The Effects of Isolation

East Coast shot vitamins into the head
Texas rides it's horse anachronism
California disintegrates
the goof irritable soul on a horse
green man in the Arkansas mud
banjo on his knee
plays this opera Oh Suzanna
plugs in an earphone
turns up the volume to drown out rock and roll
tumbling states play their Strat louder
the uncertified horseman jettisons pots and hammers
carjacks an SUV
for as long as the car chase lasts
in his mind he's Magellan Coronado Columbus
anything that sounds like something

 

“Mutt” is a mean word. So is “mongrel.” I’m pleased everyone is sensitized to the impact words have. “Dog.” Use the word “dog.”

I am a dog, as good-natured, complex, fallible and canine as any Afghan hound or Yorkshire terrier. And now I have to let it out. I’m not a star player on the dog show circuit. It’s not fair.

My name is Rover Fido Spot III, and I am a pocket poodle/St. Bernard mix. I don’t get stud fees. Town & Country magazine doesn’t care if I get heartworms. Bruce Reisner is out of room, and I’m dashing off this note on his computer. He won’t mind. He’s advanced. Sharp dresser. Nice guy to live with. Food’s all right.

Mr. Reisner has been aggrieved because he belongs to an ethnic group, is seriously low net worth and feels he is not fairly represented within city ways and means. He’s cut out of the loop. Too, that geezer has seen his share of ethnic intimidation, job discrimination, hostile environments and the furry undercarriage that transports prosperity to the lucky local few.

Mr. Reisner is throwing a bird about this, that’s why I had to get involved.

first published in Triblive: letter to the editor

 

We all know Punxsutawney Phil, the weather-predicting groundhog. Lesser known, there are many sage woodchucks all over the region, spanning all areas of expertise. Henrietta Woodchuck lives in the vacant lot behind the house here in Perry Hilltop. Her specialty is world politics and macroeconomics. It’s a popular double major back there.

Henrietta has been concerned for some time about what may be called a “corporate oligarchy.”

“At the local level,” she was telling me last May, “this can be seen in the form of the city/corporate/nonprofit partnership, which concentrates and singularizes economic and social initiatives, good or bad. It protects the wealth and power of the few.”

It’s bad for the poor folk. At the grassroots level, people have no bargaining position against that of the oligarchy. Henrietta says we need to force the Fed to rewrite the antitrust laws that were put to sleep when the Bush family was in the director’s chair.

I agree with Henrietta. The United States is in the grips of a corporate oligarchy, and it may be resisted by the use of antitrust laws.

sci-fi: They Don't Want Me

 They Don't Want Me 

I was driving south in this anus black hatchback of mine. Oil light on the dashboard, the Aladin's Lamp diode, was giving me BS, there was Roscoe's best synthetic 30 weight right up to the mark on my dip stick, and that's among the last things on Earth I trust. I think someone dumped prednisone in the brake lines, and I've always stopped in time, but it's like my neck is swelling up. Warrantee ran out while I was still wearing wrinkle free shirts and a bow tie.

Aside from natural worry, the interconnected rat-like thermodynamics in a vehicle equated wear and tear with my ass banging and sharp lower back pain. A pan-somatic deterioration in connective tissues emits vibrations, same as anything being viciously imposed upon. There really are flying saucers, and they have detectors. Your vibration tells them, 'hot fresh meat' they might take some form of interest in you. All mine are saying, 'Don't bother. No commercial or scientific value' I don't think a Martian would fuck me if it drank five six packs.

