but it's like the
drama never left
now again i feel
life and the hope
when one casts
the chaotic die
when one puts
possible
outcomes in
a box, shakes
like crazy
while praying
with rattlesnakes
draped from one's
arms and neck
drenched with sweat
involuntary prayer
panic and fear
ecstasy
possibility
time can move
story can end
La LaChamala-la
GHOST WIFE
It was clear after my third or fourth call for repairs that the landlord, Mike, and his girlfriend, Janine, who wants to be his wife, had agreed to always come over here together, never alone. But then they started getting a little cute with one another, and then a little tiffy. She’d remind him right in front of me how he'd replaced the radiant heat for ducts, slammed them in himself, mostly anxious to focus on getting the bar done and the smoke-a-lizer installed and to waterproof the deck right there on the creek in time to wed his first and only wife so far, and then for a prompt and open-ended fractalization of drinking + nature-related gatherings forever after.
In contrast to my new landlord Mike, my ex-fiancé Tom was fastidious about dampers and grumouts measuring tightly up to their doo-hickies and correspondingly flush surfaces. He wanted a home that was intact: he didn’t mind poisoning house mice, for example, because he’d already done his part to responsibly and reasonably keep them out of our sphere. If they persisted, they could only be overly-aggressive anomalies of their species, and therefore ok for destruction.
I think Janine wants to be Mike’s wife because she was so thorough about checking my references, did it all herself, you know, even though it is Mike’s place. The first time Mike showed up alone, he squatted and duck-walked an entire stainless dishwasher, still part way in the strapping and box, mudroom to kitchen, after having worked a 16-hour day, or so he said.
Then he muttered something about before his “wife passed away,” and I figured that event had to have been here in this house, maybe upstairs. He couldn't seem to get the math right, even to the decade, about when and who and what. I sat quietly with the cable remote between my knees, just a dog and a green leather hassock between us, as Mike wiped his brow with one of my dish towels.
Janine and Mike’s faces have that same shade of bologna pink except for around the eyes; they seem like they've both been liking their wine hours or countryside tavern rounds in their present neighborhood, near my last address with Tom. Maybe Mike’s drinking really took off after the death of his wife, maybe "Tessa," and he'd started living here on his own, alone except for his memories of his bride and him together, and how he’d found her, dead, in a room full of empty pill bottles, according to the neighbors.
I think my landlord Mike and his new woman Janine must have agreed to always come here together, and never alone, because it's too comically common a scenario for the landlord hubby to go and fix a pipe for a tenant, Mrs. So-and-So, the divorcee or young childless widow, or widow/ divorcee with a sympathetic child, and what ensues (perhaps infidelity).
My landlord Mike and the wannabe Mrs. Mike must have passed some kind of bottle with their pants rolled up sitting by the water soon after they met, once Tessa was gone and Janine had already commenced endeavoring to replace Mike’s inferred melancholy with her own palpable carnal and other appetitive bounties. She likely sought to address her fiduciary insecurities with his sadness and his plumbing/electrical business. She wanted to banish and replace a deadness.
The anticipatory and self-envisioned wife-to-be, Janine, prolly put two and two together and said to herself, “Get smart, bitch. I don't care how butch the new tenant is; I'm not leaving my Mike alone with that fag. If anyone's getting to know the new tenant, it's going to be me. It could even be fun. Drinks. Maybe a three-way. Anyway not until after the spring (?) wedding unless there are already little rugrats bouncing around.”
But then as the toilet/ furnace/ disposal-broken weeks clunked along (me still a wreck fallen fresh from a dream life at a fairy-tale property with Tom), footstep-like creaks would follow my own going up and down the hard pine stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor, which was really not much more than a hot, musty attic. Cold spots and fragrant or rank spots would appear and dissolve unexpectedly in random interior angles and passages.
One night I thought the utility closet doors would explode open when the European water heater turned itself on, blasting gas far more powerfully than normal, and the dogs startled awake to the urgent, mad attempts of the auto-pilot at igniting. I briefly imagined myself staggering from the smoldering ruins of Thornfield Hall in a flouncy, soiled linen blouse.
Raccoons began chattering and many other noise-making activities that were less comfortingly identifiable. These invisible yet intensely present beasts occupied an alternate universe of drama, hilarity, and domestic corporal brutality right there in the same spatial cross-hairs as my aging pets, chest of tarnished silver, and punch bowl boxed in tissue paper. The dogs drew crazy designs with their noses across the carpets and into the walls to track the vermin.
