$500 buys you a night’s worth of love: the tiles off-center + off-color the music fuzzy + attenuated crackles from dented chrome speakers an unspeakable effluence of ammonia + god knows what
plate 1. reproduces edvard munch’s the dance of life illustration vii. graphs countries number 1-8 gdp per capita figure 9. charts the death of love
the tv scrambles from color to b+w the clang of munitions the pungency of burning tires stills the air
fuck with love
What I’m Reading:
“… I’ve got to sprint and go hard. That’s one brilliant thing: When you’ve been seriously ill and you come out the other side, you really don’t fuck around anymore, ever.”
— Tracy Emin, to Jerry Saltz / “Tracey Emin Is Serious” / Vulture
not the embeds not the journalists in tunnels not the steel shards
no no
not the shards of steel not the shrapnel intercepts not in this firmament not the nuggets not the steel shards not the husks of buildings not the concrete chunks not the rebar rampikes
no no
not the sleep lost not rem not core not deep
no no
not us not them not thee other not the carnage not the death not the censorship
no no
not the news not the steel shards not the nuggets
What I’m Reading:
“There’s a rat / scrambling / From light with fleshy trash in its mouth. A / baby strapped / to its mother’s back, cut loose.”
— Joy Harjo / “How to Write a Poem in a Time of War”
“What you make doesn’t have to be witnessed, recorded, sold, or encased in glass for it to be a work of art.”
— Rick Rubin / The Creative Act: A Way of Being
“… many nights of death from the clouds, mornings surprised to be waking from the sleep of death, still unburied and alive but with no safe place. Leave, yes, we obey the leaflets, but go where? To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged? To camp misery and camp remain here. I ask you then, where?”
— Carolyn Forché / “The Boatman”
“Without actions that address the root problem of humanity taking more from Earth than it can safely give, we’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater … “By 2100, as many as 3 billion to 6 billion people may find themselves outside Earth’s livable regions, meaning they will be encountering severe heat, limited food availability and elevated mortality rates.”
— Dr Christopher Wolf / “The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory” / BioScience
“In some languages the word for dream is the same as for music
is the kind of thing poets like to say to prove they’re on your side
but no one is always on your side not even a poet”
— Dobby Gibson / “Small Craft Talk”
“And that actually would be my advice: don’t be too neat about finishing something before starting something new. Keep many pieces going at once and you’ll never face a blank page (or screen).”
— Lydia Davis / “If Lydia Davis Wasn’t a Writer, She’d Devote Herself to Climate Activism” / Lithub
“You can’t begin just anywhere. It’s a wreck.”
— Joy Harjo / “How to Write a Poem in a Time of War”
“To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving. A practice of paying attention.”
— Rick Rubin / The Creative Act: A Way of Being
What I’m Listening To:
“Stop conversation And experience joy And walk outside… …Out here the air is new”
The sum of laboring on and on (and on) In beginner’s mind. Your perception arcs and a red offense Descends—you’re taken aback. After further reflection my flexion locks, Fades, and norms dissolve. Each sense serrated, your soul ragged, Your eyes have seen the dark limit. I know less than I think I know (I know This factually) and my rocks are punks. My exuberance is childlike / your need For creation comes first. I wait.
What I’m Reading:
“Spinning wind into something vatic: seven synchronized giantesses. A thought only rarely coalesces from the brain’s static.”
Purely accessing the subconscious When Seagulls dive bomb white squirts The details and setting un-dreamlike Unsettling Randomness determined by precise Algorithms It’s always here but overcast / hidden By a thicker layer of clouds + Eels
What I’m Reading:
“Art is supposed to be about the constant process of change, of pushing the envelope with perception so that you get closer to understanding what existing is. It’s ultimately a philosophical quest for a meaning of life and a comprehension of mortality and all of those big questions. It’s not supposed to be about careers. It’s supposed to be about someone who’s just desperately trying to express something.”
3 pizzas (only 2 pictured because I ate the rubberiest one) / Thai coconut chicken with brown rice / a pound of ground turkey / chicken korma with brown rice / chicken enchilada dinner (a soggy mess) / chicken tenders / mac and cheese with turkey burger / 2 veggie naanwiches and potato & pea samosas / AND a super cheesy omelet
guess how i spent the morning
come on over & eat while i sop cold water out of the moribund freezer
(so thankful to have food and the ability to replace or fix the appliance, billions do not)
What I’m Reading:
“The problem is that nobody has real answers. The problem is that the problem is us … The enemy isn’t out there somewhere the enemy is ourselves. Not as individuals, but as a collective. A system. A hive.”
— Roy Scranton / Learning to Die In the Anthropocene
My clone is four misdeeds overlong— Always in the shade and up on a bet. A doppelgänger in northward transmission, And passing tramlines full of misapprehension And stickleback roe.
Then, about 30 sedatives in, Its vision fades to black and my own Blazes refulgent, then backwater again. A sable southern ruse is framed In Pasolini’s heavenly iPad. A processed retraction emerges From the spacesuit audio: more rhythmic, More foregrounded, in spare northern Quarter notes and given an improvisatory Pussyfoot in aural abandon.
I abandon all hope Of compositional interlocution.
The doppelgänger supplants me …
Now it seems Tokyo has no defense.
What I’m Reading:
“I realized today that I will die with work unfinished, and someone will have to find it. I am determined to be alone, so who knows who will have to sift through it all—fragments of pages of nothing”
“Alas, very soon everything will disappear: the birdcalls, the delicate blossoms. In the end, even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.”
— Louise Glück / “Primavera”
“The problem is that global decarbonization is effectively irreconcilable with global capitalism. Capitalism needs to produce profit in order to spur investment. Profit requires growth. Global economic growth, even basic economic stability, depends on cheap, efficient energy.”
— Roy Scranton / Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
“The quicksand pits they built were good. Our amputation teams were better. We trained some birds to steal their wheat. They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace. They do this, we do that… Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand (10,000) brutal, beautiful years.”
— Thomas Lux / “The People of the Other Village”
“Accelerated ice melt in west Antarctica is inevitable for the rest of the century no matter how much carbon emissions are cut, research indicates. The implications for sea level rise are ‘dire’, scientists say, and mean some coastal cities may have to be abandoned … Previous studies have suggested it is doomed to collapse over the course of centuries, but the new study shows that even drastic emissions cuts in the coming decades will not slow the melting.”
— Damian Carrington / “Rapid ice melt in west Antarctica now inevitable, research shows” / The Guardian
“I write as though you could understand And I could say it One must always pretend something Among the dying”
— WS Merwin / “For A Coming Extinction”
“In my life I see no difference between making pots, cooking, and growing vegetables. They are all related. However, there is a need for me to work in clay. It is so gratifying, and I get so much joy from it, and it gives me many answers for my life.”
— Toshiko Takaezu / “Shaping Abstraction” / MFA Boston
“… I am a theft waiting to happen, a rotten spell visioning …”
— Ruth Ellen Kocher / “Grow”
image: detail of toshiko takaezu’s “shaping abstraction” / mfa boston
What I’m Listening To:
“I’m so glad I met you You helped me see Just how very much I hate me”
thee istsfor manity reader 