Schizoaffective

by Dan Uppetreloc Blowing cigarette smoke out into the falling snow I realized that smoke is snow is smoke. I say this because they look similar, especially when a wind is blowing the snow. My breath, of course, drives the cigarette smoke as it dissipates into the falling snow. What is the line between falling snow and smoke? What is the line between you and me, reader? It could be a lot of things. I improvise these lines and you, I suppose, peruse them or maybe even interpret them. Right now, as I right this, I cannot tell you where I am going. How does, or perhaps "should," this affect your interpretation, if, indeed, you feel like making one? It's all as relative as a roll of the dice, which is, of course, dependent on fingers and wrists. Any line is partly random and partly intentional, I guess. Speaking of lines, what is a line of poetry? How does it relate to the difficult-to-discern line between smoke and snow, especially on a blowy day? For a line of poetry is, li...

guest post by Reynaldo Ishiwasho   just feet from me sit three women talking in a coffee house about this and that and other things I pay little attention to   they are mere feet from me   on the table next to this spiral notebook sits my phone a powerful computer more capable in itself of the super power sent on some early apollo missions   with it I can push buttons communicate instantaneously across the globe with some compatriot who I know only by those buttons and a pixilated image on a social media page   should I celebrate this strangely small world or should I mourn for not knowing these three women whose real voices and concerns I pay no attention to and instead think only of these pixilated images of unmet compatriots   I am confused   I know I communicate across the world on the basis of mathematics a two-0digit system where everything is translated into a zero and one and then back again   back and forth back and forth   mathemati...

by Red Rocks IV gee y'all Red Rocks here feelin'— well topsy-turvy emotionally as if strange yes foreign emotions & moods are taking possession of me way up here in not Manitoba & knot not knot not maniiitooooba 'cause Manny ain't one ain't too either Manny is manny things ands I not (k)now as Red Rocks banish these intrusive emotions and moods from me somehow someway to be me yes me without them bye bye possession HELLO! Groovy hello glorious yes yes yes Red Rocks signing off to have a groovy & glorious day to the extent possibly oh, y'all, I mean to say "possible" gee gee gee gee _______________________________ Guest post by Red Rocks IV today. --- Jay Paul, schizophrenic, uh, schizoaffective, whatever

  by Jay Paul To all my fellow schizophrenics— Fuck it! Fuck it, all— you are fine as is— some idiots made you this way— they are the nutty ones, not you. My advice is this— if you have been made schizophrenic, think schizophrenic all the way, think the way bequeathed to you by idiots you cannot control, but who tried to control you, and succeeded, but only for a time— until you seized the glory they accidentally handed you— Sanity is the side effect of schizophrenia, carpe diem , sisters and brothers,             carpe diem— the day has always been OURS

by Jay Paul "There is no better blessing than to be believed in. There are those who believe the earth is dead. They are deceived. The earth is alive, and it is possessed of spirit."   — N. Scott Momaday   Who in their right mind cannot hear the vibratory life in minerals, in what is so often reduced to mere "resources"? We need to be careful with our names. We need to court gentleness with our names. Of course, we don't name a world simply into being. But our names so easily can cover not only the world, but the worlds of worlds. When this happens, so many worlds can be simply snuffed out. The world is not too much with us. It's too much of us. Even the dirt beneath a sidewalk contains particles and particles of microplastic. I can sense them there, 15 feet away, where I can see the sidewalk itself. To name without care is to poison. To name without gentleness is toxic. The voices of the grass and minerals, from gold to agate to natural gas, come in languag...

by Jay Paul              "From hearts and brains                sprout the stalks of night"                                     --Paul Celan (tr. Joris)   there is no brain exactly as mandated there is only night just as there is no heart exactly as delimited there is only night because the brain inhabits a darkness as the heart inhabits a darkness   because the night is darkness the heart of darkness which is no heart because the heart itself by itself is darkness too   the heart pumps darkly the brain thinks darkly the dark comes down across thoughts that are born not of the brain but somewhere else entirely like the darkly heart or the darkly tree reaching down into loam communicating with fellows among the fungus...

by Jay Paul “My eyes have turned to four moons, two in the front of my face and two in the back of my bald head. I don’t see from them. They glow white, I am told by my partner. I no longer see. I just glow white orbs and listen, hearing the gurgling of a tea kettle and the scraping of frost off a wind shield in the parking lot. I cannot see. But I can hear. I can hear the morning news report of a killing by the police. I extrapolate to the crunching of bone, the cries of those brutalized for centuries. Bones are still crunched, down this very block. Moon eyes glow. I can hear the toilet clicking in the bathroom, clicking away. When will the landlord fix it? I can hear the toast pop up and think through my moon eyes of how politics ends up so often in the same place, putting down violently those who oppose. Is there another way? I smell the tea— pungent, from the earth half a globe away. My moons glow and I sense the whole earth in my body, knowing it all won’t come down the way I supp...

Various species of birds twitter and whistle, telling something or other to each other of which I am mostly ignorant. But listening in is important because  it confirms one realization— communication is not exclusively human. Birds do it. Trees do it. Biologists have shown that trees communicate through the roots. Communication is everywhere on this planet even though humans have pretended for so long that it is their exclusive domain. Animals are not dumb. Neither are plants. And I doubt the dirt beneath my feet is dumb, either. What's unusual in this world isn't life, but inertness. Does this concept point to anything real? Even the air is alive with microbes. That is clear. But is the air alive with itself? Could those molecules—oxygen, hydrogen,  water, and so on—somehow be communicating, too? It may seem mentally imbalanced to think so, but just a few decades ago  people who thought trees communicated were considered a little loo-loo. Anthropocentrism may have had it...