I Grow Monstrous with the Leukemia of the World

• I'm healing, fall-wise.
• I keep thinking about running out to get between two assholes about to fight. I don't know if I would have done it before, I never had had to do it before.
• Elric and I got into a slap fight by the B&O four decades ago, near Barnesville, parked at the station on 109. Morningstar was there, goading. That's my battle history.
• Elric, your father told Planet about Ned.
• I never put myself in situations. 
• Leave the party when the lacrosse team arrives.
• Treat people respectfully and, that failing, get the fuck out of their lives and most times they'll get the fuck out of yours.
• Maybe, probably, I'd have reacted the same twenty years ago.
• I don't think - unreliable narrator here - twenty years ago I'd been eager to go.
• I was eager to go, and had fun.
• We are being rewired.
• And then I fell on my face having fun.
• It's the frequency. And it's the frequency.

• My favorite REM song. Was never love, was never hate.
• Of course I seethe. I aggressively drive the speed limit to piss motherfuckers off.
• Yesterday made every GOP every Dem and their motherfucking Glee Clubs giddy.
• That's not fair. Dems and their motherfucking Glee Clubs are giddier.
• Political violence.
• Class warfare.
• Postmodern roots of the Alt-Right.
• The Stupime Object of Ideology.
• Bark the good Bark.
• Recollections of the Image Nation.
• Dispensing God's care.
• Algorithmic decision-making.
• Capitalism protects bigots.
• Gaza gets three hours of electricity a day.
• Kicking hives. No need for false flags when kicking hives works.
• Yes, it's the same strategy as ever, and every era thinks it's the apocalypse, but....
• Yes, the photo at top of post makes Sparks songs play in my head too.
• altermodernism, cosmodernism, digimodernism, metamodernism, performatism, post-digital, post-humanism, and the clunky post-postmodernism.

HIS SUICIDE

May Swenson

He looked down at his withering body and saw a hair

near his navel, swaying.
   

And now he saw his other hairs rise up.
   

He felt a hectic current in his veins.

Looking within, he saw the bubbling of his blood.
   

He cursed his fever, saying:

“It is the chemistry of prayer.

It increases in frequency,

seeding panic to all my being.

My cells swell with the liquid of guilt they fabricate,

juices of hatred eat my belly

my corpuscles make war in me as they devour each other.

My head heats in the combustion of anxiety,

I am polluted by the secretions of my soul’s decay,

while my brain wears away

with the scratching night and day

on the encephalograph of prayer.

I grow monstrous with the leukemia of the world.”
    

And he heard the hair say: “Hear me.”

And he saw it grow gray as it waved.

All his hairs he saw whiten,

and, numberless, wilt from their erect electric listening.

He saw them topple from their roots.

“How dare you!” he cursed them.

There surged a brief resuscitation to his body.

His heart took heart and pounded twice

with the health of fear

But then the plague of prayer redoubled and overwhelmed him.
    

In his feebleness he raged, and said:

“I will tear out this evil and free it.”

   

With his withered hands he tore the remaining hairs

from his body and head.

With his nails he opened his breast,

and with his fist he exploded his heart,

which erupted, a black and red volcano.
      

As his brain tasted, for the first time,

the birth of his doom,

he came a rolling tide, a floating mountain of ecstasy.

“I see you! I love you!” his eyes cried,

overflowing with his bright blood.

“You were the light of the world

that are now my gushing tears—

the kind and fiery tears of chaos, that wash my eyes

with the cure of oblivion.”
    

“He hears us!” cried his sick blood

pouring from his ears.

“Even as of old he heard our hair before it perished.”
  

With his last strength, the chemistry of prayer,

a few drops of his blood coagulated.

That clot whirled out, free, in the vortex of the universe.