“It’s not the responsibility of literature to offer people support and pleasure. Literature can do that, but it doesn’t have to.” – Daria Serenko, “Fighting Words” (interviewed by Jana Prikryl)
after the dreamingafter the dreaming
we woke up, wearing clothes and carrying weapons
we woke up, our women carrying babies on their hips
as we wandered the dry, sun-drenched plains
we woke up to find ourselves living in crowded cities
drinking beer in the cool, dark shops
grinding grain and gossiping by the city walls
watching the seasons and marking the stars
calculating when to plant the corn
painting ourselves, hacking the gemstones, melting the ores
prostrating ourselves before ten thousand gods
slicing the hearts from endless rows
of sacrificial victims captured by the soldiers
arrayed in endless rows of the armies
we found ourselves marching in when we woke up
out of our dreaming and into this nightmare
(Published in Synchronized Chaos, September, 2013; copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
the latest true messiahthe latest true messiah
the latest true messiah has arrived in town
he’s wearing sunglasses
he’s here to dedicate the new power plant
he has a winning smile
he wears a fine blue shirt and points this way and that
he says he’d love to stay a while longer and talk some more with us if only he could
but he has so very many things to do
his bodyguards make a way for him through the pressing crowd
we give way and he is gone
we don’t know when he may return but we are sure he will
we are sure he knows we want him to
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
hehe
he holds me down
he says, wider
he says, deeper
he says, you shall have no other before me
he says, you shall learn to love me for this
he fills me up, it hurts every time
he waits in the morning for me
he stands in the doorway
i turn my face away
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“Whether Creation is thought of as the act of God evoked in Genesis or as the great singularity that has yielded, for our purposes, everything, the moment of Creation never ended. Fiat is always as good a metaphor as any for this stupendous, ongoing burst of energy that sustains itself as it changes, lending charm and strangeness to quarks, giving ingenuity to minds and hands, turning the heads of sunflowers. Anomalous as we seem, we are in the thick of it, together with all being.” – Marilynne Robinson, “Glories Stream from Heaven Afar” (interviewed by Daniel Drake and Lauren Kane)
things to do todaythings to do today
trim my fingernails
wash my dirty clothes
press my wrinkled shirt
shine my dusty shoes
buy some groceries
clean my living room
burn my memories
mend my broken heart
hug my only child
close my tired eyes
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“It is not to be believed how innocent people are when no one is eavesdropping.” – Elias Canetti, The Earwitness: 50 Characters (trans. Joachim Neugroschel)
prayer for rainprayer for rain
dear lord,
if i take this cup of bitter dregs you’ve given me to drink
and dash it against your rock,
will sweet, cool water flow, washing away the knifing shards?
will there be enough to quench my thirst and cleanse myself?
or will i simply find myself still stuck in your immense desert,
with only my cupped, supplicating hands, and no water—
merely clods of damp soil i’ve clawed from deep beneath
the foot of your burning bush?
then you can watch me place your dirt in my mouth,
and suck until it’s dry.
lord, you are so easily amused.
(Published in gutter eloquence magazine, Issue #20, March 2012; copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
in a weightless worldin a weightless world
i thought it was because they were poor that they didn’t have
sliding glass doors in vietnam during the war
my father walked right into ours after he came back
knocked his glasses off
left a smudge
he said he wasn’t used to sliding glass doors
the dog had run into the door, too
once, in a hurry, before my father came back
left a dog-nose smudge lower down
my mother kept everything very clean
all smudges were soon gone
that door was clean to nonexistence
clean enough to eat off, in a weightless world
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“We’re now in a situation where the greatest Ukrainian warlord in history is a Jew, which proves that God is Jewish and has a sense of humor.” – Timothy Snyder, “The Making of Modern Ukraine: Ukrainian Ideas in the 21st Century” (emphasis in original)
althaea blattariaalthaea blattaria
there is something inside myself
soft and sweet as fresh marshmallow
but somewhat more alive—
there it is
over in the corner
scuttering away by the baseboards
not in its persistence to be underestimated
it can in its reshaping shape itself from animal to plant
like a weed grown out of the spot where a cockroach was crushed underfoot
such a mess—there!
