a hapless haptic shadow
infinite dashed lines
funk seeps in through puncture holes
What I’m Reading:
“Filling with rain in the streets,
this September night’s lifting me up
in an old-time elevator.
Night’s ending, time’s tearing.
And the cross streets fuse together in twisted images.”
— Judita Vaičiūnaitė / “September Night”
look in the mirror
misdemeanors and woodpiles
perfect enema-rickshaw
beginner landslides
on and off at the most inopportune
hot chomp brag
lone cocoa beat transcendence
a bunker of rogue startles
mild clairvoyance and approbation
a vignette sorbet
a rim idiom
i was an egotist in a spangled tabernacle
the most lost of causes
we are still here
unsupervised and undeserving
What I’m Reading:
“The sky shatters like a blue shell;
Veins from the back of the right hand pull free,
And float in the air, a tree of dead blood;”
— Robert Davis / “Daily”
(over tea)
and over text
sitting two feet away from each other
she says:
Why don’t you drink the rest of this?
i sez:
if u didn’t want it why did u make it?
if u don’t drink ur tea u can’t have any pudding
she says:
You mean, if you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding?
i sez:
no i meant what i piston thumbed u—exactly that
she says:
Why are we texting sitting across from each other? This is stupid.
i sez:
bcause im a stupid fool trying to meld into this oppressive ambient noise
she says:
Ambient like Eno?! This isn’t an airport it’s a busy Starbucks.
i sez:
no ambient like loureed metal machine music—forced contrived overwhelming i want to disappear into it
she says:
This is dull let’s go. Do you want this tea?
i sez:
do u want me to bus ur cup?
or do u want me to cup ur bust?
she says:
Goodbye!
(i wonder where she b now)
What I’m Reading:
“Or the way these poems found me
All of it, everywhere
I am pouring something out of me
With every step that I take”
— Dorothea Lasky / “Poems: Blood”
Then there was Kankakee—that year of enervating visions—and the posse of teenage courtiers whose dizzying luck was doomed by a pair of “ragged claws.” Fragile, as the wounded world, and openly melancholic. Yes, we had cinematic aspirations but the poisons were rapturous, draining our inner eye imagery, leaving only reverberations and badly drawn lines out of critical focal acuity. We only saw defendant palindromes swirling in the airy miasmas—penumbral and schoolmistress gray.
We never saw iridescent finches again. The world resolved as a dartboard roach living in pastina. We embodied the prosaic. The oneiric forever drained away.
We were forever wounded and relegated to lifespans of haunting memories without the ability to express ourselves precisely. We lived forever outside of the letterbox, mired in circles of confusion and extraneous silver halide crystals. Perception became a useless digital cortex.
We are now contortionists lacking flexibility—amoral tank flankers and lyric flunkies. We die with each simple fade to black.
This is a tragic feeling we live with. We expire as hopeless eyepieces suffocating in Vaseline stains.
We cleave the wings of our dreams.
What I’m Reading:
“I think the name you get given at birth should be seen as a temporary tag, and it goes with the families and the social groups and the expectations of what we’re supposed to belong to; if that tag doesn’t fit what you imagine you wish to become, it should be discarded.”
— Genesis P-Orridge / Nonbinary: A Memoir
I’m invoking a geraranium removal that is highly recommend—a powdered blessing of twisted rebounds (love spills).
These thrills cleave and clang my heart.
No detractor can spill my torch.
Love is a wastebasket when finished using.
What I’m Reading:
“Dread at home, dread to the bone, my father dangling his guillotine of dread. Dread as daily bread. Nursed dark by decades of dread”
— Safiya Sinclair / “Planet Dread”
this will be a backwards mask
this will be self-abasing
this will be scrofulous and un-dexterous
so
this will be loutish
this will be petty
this will be unpleasant
i am feeling unpleasant
this will be something of a cure
this will be an ad hoc exorcism
this will be generated by piston thumbs
and (this will include a photograph of carpet)
this will be the denouement
this will be the end of this
this will be all of that
What I’m Reading:
“When I die, I will come in fast and low. I will stick the landing. There will be no confusion. The dead will make room for me.”
— Richard Siken / “Real Estate”
“my name is zero,
my name is nonce, my name is nobody, who the hell are you.”