The more that needed repairing, the more I saw Mike, and the more he seemed reluctantly obsessed with hanging out in his old house, never at ease, always active in a pretense of punishing, grunting physical labor.
The fighting below the floor grew more intense, a real bag of cats. There was plenty of room under there in that crawlspace near the creek, where raccoons could wash their hands before eating, presumably. Prolly after a conversation with Janine, Mike told me to go ahead and arrange the wild animal removal myself. I didn't go with the really hot social media star daddy whose wife had created a huge photo-and-video album of him bending over backwards and all kinds of ways to get cute baby skunks out of chimneys. They charged $20 more per animal than another outfit, called Animal Removal Service (ARS).
The ARS guy arrived clearly attempting to hide, by posture and garment, the textual contents of a tattoo beneath his ear. He pointed out that it's mating season, so two males in one winter hole is just asking for fireworks, no matter how roomy the space.
I remembered a recent past when I, myself, occupied the viewpoint of a determined and tiny-brained but essentially innocent animus undergoing a process of systematic extermination. Even as I dutifully offered my ex, Tom, concessions and arranged for an army of sophomoric relationship interventionists, I was not at all conscious that my fate had already been sealed the moment I entered our dream home.
I'd helped my ex pick out our sprawling, ivy-wrapped Eduardian deep in the summer while a total density of green was still sealing away the panorama of protected natural wetlands professionally curated to assure historical accuracy and provide stunning contrast to a former Tallest Building in the World, which rose from the clouds, framed by goldenrod and tree-like daisy stems, more than 25 miles to the East. Even before the leaves could wither enough to reveal that scene, of course, I was toast.
The second time Mike told me that his wife had died, I had my back to him washing my hands in the sink. I was explaining how I was going to have lunch but that I'd just pulled a whole human head's worth of hair out of the bathtub drain. So I didn't expect to get hungry again any time soon.
Mike apologized, and I turned to look at his close-cropped, balding head. I told Mike that I understood it wasn't his hair in the drain. We both laughed.
Then we stopped talking and stared abashedly downward for a moment, which seemed to allow a menacing spirit to claim, for that moment, the unnaturally maroon, multi-legged glop of retrieved human remains in the bottom of the bathroom wastebasket. One might have imagined a forest-green-and-rust pants suit over a smart argyle v-neck and many thin gold chains to go with that newly hennaed bushiness, with a floppy wool cap on top. And snowflakes, bumpy lipstick and mascara, out by the mailbox, reaching in all the way to the cuff of her long beige driving gloves for the envelopes like the ones that still come for her, "Ramona."
Ramona Plantagenet or Current Occupant
But I knew Mike and maybe his girlfriend Janine had been renting my new place out for at least five years, so the flotsam and jetsam of all those bodies would be boarding-house anonymous to any forensic detective determined enough to search the pipes and corners and attic and creek bed and crawlspaces for traces of a single dead wife. Neither Mike nor I, nevertheless, could help but identify the creaking, the ambiance of a living but un-housed consciousness, the parallelism, a third dimension, added to the human and wild living spaces. We could both intensely feel the unfinished wish, the unsettledness and strong odors of a past life in this house.
We could not resist imagining the head of hennaed hair from the drain as that of the the dead young bride, Tessa, the reigning past occupant in terms of a prolonged crying out, of continued interference, a persistence of identity. Between Mike and me, none of this had to be spoken.
Now I sip coffee or jab my fingers into the kitchen window flower boxes when Mike comes by, so obviously thinking of her—and being with me. I can’t help feeling how I feel for him, how I want to be her, Tessa, not now, but back then.
I sip and wonder if any of us—Mike, Janine, Tom, Tessa, or I—want to be who we are in the present; the calendar seems to squeak along like a room where a fire's sucked out the air and there are sirens and neighbors in blankets with their breath showing, and then pretty, sunny days, then volcanoes; then it's time again to change out the furnace filter.
I long for company now, living alone again so soon after believing the mansion in the woods, and its cruel master, would be my final resting place, trying not to think about my inevitably over-confident replacement in that house and that relationship.
I wake up not quite knowing where I am. All I know is that I belong, and Mike belongs, together with an-others who are not physically or temporally here, and therefore not available for normal carrying on. This is what we have instead.
But easy to be big it's not
It's easy to ignore complications
As immense as mine
Designed as strong, prolific
Prolific of what you now
Ask, strong how?
