3/30/24
3/20/24
there's no transgression left
on the line
here you are
participating without circulation
now i have to tap my feet
or i'm going to actually die
rheumatic as
the driving my truck trope
if you've got friends
you're smiling to yourself
if you've got time
you need help
3/14/24
palming stinkbugs and closing my fist
while they buzz into my palm
throwing stinkbugs out the door
i am a man while i read about men
drinking and hunting
forcing porcupine quills
up in my dog's snout
drinking for the perfect size
and bowing down to froth
and hunting for the perfect time
whatever kind of bullets i shot
before whenever i hit all the targets
One angle of what I like about Faulkner books
In addition to their immaculate prose, I like the mythology they build, not only as individual glances into a universe of sin and grandeur, but as a collective history of a place, albeit a fictional one, a world of feeling and reaction to the hellscape of the postbellum south. While his publishing counterparts were discovering psychoanalysis, neuroses, consumerism, and industrial malaise, pathologizing middle class existence, and victimizing themselves on behalf of World Wars I and II, Faulkner chose instead to focus on the least scrutinized, the least diagnosed, and perhaps the most traumatized corners of society, despite his characters being none the wiser to their own mental illness and ideological destruction. One can, from an anachronistic standpoint, identify a collective post-traumatic stress disorder across the south, following the Civil War and failed Reconstruction era. An entire social structure burned to the ground. The poison of slavery's legacy mixed with the horrors of unrestricted warfare left a massive portion, rich and poor, old and young, white and black, ruthlessly alienated from reality, physically and mentally deranged, and without local context, resources, or honor to guide them. These are eminent Modernist subjects of estrangement and psychosis, saturated with catastrophe, total lack of faith. They out-suffer the commercial and manufacturing melancholy sweeping the north all the way to California. And they embody a new kind of disease: poisoned without being aware of it, abject without a knowable alternative, cowed to a sentence of despondency and despair that only leads to deeper darkness, no matter the cure: Faulkner's lore becomes Freud's worst nightmare, and the two drift further apart along the same riveted plane.
3/10/24
the frogged spire of grass
wounding up miles of rust
the blank wall of the ass
i love driving my truck
i love seeing the wind
color the stalks overturned
bitter as wings' icing tint
willing as fruit to be burst
frightened at skin soapy stab
grateful as squirrels being burned
followed by shards purple glass
gaping between stomach nerves
3/7/24
being hangdog
was what god told me—no!
told me be a good boy
pull my good toy damn it
i cannot do a thing
when my wife leaves all the time
looking at a chicken in the fridge
guy hamming what a st. patty's day
it is in the grocery line
10 days before the crack
break out my weevil hunter
snatch life in the act
2/9/24
the snails are riding