Dog cart

Harsh Sunrise

Like grapes, it peels my eyes.
It's no time to shine a light on.

They say radiation splinters t' kill,
That death is a smoothing guiding.

But here is what the night's been unable to heal:
an accumulation of daytime crusades n' missions.

Grant me one more hour behind the screen,
No inconsequential might from worlds away.

When my features have realigned
, it will be time to hunt and forage.


Illyn, rocking in a dog cart without a rug

punchawune

if youda ast me fo fi yee ago
will you still take this ryusk
knowing how it cd all come down

ida sed shoreall still doit
anow can we pleez goda bayut?
nowahsay godledit eyun.

juscuz yr brave dzn mean
war dzn hurt, chall.
loviz justda punchawune,

a site wayr bloodflow easy,
an irritation ana cerse,
wayr sunthing began to nerse.

Reptily, age 13

Mordon holy star

Spittle forming on his lips, Mike feverishly tries to force his sturdy plastic tubing neon-look Mordon holy star, with its loose and twisted cabling, into a cardboard box. ERUSOLCEROF FO GNIRFFO is spelled in backwards letters on the translucent paper sign taped to the picture window behind him. The points of the star are making every angle impossible. Finally he whips the star back out of the box, hitting himself on the forehead with the plug, drop kicks the box into the fireplace and storms down a long hall to the sliding glass back door and further down wide stone steps and onto a cement patio from which he discus-hurls the star into a low puddle of yellow foam at the bottom of the pool. As it flies, it resembles a spiky brain and spinal cord set free.

SIX MONTHS EARLIER:

Doorbell rings. Mike, wearing nothing but a denim shop apron and flip-flops, hears the chime from a backyard loudspeaker deep within a nest of scarlet bougainvillea. He drops the pool robot, whose tank treads are already turning eagerly, into murky water. He geishas up the stone steps and the long hall and to the front door, near which a glowing blue Mordon star can be detected from behind the living room sheers. The open door frame reveals a middle-aged couple smiling quizzically.

Hello. We noticed your star. Are... you a Mordon family, and if so, what are you doing for No-Shiv? Hmm, we are the leaders of the Mordon community in the chank, and I have a red box gathering every year at our home-- it's a Chalk tradition. That's Dick, and I'm Embhra.

Dick, Embhra; Mike. Well, I'm not a family, or-- we're not a traditional family. By the way I am one-sixteenth Mordon, and on the mother's side, but I am Shiv, brought up Shiv. Uhm, for many reasons, including the obvious need for diversity in Chalk Chank, I decided to show respect for the other part of my heritage this year. When I say we're not a traditional family, me and the folks that tend to live in this house, I mean there is no legal contract, and we are of mixed and questionable gender. I'd love to come!

Mordon holy star [the Mp3]

Her father was not Satan

Jan tries to convince a panel that her father was not Satan:

Anyone with a key to the mill is suspect, first of all. There's work to be done there; you can't make a watch list of everyone that leaves a fingerprint knowing the beast doesn't prolly even have one, do you know? And it's not because I wd be the Daughter, assholes. Whut wd that mean, anyway? Spawn of the devil indicates... are you good bad neutral. That's not been nailed down. A demon wd hang around and try to assimilate someone willfully or situationally ignorant, don't you think? OK I'm evil and I'm going to wear you because you are a sensitive searching self tortured hotty of a mess? I mean even after his cuticles became rotted with nail fungus Daad was irresistibly naive and focused on traditional virtue as a hair shirt, tio. OK, so I can speak the language of the Inquisition, and that was handed down to me by some sort of gothic nazi antihero that fits the cascading style sheet of the gift shop down at yr local lyric-opera joss house?

Jan Janzdaad: Plea of Patrimony
An Annual Public Oracle Dispenser Volca Series Event
"Only double red moon in recorded history."

Chilling howls

We're in a ditch, bottom of a moat that curls part way round a moun'n and sucks wind in from the ocean. Relief filter graphics show how a storm's plasm turns from maroon to turquoise as it pushes across Mthyuh's peak. A pink thunderhead in a sheet reaches in from the shores and up through the pass just skirting the lower chanks and back again to rejoin its northerly impulse. It's raining noisily. Feral pups squat with their ears back on rocky hillsides and search for their mothers along washes in the lightning flashes.

Peg appears sopping wet in some kind of buffalo fur hotpants and bra. She scoops the wayward babies into the fossil of a pelican bill, but giant, and drags them off in their hope boat of bone by rope to a distant glowing cave.

Phyllis, Embedded
SSCB

prison snitch

ladies, when you took my boyfriends, I told other women.
gentlemen, i saw whut you did too, but why so violent?
here we must all swing from pole to pole, but so much friction?

like an embattled civil servant, i skulked through the lunchroom.
can't sell my tics, my shiv's a pacifier, can't get my mind around it.
where was all the love i knew with mike and ken and stu and...

here in prison, they say it's *a* hard life when really it's a whole
hard life, longer than most flakes could ever notice, and then,
they say, in retrospect it won't have been that long in the next life.

i'm sorry you stopped buying my tics, but a woman has to hedge herself,
and sometimes it's shrill as a scream. it wasn't like i was running a
racket. you only become a prison snitch when all hope has soured.

Donna
Incarceration, Hour 3
"Please come for me, Mike"

Gaping laxity

Wayne and Jan's first year went by in Jan's Dad's four-clawed bed above the family-owned mortuary cosmetics forge:

"You saved me."
"I bought you."
"I hustled you."
"You made me."

Wayne and Jan had saved one another, but each still carried the shame of the lower chanks. Wayne's lowest impulse was to disrespect Jan because he bought her in an alley. Jan's lowest impulse was to disrespect Wayne because he grew up in that alley. In moments of doubt, absent parties were heavily considered:

"He bought you."
"I brought you to him."
"But you're mine."
"He owns us both."
"Let's have kids."

Jan wanted to adopt the ugly child who had been spying on them from under a truck. Wayne said ok if they could take her brother too, a baby covered in scars. Reptily explained that the tot in its wooden crib was really her uncle, who had been 27 only a few days earlier, before leaping from a cliff-side prayer station into Mthyuh's roiling gut.

"He's a re-baby."
"I can guide his nature."
"She could be beautiful as a topless aframerican in her 30's."
"There's something in yr daddy's lab we can use to cure those scales."

The expectant couple had to step back through the crack tho to find the chillen. There were hunnerds of years of folds and recriminations. Jan and Wayne were not afraid because the momentum of their luck in meeting had brought them safely to righteous lives and prolly forced the muscles of time into a gaping laxity.

the last time i came was with you

the last time i came was with you
but it wasn't like getting off on youth
it was more about respecting me and our
relationship

the last time i came with you
was a vacation from being a gender puppet
; you went ahead and acted subservient.

the last time we came it came unglued:
our construction of an oppressor's paradigm
, the wasted thoughts we paid for admission

the last time i came was with you
the last time i came was with you
the last time i came was with you

[repeat]

[thelasttimeicamewaswithyou the Mp3]

siberian rent discount

The worshipers have cleared out my home, split up the bitches. One of them, I hear, is fed on canned corned-beef hash and Hawaiian bread. If it's La-La, she could get bloat.

The pool torches, the Yukio Mishima collection, all gone. My pants suits, stethoscopes. Do you know why I'm not bothered by your pictographs in flames?

As long as they burn here, for me, they are good to no one else. Your hand on my breast was spit-blown with oxblood all around like a dissolving turkey star.

No rent to pay, no dishes to cull. I am on cement detail for a long career. The pulsing glow of my ankle bracelet is your good eye, the one that only looks this way.