wth this strap-cutter and its single-edged blade,
i can excise this thing
it will take only a few deft strokes to remove
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
safetysafety
someone has been in my back yard
from my kitchen window i can see where the razor wire
has been pulled from off the rickety fence
there is no protection
no way of staying safe
not even if i posted signs that read
there is nothing here but fear and empty husks
anyway
that would be a lie
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“Truly my own body being sickly, brought me easily into a capacity, to know that health was the greatest of all earthly blessings, and truly he was never sick that doth not believe it.” – Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal
seven devils bridgeseven devils bridge
where am i in a world that goes only round and round
where am i under night-time helicopters
and every next-door dog at bark
where am i under hand claps just outside the bathroom window
and sounds of pistol fire from two-three blocks away
another helicopter flies over
september’s nights are too warm
spiders climb the walls
neighbor-boys play basketball and laugh is where they are
laughing and playing in a world that goes only round and round
(Published in High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner’s New Mexico (2012, Outpost 19); copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
anythinganything
i turn on the television while i roll my first joint.
markets are rising and falling.
the japanese are calling for calm.
the spa i summered in seasons ago has been destroyed by intelligent bombs.
the chinese are demanding revenge.
the vengeful are demanding chinese.
there’s cold carry-out in the refrigerator, on the bottom shelf.
i roll my second joint.
it’s another working day. anything could happen.
(Published in High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner’s New Mexico (2012, Outpost 19); copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“The First World War was the moment when basically the countries which governed the planet—ruled the planet—decided to have a terrible war on the tiny bit of territory they were from, kill each other on the scale of millions and then tens of millions, and then see what would happen.” – Timothy Snyder, “The Making of Modern Ukraine: Republics and Revolutions”
“If you want to lose a war, there’s a trick, which is, start one.” – Timothy Snyder, “The Making of Modern Ukraine: Republics and Revolutions”
“You can’t make sense of yourself without other people. And you can’t make sense of yourself without listening. And you can’t make sense of who you really are without understanding what influences are coming in from where and what circumstances.” – Timothy Snyder, “The Making of Modern Ukraine: Polish Power and Cossack Revolution”
“Are you speaking the language, or is it speaking you?” – Timothy Snyder, “The Making of Modern Ukraine: Before Europe”
“I had made plans to attend a family reunion in California in about a month. I dreamed I saw my grandmother who had died the year before. She was glad to see me and she hugged me and we talked. Then she said, ‘Well, I’ll see you in California.’ I was very taken aback and decided she must not realize she was dead and couldn’t be at the reunion. After a long, awkward pause I said hesitantly, because it seemed rude to point it out, ‘But Grandma, you’re dead.’ She said cheerfully, ‘I know that. You’ll be dead too when you get to California.’ At least partly because of this dream, I cancelled my plans and never went to that reunion.” – Unidentified dreamer, quoted by Deirdre Barrett in “Through a Glass Darkly: Images of the Dead in Dreams”
“What is the point in battering oneself against the bars of one’s cage? To suffer less from the smallness of the gaol, one should stay in the center of it.” – André Gide (as quoted by Julian Jackson in France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944)
“Totalitarian regimes are hard to resist because their control of society is so all-encompassing. But by trying to influence behaviour that more liberal states ignore, or leave in the domain of private life, they politicize what had previously been unpolitical and private, and thereby increase the surface of possible opposition. If, say, listening to jazz is prohibited, a previously innocent activity becomes a sort of resistance, or at least pushes civil society into an opposition that is the precondition of organized resistance. This makes it necessary to extend the notion of resistance beyond politics. The extent to which individuals retain autonomy defines the limits of a totalitarian regime’s success in transforming civil society.” – Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944
“Other possibilities seem more remote the longer you run away from yourself, until the you you now hate has become the sunk cost fallacy that is your daily waking life, and if you change one thing then you’ll have to change another.” – Liza Olson, “The Girls in the Room”
