you warden through the forested nightmare surrounded by the monstrosity of life unspooling / rewinding synthesizing the day the raw manifold: unfiltered
disquiets / immersions / odors await you with dis-ease a volcanic erosion a turnabout: eruption
bedpans of seem schemers festooned in funks an ornate pallet: fistfuls
u spring a leak shaken: fitful
u
What I’m Reading:
We are all, in the end, swarms of mysterious, irreconcilable cells that randomly select and bruise each other’s insides through both accident and choice.
my four uncles speak of biblical rains: ¡lo que viene por ahí!
i’m conducting my cornu and sistrum band we make a heavenly racket there is dispatch in our notes alacrity in our fingers smell of ozone and electricity fill the air
water breaches the open windows
la alondra canta en maltusiano: los peregrinos estan perdidos sálvese quien pueda
a call from paducah transits through tallahassee threw little havana thru el cayo matahambre to a mamey stand in cienfuegos reduced to trecefuegos in thee apocalyptic downpour
where is the dignity in that, cock robin? why are you still in caracas? what is the sense in that, mr platt? it’s overstuffed in hell these days
i’m outta’ space & i sistrum one last clang
there is no joy in transgression anymore! it’s our new default setting
one uncle spits & pogos rises in declension: if they ain’t no one left after the storm better for us
u know about us
What I’m Reading:
You can doomscroll your way to your doom. The democratic theorists of old longed for an activated citizenry; somehow they failed to recognize how easily citizens could be activated to oppose deliberative democracy.
— Adam Gopnik / “How Alarmed Should We Be If Trump Wins Again?” / The New Yorker
see here thee arsehole of shambles mesmerizing and haunting his possessives paranoia flexing in bicentenary splendor he’s mr. touchdown incandescence from exertion to everyday lift-off
the crisp thrush of academic sentimentality comforts his tweeds elbow patches as cemetery of heroism thee beautiful blighter of nationalist desaturation homilies need not apply
his mastery complete his lechery a comfort to him his debtor deficiency and colored doubloons on vitrine display at home transfixed in his private room and immortal
What I’m Reading:
Abstraction and euphemism also protect us from having to look into the eyes of the victims. They are removed from our consciousness. They do not speak . . . Americans are never shown what it actually looks like when a US drone strike hits a wedding party, or a child is crushed by a US tank. They are rarely exposed to the accounts of those who have witnessed such gruesome spectacles, or to the voices of the family members who mourn the victims.
You pride yourself on being a realist, I told myself, so face the facts. There’s been a coup, here in the United States, just as in times past in so many other countries. Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.
— Margaret Atwood / The Testaments
Each forward movement of the clouds leadens The cupola covering the great men A bit more.
— Hédi Kaddour / “The Answer”
Half the world was flooded and the other half parched and the crops kept failing and failing again. People were starving, even here in California. There were refugees everywhere. The wine tasted of ash.
— T.C. Boyle / Blue Skies
To throw ourselves down helplessly, into happiness, into an age of our own, into our own days. There where the Pestilence roars, where the empty riders of the horror go.
— Robert Duncan / “Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal”
There is no proven vaccine or treatment for infections with the virus, which is closely related to Ebola virus and causes similar symptoms . . . It is an outbreak of superlatives. One of the deadliest known viruses, Marburg, has emerged in Rwanda, killing 13 people and sickening 58 in one of the biggest Marburg outbreaks ever documented. Scientists expect the outbreak to be curtailed quickly — but they warn that, overall, Marburg is on the rise.
— Saima Sidik / “Lethal Marburg virus is on the rise in Rwanda: why scientists are worried” / Nature
If there’s a temple beyond glands and bone for all that goes blank in a lifetime, maybe it resides in the body of a poem, in meanings left between the spread knees of enjambment.
— Idra Novey / “Value City”
My life might have been very different. If only I’d looked around me, taken in the wider view. If only I’d packed up early enough, as some did, and left the country—the country that I still foolishly thought was the same as the country to which I had for so many years belonged.
Such regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.
