today is the happen
manuel arturo abreu 2014
today is the happen
manuel arturo abreu
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Copyright © 2014 Manuel Arturo Abreu. Covert art by Štěpán Karásek, in the public domain.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark. The information in this book is distributed on an “as is” basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.
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This book is dedicated to my dear friend Heidi Whitehouse.
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contents: poetry 8 minutes
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app for optionally undoing puberty
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lamprey emoticon
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my heart is a finch
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a day spent morphing
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from 'the tiny manifestos'
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alternative sources
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cartoon wrath
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wait for glows because cars can fake smiles
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forget us when you get cold
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a list of 10 things i thought of
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eyelid
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all along
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speak tongues and faint
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upon being gravely summoned
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untitled
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curating water
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critical theory buzzwords as coping mechanisms
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sockshare
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a piece from 2006 called 'dad'
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My feelings are shaped like a body
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fake dark
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FORGIVE EVERYONE
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all anyone ever wants
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clues for the pinker shout
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everything started happening after rehab
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photos i can't have casual conversations
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my baby
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absent referent
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microwaved ocean 1
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google maps glitch town screencaps
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untitled portrait
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found image
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microwaved ocean 2
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found image (what is a right?)
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diy hypnotherapy
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the inscriptions are everywhere
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8 minutes
glass voice and animal ears glass throat clink to a halt, kneel then sound of intangible machines cup drawn too full falling bodies don't cut corners they form patterns screams go up like hands of smoke pigeons, unfurnished wingspans i hear a sound and look: just the back of my head in a dark lake i am always the ophelia dry flower, bent light stigma dilate time, dark of heartness squirting wax, thrumming moves through with a different going a darker pace and cloying cats lie therefore they can write poems muscles uncoiling like flowers or windows in 8 minutes the sun's mouth will be closed closed forever
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app for optionally undoing puberty
there are only wrong words So I don't worry about it too much every time i swallow it hurts just enough to communicate functionally, is exhausting, being exhausted is something I am amazingly capable of to speak in such a way that i have to repeat myself the words have their ears i keep repeating 'no map without tongue' i just want more time to think of a response having a hard time getting over our conversation articulating the resonant frequencies of the room we're in
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lamprey emoticon
:))))))
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my heart is a finch
my external hard drive is 2 terabytes its name is fiona as in fiona apple there you go this is my big finch heart far away from the city like a forest nurse take me to a whooping shire because i don't know how to deal when a stomach loves a boot the boot goes into full whallop white dudes are scary sometimes out here i'm lit game mandy moore a big calm, metadata for the long haul a joy that appears on the outside as terror do you feel more like yourself around strangers
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a day spent morphing
i make the mistake thinking i am exactly privy to the shape of that misunderstanding i make an embedding this is the essential cursory, the node a principle of nonsense reified feelings cannot go into airplane mode it’s the crucial facet of a conceit no dimension is obstructed by thinking but the images present a bog to climb stepping around erasure, failure is a strategy a motivated crookedizing
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from 'the tiny manifestos'
seems like asking questions should not be like shopping seems like the best way to answer a question is to go backwards seems bad for me to assume i have no common ground with people seems like there should be an app for remembering the beauty of all feeling seems like we have to decide about the dark parts of imagination like are they safe seems like articulation of possible worlds does not increase the subject's happiness seems like i am really into balloon metaphors these days, in my head seems like my truth buzzes in me, randomly, like a filament
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alternative sources
Observation of the sun reveals As far as life on earth is the sun is, Light and heat are not the only forms of energy As with any other star, the sun ; When we observe the sun in visible light, the surface, Another is airglow. Ablation: the burning away of the leading surface of an object.
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cartoon wrath I would ride my bike into town to pick up dad's newspaper me never having learned how to ride dad never having learned how to read to peek thru radiant logo and put screwdrivers inside, find clothes boil them until they finally fit in thimbles As a pile of atoms I am not alive big scar vining down my dad's right leg, like a strophe mom vacuuming slowly. A bubble in honey Mom hated when buildings sneered lips part as tho to speak but they do not speak their cartoon wrath like the coin in a turmoil of fauna trains go by slurping thunderheads out my head nervous light that smells like bread home from the hospital dad says “my spine's like a riddle� none of these trains are ours the sparks on the tracks are like rats someone walks past, meaning is not use it is doubt
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wait for glows because cars can fake smiles Broken trains of thought are like blowholes memory expands without us catching up A rock can meditate on the taste of allergy pills soon after it takes a cold shower the structure of the pearly rain Please try never to think of ghosts as nectar please remember humans haunt ghosts magical thinking is circadian the radius of despair is a hurt nest I swear to you that everything is inside this balloon satellite
forget us when you get cold angle sun
kin linework
farce age
poke grab
never, nectar balloon
momentum
meat strobe branch
roared sphere...
intuit mimic
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a list of 10 things i thought of
1. Strangers. 2. The combinations of wind. 3. Dark wet stones & the fat worms under them. 4. Taking a piece of a camera’s soul whenever a picture of me is taken. 5. Imagining the air I breathe as string. 6. My feet are hands. 7. My hands are eyes. 8. Eradicating my own voice. 9. The world resonating through me in those moments when it’s engorged with meaning. 10. Being able to pay attention to myself. 16
eyelid callous prance hold it longer be the smoke tiny coughing coughing clock rounded rain blur a nocturne drape the street cake the body hungry grin swollen corner nappy light [repeat for every blink]
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all along
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speak tongues and faint
my heart moves not to a clave in this pathmark this is the duty of the unwandering you spurn me at an ocean like black cellophane white beach and forms thrown on the wall your skin had the orange rind candy smell make me want to speak tongues and faint here now, the swallowing room that i fear i can disguise you no longer in my usual cold metaphor my dark parts thrush like traffic i walk around your city like i'm inside a throat my heart beats to the pace of your bookmarks going nowhere with the bliss of gone ruths i have never met anyone named ruth
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upon being gravely summoned
pale orange room like a sundress as she feared it would not be yet after a glance for lack and upon being gravely summoned she spirits away all her pity.
