I forget what the final word is.
Time fog is hellish.
What more do you require on the day of your death at 5:26 am?
What I’m Reading:
“There were moments of beauty here and there
Everything ends, and everything matters Goodnight, sleep well, my brave old world”
— Debbie Urbanski / After World: A Novel
What I’m Reading:
“God is not dead. God has forgotten. God has dementia.”
— Georgi Gospodinov / Time Shelter
A bluebell crack.
The storybook matador lost in last week’s storm. Like a drone cyclone of hothouse hornets, come inklings of nuclear enrichment here and there—not good places, but nowhere is good for instant vaporization. I’m in a horse drawn cart in a colorless wasteland.
The news, all of it, is dire.
Even this item: A beetle lives in dank Slovenian caves, and is named for a genocidal tyrant—Anophthalmus hitleri. Fittingly, it has no eyes and is trump-colored yellow-orange. Blind pestis. Yesrinia pest-us. Ain’t we a scourge.
Roving packs of weevil matchmakers kidnapping transit bus drivers … when they’re not punching them out.
Timeout!
No more frontier desperados. No more off-license licentiousness. Let’s get it together, dudes! Clamber on and straddle the peace pipe, folks.
Straitjacket soothsayers tied me up wrong. They’re so full of pain for their people, they have no space for my people. So I’m thrown out of my ancestral land because they have the market cornered on straitjackets.
So now I’m the exorcism matinée. Come one, come all. Bring phone cameras. Bring your favorite influencers to record it.
And the frustration detective says:
Ain’t this the life!
What I’m Reading:
“Many tongues twisted in their mouths when
she went, leaving behind only
the smallest tooth of wickedness.”
— Joyce Sutphen / “The Exorcism”
There’s a tool they use to set things right.
But it won’t protect them from the bitter cold of a nighttime swim through the shark infested straits.
A tool of last resort — shaman life hacks! Tabernacle huckster butters!
And us!
We. Decked out with finger guns.
“Be a papper slapper with a doot doot doot doot do!”
Birdsongs for birdies in glam processsion of hip slapping.
“Hingum, Jingum — do do do.”
Milkweed in the shadows and other docile locations.
Détentes from a muddled past — prepaid insurgencies dropped out of Monroe’s pants into a bay of pigs —
“wheepa deepa poo pow pow!”
Whistling childhood advertising ear worms — jingling out of key — these jagged equations validate nothing but the phlegm in our souls.
“You can’t please yourself, but you might can please your soul.”
Grazin’ in the grass is where I wanna be scattering my dead father’s ashes — throwing a handful over my shoulder once, and filling fire ant monticules with the next.
Watching the magic 8 ball answer requests from another world.
What I’m Reading:
“An author is just a temporary state, anyway, a way to get from a story to reality.”
— Debbie Urbanski / After World: A Novel
Some off-brand thing was birthed
On an off-year
The offal smell was awful
Extravagant—too many notes
Of putrefaction
Like so many cast-off organs
Of admission, submission & perception
Go
Go on and sing in your off-key manner
In your off-kilter empty halter
Your bodice sleeveless & headless
In an off-putting way
Another year of offal figgy pudding
& awful (off-note) twelve-tone aleatory
The sound of going
Go
On-off, on-off, on-off
Like a stroboscopic Santa Claus
Go
What I’m Reading:
“Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”
— George Orwell / 1984
“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
— George Orwell / 1984
“I think I can see why we humans rarely deal with the big stuff, why we get hung up over borders, will never face the climate crisis, or solve world hunger. However hard we try to hold our thoughts on what’s happening in the game, our human brains will always want to scratch around in the small stuff.”
— Raynor Winn / Landlines
“looking out at old snow,
how the streetlight
illuminates heaps and cracks as if
to prove something unpleasant”
— Alice Mattison / “During the Night”
“It’s the beautiful thing about youth. There’s a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.”
