He died with his eyes open

He died as he lived, with his eyes open.
He lived as if he'd die hoping
That he'd done a little more open-eyed living.

He died as he did, with his lips praying.
His mouth stopped what it was saying,
That he'd given for an answer all his giving.

He left open-lidded, with his mind seeing.
He saw what's for only the dead or the leaving,
But he blinked and missed out on the meaning.


by Ken

If it feels like a mental illness...

you've got a problem being logical,
or you can't scan the logic how its
laid out, and you can only speculate.

you can communicate it, but are you
just an explainer, a blah-blah to nowhere?
spend a tearless day, no inappropriate laughter?

if it feels like you want to be out all
night in the wind, and that's something
you've seen on television that's sick, is it?

Get your nose checked, or your feet for no good reason.
Multiple times swear in an hour while feeling anger.
Wishing it were another in every season.


Dr. Donna Thong
"Please have a professional take a look at that holiday 4U."

palm springs trick room

decor is prim with terror: legs and columns,
thin at the bottoms, holding their breath.

lines form only to dis- and reappear
with interruptions of fluffiness, a mirror.

surface film shows accumulation of time;
lack of clutter lets breathe the memories.


by Mike

ugly chill

you choose diamonds because they're the hardest
and they reflect everything to the point of fire, but

no alternate turning planet, in your gut, not even acid,
can stain high noon for wholly bad and insane actions

a dog can neck pivot scan for molecular waves, but
the only answer is that it's new, we've broken a record

but even mushrooms can grow in this second rate
code red horror blizzard while everything changes


Jan & Connie

pain skull

i felt something come over me
looked and saw it floating in front of me
a sinister pain skull back lit with red

wake howling from a night of not dreaming
many have tried seeing clearly with their
spirits draining into pillows behind them

The Real Pig

Do you see this wound here on my thumb
it looks ok more or less maybe even a paper cut
but what you didn't catch was the CHUNK mis-
sing outta that thing yesterday like I thought I'd maybe
needa STITCH or sunthing it was gouged so bad,
and uh, and here i am sitting in my cute plaid jacket and
you hear me tell my bitch she'd prolly like 2 strolls a day
and how that's never happened, an it prolly never will
and watch her, sunthing REAL I can help, turn and CRY.

I was slicing potatoes on the back of a cheese grater
and even while I worried I was getting too close,
flesh jammed down on its own disaster, and ever
after, have been wondering if some HUMAN simmered
in a 350 oven for an hour and a half and served it-
self to others in the various incarnations and reheatings.
It was a diamond cut with fat and skin on just the
one flat end, so no way to tell from the HAM in the GRATIN.
But who is the REAL pig who won't let his charges WALK?

Is Saliva Meat?

We call them rockers in this environment, where no one else is catatonic. Some see the many-legged harbingers of decomposition, others blind to any over-self. You might be tripping this wild natural filigree that's really an afterimage from the wallpaper in the men's or the back of a phonics workbook. Purple and red. There could be as many exclusive trademarks as flippers on a snowflake and still be the same psychedelic cutout rorschach family tree. Shadows split two ways here. Light, too, available in any direction. You wonder if it makes you a carnivore just swilling your own spit.

where we're sitting now
is so far into posterity
that it's a dizzying needle tip

as i dangle, unending state
wonder if it stops, when
, how am i connected

a flash cube might take away
all your time dependency
or a strobe light

last of the front-line genetic minorities
at a vertiginous future zenith
victimizing the right


Jan Jansdaad 
"Jan Jansdaad is Jan's dad Jan's dead daughter."

Plank @ swordpoint

Ken kneels before the Chama in her elaborate cardboard temple:

To avoid muttering to myself I guess it's better to have a focus. I have not stepped behind this black curtain for you know how long. Chama, in her gothic eyebrow pencil, expresses contempt by not changing her expression at all. It's just that life is terrifying, life seems dangerous right now. I'm afraid, well actually I'm afraid of you. It's been you all along. Chama, not even breathing much, shrewdly conveys a curtain of black with swirls of dark brown and maroon. A mixed bitch yips. "Ken... Ken..." Ken realizes he is whispering his own name, as a prompt, to God. Her unchanging screensaver now appears to be projecting empathy, but toward a target standing just behind him and maybe to his left.


