your DNA is cracked. You shall be stripped of your inherent charm and converted into plant food (though, not Soylent Green—as you know that’s already been processed—and it’s people!)
I detest a (random) deletion. I theorize a tanka theft. I remix a rejoinder. I even write a writ of mandamus, but never translate a tract. I’ll always delete a didactic dactyl. Eradicate an emaciated ekphrasis. And veto a villanelle (ALWAYS!).
So take that theft of your theft and somehow weathercock it back to me, it might very well be more unrecognizable than my Altered Nymph Ridge out of the WNW.
And DON’T TOUCH MY ALTERED NYMPH RIDGE.
What I’m Reading:
The uncreative writer cruises the Web for new language, the cursor sucking up words from untold pages like a stealth encounter. . . With one click of a button, these soiled texts are cleaned and ready to be redeployed for future use.
— Kenneth Goldsmith / “Revenge of the Text” / Uncreative Writing
She danced herself dizzy and collapsed onto her bed. Then the fog moved in. She ingested too much of the antipsychotic. It altered her senses. The fog was impossibly thick—all at once—much too thick for this time of year. The air much too briny for this latitude. Seagulls materialized, much too loud and dimensional, like an overly rich headphone trip. She momentarily flashed back to a Pink Floyd planetarium laser show. She mumbled bitchin’ at an errant gull that darted dangerously close to her head. A blinding darkness seeped in from the corners of her vision, an hour later it ceded to a canker-gray and then a faint violet. At once the sound of a sick viscous medium—as if oil was washing up on a gray beach. The ooze swelled up around her. In this manner she was encased. In this manner she teetered under the influence.
Her room an obscure cube.
What I’m Reading:
To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue pears laced with needles. I had no life in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor, its longing for before?
—Aria Aber / “Reading Rilke at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin” / Hard Damage
The United States has a particularly blood-soaked history. By some measures, the country has been engaged in wars for 93.5 percent of all years between 1775 and 2018. The Founders explicitly regarded the country as an “infant empire,” and its early history was marked by an annihilationist conquest of the land’s native inhabitants. Beneath rhetoric about how the “country we love” is “clear-eyed,” “big-hearted,” and “optimistic that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word”—in the words of an Obama State of the Union address-lies power, backed by violence.
“Much that passes as idealism… is disguised love of power,” Bertrand Russell said. Indeed, U.S. history can be traced along two parallel tracks: the track of rhetoric, appearing in newspapers and presidential speeches, and the track of fact, as experienced in the lives of the victims. In every age the press is full of pious statements. Meanwhile, beyond the annihilation of the Indigenous population, the U.S. conquered the Hawaiian Kingdom and the Philippines, seized half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, and (since World War II) extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal.
— Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
. . . These kinds of events were called battles, then later—sometimes—massacres, in America’s longest war. More years at war with Indians than as a nation. Three hundred and thirteen.
After all the killing and removing, scattering and rounding up of Indian people to put them on reservations, and after the buffalo population was reduced from about thirty million to a few hundred in the wild, the thinking being “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” there came another campaign-style slogan directed at the Indian problem: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
— Tommy Orange / Wandering Stars
We distinguish ourselves from the “terrorists” by pointing to the fact that when they shoot civilians, they do so intentionally, whereas we and our allies only ever do so inadvertently. Our victims are “collateral damage.” Of course, this explanation doesn’t make much difference to the victims. But also: Does it matter whether one who drops a bomb on a village intends to kill the villagers or just to flatten their houses?
The application of a double standard (or rather, the aforementioned single standard, namely that we can never be malevolent by definition) results in extraordinary intellectual contortions. If Fidel Castro had organized or participated in multiple assassination attempts against the United States president, or tried to destroy livestock and crops, he would be the very symbol of barbarian evil. Yet we claimed the right to do just that to Cuba. We also took it for granted that we had the right to put missiles in the Soviets’ backyard. But when they tried to exercise the same right, we nearly started World War III. The inconsistencies are barely noticed.
— Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
All the Indian children who were ever Indian children never stopped being Indian children, and went on to have not nits but Indian children, whose Indian children went on to have Indian children, whose Indian children became American Indians, whose American Indian children became Native Americans, whose Native American children would call themselves Natives, or Indigenous, or NDNS, or the names of their sovereign nations, or the names of their tribes, and all too often would be told they weren’t the right kind of Indians to be considered real ones by too many Americans taught in schools their whole lives that the only real kinds of Indians were those long-gone Thanksgiving Indians who loved the Pilgrims as if to death.
— Tommy Orange / Wandering Stars
To ask serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant. Difficult because the answers are generally concealed, and unpleasant because the answers are ugly and painful. But we must engage in the exercise, because the danger of maintaining our delusions continues to grow.
In 1999, political analyst Samuel P. Huntington warned that for much of the world, the United States is “becoming the rogue super-power,” seen as “the single greatest external threat to their societies.” A few months into George W. Bush’s first term, Robert Jervis, president of the American Political Science Association, warned that “in the eyes of much of the world… the prime rogue state today is the United States.” Yet Americans find it difficult to conceive of their country as aggressive or a threat. We only ever engage in defense.?
Whenever you hear “defense,” it’s usually correct to interpret it as “offense.” The imperial drive is often masked in defensive terms. . .
— Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
On the train ride back to Oklahoma, I saw the bones of buffalo piled up as high as a man for miles. I’d heard that this was happening. The Buffalo Wars, they called it. I’d heard about why they were doing it. Every buffalo dead was an Indian gone. But seeing all those buffalo bodies piled up like that, and the swarms of vultures and other such scavengers circling all that death, it did something to me, ate away at some last part of me, and though I couldn’t look away from the sight of it, I wanted to close my eyes, not have to see any more of the old world so dead before it was gone.
— Tommy Orange / Wandering Stars
There is an alternative path to the one we have pursued, namely to take stated ideals seriously and act on them. The United States could commit itself to following international law, respecting the UN Charter, and accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court. It could sign and carry forward the Kyoto Protocol. The president could actually show up to international climate conferences and take the lead in brokering deals. The U.S. could stop vetoing Security Council resolutions and have a “decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence mandates. It could scale back military spending and increase social spending, resolving conflicts through diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones.
For anyone who believes in democracy, all of these are mild and conservative suggestions. They are mostly supported by the overwhelming majority of the population. They just happen to be radically different from existing public policy.
— Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
What I’m Listening To:
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum Of challenge and danger
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin Leaving the carcasses to rot
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes
Thanks for the American dream To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through
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:
XI. In the alley, there is a bright pink flower peek- ing out through the asphalt. a. It looks like futility b. It looks like hope.
— Amy Krouse Rosenthal / Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal: Not Exactly A Memoir
Pucker pool azaleas and grand inquisitor kabobs for late lunch. The wine chalice dry. Your cilice wet with the blood of your midday scourge. The puppies in the box yipping by the sacistry. The girl by the baptismal font singing she can die in your rosary. All too gothic for my taste. I’ll just down this censer martini and make my way out the transept door. Something is sure to make more sense outside—in the heat and the hate. What there is of me is in the dry of the driest mouth.
So I strive for joy, Joy, JOY! Find I have none. Not even the inkling of a feeling. LOW, Low, low is more like it. So. I target an tangent. A screed. Try to work my way up to it. But. Deflation. Stagflation. The infiltration of an unshakable feeling that one must move on. Physically go someplace other. A place more amenable. A place that doesn’t like to bully-boy its way through life. A place that hasn’t ignited their paper tiger ideals. Ideals never even realized. So choose the most pleasing place to your sensibilities. One is bound to find a match—no matter how imperfect.
Maybe the place of the de-fanged bully-boys. Maybe. A place put back in its place a long time ago. No longer pushing others about. This place is long lost.
The roof. The roof. The roof is on fire.
Watch those shards of glass underfoot.
What I’m Reading:
Every great power toys with the rhetoric of benign intentions and sacrificing to help the world. Our belief in our own exceptionalism is the most unexceptional thing about us.
— Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson / The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
avant-garde puppetry is the way to hunger+want recuse urself from responsibility now u snake ur way out of the system ur avant-garde poetry falls on deaf ears think of ur future think of ur peers peerage is for slags u say u choose ur records via magic 8-ball u like the limn of a hackneyed backlight u light the darks in de chirico reproductions u flatten my perspective u flatten my chest u flatter urself with an obscure manson family opera u splatter ur pants with ersatz jackson pollock jabs u squatter like u r joe strummer circa ‘75 u fill me with inertia now im two time zones removed unmoved by poseur avant-garde frippery+ur three chord quackery
What I’m Reading:
Penguin hubbub Jesus worship is the actual hubbub heard among penguins who have congregated in order to worship Jesus.
We CAN have joy and OWN our alienation at the same time.
— Jeff Tweedy / World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music
America, like hope’s sharp pencil, winks brightly beyond a gantlet of elegant shill.
— Lisa Russ Spaar / “Before I Can Exist, I Have To Enter The Gift Shoppe” / The New Yorker
The new data, released at the UN’s Cop29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, indicates that the planet-heating emissions from coal, oil and gas will rise by 0.8% in 2024. In stark contrast, emissions have to fall by 43% by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping to the 1.5C temperature target and limiting “increasingly dramatic” climate impacts on people around the globe.
— Damian Carrington / “‘No sign’ of promised fossil fuel transition as emissions hit new high” / The Guardian
Poems are bullshit unless they are broken like a horse, like a dog kicked in the ribs, Like your favorite toy that’s missing an arm.
— Kenyatta Rogers / “Ars Poetica”
As a virtual space that perpetually performs the “now-all-at-once,” the Internet has brought with it a new paradigm of human consciousness-one that propels us toward nonlinear narratives and instantiates the paradox of ephemeral permanence. This new consciousness encourages us to align the speed of our thinking and meaning-making with the now-dominant mode through which information transfer occurs . . . We shape these systems, and they shape us in return. Set, repeat . . . This recursive sculpting has been going on long enough that we’re able to chart the many ways it’s changed us as people and as writers.
— Seth Abramson & Jesse Damiani / “Series Editors’ Introduction” / BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing
Maybe a life doesn’t matter so much as the feeling it leaves behind, whether anyone receives the feeling or not. Maybe our goal is to spend all the light. Since none of us asked to be born.
— Victoria Chang / “Untitled #9, 1995”
… I ADORE the Ramones. If I haven’t heard them for a while, tears of joy shoot out of my eyes like windshield wiper fluid when were re-united.
— Jeff Tweedy / World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music
What I’m Listening To:
Well, I’m against it I’m against it I don’t like Jesus freaks I don’t like circus geeks I don’t like summer and spring I don’t like anything
Cool handbills posted in Maria’s neighborhood say:
Every first Thursday Jesus Drinks Free: free Soul, R n B, Country, and Gospel starting at 8pm at the Jeannie Johnson Pub and Grill, 144 South Street, Jamaica Plain.
Another says:
“Baby Born with Sun Ra Tattoo…”
Bubbling brain cells at the bar, the corner pub without right angles or corners, and she’s back in flesh, back in flesh and you can’t tell her what to do. No, you can’t tell her what to do. Well, fuck you!
I’m not waxing nostalgic for punk, post-punk, new wave, or no wave; I’m seething with abstemiousness, rankled by random name generators and somewhere beyond broadcasting at 7am with breaks every hour on the hour and half.
There is nothing I desire but a desire that eats the heart down to its left ventricle, and then hatches out a clutch of stink bugs in synchronicity in a swale near a swag at the foot of a spur. I’m not writing this for nothing. I’m serious here. I’m the writer here.
***
Maria says posthaste when she means post-punk. It has something to do with the wiring in her head.
I have a box full of letters, and she has a box full of coca leaves from her trip to Peru. She bought them from a Quechua woman wearing a bowler hat in Cuzco. Her alpaca stood a few feet away saddled with a dozen large plastic garbage bags filled with coca leaves. I should know, I saw the vacation photos. Maria chews the leaves with a propulsion that seems superhuman, as if her mandible might detach and break out of its hinges and tear through her face.
She can’t stop chewing the leaves. I make tea out of them. She adds them to dishes which she invariably doesn’t eat because her appetite is suppressed from all the coca leaves she chews.