Strong of odor and corrosion
Life adapts to dangers
Sunshine once was lethal
Compliance trumps resistance
Gods transmogrify
by Reptily
armed ready reluctant
resigned ready resistant
today hour now
moment opportunity vacuum
thinking sitting breathing
shallow tentative quiet
wait listen ready
static void orphan
space time energy
will infinity ready
stasis decay fertilization
temporal infinity power
uncomprehending
nonhuman
stick-to-itiveness
Daughter of Missy
They tell me I've become less gutteral, more lucid
But because i've lived more a heretic than thou
I should ride out pain like some martyr to the sins of All
Dance out my stories on a tawdry stage
A dance that stomps, backwards
Dear aunt Chamatilly's favorite verse for me:
The One About The Oozing Sores
But seeking out mind alteration is in the same family tree
As vicious accommodation
To deal with how the most powerful urges are
Also the ones that make no sense at all
An answer that also makes no sense makes the most sense
I give you:
The Institute for the Preservation of the Mthyuh Preservation Society
strains reason from the vagary of thought
every dream refined to the quest for light
the dead the dead of the dead to all fight
with the glory of stars newly risen
[Traditional]
Rest in a place of uncaring
Surrender to the call of napping
Flail in your sleep with abandon
Grab at familiar handles
Basic functions are a luxury
Planets are moving involuntarily
Appliances waken automatically
Collect these moments in memory
The year sluffs off all around you
Gather all the deadened units
Make a pyre in a ring of iron
Send it all to the heavens
[Traditional]
an took off from isseff
itta bin pre-decide it
who be leffin d'duss
d'ones who suffer d'mos
an dey lidda ones
by Missy
beyond unattractiveness
what are repercussions for the
mind and other limbs?
these parts radiate from the loin
these thighs cradle all life
or not, but they inhabit this
architecture cultural physical
template but what of a mind
imagining itself wobbling at
the top of a crumpled stem
or wholistically unwhole
What about arms that have
strategically surrendered to
over and under working
and life-extending poisons
Let it be the legs that go
last let me cling to the
capacity to run away
to die while seeking freedom
Comical scenes come to
mind for example if blind
earnest, yet flattened by
a car, which reminds all
The rest of us of where
we are, that some liberties
cannot should not be.
Only the mind can flee.
Ayre Fromme-Diaz
Sure they use coffins their bodies are human-sized
And they go in the ground everybody cries
But who decorates a casket like a fancy cake
Parades it in the streets along with fist shakes
This is what they appear to do in their culture
We on the other hand would only act that way
If somebody kept killing our families or gays
And we wanted to send a message of both
Love and rage grief and exasperation
But i've never seen it happen in our nation
In Mexico they'll make a big show for the
Funeral but if you can't pay your remains
May be replaced by the next guey and
May even be on display in a bone pile
Invisible from the North American aisle
The more you explore exotic continents
Listen to sentences with few consonants
One finds it's also just the same: humans
Stuck in a box culture history war place
Or freedom deconstructionism outer space
Ayre Fromme-Diaz
having expended energy, there is a result
i've been heated down to my sparkly remains
i am ready to be consumed directly
my face and my facade have fallen apart
self-referentiality sings into a void
narcissus sees the lovely water, but that's all
girth of Milky Way = 140x < my debris field
who is even speaking now i can't say
wouldn't you know anxiety alone survives
Chamatilly
maybe you're too complicated now for the sun's direct rays
they bring you finally into overrated shelter
but it's a confusing and confounding place of artificial darkness
and metaphoric light and shade this isn't how nature was made
they bring you in to tell your story for you
they bring you in because they think you'll finally fit in a box
and who could stand to watch your body molder where it drops
they bring you in to pay your debt to a hole in the ground
did you dream of animals that drag themselves to a
final sounding place did you admire their agency
the clarity of their version of filling emptiness
was there a window where a life could pass by
instead of before your eyes did you allow them to take you
safely to their own imagined wigwams in the sky
they brought you indoors to die in order to manage the process
maybe it was your plan all along to disappear on a palanquin
after promising your organs to the crows and the scorpions
If you're looking for silver
I'd direct you to the center
of the cloud, not its perimeter
and if you're finding
your happy lining
it's just because the sun is shining
once in a wood
a poet couldn't see
the moon for a tree
that seemed to glow from within
a silver glow second only to the sun
a light that night cannot darken
that's why an irreligious lunatic
can be so optimistic
and savage nature so idyllic
Ayre Fromme-Diaz
To begin, select the >Batch function, which will assign the same foundational DOR setting to All Living Jans. You may select from foundational settings such as vague acquaintance, acquaintance, buddy, friend, lover, family (all permutations), family (all blood), family (nuclear), or none (your setting will default to the foundational DOR setting of the individual Jans with whom you will interact). Selecting "none" signals that you are willing to comply equally with any of the foundational settings that another Jan may have chosen.
