defilement is postmodern
defacement is commitment
vandalism is homecoming
What I’m Reading:
. . . re-vision is what keeps vision from hardening into dogma.
— Eleanor Wilner / “Her Introduction” / from Her Read by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
happy bitter skates
happy bitter on the thrash
bombshell linkman talk
happy bitter speaking tool
reread spoonful minefield blues
overlord country /
lights receding / snarling curs
come to take u home
to the savage republic
stars and bars and truncheons black
watch who u look at
what u looking at!
What I’m Reading:
Normally this walk cheers me up when I’ve had enough of being an insignificant foreigner: teaching classes in Latin American literature at a gringo university is like cutting trees in a deserted forest with no one around to hear them fall.
— Alvaro Enrigue / “Heavy Weather: Air” / Hypothermia
ive got easter island heads talking at each other
ive got songs for drella in my noise cancelling ears
ive got pier paolo passolini’s 120 days of sodom on the rewind—
and a mustard solo on a hebrew national on a bun
ive got heironymous bosch and francis bacon painting pope innocent x from the far side of a darkened tunnel
ive got the temerity of a titmouse—black crested, if u please—on the tail end of a northern expansive migration as the days weeks + years heat up
glue me to a rack / spin me on ur catherine wheel / plumb me with ur pear of anguish
hours loop and neutrinos shoot thru us
what are we doing to make a difference?
wait
can i monetize making a difference?
wait
give me some nam june paik video feedback
there
that’s better
how do i brand this?
What I’m Reading:
subversive angels flutter like pigeons from a rooftop,
this stripped and starving earth is not a grave
— Martín Espada / “Hands Without Irons Become Butterflies” / Imagine the Angels of Bread
. . . I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail . . .
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti / “I Am Waiting” / These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems
The planet just experienced the hottest February on record, with global average temperature rising 1.77°C above the pre-industrial average for the month, according to a bulletin from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). That makes it the ninth month in a row to set a monthly heat record.
— James Dinneen / “The world just experienced the hottest February on record” / New Scientist
. . . God, like the future, is female—a prophylactic
against patriarchy, a cork stopper in the mouth of a gun.
— Gregory Pardlo / “Giornata 4”
In accounts of the Anthropocene, and of the present climate crisis, capitalism is very often the pivot on which the narrative turns. I have no quarrel with this: as I see it, Naomi Klein and others are right to identify capitalism as one of the principal drivers of climate change. However, I believe that this narrative often overlooks an aspect of the Anthropocene that is of equal importance: empire and imperialism.
— Amitav Ghosh / The Great Derangement
The soldiers give off a smell that reminds me of coffins. I find myself wishing that a heart attack would kill me.
— Mosab Abu Toha / “A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza” / The New Yorker
Just to recite the relevant history, as quickly as possible. Forty years ago, Exxon’s scientists learned all there was to know about climate change—they forecasted the temperature in 2020 with remarkable accuracy. And the company’s executives believed them—among other things they began building their drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming, and plotting out which corners of the Arctic they would drill once it melted. What they didn’t do was tell the rest of us: instead, they helped erect a huge architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that kept us locked for three decades in a sterile battle about whether or not global warming was ‘real,’ a fight both sides knew the answer to from the outset. But one side was willing to lie.
— Bill McKibben / “The most epic (and literal) gaslighting of all time” / Substack
. . . I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody . . .
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti / “I Am Waiting” / These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems
What I’m Listening To:
All hail
God’s Country
Daily Mail bacon baps
Racist uncles want their country back
Flag Shaggers
Maggie Thatcher
Oh Britannia
God save the King
— Lambrini Girls / “God’s Country”
we are lost at sea without anchorage.
the firmament is a figment of a syphillitic fever dream.
the firmament is affixed to a corrugated sheet of tin—full of pinpricks—and backed by massive metal armatures. the sun and moon roll on their gyring tracks, and a giant nighthawk streaks by occasionally with a bundle of fiery sticks in its beak.
this is the vindication of the seamless. seems like a scene a from another time, but no, it’s now, it’s true. it always has been. thee internets says it’s so.
i saw with my own eyes the impossible. the irrepressible. because look what a shining city on a hill we’ve made here.
here, here. huzzah and hurrah. harrumph and holly.
affirm the freakishness of the firmament affixed by a fever dream.
the only constant is impermanence.