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untitled
The downtrodden ewe in a field of empty cashews & a paranoid wind blew by: the world in the mind of a fly.
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curating water the face the gentle gif blowing in the wind ~ the stark context the face again the broken word the pulling finger the way the shoe shows wear the gentle lungless moon like a worm breathing through its skin the face is weaponized return to infinite embrace an intimate architecture like a pinker cave the face broke words like pimple in song a carving whisk (verb) radiant utmost embrace
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critical theory buzzwords as coping mechanisms
post-post-continental anti-rationalist appropriation aesthetics, ontologized sublimity of affect-networks, augmented spirituality, the withdrawal of the identified-object into an abundance of the sensory (there are always more affects than objects/objects are multiplyanchored w/ affects), anti-accelerationist object-oriented de-ontology, dismantling of the tyranny of positive propositions, acceptance of paradox, ' shifting away from judgment, unlearning the shame we have of having internalized categorical thinking in order to start dismantling the categories in earnest instead of just aestheticizing/fetishizing the discourse of dismantling‌. lmao
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sockshare
I am contused in the vein of polyp sacristies forgetting the engine of lust/idiot compassion that murdered us in the first night * You are confused in the field thinking nature is bleak like the torque of a cadence remembering how I hurt you because it is winter and I am awful * hate grows like crystals histrionic in their stillness
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a piece from 2006 called 'dad'
sterling cross (not shown), glue, gel pen
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My feelings are shaped like a body
1 it makes me feel too manhattan listening to leonard cohen plz stop telling me “the internet is literally hell” tho bristling in my manic zen of 45 open tabs i do wonder does the internet make us evil and ‘Share’ on my timeline a photo someone posted that says “does the internet make us evil”
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Remember when desperately we threw the airplane pillow back and forth & i pretended to hate the airplaine pillow u said ‘the reason I am alive is this airplane pillow’ I pretended to suffocate u for 3sec with the airplane pillow
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And we talked about that Félix González-Torres piece Untitled (Perfect Lovers) The clocks touch and are set in sync during the course of the exhibition they unsync Imagine a puzzle whose pieces changed shape as you tried to assemble it
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On a wells fargo business card you wrote “memory has a shape (?)” The horse and carriage upside-down in a corner Have you ever sometimes left a rash alone to see how bad you let it get before you apply cold cream?
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fake dark
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FORGIVE EVERYONE
she loves FORGIVE EVERYONE's don't give a fuck attitude a rubber band dressing up as a bruise in front of a twitching mirror * FORGIVE EVERYONE seems like a good stop to transfer at but her phone doesn't have enough battery to check * she remembers that the moment her plane landed FORGIVE EVERYONE came on on shuffle, it seemed cloying a 'perfect accident' commercial
*
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meaning to click 'citation' she clicks FORGIVE EVERYONE it starts playing, she cries a little she used to listen to it with her brother on a radio, soft volume under a pillow her parents didn't let her wear pants or listen to secular music like FORGIVE EVERYONE they said it was satanic her father is like a demon gel * FORGIVE EVERYONE gives her that feeling like she's a pew FORGIVE EVERYONE makes her think 'how fat can a chance get' makes her say 'dear dad fuck baseball'
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depart from leaf i’m mournful fairy lightning singing, far & all quaking in delicate slimes. my dream of always beginning has the torque of a hand, emptying.
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clues for the pinker shout
1. The jungle is yellow. 2. An humanlike head. 3. A rock in the riverbottom. 4. Past subsistence.
1. The river is pinker. 2. The body looks like its name. 3. Letters in the cereal or soup. 4. The next conclusion you shirk.
1. Make a headdress out of leaves or out of what was really going on. 2. Make a headdress out of limbs turned raw plastic by their hiding. 3. The rocks have language like tree roots going unseen. 4. The jungle is the hunting, the ocean of possible killing, not only the place it happens.
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all anyone ever wants
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everything started happening after rehab as a fat child i couldn't do handstands and feared being ransacked by swans the tiny chamber ms. trunchbull from matilda locked kids in turns someone i know on i thought about that and i liked it my body has always been a heavy system but my god is too small, like an army of cucks i love bouquets of consonants almost as much as bouquets of empty rooms my body is a dead battery of forgetting do you remember the band cute is what we aim for they had that one song newport cigarettes or something
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acknowledgements Thanks to my reader. Thanks to my family and friends. I love you all. The image on pages 6-7 is from a YouTube video of Thomas Ades – Totentanz. The image on page 17 is from an OKCupid ad that reads “Her New Body Made Her Ex Cry. This fitness trick that's just for women is flying off the shelves. Try it for yourself.” The image on page 36 is a from a YouTube video about ant colony architecture.
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Manuel Arturo Abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is a poet and artist based in Portland and New York City. Read more of their work at twigtech.tumblr.com and @Deezius
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