I take my moles wherever I go. They were needled into me by heaven. All my attempts to extend into space from my torso, however far, have sprung me back to a single cell.

the human meat bazaars

Reptily loves telling stories of her childhood in the human meat bazaars. One endearing slave's Johnson was so large he would be ordered routinely to hold it still. It held metaphornical value as a coat rack, a radiator, a spritzer bottle. By way of salutation, you'd jive, "Just don't move, daddy!" in place of [his name] or ciao. For fear of insurrection or other friction, it was gathered to be the phrase Wayne wd encounter most often. Just as cruel were the simultaneous demands for hot verbalization. Two central desires, to act and be wordless, were denied him during moments of nature's most strenuous command. This was Wayne's work and Wayne's sacrifice. Bereft of options either for civil disobedience or employment, he wd oblige the temple-step tithe monitors to collect their coins by shameful finger from deep inside his snakeskin lucre sash.

Reptily was watching with blackened eye, from bed of filthy rag, beneath a corn hooptie when Wayne finally met his ticket to the middle chanks, a kidnapped preachers' kid from Fordamall. Jan's bare-shouldered, curly-shod traffickers were scraping her encumbrance along a pinched and moldring callejón, high on a mirrored pillow. Her veil branks was fine as wisps of smoke out the nostrils; wrought-iron finch seemed to dash for liberty from the fancy, cage-like dental installation; her head was razored to crushed velvet pile. He bought her where she sat. Without hesitation, for a five-teated cull nanny and a few ribald shouts, Wayne set Jan free. Jan took Wayne home. Jan's dad bought Wayne. Now Wayne just moans. Jan can now see. Wayne is on top. Jan says, "Don't stop..."

Illyn's Dethbed Soliloquy #16

I've been a wandering fool, and it was amazing.
Popping up though gravel like a science film--
what if every frame were an entire short life?
Somehow Shab and my cart are always waiting
; so whut is my purpose circling through here?
Both my eyes are featured too low in the face.
What's next? Skin over mouth and cheek lips?
Every rebirth takes a toll on yr body cosmetics.
I keep passing through I guess because I jump
over and over into Mthyuh. On this entire mo-
untain in fact every expiration is rewarded in
a stinging revisualization of all that was sacred.

Belle-Vu Public Value Motel

At least then I'll be in a no-bind cell. They have bed linens and sinks. We can produce eye-shadow and tattoos.

Public values have been my ball and chain of all the avenues the polls could have taken.

But the old system, a skeleton, is my Public Home. Every iron bar a month's living rent.

Donna, incarcerated
Phyllis, embedded
Chama, amica

Mass Sociopathy

Why so many zombies? Our answer lies in the widespread fear of zombieism.

You sit in the Killercoaster, tilt with the wurl. Do you dare take a sideways glance at the guy at the tip of yr axis?

Remote Tissue Decisioning needs to stop here, in this momentous space we share.

Remote Muscular Positioning seems too painful to resist. What if the operators were dead? What if a million zombies could be cured by taking a shotgun to the cameraman instead?

If everyone took a snip at the Filter of Loathing, in just an evening we could be back asleep with no one knowing. Our intimate blister would again be a universe without a crack.

Phyllis, Embedded
Sports 'n Sex Crimes Bugle

Empty pool

Mike's Swimming Blog Vol. II, #6

Rcvd from Donna this am:

There's no swimming in jail. That's how we made the most of the low chanks, isn't it? Your beautiful nips, my statue of liberty in the deep end with a glass of wine. Or you and was it Ken? standing on the bottom with hoses for the winter drain, resurface and tile fests, echoing bitchiness.

No swimming and no love in jail. They say one's lips grow thin. I remember waking up with you beneath a surgical gurney in a sea of boxes of No-Shiv. The treatment worked on you. Miss the glowing and bumping tho. There was a chick we let out in a cove picked up violin melodrama by Chausson and St. Saens. We think its how they interact with the Filter now; they are receivers and interpreters more like bats than fowl. If you had allowed yourself to develop fully you could be clawing, right now, through the bars on my window.

I don't expect you to get back together or say you will just because I'm here.

D.

trial of ms. dr. donna thong

• Please tell us what led to yr charge that Ms. Thong is a rampage shooter.
• First, when we refused to pay her, she appeared to be quite angry. That was frightening.
• Go on...
• Her reputation is pretty violencey. No one at the clinic likes her at all.
• What are some of the complaints for which you personally were stationed on cull?
• There was the one when Sandro, an enema nurse, was pretending Dr. Donna was invisible. He reported that she kept vocalizing more and more loudly to him until she was nearly yelling, which obliged him to employ a habanero spray in her eye. Anyone can tell you she seemed insanely out of her mind at that point. Like a killer.
  
• What had Dr. Thong been trying to tell Sandro?
• He said she kept asking for the key to the Ladies'. He had it on a chain. But she could have had a weapon stored behind that door.
• Why did Sandro pretend the doctor was invisible.
  
• Everyone knows what a scary, violence-toned person Donna is. Someone on the distribution list suggested that we all just aklike she isn't there until she gets the message, and some of the more responsible ones did just that.
• Did Dr. Thong also receive that message?
  
• She did, because she took it directly to the Workplace Fluffer Team.
  
• Please describe the mandate of the WFT.
  
• "To keep things fluffy with hearts and smiles, so that every day is a worker's treat."
• Thank...
• "To decorate with skeletons on Halloween; to fill our desks with things to eat."
• Thank you, Mr....
• "To sit and pout when you ask, jump and laugh when you give, go sleepies when you take."
• Is that...?
  
• "We are vested by the state to guard a worker's right to talk of sports and cookies bake."
• But sir, is this not a serious clinical environment.
• Out-of-towners don't understand how we do medicine down here. Our patients add up to one of the highest averages in the chanks for prevention ignoral.
  
• You mean their illnesses are their own fault.
• They made their beds. They could have made their own happiness. Why should we all have to pay for that.
  
• Because it's what you yrselves are paid to do?
• We're paid to satisfy the Preservation Society. They've got us filling out forms all day. So what: if the prevention ignorists can work the system, we can do it better.
  
• Would you characterize Dr. Thong as ignorist empathetic?
• She thought she understood the dreams of men. It's how she hurts us in our minds, and why we don't expect her back again.
  

Stoppers

Tom,
Tonight I couldn't harly sleep hearing this clanging. With a forty-knot gale sandblasting the paint off the Exoblinds seemed it must have been the lid to the barbeque grill getting ready to punch a hole through the chain link. So I got up but I could see that it wasn't shaking. I wandered into the kitchen and the sound was louder. I looked out both chinks and there was just the oleander holding on, writhing patiently. It was loudest by the kitchen sink. It was coming from the drains. I found the stoppers and dropped them in. Now it's tight as a thermos in here. I just had to pop my ears.
Sylvia

Can I injure my eyes by crying?

Goober searches, by Wayne: "Can I injure my eyes by crying?"

Crying not that intense since baby;
crying and traumatic globe luxation?
should there be stinging after crying?
safe to watch television after crying?
crying how brown liquors play role?
crying headaches common?
how can I connect with others self-injured by sobs?
does it matter which sounds you make while crying?
is it ever appropriate to speak and cry?
# of minutes before crying = nervous breakdown?
when a commercial makes you cry...?
is vocalization always paramount to self-pity?
crying seize or resist moment.
precursors for tears during sex?
crying outcome : rage, submission, epiphany?
Jan please call Wayne please

mob action

Donna reports:

One of my Spanish ex-husbands' families mobbed me once, so maybe that's the connect with the term mafia. *A* mob is loosely associated, maybe just by geography and emotion, an employer, or not even. *THE* mob is by definition an extended family.

