brown desolation /
a land of crusts and bleached bones /
hovercopters drone
like drunken flies over rot /
scavenging spavined corpses•
What I’m Reading:
“However, they won’t say: the times were dark
Rather: why were their poets silent?”
— Bertolt Brecht / “In Dark Times”
“I am not going
to rot. I will not lie down in the ground
with the cauliflower and the eggshell mushroom,
and grow a fungus out of my stomach
like a foetus, my face sluicing off me . . .
. . . I know what happens in the fire closet,
when the elbow tendons shrink in the heat, and I
want it to happen — I want, dead, to
pull up my hands in fists, I want
to go out as a pugilist.”
— Sharon Olds / “By Fire” / Blood, Tin, Straw
“Not everyone is meant to change the world. We let the world change around us. We let it die if it will. We live small lives, constrained by habit and fear.”
— Sandra Newman / The Men
“Partisan clustering has increased even within households. In 1965, Iyengar said, only about 60 percent of married couples had the same party registration. Today, the figure is greater than 85 percent…”
— Joel Achenbach / “Science is revealing why American politics are so intensely polarized” / Washington Post
“… there are no non-radical options left before us … if you’ve got a problem of racism in your society and then you add climate change to it, then it goes crazy. If you’ve got a problem with inequality and then you add climate change to it, then it becomes sci-fi. So what brings me to this is that I’m not just worried about things getting hotter, and this is what I think that I wish more environmentalists would wrap their heads around: This is not just about things getting hotter and wetter, it’s about things getting meaner. And that’s why we have to talk about values and who we want to be in the face of this crisis.”
— Naomi Klein, to Michael Winship / “Naomi Klein: Climate Change ‘Not Just About Things Getting Hotter… It’s About Things Getting Meaner’” / https://billmoyers.com/story/naomi-klein-climate-change-not-just-about-things-getting-hotter-its-about-things-getting-meaner/
“I felt I could relate to his distress. I walked back to the dining area, feeling completely constipated, but closer to the experience of Christ.”
— Maya Binyam / Hangman
“It takes little courage to mutter a general complaint . . . There are many who pretend that cannon are aimed at them when in reality they are the target merely of opera glasses. They shout their generalized demands . . . They insist upon a generalized justice for which they have never done anything; they ask for a generalized freedom and demand a share of the booty which they have long since enjoyed. They think that truth is only what sounds nice . . . The trouble with them is: they do not know the truth.”
— Bertolt Brecht / “Writing The Truth: Five Difficulties”
“Everyone leaves somewhere.
Everyone leaves everyone.
And there you go.”
— Maira Kalman / Sara Berman’s Closet
What I’m Listening To:
“Rumor is you’re trying to save us
Reimagine and rename us
You’re burning all the books in this town
But you can’t destroy the words in our mouths
So do yourself a little favor
No one asked for a crusader”
— Sleater-Kinney / “Crusader”
Fade In.
Above the blinding flats of white screen reveries:
I’m flying over anonymous calamities with a courageous lack of temerity—then falling again. I plunge with celerity. A godwit plummet after 25,000 miles.
Think of the honeycombs of catacombs beneath us as we plant our feet on land again. There are rows—or rose and chaplets—along the banks of empire. So may tin-roofed huts we barely see the banks of barley spreading out to the horizon.
I rarely move once on land. But now we walk hundreds of miles—semibreves aloft in a hemidemisemiquaver aleatoric vortex—but it’s really just across the street, yet the zoetropic images flicking about in my vision are testament to the rustication of my senses. I give you abruptly-shaped children in sharp relief from the rheumy discharges of my cerebrum.
If dogma concerns you, I’d look elsewhere. I’d look for monologue arpeggiators . . .
Meanwhile, someone in this world right now is thinking a righteous thought—others are concerned with pimples in the foregrounded glass, while the memeflow streams splenetic in the background!
While the rest of us feed the catastrophe—
Mandolins exhort electric car homilies—
With righteous vespers at half-past the hour.
Cut To Black.
What I’m Reading:
“. . . By April, I was the clerk periscopic,
behind the desk of a welfare hotel, where a man hollering I love God
plunged from the fifth floor . . .”
— Martín Espada / “My Twenty-Fifth Year Amazed the Astrologers” / Imagine the Angels of Bread
belt buckles rain down
the devil’s hail
in appropriate private spaces
o, father of violence
o, father of terminal lies
o, father of red-hot welts
i am soft underbelly pillow-protected
an urchin turned upside-down
a cord-yanked silence
papa was a rollin stone cuts-out
hard arms edged
thee devil’s pincers
i am choke-throes of burning stars
i am black-red
liminal space
What I’m Reading:
“There was this woman who fondled me with teargas in her eyes. There was this man who hung about as silent as a gunshot. They were my parents. He would pull the trigger and her eyes would smart and burst. The echo played a rapid tattoo on the windowpanes … I would hear another world raging inside my skull as though at any moment I would spin like a silver top and disappear out of my head … He pulled the trigger several times one night and she like a cyclone wrung all the silence from me. I howled. Howled like a sinister symphony at full blast … I had somehow entered the wrong room, come into the wrong world. I had to escape. I have to escape. The shrill whine tore through my ears and deposited three policemen who froze the bright picture. The man was carried out of my life.”
