thee istsfor manity reader

sturgeon metaphysics at heaven’s gate

…sturgeon have been on earth for millions
of years in the chill
caspian sea…

but
i’m looking for redemption
in the butt end of comet hale-bopp

emaciated
glue-eyed to the telescope diopter
sharp-eyed for a peek of e.t.
come to take me home
to a higher source
where star trek is 24 hours a day
& star wars is now

…sturgeon are losing their scales
coming apart at the seams spewing
viscera this way and that…

i choose apple sauce
phenobarbital & vodka
a couple of teaspoons a couple of swigs
a couple of new black nikes

sorry about the sturgeon, su
see you at the supernova, tom

i’m going beyond the event horizon
sucked into a black vortex of stars
streaking cold to the next world

into the void
into nothing

What I’m Reading:

The poets awoke
The poets awoke one morning
The poets awoke one morning to find
The poets awoke one morning to find that all their words had left them
Fleeing into the blackness of night that had no end

— m. nourbeSe philip / “The Poets Awoke”

i, alight

i alight on the notion of writing to the title—
a string of twinkle lights—
at this precarious height

fill the light spaces with dark marks
reserve hope for no one
everyone you know will die

you will die
the die cast (so fast it rolls)
and the lights don’t twinkle

yet, they’re not steady state
and i will go on writing into the title
i, alight

What I’m Reading:

If there is God, God is disjunction and madness.

— Kathy Acker / “Hello, I’m Erica Jong”

Your Ten Favorite Holiday Memories (redux)

1. You are playing mechanized baseball: a ball bearing is pitched out of a hole, and the bat is a pinball flipper — and fwap! The ball bearing falls into one of a series of holes marked “single, double, triple, home run, and out.” There are vastly more outs than hits. Then you move on to submarine warfare: small plastic ships float out near the horizon line as you look through your periscope: you estimate position, hit the fire button on the handle, and BOOM! Down goes das boot!

2. You are the night’s confabulation. You don a Richard Burton affectation and on occasion you break out into song and dance, Al Jolson style, viz., a good Jewish boy doing blackface or something minstrel-like. Not to worry, you’ve run this through the department of psychological sanitation, and nothing that you do or say will offend, chagrin, or impinge upon a healthy state of mind. No, in fact, you shall be put through the “so called” ringer, and as a point of further fact you are wearing an Arab strap, and it will assist you in hitting certain notes with a certain meaning. No! No cause for alarm. This is all family friendly, PG rated, and sanitized for your protection. The buzzword to listen for: gentrification, collateral damage, enhanced interrogations, debt ceiling limits… the list is long, but you know them well. So without further ado…

3. You are Claudia’s kid — conceived at that apartment she and Terry lived in above the Garden of Eden Diner in Hoboken. Yeah, remember they were doing roadie work for Yo La Tengo that year, they even opened a couple of shows for them using the name of their first band, Rasputin’s Swim.

4. You are a case of the shakes, momma made the Shake ‘n Bake. I got the shakes, momma made the chicken fried steak. I got the shakes, momma made the whole world quake — she’s got the power you know. I got the shakes, momma said she’s going away.

5. You are the doxology of reflection in a darkened alcove. God is in the alcove. God is in the house. God is loose in there. Who let him in? Did you bait him with cerulean cookies and sugar clouds? Now God’s rummaging around. Uninvited. Unwanted. What dolts you both are.

6. You are biddable in the execrable moments before the prisoner is executed. You are Richard Burton bombast, Shakespearean affectation a notch too loud and an eyelash too wide. You are the murmuration of starlings lost in the roiling chaos in that instant before banking hard left. You are the suppurations of wounds that don’t heal three weeks out. You are the gesticulations of the man without legs as the detritus and shrapnel falls back to earth and settles on the rim of the new-formed crater. You are the child transfixed with the sky as she traces the arc of the parachute bomb’s parabola on its ecliptic. You are.

7. You are last day of November: when ladies of idle lament, and big men with boxy jackets in swimming trunks, big trunks, salute portmanteaus in the streets of Deauville. You sing, “break up to make up, that’s all we do, first you love me, then you hate me, that’s a game for fools.”

8. You are lust unbound. You just want to kiss her, “please just let me kiss you.” She wants to smash you. “I will let you smash me. Beat me with that truncheon, smash me with that truncheon.” Then she broke the spell and hissed: “disrepute!” You lodged a complaint via computer, the one on the street corner, then you had enough. You stopped.