Conchi, Paco's sister explained by telephone: "Es que somos casi como una mafia."

But he lies to you, I pled. I bet he told you I was the one gave him Hep A.

"It doesn't matter. And don't surprise yourself if suddenly there is no water or power."

This isn't because I never brought children to the tribe, that your husband stated my arroz al horno was exquisite? That I mirror your sterility?

"1400 hours tomorrow. Under the M60 bridge, Parque Caprichon, near the statue of Satan. With the keys. We'll have your check."

Father Unamuno had secured some goat pen in the mountains to hide our hooptie, so I had nothing to get to work in.

The family estate on a low floor of a suburban apartment block was shuttered up with painted steel blinds.

Conchi's husband since the age of 9, Jose Maria was nearly a lawyer who could draw up the documents necessary to make it all seem above board.

Mrs. Unamuno only participated passively and hid as well as could be her disappointment at no longer having one less chico pijamado around the house to serve and mop up after.

Paco's brother, needle hanging from a vein, saw back to a time where the two boys'd lived in ecstatic flannel and hardons on thin mattresses over spring cots or at their homework desks or in the formaldehyde veneered pressboard dining salon sipping at fideos or steaming puree.

The jamon, in its holder atop the sinfonia in the anteroom, conspired to seethe with translucent mites.

Arethusa

Missy leans her elbow on a ledge, which sends a boulder crashing down the slope. A mature sugar pine snaps at the base, nicked by a wing tip. She hangs Its face in her hands.

"I take it minorities are well advised to make a strong impression. Is it like the weakling bug who's painted a gargoyle across its papery head? Is it nature makes a swarm come when not backed off so?

Maybe naiads from a previous life rising from nerve venom come to act out, in their wisdom, and with hooks in, wriggles of memory that jar or pull shut levers and consequences that can be accepted as archetypes."

In this way, a graze prey unit outside its hoard contemplates vicariously an apology for the urge to have a bloody meal.

pleasure centre

even nothingothingothing
can echo backakak when
it's bubbling just below the
plaque of comprehensibility.

when you find a sarge who
needs an order, you can
generally think up something
to stoke a larger ardororor.

once pinpointed, a pleasure
centre gloats in unexplainability
and leads thinking mhen and wymhen to
accept a state of wan improbability.

Ted on his own

Feel him, a man whose
mother's quilt's in tatters,
entropy thorough from within,
headlights from the freeway
project fast shadows on the house,
a river of leaves let go,
a current of dark on white;
guest room mattress is a raft
above a carpet where mice got in,
where gramma tried to batten down
an even older weave with red yarn knots,
where dogs moan in star-studded
torpor. Alas a night's almost
gone, another loss postdated.

Ted
"Are you there, nena?"

Auscultation

As yor my main pericardial rub,
I don’t listen to my own deep peril.

In taming me, by fashion of a hub,
There’s nothing left in life that’s safely feral.

Potential space can only be a cave
when queen is one in gawd with courtly knave;

You trace a paradox of my body
and bring the sounds that situate me, oddly.

Wayne
"For you, Jan"

wind whores

who will the wind bring, what whores.
they come slicing with their inner-thigh
meats. their drops in our soup can scar.

why must they fall under cultural artifact.
can't the civil authorities, park rangers.
can't someone reasonable bring them to

their heaven. free release, but outside the
filter; open grazing, but only on natural
animal herds, no other bird species.

one came dipping in, very tiny, against
the full moon. she was shimmering
green before the lilting purple trail.

it was three took my sister, but the
mechanical type. these days they're
all hybrid, running on borrowed time.

Illyn
"They dive like K's falling backward."

Atroposis

there was safety in my temple;
i was at a Command Center.

now i rely on the public oracle
dispenser. i experience Atroposis.

Th' Sisters know you've got it comin'.
You sit back and let them choose it

while you live in so many Temp-
oral Bodies. handwriting analysis

proves how easily Beggars are
turned to thieves.

Tom

Death row in space [the Mp3]

Death row in space [the Mp3]

Death row in space

Clouds of red dust occlude the sun;
between here and the light cracks
weightlessness is queen, and our
hooptie's gone before it even turns

around. A laser just makes the bad
pieces scatter and retake shape as
familiar clones of Christian prayer,
industrious, that this get done, that

he be changed, that I receive. These
trees are all weeds here. We haul an
burn them at the beach. I sucked on
the filter until the planet's exposure

seemed even lighter. As I stood, it
was my right arm that hurt so I knew
the supply of blood to everything but
the braino was safe. Here on a down

day, the security systems soak all the
power; all we have to do is wait until
the shingles stop sizzling off the grid
or an injury wipes the hard drift state.

Ted
"She was dead when I found her."

Exhibit

I find that generally
people who love me
will always find a
way to love the ones I
love, but not necessarily
hate the ones I hate.
everything I touch now
apparently costs
something; every move
an Exhibit. comes
a Winter when

Comes a tam in a man's laf
when she owns up to disaster.
It created you, a monster,
one who Grips and Carries.
But the shriek of a suparna,
or its roll in sleep, can only
mean an end to an age.

Donna
"They fly with their legs spread eagle."
[Dick Olde has also provided illumination on this piece.]

Force Psychosis

I'm you, and I'm dumb,
so someone else must be
planning this thing.

Look, divine's
already on the board;
it's ours to fill in,

and it costs no more;
ways and reasons are not
cheap, and we bleed frequently.

Some will find they
must believe and go deep,
but we've got our

solids, countables,
shiny coins n' dallers;
we pass the coffee

others drink. We're
here for the energy
of the beacon.

Wayne
"Warm the Presses."

Quinoa Barn

Without the Filter of Loathing,
these moments might be
painful enough to remember.
Poignancy is spread too evenly
across the laminated planks
of the middle chanks

when it comes to you and me.
Can you still feel the time
we discovered together
that birds are blind in the dark?
If this place was real,
we'd be part of the scenery.

Standing in a puddle at the
bottom of a quinoa barn,
watching an artifice prove it
can only hold its own weight,
nude farming suddenly rings
trite and fake meat, ungodly.

"For Donna"
Hoolie

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.

Batch desire

Like when I sunk with the dropping floor on the Circumference Poke at the ridemall, tain only weight that can make you fall but maybe yr composition, auto-dread, and coming back up you could lose your shoes. When you see someone coming down the ramp in their socks afterward, it can all come burning back like lava. Everyone else rising around you in a circle, watching the faces turn from mild surprise at their ascendance to pity, hilarity. What it was now that I think was all the wrong desires, bundled, so that their only gravitational reference was the molten mess far beneathe the crust of Earth. While our heads are stuck by centrifugal force against a wall with a curve, there is always the way that chalk slides down the surface of a board, under the radar of physics.

Ilyn

It's Whiter Theren

After all these years of holding on, it's whiter theren,
where departed ones are all you can trust in,
clouds blank as slates, all the purpose in the world to
be written. On a raft with a flame, floating backward,
we can only see shadows on the shore lifting burdens.

There's no path to trace in these sucking salt waters.
Bubbles face the surface and ultimately pop, selfless.
Someone, our destiny, is reeling us from the dark at
our backs. Higher personages explain it's a bed we've
made, a perpetual motion machine, this parlessness.

Peg and Hoolie
Keynote Address
3rd Annual Exhibition of Banishing

The Dirty Gory

Connie was so assured of her body that while many of her peers treated theirs as something so precious as to be given like a pink angora sweater: only once, or only in the dark, or hated theirs so much as to let it go only once, or only in the dark, she could feel Pain of Rivening but only along with the knowledge of regeneration and ever-presence. Indeed a joe felt drained and used after paying for a session, and so her clientele was culled.

