the rheumy discharges

Monologue Arpeggiator (Help me)

Fade In.

Above the blinding flats of white screen reveries:

I’m flying over anonymous calamities with a courageous lack of temerity—then falling again. I plunge with celerity. A godwit plummet after 25,000 miles.

Think of the honeycombs of catacombs beneath us as we plant our feet on land again. There are rows—or rose and chaplets—along the banks of empire. So may tin-roofed huts we barely see the banks of barley spreading out to the horizon.

I rarely move once on land. But now we walk hundreds of miles—semibreves aloft in a hemidemisemiquaver aleatoric vortex—but it’s really just across the street, yet the zoetropic images flicking about in my vision are testament to the rustication of my senses. I give you abruptly-shaped children in sharp relief from the rheumy discharges of my cerebrum.

If dogma concerns you, I’d look elsewhere. I’d look for monologue arpeggiators . . .

Meanwhile, someone in this world right now is thinking a righteous thought—others are concerned with pimples in the foregrounded glass, while the memeflow streams splenetic in the background!

While the rest of us feed the catastrophe—
Mandolins exhort electric car homilies—
With righteous vespers at half-past the hour.

Cut To Black.

image: created by fotor ai image generator via written instruction

What I’m Reading:

“. . . By April, I was the clerk periscopic,
behind the desk of a welfare hotel, where a man hollering I love God
plunged from the fifth floor . . .”

— Martín Espada / “My Twenty-Fifth Year Amazed the Astrologers” / Imagine the Angels of Bread

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of terminal lies

the belt buckle reign

belt buckles rain down
the devil’s hail
in appropriate private spaces

o, father of violence
o, father of terminal lies
o, father of red-hot welts

i am soft underbelly pillow-protected
an urchin turned upside-down
a cord-yanked silence

papa was a rollin stone cuts-out
hard arms edged
thee devil’s pincers

i am choke-throes of burning stars
i am black-red
liminal space

What I’m Reading:

“There was this woman who fondled me with teargas in her eyes. There was this man who hung about as silent as a gunshot. They were my parents. He would pull the trigger and her eyes would smart and burst. The echo played a rapid tattoo on the windowpanes … I would hear another world raging inside my skull as though at any moment I would spin like a silver top and disappear out of my head … He pulled the trigger several times one night and she like a cyclone wrung all the silence from me. I howled. Howled like a sinister symphony at full blast … I had somehow entered the wrong room, come into the wrong world. I had to escape. I have to escape. The shrill whine tore through my ears and deposited three policemen who froze the bright picture. The man was carried out of my life.”

— Dambudzo Marechera / Black Sunlight

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ain’t got friends

image: Mount Washington Observatory

coda: blindness (ise got 4)

i.

ise got a seven layer lenticular cloud
billowing in my skull
at 8:55 am
as snow slushes
to puddle-pish
in late january
gray

ise got a book
ise hating
that i keep plodding
through / blind
to choice / to stopping /
88% of the way
thru / too true

ii.

the problem with the future
is that u can’t stop it
coming & u can’t hit
the rewind

ise ain’t got friends
but ise got frenzy
ise got fury

/ altocumulus standing rage /

iii.

ise blinding
my eyes

ise got thee philistine blues
on repeat

What I’m Reading:

“For I desire as much space inside me

For light as space for shadow”

— Mutsuo Takahashi / “Dead Boy”

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of rare melancholy

black bile … (ise #3)

preface to the absent lavation
hostage letters: guidelines
for burning atrabilious simula
crum
2024

i.

ise got saturn on my printer
spavined upturned
and obtuse

ise got masscult extenders
like foam we’re #1 fingers
icy-topes of some
other half-life

ii.

don’t harvest ice from the pond
a rag said today
a world fraying yet
full of possibilities

there is certain extinction
in that mouthful
of rare melancholy

a splenetic marble
undone / over
chiseled

cast wax

vestiges of other
vestments & black
bile

iii.

saturn searches
for the dessert
child

(sense / cents / for a dying world)

What I’m Reading:

“Jan.24.2022

The funeral home calls and I open
your checkbook, a balance of mocking birds.”

— Victoria Chang / “Today”

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three dozen moons

image: created using dall•e3 ai image generator via written instruction

annihilation

i.

ise got exacto knife blues
three dozen moons mirrored deep
all festooned convexities waxing
gibbous on repeat
telescope inflected
beak-less gutter
snipes

ii.

/ wholly holy /
/ mawed + gashed /
/ swallowed whole /

iii.

ise got arroz con pollo shakes &
i look out on a january field
think i see
white crosses
in the snow

iv.

ise got skeevies
the subatomic particles
that make you & me
don’t really matter

we are all children
of dark matter

we are all supermassive
black holes

we are annihilation

What I’m Reading:

“And I’m alone in the darkness again, exactly like I was before.”

— Jon Fosse / A Shining

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eyes with yours

image: created by fotor ai image generator via written instruction

rhyparography : coiling

he’s a grandiloquent viper bursting
at the imbrications—interlocking

eyes with yours—susurrations
sibilant charms + whispers

coiling
tight

breathless

image: created by fotor ai image generator via written instruction

What I’m Reading:

“If, when he’s dying,

he’s nothing left to say

he’ll feel bereft”

— Paul Bailey / “Humorous”

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inability to adapt

The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“I’m not into resolutions—though I understand why people like them. Every revolution of a circle brings with it something like another chance to step into our own stories differently. It’s also true every second of existence we have this chance.”

