I'm a peacock on a road

it's taken a while, but the good memories are coming on

all that cement, and then the stone, scorpions poisoned springs

there were words that were pictures of another tongue

i think of the smiling faces among the barbed warnings

a subset of the females was eager to bring you in

they could announce their thirst with bright scarves whereas the men

were so undercover you might mistake them for border patrol guys

working an angle down at the same bar as the wandering eyes

off the same parking lot as the hooptie-tel and the vittle grill 

you can get your mom across or get off with your cousin's boss

there's dim lights and cold drinks like any dive in the heat sink

a private betting parlor more than a moment to think for a wayside crawler

there's a highway runs through

but it cuts us in two

there's a bridge, but it's costly to use

i'm a peacock on a road

you're the last horned toad

in a place that only we knew

by Silvia

4 classifications

Hey Sylvia

Spotted you out in the CCC parking lot this afternoon snapping clouds with your long-ass lenses and your convertible looking cool.

Your story: world is divided into following classifications: annoying, agitating, exasperating, and upsetting.

Yet there you were maybe grooving or maybe gathering evidence.

And then those of us who survived
realizing nevertheless how sluttily
chilling in the dez on mandated recreate

Remainder of world gaydom reeling
but seasonally flooding the pool
may they take home some flavor

of days when men roamed live
like it was life's last laugh
every night a glowing surfeit

alcoholic firebrand drumkits
there was this was a counterculture
so many soft-cotton swaddled dicks

everyone a similar golden color
workers were crowning paramount
unlimited beer and cigarettes

now freeze dried forever, a residual
fanciness, snide or glassy earnest,
not flannel or denim in that sense.


Love, Tom

SSRI

we remember the woman who'd tear across campus eyes ablaze with some SSRI
she was the emblem of all our sadness and was protected for that reason as a goddess
cry-happy but smile-sad, our inner affect, uncomfortable gut doubting, all there


Tom & Sylvia (Retired)
Associate Professors
College of Cement
Low Chank Campus

Peace

We moved out here because of the peace of the summer trees that surrounded the house and hid it from the street. However now that a warm winter has come at night we hear the hoarse cries of animals woken from a chill and killing each other impulsively or screaming in the heat of want and/or fear.


Sylvia & Tom Mareieds 
Associate Professors
College of Cement
High Chank

Stalked By My Own Husband

I thought no one was there but
he was in the dark kitchen star-
ing. Sometimes his soft carpet
footsteps stop just outside my
office. When we watch TV, he
faces me perpendicularly on a
settee. He follows me around
the house, not when we're out.
If he were a top it would make
more sense. It's like the prey
hunting the hunter. It might've
jived in other times, locations,
but it can't be "you'll spoil it by
talking" if there are eggs to fry,
decisions, household decisions.


Sylvia
"I am Tom's wife."

Some kind of foam

Sylvia sees a film of herself on the outside wall of the gym. Her colleagues are stopping in the causeways and pointing out look, there's Sylvia's corpse. Why is it standing and moving? Because it thinks it's still alive. Maybe it sees a projection of its past life on that facade.

Tom comes out of his office with his briefcase and a v-8, does a double take. And I was actually married to that zombie. Look at her now. He glances back at his metal door, pulling it flat. Who was it confused the word crack for dimple. Said there was a dimple in the fence.

She'd had dimples everywhere they'd put her back together, dimples in the skin between the limbs and torso like momo dough. What if everything had dimples, what a cute world it'd be? Tom starts the walk on out to his hooptie, one drowsy thigh prickly as a stuffed owl.

The word jail was blocked out giantly across the side of the county jail to give everyone fair warning and to offer no illusions as to whut yor approaching. If you had a warrant, for example, you may not be released until morning. That's where he'd gone to get her out.

Once the attacks were confirmed they'd arrested her for having been the first to report a flight-gifted reptile in an olive tree outside her office. Her coffee, fortunately, had been in a spill-proof mug. She first spoke with the chair of biology Tom, her partner.

She next spoke with her labor boss, the chain gang lawyer, and a team of crack psychiatrists. When you let me out of here with a stern admonishing, and it comes back for me, will their be a separate co-pay? she asked sarcastically. Those creatures have saw-like teeth was the rejoinder.

And if it comes for my lover, even if he doesn't believe? Is he covered? Do we wait in line at emergency? Suddenly the panel revolved like a bus destination eight ball. They were things in robes, monsters of erect and punished gravity, disappearing unansweringly into some kind of foam.

thing in the ivy

...and because it was crawling up a wall, not a lot of vegetative girth to explore. Still, in these months, you can't quite see all the way through-- whut's a sprinkler head, a totem of bamboo. Her face, green with black highlights, seemed a shade between imagination, voodoo, amphibia, a forced dusk. He could have been a tiny human, tortoisine, a kitty, cobra, otter, fake that the pups were poking and fussing at. I only saw a composite projection of whut Braino was able to slap up based on profiling.

by Sylvia
"Why, Tom?"

