Umbriate Chapbooks

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Loyola Platypus: After reading Emile’s Cioran, a strange liquid dripped from my left ear as my right ear resounded with Gregorian canticles calling on Lucifer to carry me away.

Harald Blume Review: Firstly, I would like to spit. Segundo, this impish demon known as Emile Umbriate, every time I read his drivel, cast a dense catatonic net over my self-indulged free will. Tercio, the other night I had colleagues over for cocktails and an elitist game of pin the donkey to my tail/tale, in attendance were Messieurs Klopstock, Bettelheim, and Novalis. We took turns reading passages from the works of Umbriate only to discover at some uncanny point in our reciting that, unbeknownst to us, we had, notwithstanding, not even a miniscule inkling of the depressive import of what we were doing. What? Not even…what? I, we, they, what…

These works float on the suppurating soul like some long-forgotten religion: ecstasy infiltrates the deepest dark, bringing light to the addled and forlorn. B.B. Prince

I received an unsolicited copy of What Cioran Would Say in the mail one day. To my surprise, what I thought to be benign upon a first reading proved to be a viral coup draining every ounce of my intellect into a puddle of distilled stupidity. Why am I so dumb in the presence of this masterpiece? I began to weep then and continue to weep now even beyond visions of the tombe that awaits me. T. Hobbes

Reading Sitting with Saigyō reminded me of when I was a lad sitting on my uncle’s lap and not knowing exactly why. E.A. Hoffmanstatle

Not exactly a lingering nuncio of nomos, yet subtle in a bemusing sort of way, I leapt blindly into Hiroshige’s eyes through a crater of deceit and emerged in love. Synthianna Ozik

Hanging on by a wispy glint of normalcy, these tender voices are like fingernails on a coffin’s lid. Ronnie Kippling

Reading as a child might a Santa letter of ego absorption, I was reminded of a transcendant piece of drivel: every word a sloppy lick of my petit objet a until I realized my dream contained no butterfly. Leo Zu

a veritable human stain upon an already greasy cultural zoot suit. R.A. Leavis

Sitting with Saigyō is the most sublime rendering of “recline” philosophy I have ever read, almost entirely. It stands as an impeccably deliberate berating of what amateurish minds like to call “eschatology of thought”; moreover, it proves just how risible is the scatology of self-proclaimed inert philosophy of tinkle. Olena Friese

Fantômas has parlayed his loose acquaintance with Death into a reverberation of the soul. He speaks thusly to the hoards lacking commitment, hoping in time to unfetter the wrath of idleness from the drooping limbs of the raisin-faced boys in the crowd, for they have been newly baited to attend upon the breath of the naughty mythmaker. He enunciates with throaty intent and poetic longing, tossing dimpled glances at the young and smooth skinned…

SURREALISM IS DEAD

DOCUMENTARY BODY

OR OPINION RELATIVE TO THE TASK AT HAND

AS IT RELATES TO A TORTURED YOUNG MIND

My brain is awash with the discontent of the ages, with the insidious historical fallacy of the past-as-being. A wallowing willow twig bewildered by lack of rain. I, solipsistic and sick, slither in and out of the many dense confessions out of which arises the beleaguered cure for rapturous indecision— my soul-quests so neatly sublime and ticklish with self-love — and deliberate conquests and myriad conjectures upon which naps the act of adjudicating through the thick morass of the defenseless crime of my life. Should I sing? Not as an aside, rather much like the bearded girly-man of Camden, the song of my silly (s)elf (sic). No thank you, nor think I, that it will ever come to this. But caution is the currency of the Preliminary Man, so I add in a black haze of momentary sobriety: blaspheme lest you intend to venerate the black augurs of the August moon half full and half dull. This is a liturgic Baal reified in chants from the church of barbarism and brutality. This, here and now, is my stock in trade. Please read, as you are invited to do so.

THE LEG OF BONE

All things deserve a beginning— but this, why this? Since I have been here, the night is close, is future desolation whirling blindly through an enterprise of deceit: memory. Or is it, as I lie here dirty, wet, and stiff from hunger, that the darkness reminds me of a sunlit past now dead?

I cannot look back, is what I tell myself, for to do so would be to rattle the empty skull of happiness. There is a dry pea inside; it clinks against the timbers of regret and meaninglessness.

I can only look up at the night sky and feel the sting of moonlight before it gently nestles its sugary blindness in the hole in my leg. I pack it with dirt to stop the bleeding. It aches and is turning a flowery shade of green. Is this living?

We are told to clean our weapons, dry our socks, and say goodbye to those we love, before our first and last breath.