"I don't claim to be Eryho. I have some implants that make my bones grow. It's a special sponsorship situation from PharmCo. Only one man could keep his lid on, and that was Ted. I bet he wonders wai I'm dead. T'was Wayne that did the dirty gory; he thot that Ted wd break th' story."

Hotter Black Stud Thanever

Peg and Ted approach the Altar of Forgetting.

I dint think we'd meet like this chile. I brought you here for questioning.
Please make it stop.
I can hardly hear your squealing now, silly. Be real.
OK, I kepper at the Squiggles Motel off the innerchank.
It took this much pain to let me know.
If youda showed up in yr own hair, y'ought'n hafta bring the eaters.
Don't get folksie on me now, Mr. You talk perfek on the oracle.
It's reading chile.
I know it is.
When will you let me go.
When I unnerstan wai.
She was going through the change like you did. I was hyperempathic.
Connie got some bones in her back?
One got caught on a spring in the mattress.
Hee-yuh! The Pegyuh laughs and coughs yella mucous.
I loved her so much, Peg. I swear it was a differnt part of my Braino.
I'm sorry I had to fight deception with deception.
Will I recover from this?
You will be a hotter black stud thanever.
Thank you baby.
An you dint killer neither?
No, woma! You needa ass me that?

Place of Bitchiness

Even this post, by Phyllis as Larry Acker, has been censored by the Mthyuh Preservation Society.

Joy Laffter

Joy Laffter shows up at Ted's in big sunglasses with a box just as the sun's popping behind Chukka chank. Her blonde wig is human hair, a little frizzy. She stands there in nothing but a black pantsuit but for a khaki parka instead of the jacket. The vest gives it a tank-top affect. Ted answers the door, all negroid with maroon-rimmed eyes. Peggy was seeing so much red his blood seemed to swirl on the wrong side of the skin. Who are you? asks Ted, on his day off, after a couple of mad dogs. Joy Laffter, Peg responds. Her lips are pink-orange. And she steps on in.

So this is your dive. The back of her parka flutters cape like.

Ms. Laffter. I have an office. I'll give you an autograph outside.

I have something for you.

Ted takes the box.

Then all the eaters of the world swarm out. They cover his flesh except for his mouth. They have evolved to let a man scream during dinner because it makes him taste better.

Liberty chank

Neighbor A: loose cats

• feeding is the main thing in our lives.

Neighbor B: pen dogs

• I knew we were different because Peg would take us for dinner at the AM/PM at 1:00 am and when teachers asked would I do that in my own livingroom, the answer was always yes.

Neighbor C: wasp nest

• a fixed income means you prioritrize; luxuries gained always outlive debts n' obligations

Neighbor B: leaky pipe

• it's the landlady's joint, but a beacon for trouble

Neighbor A: no W.A.S.T.E.

• I don't need no stinking waiver. Until I was in my 30's, I procreated mechanically. When I first learned about cross-sexual reproduction, I didn't see the connection with desire. Was a tam wen a woman didn't know the cause of her labor. Now that I am Ruler Queen, only the protection of my children and conservation of my lands matter, plus romantic gratification. Neither Neighbor B nor Neighbor C can provide any of that.

Neighbor C: stucco gaps

• Happy hour food, garage sales, 30%-off last day and bulk meat; a rice cooker. This is how we mate.

Neighbor C: barbeque

• Our chillun are gone, and we live in Liberty chank, the cheapest of all the chanks, so we are happy camping out on this land with no leaks or rain. It is similar to waiting for rescue on the surface of the moon, not really mattering.

Neighbor B: mud puddles

• Everywhere we step there are trials, plagues, pest. I seem to be the happy voodoo doll, banshee flapping.

Neighbor A: mosquitos

• creatures come to me, but never to kill. their pulling from every direction keeps me erect and surprise moving to their wim. if i keep drinking nectar in, my pores, wicking, can fight this gravity.

Day 99

before i could speak i re-
membered who i was before,
but it didn't matter any-
way because i was so exas-
perated that I couldn't th
-ink of a single word to say.

funny how it was accepted,
my growth, taking over space.
flesh passed other flesh to
me. i passed flesh out my ass.
still they carried me, fetid.
Now I dread to top the food chain.

when yr old you fall apart, OK;
but the cone walls of your wurl
also peel backwards into shame
while your heart hesitates to
beat for fear you'll see it,
until into another tiny form you bleed.

Missy
Full release, day 99

Flame box

Gawd everything has the same alarm sound onit.
In these times even tools must screech their worth.
Through every lens, booby traps scope into infinidy.
Kava machine wants juice, a vault door ajar, flame
box peaking. Tomorrow holds fear, vengeful timer.

A young K has taken to our birdbath and secure clearing;
pigeons and squirrels are liddered everywhere. But they
are free now. K's have riven back skies and guide our days
agin. Living in their rule brings us together as kin. Only
Pegyuh can reason at nest level and keep the raids down.

3am and i'm still trying to calibrate the oracle dispenser.
Was a day when a man owned his own cogidigitator.
Says Abort/ Try aggressive update (not recommended).
Was a tam wen we all knew whut to do.
Me? I'm head'd down t't' temple via an unnergraun tunnl.

--Wayne (boss)

War Trench

I feel good in this bed.
I want to pay for it, pay the charges.
I owe it to Sears, feeling this good;
I want to pay them everything I owe.
I want to pay my debt.

I itch all night and can only dream about my ego.
The shiv is keeping me afloat on a nightmare lagoon.
Otherwise I think I'd thrash around until I could find Ted.

I seek you in my imagination, which is different than the future.
I seek you in the dampened sheets, the stink of your razor bump meds.
From a cliff you keep falling this way, into cotton and feathers.

All night in this room is what we have,
but the sun is coming up soon, love.
It's time to take a stand and give.

(your) Donna

Hut of Saints

Clear in the middle of the preserve sits a Hut of Saints,
Where you can go and behold figures of the Holy rising
From a species of Xmas tree wheel projector or fire log
Simulation; There goes the Admonishing Spinster: look
At me, my hagg'rd creases, take a clue! Now th' Soulful
Maiden, in habit ascending like a rocket, so benevolent;

Therz th' Chama, Reptily, the only topless one, a clayish
likeness but for her breast; Oh Chamalamalalahamacha-
lamalachamalalahamala, the living one, where you roam
is our peril and our fate, chalalalamahamalala. N' behind,
a dog sillo'ette, waving up across the tied stick and hemp
string structure singing in a Squeakin' Hula with the wind.

Futility Study

Carrying a pallet of 24 gallon-sized water bottles on my back, the sun was so hot on the cliffs that i swooned and lost altitude. I have to slurp this fluid with my beak tip and tube-like lingual cartilage. These are just steps i take to get through my laif, not complaints.

My constructs have recombobulated. Daytime seems like a habitable place turned inside out. As long as i can pray and rub the shivstone, i'll send my worry through the heat of my fingers and onto the drum of Absolute Space.

The future can still exist without my imagining it. As soon as our religion was deemed unnecessary, hoards of cynics flooded in to take over the pastoring of the left behind. It left a few of us adrift, but with a true faith.

Missy
Open Release, Day 49

Pig of Depression

Pig of Depression, you leave my spoils in the corners of the cave,
Pig, lover of chewed bones, ignorer of pain, moribund of memory,
Bloated pig of feeling, hog of medicine, retriever of soiled food,
Pig of static desire, pig of selfishly unrequited want, self-penned.