Austerity clinic

What you looking at, Missy Silly? They ain't no treats for you t-tay. Why so reproachful, lovey? The stink eye. Who saved you by tossing bait in the yard, even used my best boy, the house guard, to lure you in with sexy jumping.

In the hot pockets a local wears a percent of her skeleton on the outside, and visitors have to come and go quickly. To get you back safely I'd, oh I don't know, helicopter in and hang a ladder action.

[...] how in every town and age, there's a man wanders up and starts to build a cathedral outta tracter tires 'n "adobie." Who knew they were all the same guy. He's not a troublemaker; he's like a beggar; it's a mystery his place of showers.

Suddenly he's there in your rooms, a blinding light. There must be electricity in his touching fangers, or a deep smell of handiwork.

Bitch, you are our child.

Sylvia to Peg at age 49, already an unrepentant monster, strapped and clamped to a vinyl-upholstered panel van, as Tom stands by sobbing. 

Why aren't you some kind of freak?

Why aren't you some kind of freak? How can it be that outta-all the beautiful chicks and dudes I've seen, you strike me as sumthin reelie spesh? You fall well within the heart of the realm of attractiveness, but your exceptionality makes you particularly memorable and commands an emotional response more sweet and richer than Caramel Dream Swirl, chahl.

How can I even unnerstan your language? If your tongue is the dearest, hottest live wire ever, wouldn't the creole stink on out beyond its cipher? Wouldn't yor existence compel matter into a steamy mass of shame over centuries of labor, generations of real flesh babies whose trajected paid-fers wd always undermount the lots we'd get of creating major ideas of tiny observations?

How can it be that you would become a lier out so much farther and me so conventional while having been your Discoverer?

Epistemes, plotz

we were already 14 when we acknowledged openly
the pointlessness of new friendships with strangers.
if you've often had occasion to judge the world to
be a troubling spot, then you are more oft than not
open to off or awkward approaches, epistemes, plotz.

Everything phatic or rhetic that you spew nau
will be logged entry to my journal o' knowledge,
assuming sumthin as heinous as our love
should be cock-copied down and legislated after,
in whut, clown clinics and drag universities.

You may imagine, in erotic fitz, an oubliette
Where the speech act seeps out, posteriatum,
to where ya' half claim paterfilia to the fevered
perconesias and todonoscums of yr offsprings
and their pigs they call husbands.

Sylvia and Tom
"We're thinking-complicit."

Gau Gau Bata Utha

 Gau Bata Utha

Come out your towns, where you camping!
Beat the face of your land, come out grrlz.
Got an eyebrow pencil or a crayon, bring it on out.
If your instrument plays, don't be ashamed.
You know your tool is welcome baby, come out!
If you are not packing, you can come out and SING!

Translation by Sylvia

Tabaquismo

Now yr a stranger with a bold affect; then you wr showing surface vein color, not structure. You've recently had a haircut. What's changed, have you shaved yr beard?

Nope. Juss takin care o' myself.

Yor swaggering folksiness is convincing. And even more for someone from the high chanks.

Oh you think you know me.

That was the idea of the day-long interview.

That was a job candidate in career apparel.

Who are you, Tom?

Sylvia is my wife. I smoke all day. I must be Gawda Fahr.

Is it like being in flames then, your marriage?

Not for me.

She stays around for lack of imagination?

Because we run a pyramid scheme, Wayne. Duh. Me, you, Sylvia. We got the shivaccount for the greater lower chanks. She'll be making shivrep soon. Why do you think she stays.

And you?

I'm going on No-Shiv next week, Wayne. We lost our shivstar to open release. Hardly no one wants the shiv unless they could have a degree instead.

Worship Section

It says here that on Cabaret Night the Chama was serving cocktails to a crowd of tourists in a Carol Channing wig and wacky makeup. When she looked into one of em's eyes and saw a hatchet murder. Now she's coming out as having seen her own ghost through psychic time travel. Sports N' Sex Crimes Bugle is expanding with a section for worshipers. Tom?

Tom stepped out of the bathroom like a robot, glowing in purple light. He seemed to have a bumping soundtrack. Sylvia stood and let the paper sag and watched him stroke the spines on the back of his neck.

Dogreeve

Chemical Prayer

I can still think even though most of my muscles are under remote control. This reminds me of an office job I had while I could still cover my spines. Repetetive movement. I could staple six reports at a time. My finger muscles got strong playing canasta with Sylvia and Tom. If they could see me now. Soaring over a canyon. Bringing home lost ducks. Men. To my nest. To PharmSupply.

It started as an offering, because I believed in my culture's nirvanic system. Here, look what I've found. I am a cat with a bird, but no. A bird with a cat. Then the Mthyuh Preservation Society ruled to let the corporations infiltrate the Shiv, and then... It doesn't matter if you are a lesbian when... they are force working and resting you, cramping your style.