9. You are tornado thoughts ten seconds after the weather warning has been issued.

10. You are the shrieking instrument panel on the jet spiraling earthbound.

What I’m Reading:

His father was a terrible, magnanimous being whom he ought to love first after God. Marcial felt that he was more God than God because his gifts were daily and tangible. But he preferred the God of heaven because he interfered with him less.

— Alejo Carpentier / “Journey to the Seed”

Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

There are no signs or border crossing guards at the edge of the Goldilocks Zone. If we cross over, no alarms will go off. Depending on where you live, you may cross over sooner than others. But unless we take dramatic action now, we may all discover what it’s like to live outside the zone. The human race-which built the pyramids and the iPhone, wrote epic love poems and invented rock ‘n roll, worshipped ancient gods and now deifies Hollywood stars—will exist in a world beyond the world it grew up in, beyond the place where our hearts were shaped and our genes were forged. We will be, in the deepest sense, on our own.

Heat will be the engine of this transformation.

— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

I kiss your mouth while vomitting.
Death must be an exquisite thing.

— Francis Picabia / “Chimney Sperm”

We have known for more than a century about the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels. And it wasn’t just the scientists who knew. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson was warned, as have been many presidents after him. By 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil) not only knew that decades of burning fossil fuels would heat up the atmosphere, but developed in-house climate models that projected those changes with remarkable accuracy. Despite that knowledge, we have not only continued burning fossil fuels, we have continued burning them with reckless abandon. In a sense, you could say we have built a heat-fueled rocketship that is taking us, for better or worse, on a trip beyond the Goldilocks Zone.

— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
and yellow
a terrible amber.

— Jack Gilbert / “Rain”

If the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated anything, it was how quickly and easily people were able to normalize the deaths of others, especially if they were old, sick, or otherwise living on the margins. There were a thousand deaths a day from Covid in the US alone. There were headlines and speeches and heroic doctors and nurses. And if you lost a friend or loved one, you felt the tragedy of it all. But after the initial shock and fear of Covid, the deaths became a part of everyday life. Just as the 43,000 deaths a year in the US in auto accidents no longer trigger public outcry. Or the nine million deaths globally from air pollution each year. Or starvation in Yemen and Haiti. Or casualties of distant wars. It just becomes part of the world we live in.

And so it may be, I fear, with the suffering and deaths from extreme heat. It will become part of what it means to live in the twenty-first century, something we accept and don’t think too much about in our everyday lives.

— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

Beneath the pavement,
older pavement.
Beneath that, ruins.
You can’t even afford
the cover charge
to this utopia.

— Joseph Harrington / “The Archeaology of Knowledge”

I’ve met others who believe that our neurological machinery is simply maladapted to the problems of modern life, especially in rich democracies like the US, where partisanship and political dysfunction reign and banning books is discussed with far more urgency than banning fossil fuels or educating people about the dangers of extreme heat. Hurricanes are wiping out cities on the Gulf Coast with ever more muscle, crops are failing, delivery drivers are dropping dead on the job on hot summer days and yet Matthew McConaughey is still doing TV ads for gas-guzzling SUVs. As one social critic puts it: “We are confronted simultaneously with our vulnerability to catastrophe and our profound unseriousness in the face of it. It’s as if the fires are starting to spread through Rome and all we can do is argue about the fiddling.”

— Jeff Goodell / The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

What I’m Listening To:

They wanted to know why I did what I did
Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world

— Bruce Springsteen / “Nebraska”

b-movie cycle: v. The Incantation

The incantation was one of pathos, of moving b-movietude: Lana Turner was in it—The Big Cube. Something waiting for me on “saved recordings” — something in nanoseconds that included bum trips, flashbacks, and psychedelic ass—something of moving backwards—lighthouses roiling for the death of a beachboy (no, not any of those Beach Boys despite its 1969 vintage). Not only were we moving in grapples, but we would now have to shed our small bags of flowers for our hair, smaller than any rota of our previous San Francisco trips. 

We’d never seen anything quite like it, my soursop shake (though I liked the name batido de guanabana better) reminded her of a green horny plane rom Havana. 

She said: In the intervening yodels I learned much from thee umbrella of apostrophes. 

I said she should watch Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie for a trip more sour than this and a hegemony writ large. 

Railroad flats, she said, shotgun shacks. 

At no point during our forty footsteps did we level a medicament any further than 10 or 12 footsteps—despite our “big cubedness.” 

I was stumped.