Before finalizing your selection, reflect on how each of these choices as a foundational DOR for All Living Jans will affect your trajectory. You must also take into account the likelihood of other Jans' DOR choices aligning with yours.
For example, can you realistically expect that the foundational DOR selected by other Jans, even those whom you have never met, will align with your "family (nuclear)" election? You might think it would be great for everyone to be your parent, sister, or brother, but what level of compliance can you realistically expect? How likely is it that other Jans will also have chosen "family (nuclear)" as their foundational DOR?
Next, select the >Filter function, which can batch select subgroups of Jans for assignment of group DOR settings.
Choose a group. Some of these are coworkers, neighbors, service workers, and imaginary Jan friends.
Next, assign your preferred DOR setting to that group. Do the same for each of the other groups. Remember that if you do not choose a setting, the DOR will default to the setting chosen by any other Jan with whom you might interact.
If neither of you has chosen a setting, you are on your own with the limited skills of communication and empathy that your average Jan can muster. For DOR related emergencies, do not contact MPS. Call your local emergency services number directly.
Once you have entered conflict mode with another Jan, your option to elect DOR settings manually will not be available. Please allow the technician to access your Filter of Loathing panel and make the appropriate adjustment to your master settings. These settings will remain in effect until you have updated your foundational and group DOR settings in the app.
At this time, no individual DOR settings are available for election through the app. Selection of individual DORs must be negotiated per pre-MPS guidelines, and no support can be provided for these primitive transactions.
For these and many more reasons, MPS strongly suggests setting all groups and subgroups, including your actual nuclear family, to the "acquaintance" DOR level by simply electing the "acquaintance" DOR as your foundational DOR setting.
Within the "acquaintance" foundational DOR setting panel, you may select from three modes: acquaintance (default), acquaintance (trusted), or acquaintance (red flag).
The foundational "acquaintance (default)" DOR setting is designed to ensure lasting, dependable, and uninterrupted collaboration with all other Jans no matter their group, subgroup, or elected DOR settings. You will experience virtually no production shutdowns due to emotional imbalance, abstract allegiances, biological coupling, unplanned pregnancies, or STIs.
She notices two tiny K males ready for combat. Their tails are raised and curled back over their heads. The cool, shadowy grove seems an unlikely place for tensions to build.
Feeling bored, Missy decides to take a side, to see if she can force a duel and then influence the outcome. There were far too many male Ks in the Chanklands. She would only ever need one, if any.
Soaring in a tight circle, she reflects on which of the males is most irritating to her. Then she chooses the one she would least like to eat as the loser. His left brachiopatagium is discolored, perhaps from salt water. "Did you ever stop to think about how your opponent is feeling?" she asks him.
He cannot respond, and he doesn't know where the question is coming from because Missy is speaking to him with her mind only.
"You think he deserves your wrath, but did you ever look yourself in the mirror?"
The fighter Missy's chosen as the winner, and perhaps her future sex toy, has sensed an advantage. He hasn't even bared his claws or teeth. Instead, he regurgitates the sloppy, stinking remains of three pilgrim scouts onto loser's face.
"Imagine the kind of pain he must be feeling, the stress he must be under, to disrespect you that way. You know, life is all about choices. You can give into your shameful anger and start another fight (why do you always get into fights?), or you can turn around and walk away right now. You have choices today."
Missy's loser actually internalizes her message and turns to walk away. This arrogance enrages Missy's winner, who feels that he who holds the high ground is he who can bravely be the ass kicker, not the one who self-righteously declines to fight.
Missy's winner chomps onto the end of the loser's tail and drags a couple of teeth along it deep enough to crush a row of keratinoid scaling, a mark that will heal but not disappear.
Missy's loser turns reflexively, baring three rows of teeth and a fiercely aromatic hiss.
"You're going to let him push your buttons? Tell me. Is this what you want your life to be like? Blundering from one conflict to another? Is this how you want to spend the remaining time you have on the surface? Why are you always searching for trouble? Can't you just leave this one alone?"
Missy's loser is not able to take in the last of these thought messages because Missy's winner has buried his teeth in loser's ear basket and also the corner of his eye, so there is a lot of emotional and electronic static in the connection due to this world-class pain event.