My African-American news anchor husband and mulatto kids: waiting in some hiya-percha. I am employed, enslaved, an appliance plugged in. Retrieving robot falcon. I try to be gentle, but they have fitted me with metal. Plucking an individual from a park or deserted place, there is almost no sound. One must clap one's beak around those who insist on retreating indoors.

All I want is to get my puppies to safety. You implanted your motivator chip right near that instinct. Sometimes they dangle from my toenails and mouth both as I sightsee my worn track. One day I'll find my kids and have an operation. I'll go back to them and explain how tied up I've been. You told me I could retire in a temple and invite all my friends.

Peg

Explication

Promise
this song, an avatar

Here in a trophied stone house,
the game cottage, game heads on walls

where palace charnel begins
meat meant for kings is first sacrificed and carved here, enabling their generations

its wet and glittering course,
see silver trays piled with fresh moist legs and chops bobbing up a path to the castle, into royal mouths, in royal peristalsis

I offer my fingertips,
this is where I choose to make a commitment, to reach out to the infinite (future)

blind and pendent ministers
active faith in our love, suspended in darkness

of last-moment innocence.
as yet but terminally unrequited

There in pierced forgiving skins
stacks of tiger hides on which you recline, their beauty has absorbed the violence of penetration

blood charges your perfecture
you on the other hand are throbbing with present life in a space that you experience from the inside out and I from the outside in

and can whisper a promise
blood, an excited pulse, rushes in your ears

while hours press beyond my lips.
that's how you'll remember me, how I'll speak to you, in that sound


Tom

Promise [the MP3]

Wayne Come A'Knockin

All's I can say is I was on a sabbatical from aerospace right when TRW had community days where you could stroll through their newest foam in your bellbottoms. It was a Billy Graham mission, and I'd had an unsettling interaction with a disbeliever at breakfast just about when I was ready to try and witness. So I took a golf day, and next thing, I am delivering a slimy percussive being onto a fetid pagan tuskless trunk floor. While my family sloshed in clippered jungle growth. I am the prayer of prayers, and they just got silly after I responded to Sylvia's first birth knellz without getting done. I did not feel it it my ears, as one would an ambulance or a robin. This was a primal alarm in my pelvis perhaps significant to the kind of society we had settled into on that plane. Jan had said she could see the evil rising in waves even from the runway, but I told her and truly hoped it was sublimated libido, even beginning to drum on my plastic foldout tray.

"Hello? May I help here?"

Hooded Meatball Face

Christian Giggles

She had Peggy the way she was because the birth occurred in a Crack. Water broke on a reddish brown golf course where giggling Christian children knelt bare-kneed in the dewy Spring mash with their parents and their clubs in a prayer circle. But there was a temple. It seemed a shrine to a hooded, faceless meatball head. The goofy children were giving Sylvia a bad labor, even as she recognized their clothing from a missionary barrel back at Shivchurch. Her guide, Rajkumar, had been a Living Child Goddess, and then become a caddy, then a midwife. The caddy-midwife and Tom made a human rickshaw for Syl and her unborn and carried them into the dark opening of the shrine. All its surfaces were thick with a paste made from human spittle and sacred blossoms of the Tagetes erecta. The ridges were the giant stone elephant trunk whose waviness was deep as hilliness under trees. Peg spilled forth onto these mossy undulations. Something like disco music began to play. Her special features, the spines, scales, woofers and tweeters were like mother of pearl then.

I translate this knowledge from the daughter of Rajkumar, now a domestic I've named "Miss Sprint." It is said as well that the birth occurred in a direct trajectory between the game house of conception and Peak Fordamall Chank.

That temple was a crack as sure as the sidewalk next to the bookstore at Sylvia and Tom's community college is a crack; they know and they sticky progeny are subject to fluctuation. I know. The Pegyuh's brother was my form-shifting, all-night lover.

Dr. Donna "Donna" Thong

Promise

Here in a trophied stone house,
where palace charnel begins
its wet and glittering course,
I offer my fingertips,
blind and pendent ministers

of last-moment innocence.
There in pierced forgiving skins
blood charges your perfecture
and can whisper a promise
while hours press beyond my lips.

Tom

Pothos

Gravity Station

I, conversely, felt nails through my insoles.
Maybe pothos shoots trying to get in.
Life to a woman requires a fine screen.
Only songs make a magnet of the floor.
Was your question no more than repartee?

Look, you, stud, spaceman, spelunker of holes.
We can make a bed with thousands of chicks.
Sign up the throngs in your gism as pets.
When can I make room for your steady love?
Children have rattles, and so do your lungs.

Syl

gravity station

it presented deep, but there was no pull.
a random, unvertiginous marker.
in lieu of a beacon, hoary barbed wire.
vandalists had no imagination.
you paused and asked me, “What kind of babies?”

a farmer’s wife walked towards us in the dust.
a tiny goat hung pressed behind her arm.
liver and tripe rocked in my cavities.
our knees bumped along with the potted road.
the highest peak in the world was a dot.

Tom