— Lidia and the Squid Squad and all the rocks in the world / “We’re all carrying on the best we can.” / Corporeal Writing email


“Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs-neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun.”

— Hannah Arendt / The Origins of Totalitarianism


“The fundamental reason high-tech solutions won’t save us from climate change is simple: time. Time is by far the most important variable — and the one thing technology can’t give us more of.”

— Dr. Jonathan Foley / “Can Tech Save Us From Climate Change?” / BBC Science Focus


“The angels are leaving all the alcoves everywhere, the medium in which Unicorns, Bigfoot, Green Deer exist growing always thinner, like the rain forests and the creatures that live and breathe in them. As the forests fall to make way for motels and Hiltons and McDonald’s, the whole magic universe is dying.”

— William S. Burroughs / The Cat Inside


“the airplanes fly
unassuming over O they eat
and eat the steel mouths
and burn what the earth
spun eons to form”

— Maureen N. McLane / “Some Say”


“Standing nearly as tall as a basketball hoop and weighing as much as a grizzly bear, Gigantopithecus blacki was the greatest ape to ever live. For more than a million years during the Pleistocene … these nearly 10-foot-tall apes were most likely doomed by their specialized diet and an inability to adapt to a changing environment.”

— Jack Tamisiea / “The Biggest Ape That Ever Lived Was Not Too Big to Fail” / The New York Times


“I want to be/like self rising bread/just there/in the warm/silent kitchen/sunny, ignored/and endlessly productive”

— Molly Schaeffer / “Some days, the light”

What I’m Listening To:

“turtleneck, iBook, power cord, medications
Button down laptop, hand cool body lotion, Bella Freud, YSL, Eckhaus Latta, Eyelash curler, vibrator, teaser, BYE BYE, BYE BYE”

— Kim Gordon / “BYE BYE”

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all western rib

scribblin

ise got music inna
divine way and things
to tha heart

ise not in tha mood for american
splendor—ise got socio-political scabs—
rat-scabies / virulence / in the gloaming years
of empire

/ desire /

wese got idiosyncratic news—all the news
thats fit to fix / all the fixes youse detox
ing from / when u get over
ur first world wounds

lasso me a wild horse—all western rib
and sin / u ew ewe—
eeew! scribblin
fer da villain

ise bleedin out brain
cells—vote fer me
an ill set ya . . . in
vanilla—inna
inna vise

(no self-acceptance
on da wheel)

What I’m Reading:

“In the dark times
Will there be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.”

— Bertolt Brecht / “Motto” / Svendborg Poems

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nuts for books

stuff overheard yesterday

Do you have an account with us?

… driven by a snaking bassline …

Instead of The Bear I meant The Beef.

My son is absolutely nuts for books.

I did, however, buy a pair of really expensive Beyoncé tickets.

We used it for china, crystal, and collectible display…

He used burner cell phones to contact sex workers.

My hands were frost bitten—and I had gloves on!

Use caution while entering and exiting the building as the temperature drop is resulting in ice forming.

I’m looking to lease my 1 bedroom apartment.

I have a sharpening stone …

Hey, man, you got a cigarette?

Even in winter, biking is the best way to commute.

I liked feeding people.

I can’t take another political ad …

What I’m Reading:

“I began to see that I had used the process of art not only to contain my intensities but also to exorcize those beyond my endurance, and must have done so with haste akin to panic, for it was a kind of panic I felt when once again inexorably confronted by my own work.”

— Anne Truitt / Daybook

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hourly at :23

We Ask … of Divination

Dear Residents,

We ask of divination no deviation from devotion to the caw and cedilla.

We ask that you please use cedar chips while entering the garage as the bullfight ring and kitty litter obscure a particular type of idiocy.

We ask that you use caution in ideation as our snowflake rendezvous is plying a new behavioral therapy.

We ask that call and response be done hourly at :23 past the hour, and limit itself to topics of salt and filibuster idiosyncrasies.

We ask that you dilate your pupils before driving your cars out of the garage, and that you relinquish all pertinent identikits of suspect snowpersons.

We ask that if there are any changes concerning the occupancy of your home that you please contact the nearest template manager for the appropriate boilerplate druid for inclusion into the Domesday Pay-Off Traid Plus. (Refer to codicil 11.1a. for any exclusions)

We ask that if you marinate your meats after 4pm, that you please prepare an appropriate sofrito according to Cuban standards.

We ask for exultation’s sake that cotton balls double as snowflakes and “huzzahs” be produced from deep in the gizzard. (Some restrictions apply if you are of non-avian extraction)

We ask that you excuse our caveats as we bulldoze your tenancy, and your petty concerns about glacier calving. We prefer our icebergs Rhode Island-sized and thick.

We ask our clumsy cèilidh be excused. We are all left feet and chicken-toed, bow-legged and jocularly unfunny.

We ask that you snuggle an elected idler as they shovel the excess snow which will one day be mere coolish water. They’ll need buckets then.

We ask that you pardon our glower. We’se mad as hell.

We ask you have a nice day. Ok?

Thank you,

The Manglement

What I’m Reading:

“so
we are
made
made
in pain to pose
and shimmer”

— Jennifer Sperry Steinorth / Her Read: A Graphic Poem

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