"It's ok man. You know, at least you are dying honorably. And it's karma, right? You have to admit. You had this coming. In these last few moments, forget about the teeth in your eye. This is you time. Think about, for example, how you will explain your path of self-destruction to LaMthyuh."
it won't get better with time
fact is
you're living in tomorrow fool
you're living in tomorrow fool
Train from a brick house starts as a
choir singing or a trapped fly
then you're
shaking and you wonder why
shaking and you wonder why
morning train you can go on
to the shadow of the sun
where they're
still asleep and wanting none
still asleep and wanting none
I reject mathematics
I know it's not interesting for you, and it really is beneath your dignity to be expected to follow a regimen of daily study in
It's not that I'm lazy or uninterested or too good for mathematics, darling. I say I reject them. Mathematics. Algebra. Physics. I reject them, I say! I don't even count when I'm playing music or dancing la dance. You are right, numeric pursuits, no matter how abstract, are beneath us all. They are crude attempts at representing no more than a pitiful few parlor tricks of nature.
Of course your experience of nature and of existence is inerrant and eminent and
And oh yes I know, peppermint. Please stop it. I'm just trying, perhaps poorly, to express the availability, the accessibility of these concepts and far more, simply by living a life of nirvanic mindfulness. And that such a life is the only way to truly understand nature, which is not made of laws, but of love.
Missy was actually beginning to doubt her own sanity, her grasp on reality, and she knew that there must be an experience, a foundation, that she could call reality and that, regardless of all the gaslighting that the court and the courtiers could produce, this perception, knowledge, understanding would be and must be the foundation for all thought and action going forward, but most of all, it would create a lovely opportunity for a nap.
Phyliss [trans.]
Hmm yes I certainly do. Of course I do.
I imagine it was a
An emotional time, an emotional day, yes. Just the decision to do so, you see, was difficult on all of us. She hadn't even gone yet, hadn't even been informed, still behind bars, quite lidderly.
At the hangar?
Yes, Friends Hangar, yes. They call it Friends Hangar now.
What was it then, sir?
It was a charnel house. A place of desmadre and of horror. A moonlit cavern many times larger than our greatest stone cathedral completely coated, hanging with gristle, bone chips, shredded scout uniforms, backpacks.
She'd been getting out on her own from time to time then?
No, well, there was no need. The flekes came to her, didn't they?
That was, is, in their custom, their reason to live and multiply.
To be food for the mouths of LaMthyuh, yes, of course.
So you knew, all of you, that once free, released from this cathedral of charnel, there would be others, not flekes, civilians, Jans, for example, who would be hurt, who
Who would die, yes, of course that is the bargain.
And what is it that you got in return.
I got a lifetime of penance and giving, mostly on the road, being a white light for the pilgrims, a cart to follow on up the hill to the holy place.
You speak of the diving board.
Of course, yes, it's my—it's Mthyuh's Diving Board, and it is at the climax of our holy trail of dirt and the logical culmination and the spiritual reboot of our journey our journey together.
Your message is one of reincarnation.
That's a very funny word that I would never use in the context of my circuit, reincarnation, ha! I wish I could magically get fresh meat to go around in on a regular basis but that is sadly the whole point of my existence that no matter the punishment and devastation to my body, I still rise back up through the soils to our surface without missing a beat. It's really all too routine to Shab and me now. We'd actually like more of a break now and then. We love our stops along the road to drink from the dung-spiked waters and pick marigolds and chrysanthemums for my bed and as gifts for devotees and the poor, who are known to eat them directly off the stems or burn them in funerary rites and charnel houses.
It's a message of healing then, not a do over.
Sure, it's both, and don't forget putrefaction
The stages of putrefaction
Yes, the stages of putrefaction perfectly mirror the stages of enlightenment in the charts and tables as they are handed down by the MPS.
And the translation of these tables and charts is inerrant.
I guess you could say that. The tables and charts are not translated, so ya, they are what the ladies, you know, La Pegyuh-uh, LaChama. the more articulate one, what they say. It's just that they say it with their minds only, and the MPS has to write it down, but they speak the language of the mouths of Mthyuh so I'd call it seamless, yes. You know, nobody asks how Shab gets to be immortal. We get it that the Dog Spirit is in every dog and that any dog can be loved and will respond to love and in a way teach and be an avatar of love, and when they die, they spring up again, and they are the same Dog Spirit. This is easy to spot in other species, but less so in our own, even though it is equally true.
Each one of us has
Yes, Dog Spirit, correct, each one of us has that, is that. Flipping a couple of switches in a DNA strand won't change that blessed truth.