Poem: Untitled 12 3 2021

Throwing Hatchets At Doll

 

Acoustic Keester Cafe Bathtub Rant 10 25 2021

exterminate the brutes a poem reading 10 23 2021

Upside Down Sex 10 17 2021

poem: Silverfish 10 17 2021

Word Salad for Geniuses 10 16 2021

Miffed At Evolution Rant 10 15 2021

Poem reading: Calming 10 10 2021

Please legalize weed, Joe Biden 10 8 2021

husserl rant 10 4 2021 mp4

Reformist Democrat Speech. 9 26 2021

Prose reading: Poseidon Comes Up For Air reading date: 9 26 2021

Guitar, harmonica and gong: Espresso Gongo 9 24 2021

The Laundrie Rant 9 24 2021

Auto-erotic Asphyxia Rant 9 24 2021

Journal Reading, with guitar 9 23 2021

Rant 9 22 2021

poem reading with guitar: Watched 9 22 2021

2nd reading: Downtown 9 21 2021

Poem reading: Downtown 9 21 2021

Rant: Wizard of Oz Beef 9 17 2021

Theme Song: The Acoustic Keester Cafe Song 9 16 2021

prose reading: All Waves 9 16 2021

Poem reading: Picnic Spirits 9 14 2021

Photo by John Altdorfer

Craigslist poem series reading 9 12 2021

Rant 9 7 2021 a rollicking rowdy rant

Justine by De Sade chapter 2 8 31 2021

'Splaining is in order. This thing was made by copying from a free pdf Google document, on line, thanks Google and pasting it to the text to speech app on the laptop. Percussion is an online drum machine. I plan to edit and repost this soon, and will cut the beinning down to about five seconds before the reading starts. For now, sorry for the weak, opening to the recording. I read the book Justine about forty years ago, found it interesting, and lost interest eventually. The book I had was cheaply done, started falling apart on the book shelf, and I chucked it. Checking Google, it appears the book is public domain. What I hope to do with this zero budget project is produce entertaining prose readings. I will continue to do it one chapter at a time, and will be doing different things with the background music, beat or whatever. I hope you enjoy it, it's a dirty book, an old classic by the Marquis de Sade. I don't do anything kinky, other folks do, and new ways presenting literature and prose readings is cantering your way, like a pale horse at the horizon. Groove, dear friends.

Experimental Music by Bruce Reisner 8 19 2021

Dickless Dave Flick and The Acoustic Keester Cafe 8 16 2021

A Day With Dickless Dave Flick (fiction reading) by Bruce Reisner ...

Acoustic Keester Cafe rant # 1 8 7 2021

poem reading: Country Club by Bruce Reisner 8 1 2021

Skull Ring (cover of Iggy Pop song) performed by Bruce Reisner 8 ...

poem reading: GIANT MIDGETS by Bruce Reisner 7 31 2021

reading: wandless, part 2 by Bruce Reisner 7 30 2021

prose reading: Wandless part 1 by Bruce Reisner 7 28 2021

BS Song by Bruce Reisner 7 28 2021

reading (with distortion) by Bruce Reisner 7 27 2021

poem reading: Like That

rolling stone sure enough 3 mp4

poem reading by Bruce Reisner 718 2021

Poem reading: untitled by Bruce Reisner 7 16 2021

poem reading: World Cultures by Bruce Reisner 7 14 2021

Affirmations #2 by Bruce Reisner 7 13 2021

Affirmations # 1 by Bruce Reisner 7 13 2021

poem reading: Fixing A Leak

prose reading: Haggis Festival by Bruce Reisner 7 8 2021

poem reading (remake): We Are Food by Bruce Reisner 7 8 2021

poem reading: We Are Food by Bruce Reisner 7 8 2021

Reading with electric bass and guitar by Bruce Reisner 7 5 2021

Ant Antics with Narrative by Bruce Reisner 6 27 2021

Machete Throw 6 26 2021

18 inch folding stiletto 6 17 2021

6 17 2021 speech

A Dolls legs with hatchets 6 14 2021

prose reading: The Spukes by Bruce Reisner 6 1 2021

Inside Flush

 

Sometimes I feel like a tiny gnome in a hostile enchanted forest. Feel? Am. I am teensy, weightless, here to be tossed in the pre-dawn murmuring hollows. One wakes from illusory gulches, starts one's day, and notices that between passing dust specks parallel universes tolerate one another like Fred and Ethel Mertz. The sense one is clinging helplessly to a floating air molecule is, in some ways, an emotional handicap.