— Nora Claire Miller / “Rumor”
“How do you get through this miasma of complacency and make people listen? How do we break through it and slap people’s faces—metaphorically—and say, ‘The world’s collapsing around you, and all you’re worried about is how many ‘likes’ you’ve got on your social media accounts. For fuck’s sake, wake up!”
— Genesis P-Orridge / Nonbinary: A Memoir
“As the dead increased,
the world of objects seemed more dense,
different from when our child-days dragged
or a sunflower’s face, which, once arrived,
was heaviness itself.”
— Kathleen Pierce / “Datura”
“Now, it’s fully embraced by a major political party in the United States, and by authoritarian regimes in other countries such as Hungary and, previously, Brazil. It’s sanctioned by elected leaders in the US Congress. It’s reached a new level of organization and aggression — it’s starting to resemble the 1930s, when Joseph Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union portrayed scientists as enemies of the state.”
— Julian Nowogrodzki / “Vaccine specialist Peter Hotez: scientists are ‘under attack for someone else’s political gain’” / Nature
“A muster of peacocks show off their
tails, but instead of feathers,
knives. And smoke where their
voices should be.”
— Suzi F. Garcia / “A Future History”
“Human activity is turning Earth into a world that may no longer adequately support the societies we’ve built, scientists warn in a new study charting whether and by how much we have surpassed nine planetary boundaries.”
— Meghan Bartels / “Humans Have Crossed 6 of 9 Planetary Boundaries” / The Guardian
“But the Devil is also the scarecrow that runs across the fields when everyone is asleep.”
— Liliana Colanzi / “The Narrow Way” / The New Yorker
What I’m Listening To:
“I object to you
Our deal’s un-struck
Oh, what a time to be brave
Walking ‘round an empty grave”
— Wilco / “Cousin”
Venn diagrammer,
Put-down fleshpot-bitten particulars, play me the warped Uriah bluffs. Shadow and hiss.
Triumph pad,
Draw me a Cossack and hatchway bursary embryos in and out on sternum ridges. Bring me the bluffs.
White taboo clown,
Password me the caviar spotlight of that old residence roe. Handbill and plumb,
Sinner ‘74 brazier,
Bring a Peckinpah rough cut, a splatter and blush. Bring me, please, the headlamp of A. Garcia. That mud don’t play until ten after four.
Mud don’t play.
Mud don’t.
What I’m Reading:
“I don’t quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I’m not quite sure. I don’t want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch.”
— John Ashbery
Good Mortgage,
I wanted to clarify my email from yesterday regarding the garment promenade. Please remember the same rummages apply for vocal spaniels. If you are physically able you must go out into the neighborhood to parliamentarian.
If you have a handmaiden playbill or special civilians and cannot go out into the neighborhood please see the concrete stair to make arseholes.
Please refinery to my previous email regarding vocal spaniels should you have any quicksands.
Kinsman regiments,
S.
What I’m Reading:
“Tightness squeezes the ocean of fish-words,
and there’s no home for the pigeon to fly back to.
Your place is gone, your land,
everything’s occupied, frozen, dead.”
— Katrina Haddad / “There Is Nowhere to Go Back To”
“blah blah blah
there was a plague.
again.”
— Samiya Bashir / “Some days of wine and pastry”
I’m not interested in poetry. I don’t know what interests me. Non-dullness, I suppose. Proper poetry is dead poetry even if it looks good.”
— Charles Bukowski / On Writing
“Let it be an unruly one—an unplucked ass hair—not collagen but spite—not to live to
annihilate other living things—just to receive…”
— Wendy Xu / “Notes on Sentence Crossing”
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.”
— Anne Lamott / Bird by Bird
“Trees rehearse
the gestures of fire.
“This is how we will burn,”
say the trees.”
— Robert Carnevale / “Exemplary”
“Earth’s life support systems have been so damaged that the planet is ‘well outside the safe operating space for humanity’, scientists have warned.”
— Damian Carrington / “Climate Crisis” / The Guardian
“so it turns out i’m allergic to society as a whole. when in doubt, they say, go back in time. when i wanna feel safe i figure i should want something else. everywhere i go everyone i see could be a shooter and my breasts beneath bulletproof vests squeeze the breath outta me.”
— Samiya Bashir / “Some days of wine and pastry”
What I’m Listening To:
“That’s clean like recycling
My Steve McQueen eats Abilene
That man drinks cultures of lamb
Brined Balkan, bobo yams”
—Brnda / “Beverage of Choice”
thee istsfor manity reader 