But it could change other aspects of an animal, say an extinct one, right?
You refer to the manner in which we were able to retrieve
The beasts, yes, the K bitches.
They, too, were always with us. They only needed flesh to show and assert themselves again in a less abstract manner.
Whereas once they were a metaphor
Right, that's it, no more figurative language to describe the essence of our religious moral social legal coding. Now all of that is
Flesh.
Flesh, yes.
Yes, flesh.
Your majesty, your beauteous grace, sir Ilyn, I cannot
Stop it. Thank you. It was a pleasant and welcome break from my duties, to which I will now return somewhat refreshed.
Ya, that Ayre Fromme-Diaz, especially, what is she HR? she's all like ya put it all in there! It's easier to subtract later than to add later. Really though?
I am not so sure about that. As soon as I send it through the transmitter it is logged forever and will outlive us all.
Look, said Fromme-Diaz, it's a dump. The K-5000 got shot down, so you can't expect all the files to land in a convenient storyboard for your translating purposes.
And I realize she has a point, so that actually eliminates any anxiety at least about choosing the wrong material or choosing too much material from now on. Maybe one day I'll also get
[Message Invasively Truncated Here by MPS]
Phyliss [trans.]
LA CHAMATILLY (in the mask of the Demon of All Loving, All Giving, All Knowing): Have you consulted directly with Braino as you are doing with me here, now.
PILGRIM: No, of course not, he's the one causing this mess! He's the one
LA CHAMATILLY (still wearing the mask, holding it before her face on the end of a twig): Consult directly with Braino.
PILGRIM: But it's
LA CHAMATILLY: Do it.
PILGRIM: Braino, my life is passing before my eyes, and I'm trying to sieve it off into the Fountain of Forgetting, but it's coming too fast, there are white caps forming in the fountain waters, and all other operations are in danger of shutting down. Please, make it stop!
BRAINO (Chamatilly ventriloquizes to the PILGRIM in a deep, knowing voice and with her mind only): Yes, I understand. All you need do is ask. No, I cannot make it stop. But I can continue to engage with the text on your behalf while you get some food and sleep. I will report back in the morning upon your command.
I feel guided to tell you that I know you ate my baby.
What guides me to to tell you that I know you ate my baby is to better demonstrate my devotion to worship and serve you and your purpose as good and fragrant Craw of La Mthyuh.
I mean if my dog or one of my other kids ate the baby, our entire community would be horrified, my husband and I would probably get a divorce, and I might commit suicide taking out the dog and the remaining kids with me.
You know that famous line from the shiv joints, "I've had enough! I'm packing my bags, taking the the children, and moving back to uMgungundlovu!"?
REPTILY-ILY:
Actually the line was, "I want to seek something more! I'm packing my bags, leaving you with the kids, and catching a red eye to anywhere that's not Tlatelolco." And that's the legendary truth of La Pegyuh-uh we're talking about, not some wigged out vulgate performance for shiv-heads at a shiv-dive. So stand up straight!
DEVODIE [dropping to knees]: Oh, I humbly beg your pardon, my majestic mistress of the
REPTILY-ILY [heaving a sigh]: Stop it. Say, what's this about a baby, and how dare you insinuate that that I would care whether or not your particular child may have been one of the very many babies that have been honored to pass through my bowels except to congratulate you on your auspicious and delicious sacrifice?
DEVODIE: I am grateful for your congratulations and the horror, I mean honor, you have bestowed upon my generations by eating my baby. And because you are a knower of legends, I'm sure you may have heard tell of the Mulled Twins of Dupecock?
REPTILY-ILY: Whadda you mean? The Mulled Twins? Whadda you mean, every mother's son in the greater chanklands knows the legend of the Mulled Twins of Dupecock. I as much as anyone can well remember the horrifying experience of our sister Connie and what happened after she ate one of the Mulled Twins. I above all should know Connie's legend and have taken great care to learn from it.
DEVODIE: What did you learn, my mistress?
REPTILY-ILY: You want to know what I learned? I'll tell you what I learned. I learned never to eat the other damn Mulled Twin, that's what I learned. What's it to you?
DEVODIE: The other Mulled Twin, my mistress. He was my
REPTILY-ILY [burping painfully]: Sorry, what was that? You were saying? Oh, my. I reckon I've eaten you as well.