This in not completely congenital. External forces over time steep in the hot water that is our environment. I'm leaving Mike and Doris out of this, for now, since they are blood kin to the Spuke Dynasty, and me and Rosy are on just dandy social terms with both individuals. It's not their fault they are related to a zillion pieces of shit. I'm still a registered democrat, and Rosy won't hear of any kind of intolerance towards people on the basis of them being one type or other of low life asshole. Rosy, and some other people down this way, have helped me appreciate how drug dealing takes a lot of harsh judgments out of helping hands.

With the exception of our dear friends Mike and Doris, members of the Spuke family are deviant slime, and are extra-ordinarily fertile. They pop out as twin slip and fall attorneys. There are sets of triplets that repo tall buildings. Quintuplets that all collect bad debts. They've produced octuplet bail bondsmen. There are many reasons why the Bible has a whole chapter on Numbers, among them, the proliferation of Spukes. Hundreds of Spukes work for the city or for a partnership of tax exempt organizations which, in aggregate, guarantees no one gets anywhere in life delinquent of Spuke tyranny.

essay: Economic Mystique

Let's try acting like mystics. I am now Sri Rama Bingo . I have taken the name Sri Rama Bingo because everything where I live operates like a bingo concession. Also, like a clip joint.

Before the town fully corporatized, it planned to save us all from poverty by installing the Rivers Casino. Pittsburgh city government runs like a bingo concession, and, ironically, it placed a modern gambling facility on the put-upon, rumbling north shore. To many it was welcome because they love to gamble. No one seems to be sore about folks lying like motherfuckers about everything, like it was supposed to eliminate property tax, so fucking generous the lying assholes claimed to be.

There was a case, not long after the casino was running , in which a city administrator embezzled over a hundred thousand dollars from the city. She was caught, and got an insane lite sentence, no jail time (first off) because she had grown, like potted plants, an addiction to gambling at Rivers Casino. Must be low recidivism. The flesh is weak. Jesus forgives assholes for pulling shit. The the gambling consession must go on.

Our city government, former mayor Tom Murphy in the chair, initiated all the lights, the noise, the pageantry. Murphy, while the process was still rumbling towards completion, made an much maligned faux paux, publicly, to the affect, "The fix is in." At the time three businesses were competing for the concession, one of them got in, and Tom may have felt the decision making process was not unbiased. Or else he knew outright. If memory ain't too senile, a fourth contender for the concession came in under the wire, so the placement process has a lot of issues no one cares about now.

This is all happy horse shit in the past. I am neither hopeful nor sentimental. Yet memory is an asshole, and it, too, pulls shit. Like raising concerns about what people did, and what the status of said horse shit is now. This in no way asperses what assholes everywhere are doing now, or will do in the future. Parables, dear friends, reveal what may happen in the future. Mystics are fat pricks about their goddam parables, I am Sri Rama Bingo, you are gracious to read my crap.

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The New Humanism

It's spring, and daisies have not thrown in the sponge as plant life. It's winsome of them grow free range, without supervision, chemicals or mass media manipulation. They don't know what's on the news, most people do, and the daisies manage their lilting noons more elegantly than most people. Flowers are hard to live up to. As they go, daisies are equitable.

Anything can be discussed using the daisy method. Rules are easy, each petal stands for a narrative point of view. One that has been expressed by people, a shitload of times, same shit each time, on the internet of television. The gold center of a daisy is like Switzerland, it may write a nasty letter to the World Health Organization, that aside, they stay out of shit. Each petal is a different opinion on the same subject. Most flowers want you to stay on topic while recognizing a variety of challenging concepts.

Yes, it's brutal. You have to pluck the petal you just finished considering soon as you get the point, so you don't lose your place and louse up the daisy method. It's a way of broadening the mind and matching concepts to courses of action. It could be one petal, or a combination of several. Differing ideas are not all mutually exclusive. The circular configuration with joined spokes radiating from center works tirelessly to bat home the point that free societies take all things under consideration. People are overly singular in mind.

