yellow umbrellas sprouting
in the rainforest
canopies of the insects
orange gates appear
in the desert signaling
humans on the move
mass migrations from the heat
siroccos for company
What I’m Reading:
“Jan.16.2022
They drop the morphine under your tongue. How
it must feel like a faint raindrop taken
from the sky.”
— Victoria Chang / “Today”
I trap my shadow.
I pin it by footpad to the concrete.
I crush it.
Happiness wanes
At the terminal point—
At the edge of the nimbus.
What I’m Reading:
“the darkness is as heavy as he is himself, he thinks, and the darkness is dense and thick, now it is one single darkness, a play of blackness”
— Jon Fosse / Aliss at the Fire
“If I lean in,
I can hear all the words said in your
life, now in a different order. There’s still
no love, even though I’ve looked through all the
words twice.
— Victoria Chang / “Today”
“Decades ago, our politicians and engineers and other problem-solvers failed to build us a bridge to the future when they had the chance. Now, stranded here in the early 21st century, a chasm opening up in front of us, we must find a different path between the worlds. Caught in the teeth of an unsolvable predicament, facing a future “dark and darkening further,” we must still walk forward. But how? Neither pessimism nor simple optimism is going to cut it for us. Something more robust is needed.”
— Andrew Boyd / I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
“We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.”
— William S. Burroughs / The Cat Inside
“The less plastic in contact with your food the better, because even if it’s not breaking into microplastics, it could be leaching chemicals directly into the food.”
—Matt Simon / “Microplastics are everywhere. Here’s what that means for your health.” / Apple News In Conversation
“Reader, it breaks.
We are filled with faults.
Here it is again.
An embroidered wound.”
— Jennifer Sperry Steinorth / Her Read: A Graphic Poem
“… concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power, especially as the cost of elections continues to skyrocket. There is the shredding of the democratic system by the rapid increase in the ability to just buy elections.”
— Noam Chomsky / Requiem for the American Dream
“I spend the day in other people’s tears.”
— Victoria Chang / “Today”
What I’m Listening To:
“I am still falling, the earth is dying
Don’t stop the party, the world is spinning
And you’re just a body, you’re just a body”
— Lucinda Chua / “Somebody Who”
I’d rather say…
My heart, a meatgrinder pulse in your cosmic stew churns out galaxies of beatpoet farrago. Each beat splicing and fractionating you into every nightmare, every delirium, every synaptic Fata Morgana. You’re the papaver fix that jolts my popovers, the junky serenade that jellies through my nervous system.
Imagine, butter babe, a neon skyline tattooed on the underside of your eyelids, that’s the cityscape of my infection. Every alleyway a memory, every skyscraper a bomb cyclone shrieking your name. And I shirk in my unpressed shirt, a beatnik bard, serenading you with my distortion and static.
You’re a word virus, yellowjacket momma, infecting the universe with our scruffy love. It’s going to be negative fifteen, but I’ll be out there, tangled in a Möbius strip of clenched sphincters, where time unravels, every kiss an eternal shout, every touch a super-sized syzygy. Forget linear narrative, moon pie! I’m a quantum entangled sun in coronal mass ejection across the cosmic void. I’m as asynchronous and disjunctive as they come.
So open your third eye, moonbeam, this ain’t no Hallmark romance. This is pure love that explodes off the page and into your soul via your medulla… will you be my Valentine? My St. Sebastian pin cushion?
What I’m Reading:
As Brion Gysin says: “Man is a bad animal!”
— William S. Burroughs / The Cat Inside
bulldog benefactor alcohols the bite—
spindles the jab
firework atlas sahib jackboots the algorithm—
compliant
cerberus-headed and addled—
i hold u in
there is no need for intent or evacuation—
angels bullfight fireflies
drink
What I’m Reading:
“we surrender
two birds
and
three children in the furnace”
— Jennifer Sperry Steinorth / Her Read: A Graphic Poem
I’ve planted it here in my bones and made it a part of the ringing in my ears. There’s no Marquessa of Nice Dreams. All is tinnitus and susurration—nightmares in the depths of our daily miracles.
Place your hand here on this chopping block. I promise to draw it from memory once I’ve severed it. Then I’ll scotch tape the drawing onto your stump.
Call me peculiar, call me nightmare whippersnapper, but don’t call me Mister Marmolista!
