Quickened Pulse & Blood-Glittered Coughs

Eno's birthday, seventy-two today. Fripp tomorrow. Second half of May fat with birthdays. The last five pages of just finished tablet and first five pages of new tablet scribbled with the causes and implications and ramifications of my skipping the annual Stanley Elkin birthday post four days ago, said scribble may or not appear here or elsewhere but I've negotiated a rationale for posting birthdays going forward: if I listened, read, or saw in person a work of art between the previous year's birthday and the current I will post the birthday this year. Maybe. Self-negotiation in time of plague and apocalypse

• Also being negotiated, abandoning both *Egoslavian* and *My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game* branding, abandoning the ritual of my own self-defining calendar, I can't imagine it happening but once I could never imagine even considering abandoning either since that a necessary first step to abandoning more

                                               

• Barking where there are no dogs
• Neofeudalism: the end of capitalism
• Another neoliberalism obit
• Terror management theory
• Sickness in our food supply
• Well, hell, I had a link on the Left's embrace of shitlords' consolidation of power during plague out of fear of crackers in Lansing Michigan but posted the wrong link, if I can find it again I'll post but in the meantime I am telling you three times for the Xth time, weaponizing crackers to weaponize the Left to do our shitlords' work is our shitlords' most predictable and reliable tactic
• American normalcy
• Democrats are the enemy
• Our shitlords' Covid vacations
• On the hatred of literature

       
   
ABECEDARIAN REQUIRING FURTHER EXAMINATION BEFORE A DIAGNOSIS CAN BE DETERMINED

torrin greathouse

Antonym for me a medical

book. Replace all the punctuation—

commas, periods, semicolons—with question marks.

Diagnosis is just apotheosis with sharper

edges. New name for a myth already lived in.

For the sake of thoroughness, I have

given until my veins cratered. Tests administered for:

HIV, cirrhosis, glucose, cancer, creatine, albumin, iron, platelets.

I’ve slept for days, wired to machines. Had my piss filtered for stray proteins

just to be safe. Still, inside my body—

kingdom with poisoned wells. I want anything but an elegy

lining my bones. I just want to be a question this body can answer.

My new doctor writes one referral, then another, still

no guesses. A man in a scowl & lab coat

offers yoga, more painkillers. Suggests

PTSD could be the cause—of chronic pain, my limp, of migraines,

quickened pulse & blood-glittered coughs, of seizures

rattling me inside my skin—O,

syndrome of my perfect & unbroken

transgender arm. They checked my hormones too. Yes.

Unfathomable—a suffering I did not choose. Must be gender, this

vacancy my body makes of its own flesh. How I vanish from myself.

We search for a beginning to this story & find only a history of breakage

X-rays cannot explain. Some girls are not made, but spring from the dirt:

yearling tree already scarred from its branch’s severance.

Zygote of red clay that rain washes into a river of blood.