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