The rocks I chip away at are imperfection. I want to free the plague inside of the blocks of marble.
I’m a bit unusual, you see. I work addition by subtraction. I’m an attraction. Come one, come all—but don’t use my come blanket, that is all mine.
Come into the light where I may see you better and clarify what mystifies me about you. Then I’ll ask about that odd orange-yellow patina all about you—about millet and colitis.
I don’t recall where I heard about that mondegreen once. Instead of hearing: “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes,” they heard “a girl with colitis goes by.”
So call me Mr. Mondegreen instead—that’s my life.
Now you may go about yours. Have a nice day.
What I’m Reading:
“you are the cow that gives birth
to an unutterable fantasy
you are the jelly
& you are the come blanket”
— Harris Schiff / “Pure Poison”
The world is full of asterisks and mollusks, but the asterisks are quickly replacing the mollusks. Whelks and welts are abundant in the inner spheres of lucubration and indigestion. Are you studying my gestations? My ravenous clawed and fanged It’s Alive child? … or thingamajiggy, as it were? I’m a great thespian, tragician, and imperturbable babbler of dreams. A pockmarked jelly rolled Bwana Johnny wannabe dreamer schemer—eater of beans—my grandmother’s frijoles colorados, if you please. This pointless thumb striking emolument signifying nothing but pounds and furies. What have I come to? What can I bear? What will I do next but lament the asterisk?* (Yes, ok) What a pernicious periwinkle am I. Where’s John P. Ryan when you need him?
What I’m Reading:
“You’d never
know the planet is dying. Here, the clouds
have holes in them and the deer are more etched
with shadow. “
— Victoria Chang / “Today”
What I’m Reading:
“There is snow, now—
A thing of silent creeping—
And day is strange half-night”
— D’Arcy McNickle / “The Mountains”
Me, ya’ sure.
fade into man and woman, see the words into heads
Where violet leaves ain’t
where next, you know, mouth without teeth
nightmare?
You hate a lot of it TALL
degenerate and faithless
City is a dog, prison is a prison
Prisms and sky dogs
Hate and holes
Voles and moles
Heat and hate
in a few, it’s just how paint sails
wind warps (and so on)
just a guy, you say
Exactly, eggs-actley! the point —>
i’m ears in arrears one head
toward the horizon
not dark not, not anything at all,
Really
The point is The Pulling
relations conflations + afflatus
i’m in a back way jumbled
& green—
gang-renous
SwoLLen and venomous
c u t-up in seaweed and night-
mare
standing in thee Golden ratio:
budded in Biddeford and Buddha-
suffused + elated (again) I have
A culture—mono and agro—
Ogre and agape. Respond////
emergency
… paper out of time
What I’m Reading:
“Life was one long not knowing anything at all: not knowing that there they were in their cage, husband and wife, husband and husband, wife and children, father and father, sons and fathers, terrified, universal apes.”
— José Revueltas / The Hole
“All your life you’ve been asleep, all of us sleeping and now the great waking begins.”
— Paul Lynch / Prophet Song
“This part of the ritual was always a release.
Everyone relaxed and beamed. Another thought had been correctly thought, another feeling rightly felt. One saw how little the Party asked, after all. You needn’t know all the latest Newspeak words or struggle to believe contradictory things. If you hated the enemy, you could be loved. People smiled dopily at each other, and some eyes welled with tears.
They had had a good Hate.”
— Sandra Newman / Julia
“The most powerful beings in the world are the ones that endure the most.”
— Blake Leeper / U.S. Paralympic Athlete / Headspace
“This feeling now that something has come into the house, she wants to put the baby down, she wants to stand and think, seeing how it stood with the two men and came into the hallway of its own accord, something formless yet felt. She can sense it skulking alongside her as she steps through the living room.”
— Paul Lynch / Prophet Song
“Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.”
— Amitav Ghosh / The Great Derangement
“I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.”
— James Baldwin / TV interview excerpt, I Am Not Your Negro
“… history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave…”
— Paul Lynch / Prophet Song
What I’m Listening To:
“Enough about human rights
What about whale rights
What about snail rights …
What about plant rights
What about cat rights”
— Ghost Train Orchestra & Kronos Quartet / “Enough About Human Rights”
thee istsfor manity reader 