I'm such a hot mess my first thought was that American shitlords watched French protesters battling police over French shitlords stealing protesters' retirement and watched Israeli protesters battling police over the crckrztn of Israeli law and society and became so alarmed that they false-flagged a trans-attack on an ultra-crckr/chrstr elementary school to distract attention from populist progressive protest and keep American crckrzation front and center and on schedule, and I still maintain that's slightly plausible while acknowledging our shitlords rely more on stochastic crckr/chrstr violence than shitlord schemed and prompted and executed crckr/chrstr violence
Which happens first: shitlords incite civil war in America or initiate WW3 between western Whitemanistan and the Subhuman World's Shitlords, you're absolutely right, Death to the Either/Or. Hot mess, me. Tenement Years released 35 years ago today
ON INSOMNIA
Fran Lock
And contemplate this: the heat-treated hairdos of next-door
neighbors, the roseate nosebleeds of fuckboys in hoodies;
your own face, rinsed in the mirror, the sweet green sweat
you’re riddled with in mornings, a rock pool reflection under
algaecidal light. You are going nowhere. This poem yokes
you, to the pain you are chronic and adipose with; to the desk,
to the chair, to ergonomic purgatory. And to the body, its
spasms and its rhapsodies, three-part harmonies, one-chord
wonders. You will never be whole. The voices. His voice,
broadcast on your remedial frequency, making its way
through a rubbishy dusk, the streetlamps beaming fizzy glow
like Lucozade. You will never be whole. Vomit o’clock
and the brain is Kraken, white and shaking. Open the window,
pry the chipboard from the window; fill your punctured eye
with stars. And contemplate this: Saturday night and the dirt
purrs with it; cars, litter bins, pit bull dogs. A girl with high
Yorick cheekbones drags a false nail down the scratchy
surface of a bri-nylon sleeplessness. A man rides ignorance
like a white horse, kicking mirrors from parked cars. You
have the itch under your skin. Insectile dysfunction. Lust,
with its own murky gravities. You will fail. You have not
made a friend of this city and you will fail. Cup your eyes
like coins. Addiction holds such simplicity. Check your
used-car contours in the broken glass. You are going
nowhere. They cannot nail you to a pronoun, hot mess
of cravings and behaviors, tainted frailty, old meat’s
rancid rainbow. Ugly. Contemplate. Consider: your
lilies, toiling like deaf ears, tearing the tired night a new
one, stirring a sulfate dust in your veins. Your eyes
are blue with pseudo-scientific toxicity, with chemical
expectancy, a dread that dries a smile like paint. Your
blood is on fire, full of bellicose adrenaline, nitrate
and neon; brighter, even, than the hoary fluorescence
of angels. It is so late. And you are pining the rhinestone
shine of a lost narcotism. Now trauma’s your ergotamine.
Trauma, your ergot, your argot of rye. Awful thought
that treads the brain’s rank breadth. Silence. Pray silence.
Pray the dark room away, the candles, the pious vibrations
of flame; the dim bulb with its gospel of moths, one
hundred pairs of gloved hands clasped to powder.
Marooned in your gooseflesh, one hand does not know
what the other is doing. It’s three a.m., the mind’s alive
like frostbite, a cold burn that blackens things. Your
graphite smile could shatter. Thoughts of him have
poisoned you, rust in the blood. You have not eaten
for days, you mottle, run your own hands over your
oxidizing thighs, watch the bruises ripen to a landmass,
a landmark, a brave new world, a here be dragons.
You listen to yourself, creaking like rope; your body, its
canned laughter repeating mean and low, throwing
out thought according to the malnourished algorithm
some devil has devised. You clutch and sway in a crêpe
air and you want-want-want what you’ll never have
again: sleep; his image breaking across your scrubbed
flesh like surf. Contemplate this: this is forever.
There is no movie montage where you’ll shop yourself
to transformation. You will never be whole. And grief
is not a line we walk to wellness; the tidy smirk
of therapy, the therapized, the girls licking flakes of gold-
leaf pastry from a Pret a Manger croissant, saying you
should take up yoga. Grief is a longing in the body, your
body, the machine-tooled aesthetics of starvation. It’s
so uncool, a super-terrestrial emptiness; the acetone-eroded
teeth of your disorder. He will not come again. Sleep will
not come and make an amnesty of bandages, the white
ribbons rendering you prematurely maypole. It will not
wrap you. It will not keep you. It will not launder or
succor you. It will break into your ballerina box, will
chew the jewels from their semiprecious sockets, set
them pulsing in your frontal lobe. Your heart has
a headache. Drink raw egg. Or Dettol. It’s up to you.
The sky is pasteurized by thunder ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linh_Dinh - a vietnamese-american poet, fiction writer, translator, and photographer used to get published, used to get visiting professorships, used to get grants
ReplyDeletenow he doesn't - for reasons that become obvious when you read some of his recent stuff
however, his most recent post at his substack "postcards from the end" doesn't include that particular quirk, just an account of his visit - with photos - to the remote laotian town of don det - his last paragraphs are
You can judge any community by the serenity of its residents, especially the children. Are they calm, trusting and easily cheered, or do they dress, talk and strut like whores and gangstas? Do they enjoy just being kids, or do they strain to become as insane, addicted, angry and frustrated as their elders?
Though I have much more to say about this place, I must take a breather. Was it Eliot who said, “For everything said, something else must be said”? A lifetime isn’t long enough to record and explain what happens to anyone in a day, and in Don Det, each day is extra long, in the best way.
1/the above quote from linh dinh first appeared at https://linhdinh.substack.com/p/extra-long-days-in-the-best-way-in
Delete2/i commented there
I find...a Maurice Blanchot quote: 'No sooner is something said than something else must be said to correct the tendency of all that is said to become final...' "
Blanchot, a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist, lived from 1907 to 2003, and was active in the Resistance during the German occupation.
If the current world order collapses, as it seems it must, to some unknowable degree, it seems that human life would still go on in places where people can get what they really need - the corner of the world you are now in sounds like such a place. Many other places would be less livable, however. If things can't go on, they won't....
3/in a subsequent post about that same town, we are told that among the souvenirs offered to tourists there is a t-shirt
BEEN THERE
DON DET