****************************************************
[Trans. note]
If Reptily had not eaten the mother of the Mulled Twins of Dupecock, she may have been able to extract more specific evidence supportive of any best next steps. For example, she could have learned that Connie's response to having a Mulled Twins-related blurping incident was, understandably, to go ahead and eat the anomalous life form she'd been thinking was just an inflamed groin boil. In Reptily's case, however, eating the blurp anomaly would be a fatal and permanent error, since the blurp had emerged as Reptily, herself, in her missing years, which had now become years that were existentially crucial to the present moment.
This day in the legend of Reptily-ily at least helped its eponymous hero to understand how Missy had come to be. Were they sisters? Was Missy a tumorous mimic, an invasive nightingale phylum picked up during one too many intra-The Crack transitions? All those questions were now moot. She had eaten the other Mulled Twin, and now, her childhood self was clearly trying to begin a happy life journey with the tools in the toolbox that the Biggest Tool of All had given her to work with (like the other K trans-special blends, Reptily-ily had been an adult since before the beginning of recorded history).
"If I did have a childhood, I wonder what I was like?" Reptily was wondering one day, soon after unknowingly gobbling down the remaining mulled twin during a Days of Destruction scarring fire hustle. It was the holiest festival. There were snacks everywhere. How was she to know?
As she continued to reflect on life and the nature of the lie that is time, there was a blurping sound, and a wet slap. There on the floor of her private bay at Friends Hangar lay Missy, a topless, big-city ingenue waking up for the first time in the slime of a wet, stinking clam-like half shell the size of a Volkswagen.
Phyllis [trans.]
you must learn to let him in
it was a performative
he's picaresque
and culturally
deconstructive
way to eat a salad
he's radically
dispossessed
of unexamined
conformity
so when the arugula
at the wedding
at the arboretum
at the land donor's
mansion
wrapped at the
center like a
feral gift
with a slice of
cucumber
because he's
a gentleman
he warns you first
then he takes it
in his hands
like a burrito
which could distract from the aspirational stress
of the hill monkeys
But their screeching time of year is nigh
And there's no thunderhead or punishment of ice
That would dare
Soon they'll boil up in the flood plains
Overcome our front porch issues
Violent but useless storms may then appear
Lupe Evans-Bhdoutitsuptumien
You don't think that lidderly nobody anywhere on this surface or throughout the known The Crack as we now know it, that is we know it because of Phyliss, nobody anybody could do this at all much less better?
You have to remember this is not even her full-time job. She's just a [trans.] woman in a town, not an anomaly. She learned this skill like some of our ancestors learned how to work a key punch machine.
But she's lidderly the ony one leff yall.
Now you can do your own re-translation. Remember Phyliss din even have a written language much less a dictionary and in many cases these are multiple languages and in many cases not even spoken languages. These mofos often communicated with they minds ony.
So go on, go head, you do it.
May say sure how much i get paid. And do you think she gets any compensation? Not. This is why we're all working night and day to support this project, not to throw stones at a golden goose with no more in the bush.
Tell me one corporation temple government entity underworld enterprise anyone either who would get behind and stab this important find directly into the public eye? Din thinkso.
One day it all could happen again. What are our hovering terrors, our deepest revulsions, and how will they come back to bite us on the ass in our time and on our own surface? This is the story Phyliss is allowing to be told. We owe her our most humble thanks and much honor into perpetuity.
As one of the greatest heroes our society has ever been lucky enough with whom to be blessed, Phyliss will be allotted with a permanent residence that shall be fine. She shall further be allotted with a lifetime monthly stipend minus any deductions, liens, taxes, judgments, pensions, income from investments, food bank sprees or any other claims or assets identified by Phyliss at date and time of signing or any that may surface at any time in the future of this agreement, and may not exceed by more than 2.9% the income ratio to be accepted as a client of the vittles on square wheels foundation.
Franz Gresif Stone Press
As Mkidza tries to poof Missy's wiry top hairs to help cover the as-yet unfurled reptilian mating sail beginning to protrude colorfully along the center ridge of her skull, and as Mkidza fluffs Missy's feathered collar to align with the harsh edges of her emerging spine horns, she whispers some pointed tips of her own into Missy's ear flap:
"My Missy. If you want to sound smart, make sure to begin with the word 'so.' This will signal that you need no further introduction, that everyone present probably can't wait to hear what you have to say, and in case any question or comment comes at you before you are ready to end the talk, the word 'so' acknowledges that other words than yours were spoken but also signals that those words were an interruption, not an addition, not significant, maybe even stupid, and that you intend to continue on with what you were saying, midsentence, without breaking stride. You are saying all of that with this tiny, two-letter coordinating conjunction. Do you see? Say it for me Missy. Sss... good. Take your time. Start with that."