She seemed a bullfinch reader now, something reminiscent of a reminder of limitless lies from the late psychedelic period—and we hadn’t even opened our Proust yet!

I, alternately, was baffled in a Baffin Island state of mind, wasted like an emaciated polar bear malfunctioning on wastrel seal soup. 

We stared into space, mouths agape, drool slowfalling from the corners of our mouths.

I dare you to look into The Big Cube third eye. I dare you to try.

What I’m Reading:

A toenail clipping floating in a toilet bowl
like a crescent moon reflected in water,

beauty is quiet and self-conscious.

A character in a novel
sits on the toilet.

Sometimes for forever.

Speaking of which,
where does the shit of a billion people go?

Back into the countryside.

— Hua Xi / “Toilet”

b-movie cycle: iv. Chuck and Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) redux

Chuck Heston was in my head again.

I fell asleep last night thinking I need a new muse. I’ll be damned if Chuck Heston didn’t show up for self-appointed rounds through my REM sleep. Yeah, Chuck Heston must be my new muse. But he wasn’t alone, no. Here came Chuck Heston and Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People).

Here they came down this dimly lit hypnagogic hall o’ hallucinatory goodness. Chuck “god-damned dirty apes” Heston says, “We’re ready to roll. C’mon, Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People)!”

So we’re driving downtown on a typical Saturday overnight. The fares are clicking over regular. Busy night, full moon. We just saw a guy taking a dump at the entrance to Duane Reade.

“What’s the new assistant manager going to do when she opens up the store tomorrow morning?” I say. “She’ll run her heel through the shit and nearly fall — save that she holds on to the door handle. Then that smell hits her and she adds her puke to the mess at her feet. Her new heels ruined, she fears. What kind of way to start the day is that, huh, Chuck?”

He’s busy tightening Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) red neck bandana in the back seat.

“Chuck, her heel arch is clogged with a runny shit meatball,” I say. “The knotted florets on her shoes are now spattered with last night’s calzone bile. Chuck? Chuck?”

He’s wild-eyed. He rolls down the window. He screams into the wind — to the darkened alleyways: “You maniacs. You blew it up. God damn you. God damn you all to hell!”

My own command performance in the back of the cab. Wow. He catches my eye in the rear view, spittle-mouthed and bleary-eyed, he says: “You take umbrage at my Rosetta Stone? Who do you think you are? Mr. Goodstuff? There are no more $3 whores in this town.”

“True that, Chuck. So very true,” I say, and offer him some Peppermint Chiclets.

He declines and says, “I’ve been home all the time.”

Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) barks at a group of Argentinians grilling steaks on the corner of MacDougal and Houston. They’re all decked out in cerulean blue and white striped jerseys, and chanting “AR-GEN-TI-NA, AR-GEN-TI-NA.” They invite us over for steaks by a 50-foot high bank of television screens all tuned to the 1978 World Cup.

A flash and we’re standing on the sidewalk with plates full of rice rolled up like strips of sod on gauze — each individual grain is inserted in to the gauze.

“How do we eat this, Chuck?”

“It’s a roulade of rice and gauze,” he says.

Yeah? Ok, I say. “Gauze and all.” So I toss one to Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People). He chomps it down.

The wall of screens go black and the Voice of America, interspersed with static, booms from the speakers.

A smiling woman with a name tag the reads: ANA appears with an acoustic guitar. Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) barks at her, foaming with ill intent and a bad savor in his mouth. Ana produces a steak from the sound hole on the guitar and quiets Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People).

Another lady appears who looks like Patti Smith with blonde frosted bangs and ends. Her face is covered with heavy white pancake, but her name tag reads: SWAGGY. She’s carrying an electric guitar.

An argument ensues between Swaggy and Ana about who is the better multi-instrumentalist. Punches are thrown and the Argentinians get involved. Chuck drags Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People) away on a leash.

I attempt to sort this all out. A steak is at stake.

What I’m Listening To:

Too slow to compete, they sent you away to the glue factory
Saved by a handicapped boy, now that everyone knows that boy was me

— Killdozer / “Knuckles the Dog Who Helps People”

b-movie cycle: iii. A Madhouse (redux)

It was this Charlton Heston thing.

The Romans are meeting at the Forum — more like the Colosseum — deciding the fate of the legions off at war; and somehow, I, a hero, am embroiled in the decision. But I find myself hiding in a clothes closet off to the side of the meeting. I have an oblique view of the stands where people are assembled hashing these issues out. I should be visible to some of the people at this convocation, but they can’t see me — and just in case they can, I move to a deeper hiding place among the many frocks in dry cleaning plastic bags.