Pig of immersion, happy wallower, knowledger of damnation and
Doom, freezer of food and peristalsis, forager of discarded archives,
Snorter of...

Can you just stop it for a moment, Donna?
Whut. It's the Bhagavad Gita.
No, it isn't.
You think I'm...
Yes, yor sitting there with yr pipe just chanting extemporaneously.
I have it memorized, I...
And you are using my knuckle as a worry stone; it's nearly raw now.

Yr right. Guess I'm just feeling a little low.
Have you thought about doing some housecleaning?
Do you mean the bastard who killed Connie?
No, I meant actually cleaning yr house, but... go on.

Lysate

Donna poked at her tobacco bowl with an ankh pin.
So you walk in my sleep?
What? You mean you dream of me?
No, sometimes I open an eye and catch you streaking by on the tile floor in your socks, ninja. You yourself have reported certain nocturnal peregrinations that could only have occurred among my delta waves.
A white mustache of smoke gave her a veil as it rose. Hoolie listened to the flock of windmills cooing beyond sight.
Our bodies --and moments of shared tragedy-- are the thin yarn that in those two places binds us, allows us to roll sharply forward like a squared, spongy wheel.
On the contrary, I believe it is our love of those not present that keeps us in moon-like orbit, that wobbling, borrowed light of lost knowing.
Indeed, her name is tattooed on your wrist as well as my ankle.
Ink is the murkiness that follows. Connie was the miracle, invisible.
I can't see you at all now.
But there's been a Perseid every 15 minutes.
Someone's turned off the bathroom switch.
It's on a timer so's I can check the color of my piss.

My Spread

I'm not in a space-step program. I work hard; I am highly functional, as you've seen-- I am highly functional in defending myself, outcomes aside, hardworking in my own defense, just as I was highly functional before I began to have to defend myself-- and then I was hardworking my functions for the good of the flight school.

When you give me all theez rulz and regulations, train me to strive and try, then wipe everything aside with an arbitrary decision, I get double vision, I get religion but it's upside down right then. It's a dog and pony ride, but my ass growing wide on your office chair means I participated. My spread is your bread, baby.

Cuz I chose this grinder to wind me down, I guess I have to spin in it, find the swing in it, and do my thing. Drown. As in a blender. From all that I remember, it'll be like my hometown, the one I scrammed from when my shoulder bones started poking holes in roof sections. They were tender. Now my life itself is deregulated.

Missy

Clem Bake

Dear Clem,

Ted called and sang a portion of the Patty Duke Show theme to me on Sky Dispenser today.

A group of chillun from eight different countries sang a few lines of Happy WD Day, must've been about 900 ovem.

Where are my kidz, Clem? Where are my kids right now? Are y' hugginem? Don't chyall have an account on Twiddle?

You know I'm not sitting on my thumbs cuz I'm typing. But I'm also not dormant off oracle. I think I am ever closer. How do I know this. Because I can see a hooptie in the driveway and you in it. All those seats and ashtrays, but you come alone.

All my power is nothing to you. You had to be borne of the same womban as a certain mulatto news anchor with blue eyes. Was he singing through the station next to your beauty mirror, or his? I could see the little glamor bulbs in a square.

There are candles burning in caves everywhere for my Connie, my Hoolie. Maybe they've grown up and can see the light. Hoolie said when he was six: "Aunnie Clem say you a inter-special anomaly, mommy."

No, I won't be dropping the lift basket this evening. Don't even show up again without my family in the vehicle.

I love you in spite of everything,
Peg

Saint Dick [revision]

I sit in the back pew of an empty Episcopalian sanctuary with my
degradable plastic sack and its transparent cellophane wrap on
laminated cardboard, a box of fourteen aluminum packets that contain
low-porosity, curve-cut moisture sheaths laid over 21-mg transdermal

Nicotine glue patches. A swell of lemon slavered wood and illumination
on cotton paper holds at length sweet iodine eddies from the chequered,
florid lane, and because there is a concert in town, the pungent squalls
of faker hippies curling along on mushrooms or methyl-amphetamines

With their costumes, Goodwill hunting and baby straps. Ceilings this
high create micro-climates in the dust-rayed suspension for door mice
and death moths stuck in the water tension of puddles in stone-columned
receptacles. Alone with the crinkling flotsams of Man in my lap,

It doesn’t seem to matter what might swim between esophagus and
lung. Only my lips will breathe this prayer, only enemies and friends
in far-flung orbits could form a basis for presumption or explanation
for why I’m here, but I’ve no known knowledge of my excursion

by any human ear. Tho I may detect the shriek of a suparna high
above the painted metal beams and glass of the cupola, it does not rain
fear, only static wonderment. I strode past shingled cottages, against
the backs of doorstop Buddhas in the creeping hindo-communistic

Aesthetic of the university neighborhood. A declassified man on feet
naked but for tar and sidewalk gum, with folds of cash and dreads and
beads pursued me chanting fumigation of indians by cigar store regulation
and the osmosis of their reservations, and his speaking slowed me down,

Gently forced the diversion that led me to a street that opened between
some trees where I could spot the steeples and the dome and its ribs
caught up with kite string and palm fronds and blanched bodhi skins
teased by saline winds seeping from the bay, which keeps away tsunamis.

Hoolie

Interview with a Captain of Industry

"Looking for yr fren David?"

"Yes, I know it's last call, but..."

"Who's got a call butt?"

"Have you seen him?"

"Per my advice, he'll be arriving shortly in Gary, Indiana."

"Far."

"I'd say."

"Well, I've got five dollars. Can I buy you a White Russian?"

"I'll take that drink and offer you a job."

"What's yr name?"

"I hear yor a mediocre ho."

"It's what some say."

"But yr better than that."

"Don't you love Kaluhua?"

"Some glamour, but more regular."

"It's in Gary, yr operation?"

"It affected my amygdala, actually."

"Mom'll wanna know where I've gone."

"It'll hep you get a loan on a hooptie."

"With a visor mirror?"

"I told you you wr jus right."

Employment-related

I love to tell the story of how i started working at a mortuary lipstick factory. My fren David was wondering what we were gonna do for fundz in order to keep riding the New Wave one night. How would i contribute. I said oh i'll go next door and turn a trick. Too shy, took me till closing, and the Gerente says he'll give me five bucks to sit on his face. But not before therz an ugly scene with the barkeep. "Show me what's in yr drawr," Gerente says. Bartender looks so Pissed Off, spits out his nose on the Bottle Washer. "Hand it over. Sorry, can't pay you this week. It's all Rent." Bar guy stomps out the door like a Sissy, which in fact he was.

Gerente throws a deadbolt as big as yr arm behind him, says come with me.

Upstairs on a rug in the out-of-code loft office/bedroom plywood efficiency platform, i was at first frightened i'd suffocated him until he started to snore. Then i looked over at his wallet, full of a night's take. I just poured beer on his face until he was awake, climbed down some kinda bunk bed ladder and walked out the front door with my fin.

Just because of that, because of that story and the sincerity within, i met a believer in the rehabilitation of youths who have too much fun. I'll never know his real name, but now i breathe toxic powders and work in slime as others do in fog or wind.

It's all about death at PharmSupply, Funerary Cosmetics Div. We deliver because we can, and we are. And we do. Did.

Now that i myself am Dead Physically as well as employment-related, i can say whatever i want.

Connie

Monopoly of Prerogatives

The Chama's challenge as she scales cliffs and tears flesh and nests is to find some rest in conscience. No longer a topless AfroAmerican shivstar in her 30's, neither beauty nor the powers of hypnosis can be centering virtues. Even infamy is left yet unrewarded before tracking kicks in. All she has is my early reporting, and through it, a monopoly of prerogatives.

