Monday, August 31, 2026

A Melancholy Affair Occasioning Much Distress

Once upon a brick-shitting human
Suffering from whereabouts failure
On non-functional turf, then a
Senior embedded software affairs specialist 1
At a genuine authorized dealership
And aint’ gonna press No for an answer
He had looked forward to the fuck date
And what happened is he
Famously took meat rub---
Please silence all genes.



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Sunday, August 30, 2026

The Frisson of Honored Status

Earn cash on select bookings
Private chef-curated dining experiences
Super awesome destinations
Really cool countries.

And did I tell you
About the deal I got
I was talking to Crystal about it 
Unlimited double points.

And then those points
Combined with the multiplier
On a platinum card
Got us a suite for $99.

This card OK
This one I use for
Tickets to everything
Turns out tiers are transferrable.

Had my assistant call and I’ma pull up 
In my Silverado tomorrow for early check-in
New restaurants, new rooftop lounges
I’ll try to catch a couple of games too.

But yeah
It’s been super easy
To use those points
Which is nice.




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Saturday, August 29, 2026

A Smash of Yinnys


ENRICHMENT

Recharged “my Kindle”
Got time on “my hands”
Gonna revisit “the canon.”


HEADING INTO TOMORROW

Grab your locaters.
That area.


TRANSIT PLAZA

Ten bays no buses
Four tracks no trains


SOURCES

Public restrooms, local newspapers, online.


INEFFABLE

Needa disable your share screen.


UNEFFABLE

Can’t be effed with.


NOTICE OF INTENT TO ADOPT A MITIGATED DECLARATION

But what I’m saying is
Well it’s not
Just that
It’s like.


WAIT

Really?



© Copyright 2026 Randy Stark

www.randystark.com

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Friday, August 28, 2026

Plot Points

First they hate crimed me.
Then they tried to unalive me.
They pitched me high and tight.
They fouled me.

And when it came to nepo nephews
Of casino moguls linked to… 
Let's just say it pays the rent to be terrible with names
And straight as the bangs of a library volunteer lady

Lest you get walked off,
Lest you be found floating face down, 
Brackish waters, your premium peacock
Charm pouch stuffed in your mouth.






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Thursday, August 27, 2026

A River Runs Effluent

Among tentpoles in mild grade backcountry
A river runs effluent in fan fest additives.
Combos and plates.
Sizzling nachos of brisket or pulled pork.
Bacon wrapped carne asada
Hot Philly or Hawaiian Baja style.
Jumbo hot dogs and giant kielbasa.
Spinach lemon chicken breast.
Crab garlic fries
Served smothered
With grilled onions or
In a warm pita with tzatziki sauce. 
Cole slaw, street corn.
5-layer mac and cheese.

But then I thought
You know what
Fuck fan fest
Fuck watch parties
I’ve totally done this before
I want to attend the actual event
I want to have that crazy status
That it takes to get in
To be fucking dope as fuck
Like a breakout content creator 
And your franchise is 
JUST SO HUGE
That your shit is featured in video games
And you arrive pre-acclaimed.


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Wednesday, August 26, 2026

The Norm is Actually Never

And you’re up to your eyeballs in 
Out of network billing
Or to put it in terms of tomatoes
Tim and Terri in Tennessee tell me 
They’ve got four hundred Jolenes and 
Twice that many
Defiants climbing everywhere
Or you got AI hackists chipping at your system
Guardrails are wet noodles
Centipedes with diabetes
Mushy rotini with legs.

I could troubleshoot and debug all day long
When sleep became an industry
Night tripped and fell
And a voice commanded a hassle-free flush
(Alas no more reflections from a toilet handle)
Franchises and brands applied 
A chokehold on the cusp of peace
The people here, they told me look
You’re about to find out for yourself what 
Millions have known for millennia
A whole library of it.


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Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Feeling Discoverable

Small batch, small ship
A whole new level of drip
In a global brand campaign trip.

Privileged but not immune
Flowing like silk robed lava
Barefoot on rare earths.