What I’m Reading:
It is the star above us makes us see
The distance of the firmament, immensity
Of the green wave that swells beneath the dark.
— Jenny Joseph / “Out of Sight of Land”
Back from the sun’s glare—
Fog obliterates the sky—
It’s good to be home.
The birds shroud their songs in gray—
Sunshine State withers away.
What I’m Reading:
I dislike tanned people. They walk around with dead skin on their bodies.
— Agustina Bazterrica / “Dishwasher” / Nineteen Claws and a Blackbird
What I’m Reading:
Outside, even the sun-god, dressed in this life
as a lizard, abruptly rises
on stiff legs and descends blasé toward the shadows.
— Reginald Gibbons / “At Noon”
Traveling sorts her memories.
Driving to Miami sharpens
her father’s voice—like acid
catalyzing in her ears boring
a ragged chute to her amygdala—
simultaneously black-holing her backward
and shooting her into an uncertain future
full of Get to Know Jesus and Get Your Guns
& Ammo Here billboards. She fights.
She flees from all her ghosts. She barrels
south—under the heat dome.
Tobacco leaves yellow—corn browns & withers—in her wake.
What I’m Reading:
. . . my father dug a pit
for the pig roast,
and neighbors spoke prophecy
of dark invasion
beneath the growl of lawnmowers . . .
— Martin Espada / “Cada Puerco Tiene Su Sábado” / Imagine the Angels of Bread
Paranoiac-critical to channel light vessel automatic—distortion to static—yankee hotel foxtrots in 3-minute fixes.
I’m good—occasionally moderately—and now I have the unveiling change heebie-jeebies. The only thing constant is impermanence.
And sure showers are good—but all day? all night? All right this is where we get off, get out, get thee behind.
I crossed a continent for a funeral that was cancelled. Crenelations and observations of the self lead to what? How do you find it? It was really an unveiling of sorts not a funeral.
So if the funereal is delayable when you start to notice your own breathing? Death is transmissible, baby.
We will now have surgeries instead of threnodies, but you may lament anytime you wish from anywhere on this globe — including Berwick, Guernsey and somewhere near the Hebrides. Oh what pain and navel gazing this has become. Get me outta’ heah!
Due to surgeries and broken bones I am 1400 miles away from home, untethered and at the edge of the country, in a state where they let the kids get measles (unvaccinated and in unconsidered ways) . . . because . . . America!
Got me a good pile of books to burn here.
I’se so crazy now I actually read an Ayn Rand book because . . . America. Because thee internets said so.
I have weather reports in this dead lilt, and the humidity creeps in, and the spring breakers break in, and the shootings multiply, the car chases are thrice daily, and the shootings once an hour . . . because . . . America! Land of the insurrection special.
I’se got the Saint Vitus dance without knowing the steps. I’m stepping in soggy watermelons, shagging the wheaties, and suffering the waffles. I’se got the cross country Zoom blues.
Remember, every good boy deserves fudge — and emphysema hacks. Who need Big Tobacco when microplastics are gonna kill us as slow as a tabasco drip.
I hope your good intentions pay off, because La Niña is about to make an appearance and the Atlantic is the hottest it’s ever been. The Gulf Stream is slowing, and getting hotter, and I’m hot with fleas and full of unrealized funereal bedbugs.
There’s a weird cadence to all of this, and if you figure it out, please, I beg you, PLEASE, let the rest of us know.
What I’m Reading:
I’ve spent my life running from one bit of earth to another. Carrying my smashed peace of mind into the oddest gangs of peoples. Take this one for instance. I bring them music and laughter and poetry and they throw me into a pitlatrine.
— Dambudzo Marechera / Black Sunlight
got passage recount time
presage press : bunny musculature
policy sets vs set accounts
treble and clean
cleft and warble
every app has its own keyboard
this is all broke down, no chance of fixin’
What I’m Reading:
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter in their palms
— Martin Espada / “Imagine the Angels of Bread”
thee istsfor manity reader 