Reptily, now you are a bird. You were an ape. And before that, a maid. Summon yor warring facets, grrl. What does evry suffring living creature believe in. They next move, woma.

"Just because of a helicopter doesn't make you queen neither."

We're embedded. I'm awol just like you, but also no one told us we coont.

"This is my life to save. For you it's a thrill ride, dispatch."

I love you Chama. Together we can have a home in this sky and crags.

"Until you ship out to sell me out, charlatona!"

Don't swipe at my ride, now.

"You go an take a break. You hold yor shit."

**end of transmission**

"A Hero"

It was a year ago about now, that many people and things having moved through places. Even then we thought of how solids are overrated, that mass itself got too much attention. A vacuum is a place. There are spaces where there is nothing.

Twice a week you went off to the tramp with the crystal ball on a stand. The solid and the gas were both clear, but the one could only tauntingly reflect, not contain. Your sadness spilled into the air of that room, tent, hooptie, ditch.

That was one time you answered back with an all-time and timely disregard for time. Your movement has carried you here, and that could not have happened without unlimited space. Possibilities of emptiness make even pagans fear.

to Cap'm, "A Hero"
Phyllis

false awakening

After a Plethora of Mornings that feel the same Cool Straw in the nest, Peg deserves a False Awakening. I am able to tap in, with my job in the media, to her remote decisioning conduits. I'll appear first as a Tease Report, then a feel-good piece, and finally the Signature Commentary. She'll know enough to try and open a Closed Circuit. Because she mutters in her dreams, we can touch and recommit until I Can Come.

Or will you come to collect Me, Darling? Pluck me from the World of Connectivity? I ask you, as a Long-Hair Cat filled with burrs but will only lick its Pink Bits, to wipe my Channels Free with a Single Spasm of your claws as you sweep through town.

The kidz are operating bess they can on yor governmental income. I still have blue eyes and brown skin. You could be diamond mining Africa or harvesting the next chank over, tell me love. Please Goddess indicate if you've been marching, that yor one of the ones they've scheduled for Open Release. We can pool our networking and raptor skills for a Sure Kill of the intruders. I hear they've got litcrit support now, but it's only a matter of time before love mixed with procreation will bring them down.

Yor dark clear stud,
Ted

The Windrose

The windrose is a plus or cross negated. The
in-betweens spoil everything by suggesting
infinity. Man has four limbs; so many in-
dividuals depend on numbers like these.
The true rose is only a cross turning;
all circles, thus, are an illusion.

Turning in every direction creates our globe.
Wind, not chaos, displays this point. A spin-
nig cross is a wrrlpool, yet not open ended.
This is how we arrive at the proof of solids:
Nature's want is to wrap herself around thm.
Otherwise she spins like an eating, shitting

Vajra going down on her insides and spitting
air. Our trade routes only follow the sucking
of a deep inner core, only wanting to tap a
meaning. Fortunate as an epic, I can turn cir
-cles around the glare, dip my beak deep into
the mesh as for a fish, eat of dust forced by

A system of apparent perpetual motion, like
my lifespan. She needs to close off the in-
take and egress and carry on self-contained,
around a man, someone staunch who wants po-
lish. Pregnant women seem to be hauling a ball
when it's only a windrose protecting its nut.

Peg

Strange House at the Mouth to a Windmill Farm

The bitches' ears go back; they stand frozen in poses of toe-testing and finally sink like sphinxes into the sand.

Puzzling behavior is often the result of sounds inaudible to the human ear, yet tonight it is still as a lake bed.

They can hear much farther, other packs, the highway, emptiness of radio waves bouncing against their heartbeats.

Like bats, their shameless emotions are broadcast and return as a map, but a monolith, with all space filled in.

As you walk between buildings in your black cap, far away from here, my love is a beacon that stuns me sleeplessly.

We can all still smell the jetsam of your last moon on this octant of the planet. The room and land have turned strange.

In a wide mountain ditch carved by wind and absences, a bowl of gases, sits a house where dogs keep the vigils of men.

Cap'm

Mike's Swimming Blog, #6

You are anticipatory, yet
you want the days to undulate slowly,
even anxious to reach a day that's slow,
so anxious that the day grinds by.

We thought time was the
difference between today and tomorrow,
not how you resist or move in space.
We were wrong. But are we dorky mimes?

Two nights now I've fought a permanently
duct-taped vacuum hose, a sea monster or
reef, after only one and a half strokes.
I am not comfortable with my nose underwater.

The pool in that house is for show or
soaking, not to swim. Only the Mexican
understands this. He came with his
blower at 6 AM, or wasn't that him?

Now that all that was mine is repossessed,
Water stalks me, even as I try to stand
free, to remind me perfunctorily of its
disillusion and ravaging suspensionship.

Where are the bats and leafy, hairy flotsam?
How can toes scribble nonsense without algae-
filmed walls of bathroom tile to record each
grateful and confident, leveraging touch?

You and I look to swim in each other, fools.
There will be better times when we cast a
glance backward and see what we've written
in these caverns, once they are still.

Mike

High Chank Turnoff

Ancient mulatto news anchor and his wife, a K; What kind of messed-up children would they lay? Therz mixed-up situations everywhere; We've got them coming at us by air. We've got to hit them in their nests, where Peg and her assassins rest. I see The Chanks one day with clear skies and no grid, no worship or fear. Devils hide above; wisdom rides alone. We will set bait and track them down. Wayne [Disassociated]

Our Genus

We take in swarms from the windstorms
, give them stillness and warmth, and lay
out glue traps meant for much bigger an-
imals. Everyone is seeing apolyptic mean
-ing into anomalies of nature. There is no
other way that is non-toxic to our genus.

They struggle themselves to exhaustion
and then maybe fall asleep or just sit th-
ere pissed off and starve, helpless stiffs.
Their numbers show how our own lives
depend on killing off as many as possible.
They seem to prefer living sweat even o

-ver shit. Sugar draws few. The smell of
sliced ham poked into the grill of a zappe
-r lamp just makes them crazy writing t-
heir names in the air and lighting on any-
thing but the fry tubes, though now an a-
gin the pups jump at the stray execution.

Wayne [Rebuttal]

That's Some Low Security

Dipping this far into the evening
makes my circulation pound
from fright of undermining the
security of tomorrow.

Sleep lost is death wasted.
I've got appointments with
shivreps in the morning, so
I can't bash the establishment now.

I only know that Missy and I
love one another the more
certified I become, or now that
I'm washing bowls things seem in order.

Without her really I'm em-
bedded in meaninglessness.
Or is it with? For technically,
she has yet to be assigned a significance.

Phyllis, SSCB

Failure

I've been a failure, everything I've done.
At the time it seems like progress, but
it's just a move from one to another failure.

We were going to preserve these gods
because they were real and when we
saw them, fantasy turned obvious.

Of course, there they were. And could
be saved with parts of machines.
Musculo-skeletal decisioning was first

piloted in glass booths with heavily
made-up flakes so we couldn't see
who we were killing. Problem was,

None of them died. After swatting
them together like dolls, they were
broken and mascara splattered.

Now they've bred their sticky
progeny, all coming up through
escuelas monarcas to join the

last of the real sky lords
and be flying maybe remote
control gods but not controllable.

They are not completely controllable,
and the real ones are dying. In our
medpits. It's like they're over-fertilized.

They spill a purple glue
flakes have taken a liking to,
up to sacrificing their own

to collaborate with our project.
Though I'll lose my job, seems
like the only thing to do now is

hose down the old biddies on the
death march, and let them out to
see if they or their epitypes win.