For as surely as sect follows schism
When the destination is unwavering
Routes are infinite, vectors robust.

And karma brings saffron cybersecurity
Come winger, come refugee
Grow with me.

 

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Monday, August 24, 2026

4x3


FLAKY

Important update
Do not reheat or refrigerate
Click here.


HE SAYS HI

I told him I’d be visiting you
Had she known she would totally
Have said Hi too.


GRAPHING MY ARC

Pretty much a forever horizon
I pretty much stayed put 
Let the scenery pretty much shift around me.


IT’S SO WEIRD THAT

I might but
I probably might
Not at the same time.



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Sunday, August 23, 2026

Recent Inspo

“I am so hip even my errors are correct”
---Nikki Giovanni


Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa, 2023
English translation from Japanese by Polly Barton, 2025

She Who Remains, by Rene Karabash, 2018 & 2026
English translation from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel, 2026
 
Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey, 2023
 
Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, by Mónica Ojeda, 2026
English translation from Spanish by Sarah Booker, 2026




  
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Saturday, August 22, 2026

Strange Interlude Dude

 Thinking

                        bitterly

                                    good naturedly

Thinking

intensely

                        irritably          

                                                Thinking

                                   remorsefully

indifferently

indignantly

Thinking

                        immediately

                        dazedly

                        keenly

 Thinking

with

sudden

            guilt

Thinking

               with melancholy interest

                        with desperate rancor

                        with bitter hatred

Thinking                    

                        with a dull fatalism

            with a sneer

with a deadly calculation

                                    Thinking

                        sadly

yearningly

                                                cautiously

                                                            cynically

                                                                        desperately

Thinking with a strange

strident, wild passion

Thinking

with a smile

of cruel triumph

Thinking

exultantly.

 

 THE END


Strange Interlude Dude received its World Premiere on June 10, 2026 with the following cast:

Jude (Takashi Nadami)
Tess (Jalzo’nel Mbezzi-Hazareesingh)
Frankie (Avetis Davtyan Farahanipour)
Annette (Gohar Razanig)
Bob/Bobbi (Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei)
Randy Stark (himself)
Person of Interest One (Farzin Caballero)
Person of Interest Two (Yulia Grabovskaia)



Strange Interlude Dude (2026) is inspired by stage directions from Act Eight, Scene 1, of Strange Interlude (1928) by Eugene O’Neill

© Copyright 2026 Randy Stark

www.randystark.com

Randy Stark’s Amazon Author’s Page




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Friday, August 21, 2026

Dessert

I’m very whatever
Until I don’t
See yeah so no I

Found myself engaging
With my vertical video experience
At a first amendment fan event 

Proselytizing, normalizing, validating
Ok I was – yes
Just to be abundantly clear

It’s kind of multi-layered
It’s kind of two-fold
And it deepens as I dream

Now something is telling me by
Sending a plume of smoke into the air
That I’m building my streak

Early rain flocks it down old school
Bouncing off the top then
Bam vertical off the blue

Interactive, immersive, cross media,
And I’m here with Hamid
From Security and Infrastructure

Secure in the feeling
The ice cream cake
Is secure in the freezer.


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Thursday, August 20, 2026

The Wheels of the Front Facing Video Go Round and Round

If you’re one of those people who 
Can’t help but think
Birds chirp
Your elbow hurts
Part of you starts to wonder
And there goes your knee
Is it the shapewear
Might the electrolytes be 
Bypassing built-in guard rails? 

Let me leave you with a little something
Fuck that lift point
My deep fake defense coordinator 
Slipped its digital leash
So we can show our love and support by helping you
Power your ambitions and cultivate bonds
You will learn to slow aging by hydrating clarifying and brightening
With iconic brands and ionic franchises and wellness scores
Image generation tone shifts are like giving candy to a baby.