prose reading: Me and Rosy (fragment) by Bruce Reisner 5 4 2021

slide guitar, open D, harmonica by Bruce Reisner 4 30 2021

slide guitar D tuning 3

poem reading: Oopsie by Bruce Reisner 4 27 2021

poem reading: Manhattan Project by Bruce Reisner 4 21 2021

poem reading: Space Libido by Bruce Reisner 4 17 2021

poem reading: Mr. Ambivalence by Bruce Reisner 4 13 2021

prose reading: The Spukes (fragment) by Bruce Reisner 4 10 2021

prose reading: Rosy and Bach by Bruce Reisner 4 10 2021

poem: Loserville by Bruce Reisner (alternative reading) 3 26 2021

poem: Loserville by Bruce Reisner 3 26 2021

poem: Parachutes by Bruce Reisner 3 23 2021

poem: First Day Of Spring by Bruce Reisner 3 20 2021

poem reading: 3 18 2021

reading Relaxing by Bruce Reisner 3 13 2021

Experimental Music 3 13 2021

poem: Foreign Phrases by Bruce Reisner 31 2019

A Rant with Bat 2 22 2021

prose reading 2 19 2019

prose reading: Pandemic Chic 2 19 2021

The Not Too Social Hour with Bat Robbins 2 18 2021

prose reading: Me And Rosy 2 (fragment) 2 17 2021

prose reading: Me and Rosy (fragment) 2 17 2021

Cinematic Sleep

Bad dreams are great! In the last one, there was an alpha-male bully who looked a lot like the young Ted Nugent. Great hair, great bones on that bastard. I was riding my bicycle on a circular riding track, twenty feet in diameter, in a store front across from the PNC building downtown. 'Ted' got on the track on his super Harley, broadsided me on my bicycle, causing the handle bars on both vehicles to lock together. He then forced me to circle the track at high speed, yours truly unable to dislodge from the coupling. All the while, 'Ted' was smiling, brutally, inches from my face, and he seemed much too powerful to punch out, though I considered trying. It's such a drag when you do so, and it doesn't work. Add that one can't control a two wheel vehicle and brawl at the same time.

I managed to get off my bike and get away, to the Northside Park area. It was rimmed with crowds of mean looking, gnome-like people who exuded hate and misery. Realizing my bicycle was still down town, I got back where I was, downtown, faster than humanly possible, and began looking for it. Across the street, 'Ted' was pulling up on his power bike. He parked it, got off, and engaged a bystander in a fight, kicking his victim in the face, decking him. But he left me alone, and as I searched the mini-track outer flooring, there were bicycles that looked like mine, but weren't. There was a seedy old man at a desk to one side of the bike track, looked like the character 'Ollie' in the film Repo Man. I demanded he compensate me for my lost bicycle. Other people were there, also demanding he pay for their lost bicycles. He uttered a load of BS, and offered me nine bucks. Other people were demanding hundreds of dollars, and were getting the same BS from 'Ollie.'

Waking, I crossed the house to get to the coffee, and saw my bicycle parked in the kitchen, per weird normal for me. It took minutes to fully realize there's no twenty foot circular bicycle track across from PfuckingNC. There had been no 'Ted.' Sigmund Freud might have agreed that the subconscious mind is like a Waring blender, turning that which was real into a recondite reality frappe. I got picked on a lot when I was kid, and it didn't change all that much as an adult.

essay: Mein Itch

 

There are those among us who want to know how my 'roid flare-up is going. Others may be indifferent to it, mayhaps callous, and then there is the more articulated reaction of disgust and boredom. "Why is this man telling us about his asshole?' people may be asking. "Doesn't this bastard have something better to talk about?" is another question I'm not shy about.

I took psychology classes. There is a list of anti-social traits, they all fit on the back of a post card, and talking at length about either boring or repugnant subject matter is one of the lesser known of traits. I've worked in a dozen different telemarketing businesses, and every phone room I was in had text book deviant assholes there, many were top earners. One such had deliberately annoying behaviors like slamming the receiver down on his push button phone. He'd been asked repeatedly not to do it, and kept doing it. He was a top earner, and could get away with annoying people phoning nearest this creep. His forte was the shaggy dog story.

He'd tell us all, in gross detail, how he was going to cook a chicken fillet. Painfully boring content, he would effect annoying mannerisms while doing his act.

