(Flatulence) Contumely & Bloat

After a bedbug bedpan tryst he is a pulsating washbasin engineer of electrified stinging… 

The fairground that you long for—a sequence of belonging—you can’t feel.

And according to the burble it stilts you.

You ain’t the last one bringing the canker sores when the last American crank flees.

You are no one nubbin. No Gold, sphere freeze fear, full-morality lychee motorist, underpass off to Cuba, grapple-looking for unrequited luminaries in Puerto Rico. No one. No Nub. Even Chiang Kai Shek won’t show up to keep you compliant.

You don’t like the old men’s landmarks over their fritas y pastelitos: 

Well, if this didn’t happen go backpacking and clear your mind—brainwash yourself.

The two drama-monger started the rhino walk with less than seven humblebrags.

The fairground got the hawthorn and the Kennedy shank (and how they were peacemakers in a calculated endgame and sacrificed the libation bearers) because it was exploitation at the policeman’s behest—and there was the thrum of annihilation . . . There was!

**********************************************

This was a madcap syringe waved at a blind motorist—held meekly in his open pallbearer gaze.  

Call a qualified technician to sense this out. It’s awful cold in this here coffin.

What I’m Reading:

My days diminished to the word count in the corner of a screen.
Every day an echo of another.
You had to listen hard to hear anything.

— Babak Lakghomi / South

I Will Not Witness

I’m confronted by your approach.
Thick. Sinuous. Sinister.
It may take years, now it’s arrived.

It’s my custom to move on.
I will not witness your arrival.

What I’m Reading:

Already, in the capital, the president-elect had ordered a statue and a fountain, was drawing up plans for his new home. While down below, in the rubble, people were scrabbling as they had always done.

— Karen Jennings / An Island

The Communitarian Anarchist Approach (Oct 28, 2016 at 2:01 PM)

This is just out of frame:

(I’m sorry) I dosed you so strongly. You can’t resume thinking clearly now…but I’m sorry that you bored into your cerebral cortex.

I never planned farrows with either you or Connie. That was me actually, just “back bench” me. I have an analytical ministerial portfolio. I can indeed be sheepish but that was Misery Lite. 

I agree about the banality of the testament of “brutal truths” which is why I said I “want to see the brutal truths” … meaning “show me the doorway and sell sell sell!”That’s not my accomplice … just a basic yashmak—run-in and cover up—it can be broken too. I do like brutal truths in ashtrays. 

I yaw though the ice rinks in your mind. Windmills are blackhead trite. Is that you baring your farrows or just being porcine analytical?

I have a loyalty to schedules from weathering,  so I relate to that. But I would not personally put what I said in the “ball bearings baring” caucus. 

I think the heating and the headphones are necessary to your asperity. 

You’re think that a tootle is lost online but it saddens me that my tootle was lost or misunderstood for pesticide. 

You are welcome at the drive-in, but you must pay. No free passes! I can get viscountess brutal on you. Sorry it wasn’t even a summit of character you were invited to, your work has tended southward of likeable. This is something this makes me think about piking you about the head. 

For all I know, Connie appreciated my femur. It was said that I was interested in the “brutal truths” and intense compulsions. She said “brutal truths” for her thermoplastic surgery. You’ve wounded my commode. 

Think about it.

You are a holograph in the darkened background.

What I’m Reading:

What’s ghostlier than gray morning winter light?

— Peter Balakian / “Day of the Dead”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

If cynicism leads to passivity, we walk off the cliff . . . The choices are stark: either you give up and help ensure that the worst happens or you become engaged and maybe you will make things better.

— Noam Chomsky / Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy

---

I can’t sing

my lungs are full of ugly

I look down and there are no paws

any sec I could step off a cliff

I think I’ve always felt this way

the smoke makes it clear

— Henry Hoke / Open Throat

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… the odd incongruity hit him: he was in his own country, but somehow his country was not his country; an imperceptible mutation had changed people and things into their mirror image; everyone and everything was there, but they weren’t themselves, Cuba was not Cuba.

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante / Map Drawn by a Spy

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Power systems do not give gifts willingly. In history, you will occasionally find a benevolent dictator, or a slave owner who decides to free his slaves, but these are basically statistical errors. Typically, systems of power will try to consolidate, sustain, and expand their power. That’s true of parliaments, too. It’s popular activism that compels change.

— Noam Chomsky / Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy

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Climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time last year, supercharging extreme weather and causing “misery to millions of people”.

The average temperature in 2024 was 1.6C above preindustrial levels . . . The heating is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and the damage to lives and livelihoods will continue to escalate around the world until coal, oil and gas are replaced.

— Damian Carrington / “Hottest year on record sent planet past 1.5C of heating for first time in 2024” / The Guardian

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I love the scratch of celluloid
and a low-register noise,
the hair of heat burning in a lit bulb.

— David Roderick / “Self-Portrait as David Lynch”

---

If you’re a CEO or on a board of directors, you’re supposed to make a profit. You don’t pay attention to the costs to others. And in the case of the environmental crisis, one of these costs may be destroying our species. It’s an externality, so therefore it’s a footnote. Of course, when it comes to the environment, there’s nobody to run to, cap in hand, to ask for a bailout. In a financial crisis, the taxpayer can be bamboozled into bailing you out, but not in the environmental crisis. 

— Noam Chomsky / Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy

What I’m Listening To: 

Waiting for the firestorm
Waiting for the false alarm

— Yo La Tengo / “False Alarm”

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”