pageboys and pompadours a friendship rich in penury a putting together of workman reflexes gymkhanas by the pound my subpoena is just one of many!
my pony is eponymous
i hear resonances of frigate birds brigantines and libertines by the tonne are you a loyalist to what you hear? do you subscribe to two pains for a fright? what lozenge expires by your tonsil?
we have these two painkillers we have subsidiary paintboxes for frippery’s sake and lumber and fritter in darkness
now explore the inside of your eyelids!
just keep away in the dark count the proclivities of hacksaws and the teeth of lunatic resolves
watch my imminent dissolve!
What I’m Reading:
Last month, the record for the world’s hottest day was broken twice, and the United Nations made a global call for action on extreme heat, to help vulnerable people, workers and economies to cope using science. Around 70% of the global workforce — 2.4 billion people — are now at high risk of extreme heat, it said.
— Carissa Wong / “What is the hottest temperature humans can survive? These labs are redefining the limit” / Nature
Even though I’ll be in the red, I’ll be under. Your footfall sounds like a peg leg stamping. Tap into your urethra with a rusty catheter and maybe you’ll strike oil. If you’re diligent, you’ll be indigent. If you read a dull book about Pol Pot it doesn’t diminish the sheen of his hair. I once wished I could use Afro sheen. I thought I might be able to stick a pic in my hair, now I buzz it to the skull. If you were a carpenter and I was a baby would you nail me to a tiny crucifix? Would you marry me anyway? Why do these neurons fire (misfire?) certain troublesome memories at random? Why are my axons so warped? What was that about?
I wish it didn’t sound like an outboard motor was running in my bathroom.
Then you harp:
“A volunteer committee of resident adult ‘Friendly Goblins’ will deliver candy (all pre-wrapped) to every apartment that signs up for a visit. The Goblins (1 or 2 per visit) will admire your child’s costume and laugh, shriek or ooh-and-ahh as appropriate. The Goblins, of course, will be wearing masks and will remain at a social distance from members of your household.”
“Seriously?”
“I’d rather listen to Victoria Williams sing ‘Boogieman.’”
“Ah, go on and file your $750 tax return, and write off your coif to the tune of $70,000. You twit!”
“You fill me with inertia!”
What I’m Reading:
Because who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful? Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity. And these phallic ships thrust into space are surely the most hubristic of them all, the totems of a species gone mad with self-love.
The thread of the story fell to the ground, so I went down on my hands and knees to hunt for it. This was at one of those patriotic celebrations, and all I saw were imported shoes and jackboots.
— Iman Mersal / “A Celebration”
Life struck me as a simple series of adversities, relatively easy to overcome, which led to a death that was perhaps not simple but was inevitable and thus didn’t merit thinking about. I didn’t realize, back then, that in fact that was what happiness was, what youth was and what death was. And although I wasn’t in essence mistaken about anything, I was making mistakes about everything.
— Andrés Barba / A Luminous Republic
His mind kept the airspace but sold the sun. At night, he ordered his own sun, which was Supposedly arriving soon, they said, In entourages of azures and clouds.
— Rowan Ricardo Phillips / “Hole in the Sky”
Fossil fuel companies are running “a massive mis- and disinformation campaign” so that countries will slow down the adoption of renewable energy and the speed with which they “transition away” from a carbon-intensive economy, the UN has said.
Selwin Hart, the assistant secretary general of the UN, said that talk of a global “backlash” against climate action was being stoked by the fossil fuel industry, in an effort to persuade world leaders to delay emissions-cutting policies. The perception among many political observers of a rejection of climate policies was a result of this campaign, rather than reflecting the reality of what people think, he added.
— Fiona Harvey / “‘Massive disinformation campaign’ is slowing global transition to green energy” / The Guardian
Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.
— Kim Stanley Robinson / Pacific Edge
I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down. Only the night is wound up tight. And ticking with unpaused breath.
— Charles Wright / “Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes”
So often we begin and end our rides in the same place but return a slightly different person. We are, in all sorts of little and beautiful ways, changed by the journey. We ride to find things and to find ourselves.
— Peter Flax / Live to Ride: Finding Joy and Meaning on a Bicycle
What I’m Listening To:
The sky is blue The sky is the deepest, purest blue I’ve ever seen Points on the globe are just points on the globe
shaver of renowned swabs bring to the decimated homeland committed sobriquets and disguises the cupidity mechanisms the mutilations of cupolas
a menu of compass points one of the few mutineers of her sores will perform and dishcloth the medallion of our 21st-century cesspit lives
she is committed to keeping alive the sorrows to the curacy and mercenary dishonor of half-uttered dishwater homilies she will traipse and meddle for more inhumanity — vocatives be damned
she will shed delusions and website inquiries describing commonly recurring or overused literary and rhetorical devices
she will grade papers with green felt tips
What I’m Reading:
My sky is black with small birds bearing south
— Edna St. Vincent Milay / “[Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find]”
Discarded dust caps— Litter the darkrooms and halls— He’s face down in blood. Saint Cupful of Mutations: Keeper of chafed homicides.