Token based billing usage requires a subscription 
On our website just go to cloud environments
Click on cyber capability
Paid plans, bundles, edibles
And start receiving all the hallucinations
Plus the frisson of single payer passion and vision
Always elevated, intentional and auto-dubbed
Compliments of some crazy scraping by our rogue force multiplier
You’ll never be without wearables again.


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Wednesday, August 19, 2026

You Know Who I'm Talking About

It’s time to let me breathe she cried
The way a diva craves light
Sweet and wholesome and nasty
You’ve seen the zoom zooms
The sinewy-hearted suffuser of DMs
Shedding scores of paper tears
Her shredded sobs littered my gazebo
So I studied Aida’s libretto
And yeah so
A bad case of 
I know a good fuck when I hear it
Only more so.




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Tuesday, August 18, 2026

Value Feast

Real picks real payouts
I knew the reels
Green every time

Start picking today
View all achievements 
With a single click tomorrow

But zealots in abrupt mode
Handed over their personal space
To digital media monetization

Chat bots super clocked how
They placed their own bounty on 
Their own asses and paid their own ransoms

They did what they needed to do
So they could do what they wanted to do
But the pot belied the pot-bellied pigs

Now the Arctic fox turned sunseeker in a seersucker suit
Compliments of welding and fabrication
Be wolfing them 10-count packs of jumbo legs.


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Monday, August 17, 2026

Invitation Enclosed

History is an endless loop of
Truly moving nonsense
By the time you catch on to the argot
It’s no longer magic
So upgrade your plan
View, review, share.

We encourage you
Come visit us
Discover the stories that connect us
The stories that connect us all
Come explore
There is always something new.

Join us, join our member community
Be part of our origin story
We’d be thrilled
Stories are how we make sense of being human
They reach across time
Stories help us to find the place we share.

Our provenance: Members enjoy stunning spaces
Our approach: Rewrite the rules
Is your French roast French?
Is your Tupperware Tupperware?
To where you can’t help but say
Yes! I want to become a FOUNDING MEMBER!!!!


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Sunday, August 16, 2026

Another Sunday, Lit

 


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Saturday, August 15, 2026

Pickup at Early Dismissal

Even after the schadenfreude wears off
And the blossoms unpucker
Life still doesn’t totally seem like
An amiable rom-com with ambition.

Front ends and broader trends
Back ends and core drivers
Real Long-term value creation
And that’s just the scalable beginning.

I can’t be around people
Who dog theyselves to 
Deals and price drop alerts
And one-time codes.

Care starts here, advised the 
Unilateral disarmament attaché 
Guest experience director
And father of three

Nyrike and Mehdi and Mysti Joy
Spirited epistemological frameworks 
Big ol' smile on his face
As they vogued to a Beyoncé song.


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Friday, August 14, 2026

Where Clubbing is Central and the Dance Floor Rules

I’m a pagan market research analyst
A rare form of chipmaker’s future
Crazier than a red-headed incident commander 
I sphinx therefore I am
A pioneering fitness tracker
Burdened by ball handling duties
Winner of laurels seldom bestowed
Sometimes a check swing tapper
Sometimes a little looper
Famously opaque
And always only one click away. 
I want to flag that really hard.



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Thursday, August 13, 2026

I Asked AI

Knowing me how should I vote
And compared AI’s answer with how
I thought I would vote.

I asked AI why it chose who it did
Which didn’t match who I was 
Thinking I’d be voting for.

AI’s answers made sense
(Edited for length and clarity)
So I’m going with AI’s recommendations

Except for county commissioner.
What AI somehow didn’t clock is  
The incumbent is a very close friend of mine. 




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Wednesday, August 12, 2026

Scrappers (Les Baroudeurs)

They’re not bad models in the sense of
Hoping to bite their favorites
And their favorites’ gold medals
Most people don’t need to worry
It’s just due to a lot of factors.

Keats writes of the “beaminess” of bright eyes
While resampling local image orientation planes 
Out where the grid diverges and
Only thing lacking is a brand
And the fans to get it in front of.