Raga Darbari Rudra Veena

moon-corona-stars

Even the innocuous and virtually unknown text formerly in this space was spirited away by the Mthyuh Preservation Society. PIGS OFF!

Chama as Moonflower

Retrograde echo: Monster Poinsettia

In this forest we give fear, alms to the Begging
Rajah, who straddles a red-eyed dog named
Shab. M' lord, your palms once carried, gave
Vajras as gifts, cupped milk curd and batteries.
Once, riding home to the Moist Pinkish Cave
From a tour of generosities, which were your
Fetish, you came upon a poinsettia as high as
The Fordamal Chank, at Chukka. Its star-shape
Mouths bobbed in thickets of plaited wondry;
It's hunger smelt rough and good and buttry;
But as your fingers slid thru the crinkled folds
In bliss, there was a neuro-chemical stab,
Your eyes rolled, and the Monster Poinsettia's
Incisors chopped your hands off at the wrists.

can't feel pleasure

can't tell this lush diamond pave from the glory or pain of blood and treasure
don't see eye to eye with peacock feathers, shade or nudity, healing waters
shant feel pleasure, won't embrace the never happens part of our tomorrow

mangaboyhagcapm

pie and wooden box

50-year-old Dildo

Sometimes when cherished guests have been to stay
and I'm lounging in around-the-house apparel
it feels as if they never went away

bird twisted like a fish into an 8
wild dog's high call
two-dimensional representation
balls of the hillside coyote

kill the night? or leave it to night mongers
irresponsible domestic predators
are not allowed to perimeter guard or roam
after dark or when we're not home.

Donna

List for John in The Fifth

we thought we'd invented 69
he was white and i was black
one of us hated, the other loved
we were in bed

i good, he so bad
him cunning me linguistics
Each of us say over and out
bleach and trade underwear

as in passing fire buckets, tandem
to achieve a common goal: heroism
but turned in opposite directions
stomped along streets out of step

late and later to finish eating/ exit car
once i read while he wrote a letter
fair is everything not real
fortune arrives if you look away

i stretched, he hung from a bar
rosebud, green pine cone
dozens of eggs spinning
his knees wrapped in my elbows


Reptily

Last rabid dog in England

you can only hear
how water rubs air
stones click together

trust a moonless wood
to take your sloughing  
ruin in its brook

crickets' constant ring
feeds between the ears
sanding smooth the nerve

breath of tar and loam
this evening sinking
below the earth's turn

anywhere or to anyone

I don't belong anywhere or to anyone
My life has been a zig-zag up these
invisible stairs, cartwheels on air.

To me most of all it's clear we're alone
each in a maze with the tunnels sized
down to our own labyrinth choices.

When you toy with your hair, it's like
what God says: do not trace roots to me,
for I've always been a self-unto unity.

Ken

Fruit Bowl

actors seem false

On the information highway,
my husband doesn’t know how to drive
“with the flow of traffic.”

always the asso flying past
or freaking out, boxed into a hive
swarming slowly past him

when it gets like a wet racetrack
living longer’s not a top concern
but panic turns to calm

I asked him once, Jim, I asked him
Have you ever caused someone to skid.
Yes but with shame, he said.


Jan
"My Husband is Wayne"

Another Amsterdam or Another Venice?

As the butt of everything,
do you dyke in or build up
when churning natures call?
As the mons warms, his
eyes they skitter and sweep,
want to feel her everywhere;
Is she in the palm of an outsider?


Baal

De Zonia

Dosia N. Conner

Community Butt

I was a tall, skinny hustler with rings of abs and ribs
holding up a light armor pecs and deltoid silhouette.
I appeared around the same time hippies turned to drink.
My face looks like I got punched in the face, which I did.
Then I pulled a love handle.