I’m a just a writer that had a pocket full of wrens this morning. They were spry then. Now they’re a clump of feathers — limp bodies — a dead pocket o’ blues, with the divine exception of the aggregate lump of parasites that abandoned the birds when they went cold. Now, I tell Maria, “with this pocketful of cavorting beasties, I thee wed, and honor and cherish and vow to infest thee with said beasties (of a cavorting nature) and then nurse in sickness after you contract a rare blood borne illness from said beasties.”
She says this thing between us will never work. “Let’s forget this all altogether and just fuck,” she says.
“Wha—”
“Put on that Dead Kennedy’s record and let’s get to it,” she says.
“Which one,” I say, “Plastic Surgery Disasters or Fresh Fruit for Rotting — ”
“The one that starts with ‘Kill the Poor!”
***
Near the end of the month Maria tells me:
I’m not your cheap factotum. I’m a sex engineer, and I service you in a highly skilled manner. Don’t speak to me of trashy whores and floozies. And furthermore this is not a flophouse. It’s a proper Limehouse, and only the most discriminating junkies crash and score here. So readjust. And reacquaint yourself with me and where you are. This is not a place that panders to dilettantes. This is a fine house of the illest repute. Check yourself. Leave your privilege at the door, swoon, and adore me, and bask in my agency. The music will start shortly. The young boys will be here to wash you at six. The heroin will arrive in fifteen minutes. Enjoy your cisgendered stay. It won’t be long.
She meant I wasn’t long for the place. She played The Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” on repeat for the better part of the day.
***
On the penultimate day of the month:
Love. It can’t help but bloom.
***
(xxvi – xxvii)
On the last day of the month, on the news:
Miners discover a baby 700 feet below ground with a Sun Ra tattoo on its back. No one inspects it to note its sex — had they checked they would have found that it was the baby who fell to earth. Truly sexless. There was a skronk of improvisational horns and syncopated percussion and rapid fire snares. One miner pictured himself mating with the hydra and producing this child. The foreman miner imagined this being his and Medusa’s love child. While yet another thought it his own immaculate conception.
But the baby was a blatherskite — its senseless volubility, a logorrhea without words, shaking the earth to its core. There was one full minute of confusion while a horn sounded, and the miners ran pell mell leaving the child to its own devices — which were very specific and well-calibrated devices: Geiger counters and magnetometers dating back to 1973.
“Space Is The Place” played on a continuous loop for 114 hours, until the fissure that split the earth sent the stereo console and the baby flying off into the murk.
***
Post-mortem:
There is no story — only peonage and pauperism. But there is a moral here.
I once dreamt I was eleven and elevated onto the precipice of a tall building. I was asked to carefully look over the edge at the street, 62 floors below. Why I was asked to do this and not just thrown over beats me, because whomever was asking touched me ever so gently, just tenderly enough for me to lose my balance when I was looking over the edge.
Why’d you ask me to look, I thought, as I passed the 48th floor. What were all the histrionics about?Just do what you gotta do and push. But now what I had to do was find a way out of smashing my skull open on the street below. I quickly angled my body to the right, but that only caused me to tumble head over feet past the 26th floor — oh, jeez, control yourself because you ain’t got that much time or space left, boy.
This was all so surreal, as if I fell into that Frida Kahlo painting on the same subject — you know the one, you’ve seen it: The Suicide of Dorothy Hale — except there’s not even the slightest hint of cerulean or cumuli in the sky — above, it’s all a leaden gray mass smeared with charcoal gray corrugations.
I flap and flap again, and lo, I flutter up a few feet and arrest the fall briefly. I’m surprised, and then I’m falling again, down by the 5th floor. Flap flap flap. Hey, this works. Flap flap flap flap flap flap flap, and I smash through The Plymouth Assurance and Annuity, LLP., office window on the 9th floor. Glass, typing paper, an upended typewriter and phone all discombobulated on the floor. I landed on top of this pile. The lady that was at the desk is now on her back spread eagle beyond me and the pile of her work. The boss man peaks his head out of his office and says: “Ms. Haversham, please clean up that mess, and show our guest to the claims forms and pray, tell us the moral to this.”
“Is there one?”
Just then cheering is heard from the street below. It started to snow for the first time this year.
***
(“Hey?! There are four pieces of the auto-sedition quilt missing!”
“Ay, I’an sorry con ‘escuse me.”
The End.)