Missy clack-clocks past the front row of the makeshift auditorium at Friends Hangar and up the steps to the podium fully en point. She then faces the audience of her peers and slowly lowers her heels without allowing her head to lower as well. In fact, her neck seems to grow before their eyes.
[MISSY'S FIRST TALK]
So... i place myself in what i successfully refer to as the borderlands of epistemological theory. This works even and maybe especially when i can't remember what epistemology is or which one it is. There's epistemology, ontology, oncology, existentialism, lyricism, a whole variety of tautologies, including many redundant ones, the tyranny of empiricism, and then extracurricular activities, in which I got an A? meaning where was I? But before that question mark there is indeed an A, an A for Assumption that whatever, wherever it was i'd run off to, it must have been good and it must have been crazy fun—this assumption my temple instructors may have based solely on my verve and personality as well as their own lack thereof.
So... because of the fact that the only way I could possibly be pursuing proper epistemological methods as i journey forward in La Dance would be by pure accident or divine intervention, I just feel like if my true behavioral underpinnings were ever to be discovered, measured and understood, I would most likely place outside the mean. Borderlands. Epistemological. Theory.
So... how besides frequent disappearances and charm did i attract such close attention, such whispers of promise from my educator-abductresses, in all my profound ignorance? Was it a case when your poor life choices are being overly admired by those whose job it is to hold you back? Just as they themselves were held back? Held back from living their best lives, from singing their own kinds of music, from hacking new temporary passages through the thicket of vines overgrowing our most cherished brutalist structures, held back from carrying a burning torch forward for all to follow, held back from burning it all, every last village and tree, as far as the eye can see?
Umm, so... the problem with this type of developmental approach is a situation where these powerful and covert admirers who call themselves instructional architects want to see the entire arc, not just the money shot. They know why they'd never dare surrender to their own curiosities, their own vulnerabilities seedy passions; they knew why it made so much more sense for them to stay at temple chomping on grapes spitting out the seeds and remain simply well with la dance. It was a thrill for them to watch me, and even better to imagine me, a singularity at La La Dance Academy of La Dance, burning through my youth in a more spectacular fashion than they had ever dreamed of attempting for themselves.
But, so... even as they cringed and looked away, they imagined shielding their eyes from much more elaborate aberrations of virtue, more brazen adventures in indecency, a sweeter masochism, a scarier narcissism, more enthusiastically bottom-seeking personal associates than i could or would imagine or have within me. The inherent bias of course, of their point of view, is that there must then be a crash, a comeuppance, a heavy consequence, a final judgement to equal in dramatic effect all the umami of their most prurient fantasies—a judgment in their favor, not yours!
Missy is sent off to her next life journey by a warm round of applause from her audience of underdancers, all the nuns of Mthyuh, and especially her beloved Her Grand Madame Mkidza. Now Missy leapt from the stage as if she would take to the winds sure as La Pegyuh of legend abandoned her kids for glory. Mkidza, waiting in the wings, made sure to pull Missy aside before she headed to the first-talk reception of the shiv. "I couldn't be more proud of you," she gushed as they embraced.
MKIDZA MLAF: You read us for filth, Missy.
MISSY: So... that's Ms. Missy to you, mister.
BOTH: HAHAHAHA...! HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Phyliss [embedded]
taking Roma
when my lover became a feathered savage
every fall and recovery in la dance
astride my lover in his beads
marriage of my only sister
lolling by a creek with temple friends
sunset in the wastelands
first and second puff on any cigarette
a schoolmate sat behind me and cut himself
presentation of his semiotic palm carving
wavy dark bangs
specter of being stranded
in the high chanks at fog
every dangerous moment with my lover
comments:
he could crush yet he was gentle
i could only see him in the lightning
his palms were raised with blisters
it had lost respect for hands without qualms about touch
but the odor alone didn't change its category much
frizzed edges embedded grime visible fissures
haven't they earned a sponge the right to move on
disgust comes first in understanding one
a sponge becomes important enough to not only sense
but also as a totem of the residue of memory
of a term absorbing realities directly
no dissent is registered prior to the destruction
of a synthetic sponge created to trap in posterity
what's best defined through archaeology
the residue of cooking and eating practices rituals
what gets left out or over-emphasized in the mind
only in disgust at looking behind
or concern for environmental contamination
with only the residue of living on the horizon
does an old sponge enjoy true recognition
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