fresh & pressed

thee stillbirthed republic

hit me on thee settee
leave your fingermarks & hot
welts rising on my twisted back

be my grand inquisitor imperious
in ermine & red velveteen
your incandescence / the wean
of duchess-induced melancholia

i call you weasel fingers
& you coo like a showroom dummy

its a luminary anthropocene summer
in the waning years of thee stillbirthed
republic
listing rudderless

let us hedonistically drink
apple cider vinegar
& chew our appleseeds to splinters
piercing our swollen tongues

our brand is mint!
mintry fresh & pressed
with the privilege of inquisitors

if we need to rape & extirpate
why not be best
we’ll be great again

in oblivion

What I’m Reading: 

The classic idea of the compassionless psychopath is outdated. Research is revealing how people with dark personality traits can also have high levels of empathy … Science shows us that people with such traits simply think and feel differently, enabling them to act in morally corrupt ways. 

— Miriam Frankel / “Inside The Mind Of A Dark Empath” / BBC Science Focus

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delirium dream fever

vintage mintage

610 am
delirium
dream fever

acorn thwacks
my head
/ tizzy /

netherworld revealed
my shadow eclipse
upon eliot’s prickly pear

he’s wasteland bound
preying on a praying
breathless culvert

ms breathless culvert
if you please

she’s high
on perry mason
reruns
all

incompetent irrelevant & immaterial
&
if it please the court

ecolalia
cuppa fingers
courtroom floor
full of teeth

vintage mintage!

you shoulda seen

What I’m Reading: 

Evening is so small these days
It’s the size of a green pea
The small expensive kind
That come in a silver can
That rolls for a long time

—Ron Padgett / “Mister Horse”

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three trick pony

world be damned

call me by your martyr name
martyrs use specific appellations

admire the ultrasound mindsets!

sets of resistors separate
from our captive marmosets
bassoonists & timpanists (all) from olypmpia
national park swarming lemming dens
with an ostinato phrase pitched at deathly

they gotta bellyache eurythmia
and bellyfulls of snout nosed moths

this is all as preamble to say
i desire your arthritic fingers
as you desire my camshaft mudguards

we both martyrs to dub versions
of our favorite trip-hop-trap fugues

i love your osteophytes
as you love my flatulence
let’s abscond to pago pago
on pogo sticks

i love your three trick pony
prime! mint!

the world be damned

What I’m Listening To:

He stood upon the shore and laughed at the ocean
He climbed trees and learned the secret of fire
He took a job as a investment banker
And spent a lot of time at the racetrack
Playing the ponies
The ocean swore revenge

— King Missile / “The Fish That Played the Ponies”

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a momentary flutter 

plosive of implode

i prefer the plosive of implode to explode / it leaves an ashy sheen on my body / my tongue a clapper ricocheting inside a bell / my heart pealing+racing / a momentary flutter that steals my breath

my mind a guttersnipe wild in the streets / ogling the arabesques of peking ducks in chinatown windows / hurling epithets+rocks at empty storefronts+bent wrong way do not enter signs / the signs of the apocalypse long gone / a nuclear winter haze for sun

the plosive detached / hoyhoyhoyboy / floating disembodied down crumble canyon streets / storms a comin / humanity / aint we a treat

What I’m Reading: 

About you: weather will taste metallic in the overnight

visuals, something lightdark, slick-liver-wet 

Put a whisper into a jar, a war

  trots out of your chiaroscuro head

— Carolina Ebeid / “Assume the Role of Cassandra, Wearing a Mask, Speaking into the Camera”

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scrubbing bike lanes

scream turtle dream

im stimulating the mops / the vivisectionists roiling peloton up and down the hills headed for this bike lane / im scrubbing bike lanes / drunk on artful showing / scrubbing macadam onetwothree / failed out of convenience store intrigue / campion mucosa is waving this way+that / scrubbing good on the person on a bike icon / dirt away bugbear shine / here it comes the demon pack / kick bucket fling ancillary swabs in the flickering grass / onto the left edge of the road i gogogo / at the edge of mindbender aquarium / a mopey beach type shore-bugger scream turtle scene / myriad sizes villain to mincer / the demon rush nears+i lose footing trip on my favorite mop in hand / intense feeler tingles of feeder cold water plunge into the minicab mincers moat on the float / soar over the hatchlings out of the boil / my summer of mops at an end as big villain turtle breaks for my tread / to reach the beach i reach and get a handful of sand+headless crabscorpion tail stinging the air / rebuffed by a whop of the mop / the villain+hatchling gaping / petty beaking my toes / whop in the water on the villain wattle / nothing but water in my lungs / peloton long gone / villain+hatchling+headless crabscorpion move in on my skin

What I’m Reading:

And rising up to the surface of the water clenching and unclenching
The thick grey muscle and dense shoal of fish brought to just beneath
The surface the grotesque bouquet of their rapidly blossoming and
Shutting the crowd but as if behind glass so there was no sound
Of people screaming I feel helpless and cold

— Laura Mullen / “The Surface”

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trippy visual sexes 

boyfriend ogres

the moorlands…

southerners and vitamins felt on the drumstick
artful showers / groovy serializations / trippy visual sexes
innovative campground muckrakers
shopper-bug cup finches / impulsions on villages

the boyfriend ogres

trippy opiates / closing serializations /
including atonal flickering / experimental imagery
rectangles compete positive and negative expletives
lsd raging from felons of euphoria
to intense aquamarine
elixirs of the avant-garde

allow your head to be rearranged

What I’m Reading:

… schoolyard blotted by the dark, but its bars,
drug stores, groceries, and luncheonettes
swirling with the melted ice creams
and spilled perfumes of colored lights

— Jack Anderson / “Girl on a Roof”

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economically existential distinction

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

the noise would weave a net to bounce against: no wonder
she’d lean from the edge and leap, yes, leap
straight into it, falling
through a bubble bath of air

— Jack Anderson / “Girl on a Roof”


This is the crucial distinction between the rich, or the owning class, and the rest of us. Most of us make our money from working, but for the rich this is only sometimes the case. The ability to not just have a giant income, but to have a giant income from assets your family already owns, is an economically existential distinction.