Tom
"My Boss is Wayne"

My First Screech

A semi-official, I haven't rose through the proper channels.
I feed in these unmarked pissholes. Freedom breeds suspicion.
Whenz my release hearing? Am I on semi-auto till doomsday?

I don't suppose anyone could fly me a lead pigeon;
cramped as I am, even by the wild, I crave noticias.
Mis vecindarios hoy son rocas y charcos de vomitos.

Or just return to me my Reptily braino. Therz too
much longing in these woodz. Where is the camphor
oil of my abuelita with the shimmering tail? Aiii!

Half Missy, Half Preservation Society

weird growth

When the ground shook, something rose like thick white smoke but with a slow growth, maybe second hand speed, out of a crack, faster than cauliflower. Then it bled.

Illyn's burns and stretch rips caked with the dry sand in a mud made of static born of friction powered by movement. Movement, it turns out, is more relevant than time, which mostly lies.

Synaptik action batched an array of repair technologies and who cares how long it took, anyway; he was a naked monstrosity who would fall resignedly into a wooden cart he himself had placed there at the event mouth whenever. Shab could have been saddled up for millenia or a couple of bucks, didn't matter. The jagged planks and their absences felt like a rack of feathers.

These are chanks. They rock and pitch. A baby of God, Illyn felt seasick. His eye was way too low. Go now, he commands. Look for your master. Wherz yr bowl? Shab twiddled his limbs like a small dog running but stayed hovering shadowless over the ground. Only the mountain herself could scoot the squarish wheels along their rutted path of lurching and weightlessness and impact.

Illyn's sojourn makes me think of Donna's patio. It's the same place at night with the leaf blowers and watering jets as it is at 7:00 AM as I scurry across it to my car. The body can only feel the sting of time when matter moves. The body senses movement and wakes up and moves and both movements leave scars in the shape of time, which tells a lie, even in writing, even in yr flesh. Tonight, the distal screech of a suparna added to the mess.

Phyllis

Embedded, SNSCB

Communal Disharmony Camp

Terror in the Sky

It should be a peaceful place
because nothing's there. It's
where light comes from, but
it stabs my breast to look up.

Why can't I see the beauty?
It's like it's yr last snapshot,
all blank, but then therz an
Unexpected One also absent.

This I believe: we must have al-
ready crossed over. Our whole s-
phere buttonholed The Crack, an
now the heavens are a sewer.

Or ancient flakes, gawking up in
fear, evolved synaptikly into wonder
till the moment they were pierced
with ebony, rocketed off to Never.

Only cuz my own mum is the most
possible pure and beloved can I
call it "anti-mother." On a personal
note, I feel it's coming for me.

If I'd meant the Wild Savior, I'd've
gotten a slap on the back, but since
I'm sticking with K's, I end up slinging
rhymes in communal-disharmony camp.

Connie
"CDC VIII: No Rights!"

Chunk of Horny Rock

IN 15 minutes I shall swallow the shiv and wake up seven hours later in full wing, full toothed. My nail rigs are still soft as bowling balls, but that's to carry me in fear far enough to hide and sharpen, grow and take me just as long to return. Therl be warnings. I'll be famished. Two unauthorized kills set me back a growth cycle, and I will carry the nubs in my skeleton for life. That means nothing now. With flake donors, I can go on to lay dynasties and just be, permanently, like a chunk of horny rock in silent orbit. I'm a fixture in Mthyuh's plan. Quasars, plague, all kinda cataclysms you name it. My job is to witness, monitor how life progresses, ebbs. In between I nap and fart.

But tomorrow I must pass the final test. Am I really formed. It's a hairline between liability, casualty and launching me half assed. A K's buttocks grow and balance in flight, not squashed cruelly into a wood desk. With an ink well no less. That was how I tatooed our life, your blood on the inside of my cheek flap when my halla talons were fresh. I know now I can't stop and smell the mercy after whut I've learned about the mission. I am built for particular understanding. Because I am not destroyed, my purpose is truth and trumps rightie/ wrongie. I feed and take and create culture.

Missy

Callous in an Odd Place

Donna's hut, carport and pool create a Tiki-style octagon behind the chain link fence. She can often be seen in knee-to-toe bells and a halter adjusting deck lounges. The parcel is mortgaged at more than three times its worth; one would expect it to sprout exhaust plumes and fly. True enough, a layer of hot lava sufficiently shallow to be covered in the mineral rights sometimes causes mudpots and steam vesicles to appear in the yard.

Donna lives in shame of her sun damaged forearms and ankles. The scar is a shimmry curt'n. The desert pulls at your blood through the skin. Someone has snipped your life stalk and placed you in a drying bin. But why the callous on the back of her thumb?

She was into fresh-juiced carrots until it turned brick-orange. Why should the most puzzling parts of the physique present so saliently dyed? Donna'd been at P-Supply U during the tenure of a psychoanalytic dean crossed with Jungian department heads. She wondered how she was somehow callous in an odd place. One would expect a life to form armament where friction is most frequent. Donna loves her girlz, has shared a kidney with the poor, and of another race. Of reverence to higher beings, one does not chafe from that which can't exist.

Could my linguistics background add something to the mix that would reveal, through language, a fallacy in the metaphorical approach? Not. Memory trumpets: "Phyllis, to tell you the truth, I think something may have bitten me there." Donna crammed a smoke in her mouth and stood to fold the chair. An incision had left the faint white jet-like streak on her lower back.

Phyllis
Re: Donna

Wild Savior

You were lucky it was a seven.
Yeah, you were too.
Seven saved us.
Yes, it did.
Pfist.
What, Fool.
Do you know the story of the Wild Savior?
Yeah, the Seven.
How did it get to be that number?
It's just an old game.
No. There were seven that stepped through The Crack. Only one could be a savior. The rest would do menial labor.
Seven what.
Seven mountain rebirths.
Some of them were bitches.
Yes.
Someone told me they came up from the soil.
After jumping into Kareer Kesh.
I didn't hear that.
You know how flakes take to covet their land.
Hell yeah I was born and will die here, I
Calm down. You don't even know the story.
What sto- hell ya I know the story. Seven went up; it was a pilgrimage.
Moms dropped them off in town.
Dads were working in the mines.
Sisters and brothers praying for them at big assemblies.
Wind blew the roof off.
K's took some of the chillun.
They prayed for a wild savior.
When all the numbers were down except one.
What numbers.
The damn ten numbers. In the law.
In the Law that Saved the Chillun?
There's no such law.
In the Law of Climbing the Mountain?
And that law says
It says you stop ten times and praise Mthyuh and beg.
Beg who.
Beg Mthyuh to
To eat you last. Beg her to eat you last.
That's true. And which station didn't fly away.
Station.
Which of the ten on the way up to Kesh where they pray?
Musta been seven. People get blown all the time in there.
Exactly.
Whut?
I think I met him the other day.

We Will Live in Wanting

We Will Live in Wanting

Until these winds die, we will live in their wanting.
We just continue to resist some far-off vacuum
While air alone, in its fairy likeness, can only follow.

A void rules our yards and makes us feel shelter.
It's a release from pressure makes hearts rush on;
The determined surf, in all its roaring, is sucked back.

There is a hole in space that keeps things moving,
Even within these walls as we listen to the locomotives
Night trumpeting their liberation from nature.

Phyllis

Empathic Implant Report

Empathic Implant Report: Birth Boot
Mod#GAYSHINER89.1-6.10 Glass n’ Foolz Gold Filament
WD40

Sun about 80% of the way down, straight ahead. Visor employed. Two men about 20 years apart stand close enough to touch in a V facing me. They both have long goatees: one is grey, and the other is red.