— Margaret Atwood / The Testaments
What I’m Listening To:
You’re rereading a book To feel reassured By the life of your favorite hero But don’t worry, honey, don’t worry This is just a fairytale Happening in the supermarket
image: unknown artist / Celestial phenomenon over Salon-de-Provence / 1554 / in public domain
unspool
the tulip finally came out / this was an ingenuous hoist / powered by fairlight synthesizers and fogsmoke
two-stud american amour full of resignation and striving / fascination and cupidity on matchstick wings / with a well-practiced press of a thumb / gyroscopes on swivel / a bloody eyewash
another cornice-scrounger eliminated / weather clear doze / a wisp of cirrus / he made a lobe / a hose trailer / a caribou cheerleader mount / he was either imbecile / as contingencies attested / or / by his own ache / a voracious reappearance of a mouthbreather t•bone / he married his nightmare with his last look in the mirror / cloudy there
when she was sixteen a theological literalism angered him / he was thirty something / a precondition / to carve his name on her lower back / no / she said in detonation / the scene detritus now / he left decanting his viscera / throwing sticks at a whirring machine / i saw this / as i tell you now / a hummingbird so incensed / so raging with fire / all was dust for minutes
later / it occurred to me / he shouldnt have played with tinderboxes
these are thee behemoth stories of old / they still play out today / they will unspool tomorrow
What I’m Reading:
… when so much weather is raging inside you, and Twitter is cawing the news. Gunfire, murder, oil spill, terrorism, wildfire, abduction, bombing, floods. Funny video in which a woman opens her car to find a brown bear sitting in the driver’s seat snacking on her groceries. Murder, murder, war. The internet is upset. To experience reality as a handful of tap water, at a time like this, is to find oneself in good company.
la niña is coming / a perfect possum of a viper in the same northernmost armchair driven by a similar detail to carcass the roadsters and traipsers of rehearsals / rocky, barren lands imperative / vivid green presses inured / a tent and a deeply enthographic personal molester of cisterns / reversions to dogleg cans in fair ballrooms and intoxicant subjectives / is this irreconcilable with logic and comprehension / only you can say
virago armfuls of carcinogens and millions of pounds of listeria riddled meats as your prize / the reign of imperfection to the nth degree / elements of magnitude in play/ the roadways soon barren / the larders soon empty / don’t be a stranger in the time of the corpses / here’s some balm for your tentacles / all best
What I’m Reading:
All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.
-Series of found moving images as the film racks out of focus
-Series of stills: long open highways receding into the horizon line; traffic jammed still; parking lots (these sequences without people in the frames)
-Series of of shots resolving into sharp critical focus: buildings from various anonymous downtowns
(Fade Out)
– 4 seconds of clear leader
(Fade In)
-4 seconds of black leader
(Lap Dissolve)
-Asynchronous sound of obtuse observations about reality shows broadcast on the E! Network, c. 2007 / Over clear leader
-Mundane observations about obscure European celebrities / Over black leader
-Silence / Over cut-ups compiled from 33 sequences of film, all exactly 105 frames long, thrown into the air, and then assembled by chance operation
(Lap Dissolve)
-A Random Series Of Magnified Images Of Fleas
(Voice Over):
“The way that fleas become infective is due to a feature of their alimentary system—they have not only a stomach, or a ventriculus, but also a proventriculus, which acts as a valve that regulates the food that the flea is ingesting and trying to get to its stomach.”
(Lap Dissolve)
-American National Anthem plays
-A flagless flag pole pings as the wind whips two metal swivel flag snaps on a rope resoundingly into metal pole.
image: Johann August Ephraim Goeze / Traite d’insectologie / 1773 / in public domain
snouter
i am a parasitic acarologist hosting a tick and a bacterium an entomophage pullulating amongst legions of others looking for a parasitoid wasp im a beaky toothed sort of snouter out and about for a ladybug finger or two the dog never knew what hit it and neither will you (microbes are where the action is)
image: Johann August Ephraim Goeze / Traite d’insectologie / 1773 / in public domain
What I’m Reading:
I’m no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand.
image: George Mayerle / “Test chart, Negative” / ca. 1907 / in public domain
clang of bombs update
dear sirs,
please regard our mangrove from this promontory / premonitory backfilling will fracture pillars on monday / keep your sunday receipts beneath your oilskins / drone quintets will perform on contingency / feel free to discombobulate with nefarious natterings / this is no way to start the week / but we must start it anyhow / with the clang of bombs in the morning
image: George Mayerle / “Test chart, Positive” / ca. 1907 / in public domain
What I’m Reading:
It would be a quieter holiday, no fireworks or loud parades, no speeches, no salutes to any flag, a day of staying home instead of crowding away, a day we celebrate nothing gained in war but what we’re given—how the sun’s warmth is democratic, touching everyone…
thee istsfor manity reader 