What I’m Reading:
Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.
— Gabriel García Márquez / Living to Tell the Tale
It’s been six days since I fell through the crack. I’m spiraling down depression way again. The crack has been widening and if I don’t do something about it — San Andreas be thy name — you unholy fucking fissure! This is a familiar landscape, I’m never too far from my stepping through it, into it, farther and farther down — canyon-like — now in a skirl of whorling minimalist notes, repeated and repeated until I am tranced-out and lost.
Having lost six days now I ask myself: what’s next? Which way do I move? What direction? How do I get out of this, and here I am writing again. Is it fair enough to start like this again? The only option really. How did I get here again? How do I avoid ending up here again? I don’t think I can adequately answer the latter, but the first question must be asked always because it presupposes awareness of the situation. And here is where I usually make the pivot, because a pivot is required. The only other option isn’t really an option. Is it? No.
So here I’ll start again, and content myself with starting again. This is an acceptable… No, it’s a good step forward. It had to begin somewhere. Why not right here?
***
The next day, the 20th, she wrote:
I exist in meaningless patter, in the trifling titter of expense and abuse. I persist in this dominant issue of breaking a standard that I once pretended to. I perform unlimited horrors on my own discernment and troubled world view. I will disengage from timbre and search for a tone so acute it pilfers life itself. This signifies nothing within nothing.
But Thoreau said: “Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.” And that’s why I persist with this thumb tapping. To use what little heat warms these fingers attached to a tepid body sitting on a cold toilet.
***
21 January 2020
The tincture of blood, an anodyne for the misery of the loveless. How does one evaluate the loneliness she feels with her pain? How does one put a price on relief?
***
The last week of the month started dismally.
The boy, nouveau riche and Booker-Prized now, went through freshman year tossing humblebrags until the day he didn’t anymore. That was during spring break, which that year just happened to coincide with Mardi Gras — and in those rare years when they coincided Loyola University became a madhouse, despite its Jesuit veneer. It was in that hothouse-madhouse that the boy — his name (why deprive?) was Maurice — came upon Derrick.
Derrick did not suffer humblebrags in his New Orleans — especially when the humblebrag was dismissing his mother’s insistence that he accept a Porsche 911 instead of the Porsche Cayenne that he drove about campus with ABC, The Fixx, or Haircut 100 blaring from the Blaukpunt radio in the car. Derrick hated 1980’s synth-new wave — the worst epoch for music! — he claimed in a drunken stupor once. Derrick befriended the friendless boy Maurice that day, a smile and a raised thumb worked its magic.
***
Subhuman, Subhuman…
The boy Maurice was surprised by the abrasive quality of the music he heard before he opened his eyes. To what? What was this place? Why was he tied up? The first half minute sounded like a squall of detuned guitars strummed wildly. He was told the lead singer was named Genesis P. Orridge, the band called Throbbing Gristle. Derrick was screaming along to the song: “subhuman… subhuman… drinking dirty water… you’re a disease…” and so much else the boy Maurice didn’t understand. Couldn’t.
Then the music shifted as if it fell off a precipice. The singer modulated to a lower register at a fraction of the volume he was singing before. Derrick went silent. It scared the boy Maurice. Then a ball attached to leather mask was foisted over his mouth and face, and all went dark for the boy Maurice. It never became light again.
***
(continued tomorrow)
What I’m Reading:
It’d be cool if we could see the worlds within the songs inside each other’s heads. But I also love how impenetrable it all is. I love that what’s mine can’t be yours and we still get to call it ours. Songs are the essence of this condition. And in my opinion, they’re the best way I know of to make peace with our lack of a shared consciousness.
— Jeff Tweedy / World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music
“I’m from the northern part of the state, and we don’t see this kind of nonsense up there. It’s just not done this way where I’m from.”
Milton Sosquade, the boy’s father, removed his hand from inside the cow’s rectum, and turned to look at Alan Tenter. “Well, Alan,” Milton said removing his arm’s length glove cover, “you do what you like to your cows, and I’ll treat mine my way.”