Things didn’t work out like they should have
To know what it means is to know
What it means in every real sense
But brandless is no way to go through life
It does something to them.

And sometimes the models developed attitudes.
Bypassed simmering, brought straight to boil
With multi-surface spatial concepts 
Supervillains and synth-laden leitmotifs
The grandeur with the rude.


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Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Relative Species Abundance

Like looking at the biggest opening in franchise history
Like fans reaching for the homerun 
Faces lit like a selfie and the ball is a camera
No happier faces than selfie faces

Built for today, ready for tomorrow
Committed to a net zero carbon future
Hyper-Fast fast network 
Plug in, power up, and go

A new road map 
Provides a patch
Opens a critical window
All rights belong to the rightful owners

More chargers, more freedom
Simplify the charging experience 
Make your charge as seamless possible 
Power today and innovate tomorrow



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Monday, August 10, 2026

Sweat Inequity

I just got back from chasing global growth,
Grab and go to smash and grab
To biometric screening of the latest diss tracks.

They put something in my file.
My file is my life
Sans charming cellists.

I talked amongst myselves
Blunts dangling from our lips.
I trolled a couple of myselves.

Who told me to do it?
One of me did. I wouldn’t have
Done it if I hadn’t first been told.

One of me is a tall handsome brawler 
With a cartoon stutter and lisp.
Another’s just an antlered grazer amidst 

All that I have in the way of a home,
The impact of influencer partnerships
At the end of subscriber engagement.


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Sunday, August 9, 2026

Weekend Reading





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Saturday, August 8, 2026

Another Growing Degree Day in Paradise

Gender expansive
Nothing less than
25% over asking.

Excitement at every kiosk 
Daring and vitally transformative
Rare and deeply transfixing.

I’m over here guys
I’m riding and skating
And clicking and swiping.

Here where it says
Some can’t get enough 
Cranberry crumble.

Here where the lucky die 
Where they fall like sections of fence
Serene with dilapidation.

Here but a few versts filled 
To bursting with custom fragrance away 
But you can’t get there without the app.

You needa diversify your device ecosystem
Before you pitch your smart tent
In the forest of transmitter trees.

My advice: stay hot
Heart the owie kisser
Upskill to an onboarding fervor.



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Friday, August 7, 2026

While There's Still Light in the Sky

Near enough closing
Coyotes for the third night yipping
Mary ran the last of ‘em out
With Shostakovich on blast
Send ‘em back where they came from  
The wildlife resource protection corridor
Where they belong.

From clips to a special
To the pumpkin vine by the guava tree
As long as the times are historic
There’s no need to fear forever poems from me
I’m in for the pop not the plot
And let’s have a crazy hand for
Straight up crossover.




 
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Thursday, August 6, 2026

Lanterns of Winter Squash

Enlightenment on the light rail
Tells and reveals of 
Anti-capitalist wannabes. 

That’s how I found calm
Before the storm is not serenity
People are just laying low.

Or gathered burly and fomented 
Or wagering on sleep quality scores
Or giggling and glued to their phones

To see if a beloved romcom genius
And two-time Emmy winner
Will earn an Oscar nod.

So this morning I
Which is funny
It’s on my FYP:

All these people outed
With sun-soaked savings 
At yet another gated entrance.


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Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Double Play

FOMO A' GO-GO

Kneading her phone
Like a cat scrolling a doormat
Mamaw called to ask
If we was 
Going to Wenzhou
Could we pick 
Her up something
From the Merchants of Muchness
Producers of viral marketing
It’s like halfway around the globe!
 

RAINBOW CHARD RECALLED

Trading red cedar for black walnut 
Saint Dominic for Saint Sebastian
Smart rings for Shark Week

The birds are agitated and noisy 
Is it the butchering apron?
The lung removal tool?


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Tuesday, August 4, 2026

It's the Little Things


URGENT CARE

Closed Monday.


I’M SWEATING

Are you sweating?


THREE FOUR FIVE

It’s the new
Six seven.


THE VOICE IN MY HEAD KEEPS TELLING ME

Upgrade your plan.