This position of ownership of the productive economy, and the social and political power arising from that, is what defines the ruling class, and it goes back centuries to the advent of capitalism in the enclosure movement.

Economist Douglas Dowd recalls the origin of capitalism in “the exploitation of workers whose farming land had been commodified by “the enclosure movement.” Those who had worked the land, free but far from rich, were swept off the land…and were transformed into desperate and powerless laborers.” The land became private property, its new owners the ruling class.

— Rob Larson / “As Much Power As the President: How Billionaires Became More Influential than World Leaders” / Mastering the Universe


in unison we sing:
we have no future but ourselves
our infinite realms contain our past
all we will ever feel are
New Periods of Pain!  

— Daniel Borzutzky / “Painblank”


We’re once again faced with a situation where a substantial bloc of American politics is talking about committing acts of violence and bringing down the government. We saw this before, in 2020, in the run-up to that election and the aftermath. A lot of us held back; obviously, these guys have a long history of blowing off a lot of steam, talking, and wildly exaggerating their actual ability to carry out a threat. But I think we saw on January 6th, that was probably not the wisest view to take. We should have been paying more attention to what these guys were saying amongst themselves online. And what they’re saying amongst themselves right now is probably disturbing. Because they’re talking about shooting their neighbors.

— David Neiwert / “The Election Story Nobody Wants to Talk About” / The American Prospect


I’m a Keats bot
so are you
our living hands
held toward each other
on the internet
solution sweet

— Maureen N. McLane / “Haptographic Interface”


This amount of extreme heat events is beyond anything ever seen or even thought possible before . . . The months from February 2024 to July 2024 have been the most record-breaking for every statistic.

— Maximiliano Herrera, to Jonathan Watts in interview / “Unprecedented number of heat records broken around world this year” / The Guardian


When I listen for what will not appear,
I hear my own voicelessness amplify.
My hearing is most acute when I’m naked
in front of the bedroom mirror.

— Rusty Morrison / “To measure internal activity while it turns all I know to rubble”

What I’m Listening To: 

The freak in my reflection sparkles into view

— Kim Deal / “Crystal Breath”

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shot adrenaline fear

sanctimonious crow tankas (+)

the way a crow shook down…
abhorrence from its hemlock
sanctimonious—
humanity wallowing
at its talons sharp and black

has given my mind…
a steely cortisol shot /
adrenaline fear /
scores of crows fill the dread sky
my heart arrested in flight

where is my dark hidey-hole?

What I’m Reading:

It’s quarter to two.
On this street of darkened pawnshops, Welfare hotels and tenements, One or two ragged puppets are awake.

— Charles Simic / “Puppet-Maker”

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of pony kleptomaniacs

unit 145 (pt. ii)

fumarole dreams in the vestibule
celebratory dinners featuring jackals

and other untruths
currently undergoing a vector change

kiwi quiches timekeeper their florins
move away from the couscous & contempt

dowry requests will now winter in situ
smokes drinks talk and then bed
see that your damsons are free of fleas

i apologize for the indemnity of loud nonentities
i apologize for the quicksand martini glasses

unit 145 is currently undergoing flotation
which consists of the renegade consumption
of pony kleptomaniacs

my nightmares are forsaken and bubonic
my pestilential inner eye is palsied
my parsley looks like paisley

so please, please, please
let me, let me, let me
let me get what i want this time

i am contusion-adjacent in black
the quinces are in the tinderbox
and i am ill with the human condition

send colonists and hogsheads o’ vermin
we’ll rule the world in a century or two

oh bondage, up yours
oh bondage, no more

What I’m Reading:

there were chickens, chickens, chickens
for as far as I could see…
when I woke today, I noticed
there were eggs on top of me.

— Jack Prelutsky / “Last Night I Dreamed of Chickens”

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recommending a downgrade

unit 145

contagion uplift
the universal undercurrents
the indentions in unit 145
at the rate of 751
a tiller floozy in kite-flight

the contraltos are having a hard time
timepieces shot / colons missing /
its 333 (really 3:33)
get thee behind!

take a downer, man …

check your wallet and avoid increments
/ and denunciations / no denominations of 10
these thoughts make no sense
these medications work all too well / or not at all

there is jackhammering to be done
i can’t hear myself treading water
head full of de-fused / de-funct / lightning bugs
generating darkness / a heteronormative lotus

i ate the lotus and can’t remember how it goes
and so it goes and so it goes and so it goes
and so it goes
the way it’s going no one knows

i’m recommending a downgrade
and a tardive dyskinesiac tardigrade
a wormhole in my parietal —
lobes be damned!

is that a bulge or a bugle?

or are you happy to sieve me?

who will declare us sane?

it’s time for floppy kitty
it’s time for jabs and wallops by column 7B-6

you are thee loudmouth of nonconformity
whispering truths to the deaf

What I’m Reading:

  1. To correct
  2.  A historical inaccuracy, the
  3. Hypermobility of the spine.
  4. A man tipped his forehead on
  5. A windowpane, next
  6. Had difficulty finding words.

— Patty Nash / “Metropolitan”

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