Mike was a physical therapist who came into my life when
dawn was darkening the focus of every day,
and when I couldn't catch a ride in the city canyons from
one to another 3rd floor reflector curtain hotel,
he helped me pogo to the next level.

You grasp at stuff when it's too late, literally smoke;
as community butt, you have to set it aflame.
Fast lane living is about always looking out frontally
and maybe registering peripherally a bum hitching,
later as afterimage or sunspot, and then a funnel.


Love,
Hoolie

what an idiot

this weekend can't mean anything,
and not for lack of trying;
we're in a story's long stretch now.

this dread torques countenance
through your ancestors, correspondents;
the world's an idiot to your purpose here.

Static Parade

cott'ny balloons resting,
blobs splattered into frozen
place by a blowtube

billowed as if popped,
their shadows tattoos,
spread on a membrane

wanting humility

Sunflower heads, popping their stashes,
want to bend away and face the ground.

The earth itself likes to turn in its grave.
Diers of thirst circling are well drill bits.

In fire, grains of years curl remorsefully,
and only glowing caps of dust can relax.

gimme the dee effin money

gimme the dee effin money,
an eagle with wings that are a map:
these are the things that seem a
good idea to me.

a spaceship secured by
gravity and chains
where they chop down trees,
jubilant dirge of victory.

sorrowful tomahawk,
legs of ginger
stomping through tall grass,
tuneful recorders, fingers.

Hoolie
"desesperado"

Terror v. Horror v. Anxiety v. Fear v. Panic v. Paranoia v. Puzzlement v. Exasperation v. Dread

Headlights made me squat and lie down on my back like a cat burglar. Those and other slick gangster moves made me wonder who am I?

I'd stand before the oracle dispenser and a great personality, an exaggeration, appeared to bubble into the frame, a swelling from my skull.

Was it self-regard made me lose a way to muscle outta here? I wake up exhausted from a night of paramilit'ry operations: for bread.

Reptily

Prop

the painting looks like a prop,
or it is a prop, or
the boy is a prop,
or he looks like a prop, or
the painter saw him or used
him as a prop, or
the painting was a prop for a large
and pretentious receiving hall or
middle-class cascade of staircase, or
set as a prop in a film or on tape.

it could also have been an ad,
or a mockup for an ad, maybe a
generic boy for any number of ads, with
no copy, or a painting of an ad for
anything, a bill board could have pro-
vided to the painter a free model of 1 the human figure,
2 how you can produce commercial art, and
3, that if you are a boy, this look would be OK.
this painting could have been the result of a grandmother and
some ads she'd seen and wanted that look for this boy.

moths b and c

garlic phallus

am i strong willed? is that why i'm doomed?
as fish schools part and switch back,
the shading i cast, as fool, seems to dissipate.
half-buried chains wave to give anchor but i drift.

my staff are a bunch of dicks posing in lab coats
, and even they can't find a way to get after me.
some friends might fuss or threaten, chumming on
jetsam of the callow marrow of a man's trajectory.

Donna

something empty we share

The emptiness between us is something empty that we share.
Your head blocking the light behind you makes our faces dark.

Let's not

Let's not
take this any further
or end it either

wild poinsettias bobbing in circles is their race up the mountaintop
and while we're someone who'd never say no to a splash of color
we're stuck with the translucency of skin as a crude odometer


Ken

self-regard

i see fresh irises, ski slopes,
pancakes, cross hatching,
a jutting larynx ridge.

there is an eyed, faceless being
inside a face with no eyes.
spasms, years pin back a jeering.

clusters of melanin
are moving back
and blending in,

for youth is in a reversal.
dyed payback is all ahead;
winter is nearing an end.


by Missy

information in search of a vehicle

violence as social media

admonishment

wasted bird of paradise
edging sideways through life
straight is the final arrow's flight
even if you do things right

harsh are the rains and tides
jarring are the co-confined's
needling the pines
wicked the minds

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By Donna

Another Damn Sun Hole

"You could drive a truck through it."

cicada

Its wings are bright green webs.

the drive home

broken pot

smoke

punkin' barn

the most tempting metaphor

migrant worker