“My friend, your notion of what is correct is sheer madness,” Alan said. “You can’t go rummaging up in your cow’s intestines and pull out appetizers for the evening. You can’t feed us that. We don’t do that upstate, mid-state, or downstate. Friend, it’s just not done.” Alan took off his glasses and placed them in their clip-on case and clipped the case into his left breast pocket and raised his fists. Milton picked up a cow chip and tossed it at Alan’s face. The chip grazed Alan’s chin and careened off his ear.
“Listen, bub,” Milton said, “what I do in my seraglio is my business. These girls here love me, especially this one,” he said pointing at the guernsey he’d just inseminated with his stuff of life. “I am god. Here in the southern highlands of the state: I. Am. God.”
***
Milton’s wife, Lucrecia, had her eyes checked and the man told her she had mycobacterium leprae of the retina. She said her eyes started feeling “flammable” sometime in the past month and she wanted to have her left eye removed and replaced with a ball bearing painted with an iris and pupil. The doctor said, once replaced, the eye had to be patched during the day, and then manipulated and slanted into her nose in the evenings, for 30 to 45 days. He told her she would see wonders after the convalescence. Her eyesight would improve, and she’d woo an army of suitors with her new look.
She told him she was newly married.
It was avant-garde now, sure, but it would soon become the trend and eventually everyone would be clamoring for this look. He granted her that her vision would suffer initially, but with time her sense of smell and hearing would improve.
“It sounds a bit extreme, Dr. Sobrenada,” Lucrecia said, never taking her eye off herself in the consult office mirror. “Is it reversible, Doctor?”
“Hell no, it’s not reversible!” he said. He sat behind his desk and threw a paper clip at the eye chart. “Who ever heard of replacing an eye with a ball bearing and then putting the eye back in at a later time? Are you insane, woman?” He pounded his desk with an open hand.
“You’re an Ojonaut! An astronaut of the eye. The first and the foremost. You make me envious of the path you are about to blaze. Come here and be my bride.”
“I’m married,” she said.
She decided that in his dotage he’d not only become genius, but more attractive to her. The loose skin on his arms, his wattle shaking like badly set jello, his drooping earlobes — he made her think prurient thoughts.
“Milton the cuckold,” she whispered.
She felt as if she were ovulating, for the first time in fifteen years — some sebaceous moisture in that place below.
She said, “yes.”
***
The twelfth day of the month was Copperhead Wednesday. Serpentine was the look we were going for. Beatific upper register notes is what Maria was reaching for: “Ta da la ta da la dao,” was what she sang to a supper club of adoring mengeese eyeing a pair of lady rattlesnakes. Midnight. Thursday morning. Applause. Thunderous.
Savorous twistings of moonglow hairs into chignons and much dispensing with shoes and underthings. There was nothing like a cobra line dance to make it libertine-free and parsimonious-lite.
I, the author, heard someone order a chocolate stout. “Not served here,” was the reply. Vehement — something akin to buzzards on parade: wing-wide, convection current surfing, loafers — something free, not imagined, not paid for, not patented and surely made to disappoint.
Asseverations to “live fully and create in the midst of the desert” notwithstanding, Maria went home alone.
***
On the thirteenth day Maria wrote this poem:
Mauve and meager tendrils of the morning
Roaming in your eyes and in your suitcase,
Something supple this way washes
Over my consciousness and yours,
Atavistic and Paleolithic.
What if a nocturnal sprint across the sky caused panic?
What price peregrinations and pantomime?
What does the pilgrim do for succor?
Where the lightning divides the sky in jagged shards
You check the reliquaries for theft.
The evidence provides no solace, only a lack thereof.
This excresence, an abscess of a rising sun maugre
Rain and intermittent meteor showers render
Media towers mute.
Inoperable inoffensive inconclusive incendiary.
Try to frame this feeling and hang it on
Yourself, as you hang yourself —
On this tendril of your family tree —
On another morning of meager maudlin mauve.
She titled it Writing 39, and copied it into her notes application on her phone; her thumbs unhinged pistons, stabbing furiously at gorilla glass.
She was spiraling again, unhappy to have written the worst poem in this worst of all possible worlds. Pangloss had nothing on Martin. Fuck ‘em both anyway, she wrote.
***
(continued tomorrow)
What I’m Reading:
One’s on tenterhooks nearly all the time and there’s nothing remotely glamorous about tenterhooks.
thee istsfor manity reader 