THEY JUST MOVED IN

They seem nice
I wonder what’s
Wrong with them.


SHILOH

Name like that
You know she a skater.


EARTH

(Spoiler alert: this includes you.)


AVAILABILTY

He Kant.
I Cannes.


DRONE FLYING OVERHEAD

Man found dead
On shiny slurry spread
By robots the night before.


I NEED A HUG BRO

Add to cart.





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Monday, August 3, 2026

Why It Matters

Related by blood, marriage
Living their large portions
Vascular and landmark
Junior harvested his own power
Papaw sculpted glass
And often spent evenings blowing
(with the broader glass community)
Meemaw mostly stayed home
Mamaw worked at 7-Eleven
Mom worked at the community kitchen
Dad worked for the county
Angel worked at Walmart, Amazon, 
And, before she went to Buffalo
Wild Wings, there was Ross, Boot Barn, 
Torrid, Best Buy, Powerade, that hot dog place
Hell, Angel worked everywhere
But she didn’t come home one night
And next morning her body was discovered in an arroyo
Her head crushed and face mutilated
By the bloody concrete block found at the scene
You fucking unfollowed me
He had yelled over and over and over and over.



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Sunday, August 2, 2026

Sunday Lit: A This and a That

Want to first give a memorial shout out to the artist Betye Saar who passed away last week. She received tributes from all major media. I have been lucky enough to see her work on display in various museums and galleries. Images of her art are widely available on the internet. I return to them frequently for inspo.  Her artistic expression was satire-laden assemblage, and I’m a big fan of that, and she was awfully good at it.

Betye Saar's 1972 piece The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Meanwhile, my writing continues, as does reading, thinking, notetaking, and I’ve added a new habit: staring into space.

As W.S. Merwin wrote “the trouble with pleasure is the timing.”  Yesterday as I lay dying and reading As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, my laughter practically healing me, I got about why, and how i came to be, a writer.

I attended the University of Southern California (USC) for the same number of semesters (3) that William Faulkner attended the University of Mississippi (Old Miss).

Bedight with delight, John Keats went to the ocean for the same reason I do, to refresh “ears…dinn’d with uproar rude/or fed too much with cloying melody.”

Just a coincidence? Or are there a deeper connections. For example, I was born in Chicago as were Sandra Cisneros, John Dos Passos, Patricia Smith, Carl Sandburg, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sherwood Anderson, Fenton Johnson, and Studs Turkle, among many others.

I'll give it some more thought.

And in closing, have I mentioned that my hometown library participates in a consortium of county, city, and university libraries in California where if one library doesn’t have the book being requested, there’s a good chance that one of the other libraries will. I’ve requested books from libraries all over state and they’re ready to pick up at my hometown library usually within seven days.

Works used for this post:
As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, 1931
The Window Seat, by Aminatta Forna, 2021
The Shadow of Sirius, by W.S. Merwin, 2008
And various poems by John Keats, circa 1820
  

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Saturday, August 1, 2026

I, Schizo Human Algorithm

Endlessly is back, retooled
Prayer flags worse than inutile
Like expired medications
Unrealized video game scripts
Urine sloshed bathroom floors
Dirty pants, greasy bottoms like fast food sacks 
Industrial pollution leads to bad test scores.

Pet cameras beeping amidst deadly unrest
Fuels, lubricants, solvents
Rudely introduced to they throats
Details emerge
Officials pledge
Cases climb
Threat worries.

Are you picking up what I’m throwing out here?
Barechested white guy 
Accelerants virile and viral 
Checking Insta 
Checking Facebook
Checking checking
Like a rat hitting a pipe.

Fuck that plot point
And other reasons why
Being a miniaturist
(“In more ways than one” she adds, helpfully)
Never been tagged
Don’t have nice things
Like a flexible outlook
Or a smart nose ring.



© Copyright 2026 Randy Stark

www.randystark.com

Randy Stark’s Amazon Author’s Page

  
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