— Blake Crouch / Dark Matter
“Sen used to sit on the porch and stare at the stars. She did this until one night when she felt herself disintegrating into multiple bright pieces. Not literally but this is how it felt. She felt herself scattering into pieces of light. The brighter light was the color of an animal’s eye, the pieces were the shapes of animals. Until she couldn’t feel anything human in her left.”
— Debbie Urbanski / After World: A Novel
“Since 2014 the price of renewable energy has dropped 90 percent and the planet’s temperature has spiked; it’s indefensible intellectually or morally to pretend we should just carry on as before.”
— Bill McKibben / “Different Kinds of Winning” / Substack
“Sun guzzles quick down August’s throat.
Final flagging gags of heat.”
— Sylvia Legris / “As If These Objects Were Moving and the Bird Itself Were Quiet”
“By the time we had finished with them they were only the shells of men. There was nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how they loved him.”
— George Orwell / 1984
What I’m Listening To:
“What have you got in that paper bag?
Is it a dose of Vitamin C?
Ain’t got no time for Western lesson
I am Damo Suzuki”
— The Fall / “I Am Damo Suzuki”
I overhear them talking of justification served brusquely — of the red, white and bluebell slash of false prophets.
I overhear them considering who to bring justification to next: the slogans of smarmy approbation, the soft-pedal formless relapses, the meringue laden queefs.
They’d kill just about anyone if they could get away with it, and they get away with an awful bruising lot.
No cavalcades of concertinas if you don’t crossbreed in their smoke-filled pathways. No fusillades if you don’t genuflect before their grimy brows, or their sweatshirt-impregnated cloudbursts — appreciate the smiles of fetid nappy droughts absorbed on the hemline of their soiled panthers.
What is this really about?
It’s about how Lugosi slicked back his hair, and the affectation of his countenance in Dracula.
It’s about the last polar bear. The last breath of fresh air. The last potable water. The last I love you. The last human.
Fossil Fuel means business, and business is booming!
(It all overheats)
It all goes boom!
Another has all the correct placebos listed.
Look there! A riot in the planetarium.
What I’m Reading:
“Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.”
— Blake Crouch / Dark Matter
I know of no one who considers themself a veteran. A Venetian, maybe. A Venusian, most definitely. A Velvet Undeground-ian … well, that’s me.
I play “Sister Ray” everyday. I start each day with 17+ minutes of “a good time … just like Sister Ray said” before I get out of bed. If I don’t start my day in this way, I don’t get out of bed. And I get out of bed everyday. So you may imagine my life as one of utmost principle and decorum. It is. While it’s “no way to earn a dollar,” I know how to “hit it sideways.” I am most adept. That is all you need know.
Life is distortion and static.
Life is full of stained carpets.
What I’m Reading:
“This isn’t, on her part, a lie. Humanity really did believe it would be around for much longer than this. No one and nothing would ever trigger a human extinction event to save the planet, people believed.”
— Debbie Urbanski / After World: A Novel
darkness in the afterworld
muzzles flash at night
black forest pierced by fireflies
What I’m Reading:
“Cold, moist, young phlegmy winter now doth lie
In swaddling clouts, like new-born infancy;”
— Anne Breadstreet / “Winter”
This is what I see as I screech this joyride. I take a photo because I prefer Icelandic volcanic fissures to insurrectionist former presidents or storm water floods.
I’ve copy and pasted manifold eons there and here to improve the deadbeat dad memories that flood back at inopportune moments.
Once I migrate the last 14 moonlights I remember, the visitations will commence—mostly in Spanish. I’ll hit the “return” key multiple times and achieve cursory appreciation from vignette to mutation. Then hit “archive.”
That’s it.
Jiggle for sedatives at your own risk.
What I’m Reading:
“Despite the record heat of 2023, this is still likely to be one of the coolest years in the lives of many young people.”
— Jonathan Watts / “Down to Earth” / The Guardian
thee istsfor manity reader 