— Dambudzo Marechera / Black Sunlight
i.
ise got a seven layer lenticular cloud
billowing in my skull
at 8:55 am
as snow slushes
to puddle-pish
in late january
gray
ise got a book
ise hating
that i keep plodding
through / blind
to choice / to stopping /
88% of the way
thru / too true
ii.
the problem with the future
is that u can’t stop it
coming & u can’t hit
the rewind
ise ain’t got friends
but ise got frenzy
ise got fury
/ altocumulus standing rage /
iii.
ise blinding
my eyes
ise got thee philistine blues
on repeat
What I’m Reading:
“For I desire as much space inside me
For light as space for shadow”
— Mutsuo Takahashi / “Dead Boy”
preface to the absent lavation
hostage letters: guidelines
for burning atrabilious simula
crum 2024
i.
ise got saturn on my printer
spavined upturned
and obtuse
ise got masscult extenders
like foam we’re #1 fingers
icy-topes of some
other half-life
ii.
don’t harvest ice from the pond
a rag said today
a world fraying yet
full of possibilities
there is certain extinction
in that mouthful
of rare melancholy
a splenetic marble
undone / over
chiseled
cast wax
vestiges of other
vestments & black
bile
iii.
saturn searches
for the dessert
child
(sense / cents / for a dying world)
What I’m Reading:
“Jan.24.2022
The funeral home calls and I open
your checkbook, a balance of mocking birds.”
— Victoria Chang / “Today”
i.
ise got exacto knife blues
three dozen moons mirrored deep
all festooned convexities waxing
gibbous on repeat
telescope inflected
beak-less gutter
snipes
ii.
/ wholly holy /
/ mawed + gashed /
/ swallowed whole /
iii.
ise got arroz con pollo shakes &
i look out on a january field
think i see
white crosses
in the snow
iv.
ise got skeevies —
the subatomic particles
that make you & me
don’t really matter
we are all children
of dark matter
we are all supermassive
black holes
we are annihilation
What I’m Reading:
“And I’m alone in the darkness again, exactly like I was before.”
— Jon Fosse / A Shining
he’s a grandiloquent viper bursting
at the imbrications—interlocking
eyes with yours—susurrations
sibilant charms + whispers
coiling
tight
breathless
What I’m Reading:
“If, when he’s dying,
he’s nothing left to say
he’ll feel bereft”
— Paul Bailey / “Humorous”
“I’m not into resolutions—though I understand why people like them. Every revolution of a circle brings with it something like another chance to step into our own stories differently. It’s also true every second of existence we have this chance.”
— Lidia and the Squid Squad and all the rocks in the world / “We’re all carrying on the best we can.” / Corporeal Writing email
“Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs-neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun.”
— Hannah Arendt / The Origins of Totalitarianism
“The fundamental reason high-tech solutions won’t save us from climate change is simple: time. Time is by far the most important variable — and the one thing technology can’t give us more of.”
— Dr. Jonathan Foley / “Can Tech Save Us From Climate Change?” / BBC Science Focus
“The angels are leaving all the alcoves everywhere, the medium in which Unicorns, Bigfoot, Green Deer exist growing always thinner, like the rain forests and the creatures that live and breathe in them. As the forests fall to make way for motels and Hiltons and McDonald’s, the whole magic universe is dying.”
— William S. Burroughs / The Cat Inside
“the airplanes fly
unassuming over O they eat
and eat the steel mouths
and burn what the earth
spun eons to form”
— Maureen N. McLane / “Some Say”
“Standing nearly as tall as a basketball hoop and weighing as much as a grizzly bear, Gigantopithecus blacki was the greatest ape to ever live. For more than a million years during the Pleistocene … these nearly 10-foot-tall apes were most likely doomed by their specialized diet and an inability to adapt to a changing environment.”
— Jack Tamisiea / “The Biggest Ape That Ever Lived Was Not Too Big to Fail” / The New York Times
“I want to be/like self rising bread/just there/in the warm/silent kitchen/sunny, ignored/and endlessly productive”
— Molly Schaeffer / “Some days, the light”
What I’m Listening To:
“turtleneck, iBook, power cord, medications
Button down laptop, hand cool body lotion, Bella Freud, YSL, Eckhaus Latta, Eyelash curler, vibrator, teaser, BYE BYE, BYE BYE”
— Kim Gordon / “BYE BYE”
ise got music inna
divine way and things
to tha heart
ise not in tha mood for american
splendor—ise got socio-political scabs—
rat-scabies / virulence / in the gloaming years
of empire
/ desire /
wese got idiosyncratic news—all the news
thats fit to fix / all the fixes youse detox
ing from / when u get over
ur first world wounds
lasso me a wild horse—all western rib
and sin / u ew ewe—
eeew! scribblin
fer da villain
ise bleedin out brain
cells—vote fer me
an ill set ya . . . in
vanilla—inna
inna vise
(no self-acceptance
on da wheel)
What I’m Reading:
“In the dark times
Will there be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.”
— Bertolt Brecht / “Motto” / Svendborg Poems