A trailer with silver stripes frames them in back. A campfire oranges up the nic-stain faces. Subject A waves. “Hey Micah howya doin!” it says. It gives too loud and too fast even at 50 yards, its movements cartoonish. Pfist is projecting a man who is giving himself to you and fighting you. He acts as tho he would perform fellatio and shoot you for having let him do it.

Flakes can be found easy in trailers. Rolling up to the big one, made clean with stucco, there were the bitches. La La’s eye fur is bruising in mocking tear blobs. She sports a fresh jaw bone from the carcass of an escaped embra kid. M’Lady comes fullallopping up to the truck and scratches the trim with her gnarly black foot pads. Amygdala has some degenerative hip going on and smiles her painful greeting with fangs.

Sometimes her eyes glow red, as if she’s in a spoiled foto. She nods her head toward wherever there’s trouble, never taking them off you. Her front legs are permanently mangled into a hug. I, too, have a disease of giving.

Mike and Jan came out to help lug groceries and my cameras, tripods. Pfist runs up pulling out a gun. I’m caught with sun in my eyes for a moment-- too many glinting metal objects. Jan and Pfist take me down to the vegetable garden and set up an empty 2-liter PowerShiv bottle. "Shiv" is any worldly comfort that simulates death.

Jan’s clothes are apparently meant only to constrict her hottest parts. There is not much warmth or protection. She feels this intimately when she shares her eyes with you. She is always scrubbed clean and ready for sex. She passes out $100 bills coming back from the casino. She and her kids once lived with Wayne, or Jack. There she is posing with the tiny Colt Automatic 25.

I get my training with a beer and fire off the only copper pellet in the clip. La La & M’Lady’d followed us down and laid there patiently in the rows. I’m standing like a cap’m on a ship or ready for a big-star bow while jazz dancing. Ball went high on the kick, made an explosion in the sand, and the girlz jump a good 10 feet. From there my moral standards were set for the weekend.

The next step was to run shiv for the whole mountain. It was the only thing Mike was out of except butter, mayonnaise, vinegar, salad dressing or any other balm or salve for things that raise themselves from the ground. Me and Pfist take to the truck for the local PharmSupply.

There’s a flake in the road who rents out his Caterpillar and a day’s work. He’s walking three giant mastiffs in the dust, one of them in an empty saddle. Hey, Joe! You don’t remember me, but we dug a hole for a whole lot of cattle. And a dog. And a cabron. Which went in first. It must have been 20 feet down. Perfick on his knees, a bowing pony clown. And then a Dalmatian. With the bullet stigmata. I had to fling it by the ankles. It ended in the predatory pose gravity'd chosen: teeth dead across the back of the old goat’s neck; legs struck, spread so hard as to pop the nails. We used to call it Death Farm 3000. Say—you were the one in the cockpit that time, on yr backloader!

No, I don’t remember you.

The Flake in the Road squinted into the extended cab. Nope. Who are you? I could hear Phyllis, my editor, cackling in the auditory node. On the way back Joe was walking in the same direction but about 100 yards behind where he’d been.

The liquor store guy reached for his alarm when Pfist came in and they both started laughing. Pfist starts to rant: I hate you! Everything’s free today! I want that, that, and that! while I get the libations. And one of those, please. At a discount! Pfist chimes in, then quiets down. Yeah, guy knows me. I beat up a flake in here. He was, he was touching chillun. He’s doing time now.

Get the phuck out of my store, liquor-guy stage yells. Yeah phuck you brother. I’ll see ya now. Pfist smiles like Clark Gable. Pfist is OK! the guy says. Are we all done here, I ask him.

Back refreshing remnants of our earlier cloud, we rumbled out of town again and toward the stucco trailer. Cactus whiz past so close they could give Pfist a ruddy shave while he sounds off in the open winda. Yeah, he was coming in, and me and some friends were coming in, and he says here come the snitches. I say good cum goes to things who wait. Then I was all saying shit and he was all saying shit even more, and then we just let free like when yr drinking and you get to the point where you know it doesn’t make sense, and you just feel this hate, and you just don’t care? Well we were both getting to that point and he hit me and I hit him and knocked him on the floor, and then I beat him up until he got knocked out. He was all blood and drool. And I said, “I’m a felon; I’m on probation, and I can’t even vote. I got some meth, and a gun. I’m goinda jail. I’m goinda jail.” Pfist said this in an exaggercized way that would make you think he was ready to suck your dick or mad and ready to really wail into and murder you or both. The question was when. I felt excited and sad then.

Should I pull my briefs looser in my jeans or mourn my own offing. Back at the ranch we poured the shiv into the rest of the morning coffee and broke up a box of hard brown sugar into stones perfect for casting in with some ice. Skole!! Pfist shined with his mug of beer and played a game of stealing mine at the point of toasting. We were clicking just fine as he let me claim a joke about Johnny Walker and answered Right on Micah, friends for life, or if not, phuck you!! Phuck ya’ hard and in the head!! His glass had raised to cover one eye and wink at me through it.

OK here’s the deal I say. If I die, and it’s of natural causes, you can phuck me in the head. You can phuck my cerebrum. You can phuck me anywhere cuz I don’t care. But if you kill me, no. You can phuck my stinking corpse in the ass but that’s as far as it goes. Hell I can phuck you in the nose for all I care; you can’t do anything about it, says Pfist, who’s pulled in; You’re dead. I’ll come back to haunt you, I keep on. I have friends. They know how my head’s supposed to look. Where the holes are. I’m sure they do; I’m sure they do, wavers Pfist. Man, that’s sick!! You one sick Mthyuh phucker.

Meanwall Jan is done marinating pork steaks. Ooo. What are you guys talking about? That’s sick. Sick Mthyuh phuckers. Jan, you look beautiful, I say hoping to piss off Pfist. She looks at him. Thanks. Pfist gives me a thumbs up with the top row of his teeth pressing on the bottom lip. Taking a piss, I find a bar of baby soap.

Ya’ll have littluns yr not tellin’ about? Nah. Just my baby. The girlz caught her mousing in the bedroom the other night and now she ain’t right. They got her in their teeth. And shook, chimes in Mike, staring at the beets in the salad spinner.

Mike, yor a scientist; why don’t we all go down and have a look? You can tell us, on a scale from one to ten, how grave it is. Pfist wants a wager. I’ve got 8 and 9, him one through 6. Seven is the Wild Savior. 10 is dig a hole, Chihuahua meets its maker.

So after dinner we all tramp on through the stickers to the silver trailer under no moon, just torches. You can see the fabric of stars and boobs and thongs and hear Pfist and me working through the conditions. There is no payment unless my numbers prevail. We call a vet. No responsibility is required in the unlucky event that the scientist pours his tube in the direction of your fate. Mthyuh will be in charge then. But we don’t know yet.

There is a tiny, dobie-like bitch trembling in a pool of yellow light on a 99-cent astro-turf Welcome mat as a space-age altar to the sofa on the mauled and hoary w2w carpet. Get out or pipe down; we can’t hear anything, warns Mike. Yeah you guys, says Jan sitting, looking up and hugging her own naked brown openings. We can’t hear a thing. Get out.

A casino girl and a scientist through an oval plexiglass window. Pfist and I smelt glowing acorn smoke and an accordion RV hose dumping slowly under some oak. Mike'd got his training with a swimming scholarship and a grant from the Preservation Society. He was stroking the pooch and listening hard for a job or sounds of protest when he pressed for trauma and/or seeping. Ouch! Pfist barked at the sill. Bitches get all the attention. The night was still.

Micah
with Phyllis, Embedded