Then there was the creep who lived next door. He would talk at length about clipping coupons and buying canned goods. This guy also talked at length about his bowel habits. The guy was, among other things, a stalker.

I'm a nice guy with a 'roid flare-up. There are people who think anything butthole is funny, and I am in partial agreement, with reasonably normal reservations. It is possible to make the whole fetid affair entertaining, and I adore an open possibility. I call it the 'rictus of hope.' It might be fun to read about my ass. It may be disgusting. In any case, it is true. It is in the reader's heart and mind to be 'roid or anti-'roid. I care far too much about my reader's ass to neglect a proper explanation of why I talk so much about my asshole. Thanks for reading!

poem reading: Convalescing 2 4 2021

 

poem:

Canine 

borderline crossing

malamute trots to the approaching baby carriage

Marmalukes watch with dispassion

as a young bride canters

with her load

"what's the point of comparing mastoid scars"

the dog says to the tribesmen

"do you not care how we adapt?"

the Marmaluke says to the doggie

"I care, I care completely"

snatching the baby in it's teeth

poem:   The Resident

a hockey town 

long slapshot to the end

I hope

I expect to be going

 here

 and not for loyalty

 nothing flew elsewhere

 

A Log Jam is Hurting Bad 

We all know each other, maybe too well, but we're all enough in the know, enough liberated from convention, to be open and honest about urinary tract issues. It's not syph or gonorrhea. That's dripping and burning, then you're mind goes to shit. Ask Al Capone. He ended up fishing for manatees in a chlorinated swimming pool. At least he had one. Syph gives you unwanted lawn ornaments in your bad zone.

I haven't been dripping, and I almost wish that were the case. This is about peeing, in common language. It's like I'm storing old furniture in my dick. It would be a rare pleasure to consult a physician, but most of them these days are crooks. Ask a doctor what's happening 'down there' and he might put it down to a new strain of covid, a dirty fucking bastard strain. Then they cut your dick off, because you're not in their network. They need it for research, you don't need it because it's a fulminating warehouse catastrophe in there, loaded with shopworn suits and sweaters. It's like pissing out a three piece Harris tweed suit.

I choose to live with this thing of mine. If I gots it, other dudes and dudettes gots it too. They're shy. Some of them. The rest will whip it out and show it to you, on request. To everything, a crime and a sore piss. I show it to people I don't know from Adam. The advice I'm getting is all aces. One kind Samaritan told me to jam a blade straight into the bush. Says he did it, and it worked perfect. What do you think I should do about LJP, or 'log jam penis?'

Addenda...

I don't really store furniture up Larry Johnson. The problem was a minor irritation at the tip, probably from wearing the same duds three days in a row, 24/7. Why pile up dirty clothes when you're staying home, 24/7? Bad question. A guy could get an intense flood of unwanted sensation when pissing. It's all better now.

I read popular med science articles, and there's all sorts of things that go wrong in the danger zone. Scar tissue can interfere with the waterworks, urinary tract infections are ubiquitous and painful, and our dear pal syphilis is a famous genital marauder. But we are poets. Artists. We value concepts more so than tactics. And we are able to think in the abstract, unlike so many stupid jerks we've all had to tolerate. It can be as if there was furniture up the urethra. If it's a total blockage, you may be keeping weathered old couches from Furniture Warehouse. Those bastards went out of business a long time ago, and their heavy, tacky desks and bed frames fill self storage units now and probably for ever. I'd like to talk about a condition called Hepplewhite Penis.

This is when you have a priceless antique ladder back chair in the pipe. You can piss, but not so easily. That is because your urine stream has to cut corners and pass cautiously between the rungs. It can hurt, and there's dripping, like water torture. Wear clean underwear. Fucking near anything can happen, 'down there.'

Prose Reading 1 22 2021

 

Poem Reading: Horse Tale 1 19 2020

 

Limerick 

pointing with a pointer at the apex
protruding from the person of latex
the scientist chuckles
as his belt unbuckles
while sucking a bottle by Playtex

 

sword seersucker 2

 

Peace Canoe (alternative reading) 1 7 2021

Peace Canoe 1 7 2021