“If we cannot help but blame others for things that are beyond their control, this may be because wretchedness is our basic condition, as inevitable as it is blameworthy, and only an ideology—such as the one that has reigned throughout modernity—that stresses our earthly perfectibility will place the wretched in the earthly purgatories of rehab clinics and ‘correctional institutions’ and psychiatric outpatient clinics, where in each case the purported goal is to purge the wretchedness right out of a person.” – Justin E. H. Smith, “A Surfeit of Black Bile”
“Mitch Hedberg, dead of an overdose at thirty-seven, said of addiction that it is a disease, but a weird one: ‘It’s the only disease people yell at you for having’.” – Justin E. H. Smith, “A Surfeit of Black Bile”
“We say different things for different audiences, whether in intimate dialogue with a loved one, or displayed as a curiosity like the eloquent ape in Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’. This means that at least to some extent all life is a ‘performance’, which we do not have to interpret in any radical way, such as you might have encountered in a graduate seminar in ‘Performance Studies’ at NYU circa 1996. We only need to acknowledge that our encounters in everyday life are not just a matter of showing up, of hauling our body out of domestic storage; these encounters are also a ‘presentation of the self’, which requires at a minimum that a person make choices about how the self is presented, in what light, which angles to showcase, to what ends. It may be that one partially adequate gloss on what it is to be mentally healthy is that this is a state in which the performative quality of quotidian self-presentations retreats into the background, and a person feels as if the self who is coming across to others is naturally and spontaneously the real one (more or less). I can only guess at what that might be like.” – Justin E. H. Smith, “A Surfeit of Black Bile”
“From the earliest times when man chose to guide his relations with fellow men by allegiance to the rule of law rather than force, he has been faced with the problem how best to deal with the individual in society who through moral conviction concluded that a law with which he was confronted was unjust and therefore must not be followed. Faced with the stark reality of injustice, men of sensitive conscience and great intellect have sometimes found only one morally justified path, and that path led them inevitably into conflict with established authority and its laws. Among philosophers and religionists throughout the ages there has been an incessant stream of discussion as to when, if at all, civil disobedience, whether by passive refusal to obey a law or by its active breach, is morally justified. However, they have been in general agreement that while in restricted circumstances a morally motivated act contrary to law may be ethically justified, the action must be non-violent and the actor must accept the penalty for his action. In other words, it is commonly conceded that the exercise of a moral judgment based upon individual standards does not carry with it legal justification or immunity from punishment for breach of the law.” – Judge Sobeloff, United States of America v. Mary Moylan
“We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic or passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision.” – Judge Sobeloff, United States of America v. Mary Moylan
“An aspect of the deadlock in British and American politics today is the way in which the hinterland of the left’s assumptions remains determinatively Protestant. Indeed its subjectivism, emotionalism, restrictive puritanism, iconoclasm, and opposition to high culture owe more in the end to the Reformation than they do to the Enlightenment. These attitudes are all powerless to resist capitalism and bureaucracy, because both are profoundly promoted by the mainstream Protestant legacy. Even the radical Protestant legacy is in the end unable to think beyond individualism, sectarian isolation, and collectivism—which is but individualism dialectically inverted or else writ large.” – John Milbank, “The Politics of Paradox”
“An elderly man was at home, dying in bed. He smelled the aroma of his favorite chocolate chip cookies baking. He wanted one last cookie before he died. He fell out of bed, crawled to the landing, rolled down the stairs, and crawled into the kitchen where his wife was busily baking cookies. With waning strength he crawled to the table and was just barely able to lift his withered arm to the cookie sheet. As he grasped a warm, moist, chocolate chip cookie, his favorite kind, his wife suddenly whacked his hand with a spatula. ‘Why?’ he whispered. ‘Why did you do that?’ ‘They’re for the funeral,’ she said.” – Mady Schutzman, “Being Approximate: The Ganser Syndrome and Beyond”