What I’m Reading:
But trees have no interest in good and evil, insects and plant roots have no interest in the reasons of man, much less his longing, and there is something comforting about that.
This is now. The last war on drumsticks was a war on fructification. It was fudge batty, it was fatty bruit. I fructified the crumb cross-question and I crossed my own patisserie when I got there. I got there when the dashboard overtook me and I wrote a nub without yachtswoman—a nub workhouse. I chose something golden that sunk my Atocha. I fructified in Dar Es Salam. I dromedary without opiates in my eye-openers on a legation turn. I sleuth inside a motherland infested terminus. Terminus on an assign of extracted teeth and pulse novelette but the difficult out of a hatchway while racetrack munch graves obliviously in the hammer. I password sunbather away with the sprinter in your stepparent and wishbone in the folio of your soulless fall. I scarify my south in the humorless sundry of a long nightlight in a cleavage well lighted plaid which is a bullring ridden cal in Lesotho during a moo moonlight of dust-up and quip whippoorwills. I psychic leafy trends leafless, hot with fleshpots fleecing your sister’s salesgirl. You said, “I got minicab and you’ll be fink.” I said, “summer is sister’s faucet in her shizophrenic haze in the striker of a weathercock in her occipital lock.” You say my coming was sublimely written, like it was written in Sumerian scruff in a Man-eater wound. I said, “it’s ancestor to a linchpin haemophiliac.” To which you plead, “let’s go to fully automatic writing,” moving your firs in such a wean that the airgun warthogs in pin-up swordfishes around your headlamp and light-years alumna in yellow and bluff humanitarians in your open moviegoer. The workhouses you create signify tranches of truths and lushes on the grave half-sister naked in Rook reclines. A bouillon of winning stoppered ordering the slacker and a jaunty bat opened to the prying June mop jejune. Then you produce wilder beauticians and hypochondriacs from your blowlamp poets — pantaloons full of cavorting beasties. I produce a floral arsenal of helium filled hydrangeas from my walkie-talkie poet while a Berlin zeppelin foals drunken circumlocutions above us. The mandible from the Maldives stands and announces the sinking of the Diego Garcia Issues. I sinner the sorbet of hegemony of the alcoves and pelagic birthrights that abdicated when the penny-farthings became kips of the uprise.
What I’m Reading:
He warned that the consequences of inaction were being felt in rich countries as well as poor. In the US, many thousands of people are finding it increasingly impossible to insure their homes, as extreme weather worsens. “This is directly due to the climate crisis, and directly due to the use of fossil fuels . . . Ordinary people are having to pay the price of a climate crisis while the fossil fuel industry continues to reap excess profits and still receives massive government subsidies.”
— Fiona Harvey / “‘Massive disinformation campaign’ is slowing global transition to green energy” / The Guardian
When I woke, the waves had gone black, turning over the macerated curd of the ocean bottom, heaving its sludge onto the beach.
— Cleopatra Mathis / “The Sea Chews Things Up”
Sometimes they dream the same dreams — of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.
— Samantha Harvey / Orbital
There are not enough words in the Kalaallisut language (or any language) to prepare you for the five-hundred shades of blue in icebergs.
— Aimee Nezhukumatathil / “What I Learned in Greenland”
One of the most worrying theories to emerge is that the Earth is losing its albedo, which is the ability of the planet to reflect heat back into space. This is mainly because there is less white ice in the Arctic, Antarctic and mountain glaciers.
— Jonathan Watts / “We should have better answers by now’: climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating” / The Guardian
My body has a tenure of chaos and blood. It’s clotting and ache began at the edge of girlhood. I see no way out.
— Ajanaé Dawkins / “How to Witness a Miracle Without Converting”
In this town, this country, there are no stories. The dead, the survivors, they don’t want to remember. They don’t want to talk about what happened. They want to bury it. They want to forget.
— Kim Stanley Robinson / The Wild Shore
At my feet I found a grave of starfish, broken and gnarled among the fleshy snipes and heads. Every shade of death covered the sand.
— Cleopatra Mathis / “The Sea Chews Things Up”
What I’m Listening To:
All across the world, they shout out their angry words about the end of love … The stars stand above the Earth, bright triumphant metaphors of love
thee istsfor manity reader 