And again, there’s this palpable feeling of the presence of Charlton Heston but no sight of him. Then it’s dark, and I’m in the catacombs and holding cells below the Colosseum. There are cells with bars, and some skeletal remains in theses cells propped up in poses. I’m looking out from behind the bars onto a ramp, and out of the gloaming comes Charlton Heston.

Charlie, friggin’, Heston!

Somehow, even though this is an early role for me I tell him he’d be surprised at what my favorite film of his was when I was five years old.

He instantly says, “Planet of the Apes.”

“Absolutely,” I say. “It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!”

I challenge him to guess what my second favorite film of his was — to which he says, “Omega Man.”

Man! How does he do it!? How does he know?

He holds an open palm to my face and then up to the sky and says, “from my cold dead hands, Mr President. From my cold dead hands.”

I think, but don’t dare say, Wha’? Huh?! Then I go through the calculations… he said that during Clinton, right? Wasn’t he already dead by Obama? Whatever.

It doesn’t much matter. We’re fast friends now and heading to a combination bar and full service gas station atop the Los Angeles Colosseum, but it really seems to be the press box at the Daytona Race Track. Heston asks me about Soylent Green, and I tell him I didn’t see that until I was an adult 30 years later.

He says, “Ah! It was people you know? The green crackers… people!”

“Sure, whatever,” I say.

We’re getting familiar and there’s a hubbub behind the bar. Everyone around the square bar is clapping and cheering the muscular bleached blonde bartender who’s wearing a classic gas station attendant’s shirt — with the sleeves cut off and ripped jean shorts — he’s getting his trapezius muscles massaged by a waiter, and they’re both wearing Oakland Raiders caps backwards.

Charlton looks over to me and says, “everyone is an actor in LA.” He points at the TV and says, “every time one of the commercials or TV shows they appear play people take a moment to recognize them.” Another cheer and clapping is heard from the adjoining rooms as other staff memebers are seen on the dozens of televisions throughout the bar / gas station.

A couple of guys wearing cageless football helmets, modified to look like motorcycle helmets, are causing a ruckus at the edge of the bar and punches are thrown.

Heston says “let’s get out of here,” and we walk through the window and hover 80 feet in the air over the racetrack. In a flash we’re in the pits, but it’s really an old time gas station and Heston has disappeared — but the guys who were just causing the scene at the bar are in a car backing up, coming at me slowly.

I step out of the way on the passenger side and tap lightly on the trunk. It’s one of the troublemakers, in the cheap plastic helmet made to look intimidating, flexing his fist open and closed. They exit the car with ill intent. The smell of motor oil and cigarettes wafts out of the car.

We’re crunching on small beads of tempered glass as we make our way toward the rear of the car — it now appears as a hatchback made of thin, pliable tin. It’s broken and missing a section.

“Look at what you did,” the driver says in a menacing tone. I tell him I didn’t do that. “I lightly tapped the trunk. This wasn’t like this before. This car wasn’t even a hatchback!”

The one with the helmet says, “you did it, man!” and they pin me to the rear of the car. The glass below our feet is gone and I say, “see here, there’s no glass. This hatchback was already in this condition.”

Then I’m in my darkened apartment. But instead of being on the 16th floor in Boston. It’s on the 60th floor of a condo building at a crossroads in mid-Manhattan — something like a combination of Times Square, FDR drive somewhere near the UN, an open air version of Grand Central Station, and Columbus Circle all at once.

All the lights in the city are out, and it’s my duty to turn them on before my partner gets home with Charlton Heston. I’m feeling my way down the hall in the dark toward the fuse box to trip the switch, but I hear the refrigerator start to hum, and some light streams from the open refrigerator door.

I hear my partner at the door, and she gets to me just as I’m pulling the switch. We hear a earth shaking noise outside.

She says, “was that a car accident?”

“It didn’t sound like cars,” I say. “It sounded like a detonation of something large. I don’t know what it was,” I say.

We run to the balcony windows. Darkness. Then it dawns on me: “hey, where the hell is Charlton Heston?”

What I’m Listening To:

On the screen the city crumbled
So realistic, but yet another film
By the master of realism, Mr. Irwin Allen
No lesser men than Lorne Greene
And Mr. George Kennedy
Risked their lives to save the lives of strangers
Their selflessness was moving
Chuck Heston was in the movie too
But he was just a ham

— Killdozer / “Man vs. Nature”