the evocation of ink sounding delinquent ten splotches emitting sound
turn on your pivot graphite screed on a sharp point black holographs spread engravers burp dark matter— speech balloons full of stardust
accretion disks cut the universe in segements write: wish you were here
What I’m Reading:
“We don’t fully understand if the material observed in radio waves is coming from the accretion disk or if it is being stored somewhere closer to the black hole. Black holes are definitely messy eaters, though.”
— Yvette Cendes, research associate at the Havard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics / Live Science
The refulgent quality of my psychopomp is only surpassed by my staring into the sun.
Psychopomp?
Who the hell needs to be led in?
I often stare into the sun. It’s the only way I know to calm down. My father required it of me when I was a young boy — he broke me early and often. He was the superintendent of our crumbling building in Camarioca after the revolution. Our homely squalor had a taste and a color: bile-yellow.
When I was a pre-teen my mother also demanded that I stare for hours at the sun. One early morning she plunged all of my father’s screwdrivers — a dozen from his tool box — into his chest; and when I say early morning I mean when it was still dark out. The talon ends of three claw hammers were embedded into his head.
None of this was traumatizing at the time. But over the past few years I find myself living inside that visionary loop multiple times daily. And here, when I say daily, I mean when it’s light out. In the dark I have other devices and literary tropes to rely on.
All these years later I live in exile, in Hialeah, and as you might imagine I am half blind. I still look into the sun out of habit, but the sun at this hyper-capitalist meridian is out of tune — a legato A minor flat 6 chord that fills me with revulsion. I want to go back to my island where the sun is in the proper key.
But for now I wait in this dollar-rama thrift shop of a philosophically bankrupt and pestilent country. At least I still have my guaguancó and my son montuno. I carry those in my heart everywhere I go.
I do like the sound of the word kookaburra but I hate the fact that’s it’s a god damned dumb-ass looking bird. It should be a god damned marsupial with a name like that. I hate it when life does that!
Life does that all the time.
And I hate inhabiting my skin. It gets to me, especially these days — it happens more and more that I find myself with some sharp implement in hand ideating about all sorts of bitter and painful ends for myself, but I can’t get anything to happen. My hands won’t conform to the images unspooling in the projection room in my head.
But, man, do I remember mother and those stare-downs with the sun. For the record, I never blinked first. I was always called away to do my chores.
Sometimes I envy how the Mongols had Caffa (I think they call it Feodosia now) and their trebuchet delights; how the Spaniards had their mastiffs for Taino ambush oneupmanship; and how deftly American colonials deployed their pox blankets.
Why can’t I get what I want?
Please, please, please let me get what I want… but I’m even off of that song, as the man who sang it is a supremacist of some sort now.
The rails— bottom and top — don’t stay in place anymore… everything that rises must converge… or so mother told me. But I found, as all frauds are eventually found out — it was really something she gleaned from a Flannery O’Connor narrative… and then she said that Hemingway rewrote the last page of The Sun Also Rises 39 times.
Apocrypha?
Sometimes I feel like a detached bathysphere. All I have is this metaphoric gibbet and the wheel: I’m here alone. Pitched up here — 30 feet in the air, spinning a half turn with every stiff breeze…
What I Read On The Sidewalk:
“I hear your voice in all the noises of the world.”
“Climate change is a pandemic that we need to fight quickly. See how fast the degradation of the climate is going – I think it’s going even faster than we predicted … Everyone is fixated on 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and it’s a very important target. But actually, some very bad things could happen, in terms of soil degradation, water scarcity and desertification, way before 1.5C.”
— Alain-Richard Donwahi, President of the UN’s desertification conference / “Global heating likely to hit world food supply before 1.5C, says UN expert” / The Guardian
“All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear.”
— Sylvia Plath / “Morning Song”
“By digging up millions of years of biology and setting it on fire, in the course of a century or two, we’ve managed to overwhelm the world … We’ve poured heat into the air and especially into the oceans, and now that heat is beginning to dominate life on our planet. We can still back off some: every pipeline we shut down and every solar panel we install contributes … But as Florida found out again on Wednesday morning, and the world rediscovered this brutally hot summer, we’ve already shifted our earth in the most fundamental fashion.”
— Bill McKibben / “Hurricane Idalia’s Explosive Power Comes from Abnormally Hot Oceans” / The New Yorker
“She sits inside a viewfinder while the horizon scans her brain for fires. The sky sags into a blue body cast. What is the meaning of a mountain of masks?”
— Lauren Russell / “Exposition”
“Hence extinction credits.
Today, if you were a company like Brahmasamudram Mining and you proposed to wipe a species from the face of the earth, you basically just had to hand in a voucher to do it. The name for this voucher was an extinction credit. An extinction credit could buy you bulldozing rights to any species on earth…”
— Ned Beauman / Venomous Lumpsuckers
“i want to have something to say about my own destiny something i care about something of value something important”
— Jennifer Karmin / “work: an ode for the human micropoem”
“[Look at] the effects of droughts on food security, the effects of droughts on migration of population, the effect of droughts on inflation. We could have an acceleration of negative effects, other than temperature…”
— Alain-Richard Donwahi, President of the UN’s desertification conference / “Global heating likely to hit world food supply before 1.5C, says UN expert” / The Guardian
What I’m Listening To:
“And the car reverses over And his body rolls over Crushed from the shoulder You can hear the bones humming Singing like a puncture”
thee istsfor manity reader 