Saturday, December 27, 2014

Husbands instead of children

men and women get weird in their old age
they go to a place of irony and rage
it's as if they think they've discovered
truths not yet to the young uncovered

an hour may pass in thoughtless surrender
uninterrupted by race or gender
splashing, burning, sun in the trees
stepping fully into my abilities

but then the sweep of decades, centuries
seems too dizzying to know what to do
missing a you that's multiple seems broken
can I have 5 or 7 husbands instead of children?


Peg

Monday, December 22, 2014

self-righteous fugue state

this skin has lost resiliency, just tears, a
bee has lit, gone, n' returned in the shape

of four clover leaves over the years, but
all totaled, stinging memories are plenty

i begin to glow and matter presses in
tongues of the aggrieved spew theirs


Donna

Friday, December 19, 2014

i keep figuring it out and then i forget or doubt that i figured it out


as soon as you started handing me folders with names like my music
was when you starting taking away both my music and the concept of mine

right now i don't even know where my music is right now, even the light
hold you give me on my property is ellusive and subject to fire walling

and invasive questioning, long periods of solitary hold time or blaring music
just to do what i used to do with a plastic disc and a needle, i need your

permission every time, to sign away my privacy and become a whore for
your partners, i get sucked into the back door of the industry but for free

Connie
"Angry even yet from the grave."

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Phalli

PEG: Phyl, now that you are a journalism adjunct at several institutions of post-high school learning, how would you cite ways it's different from actual journalism.

PHYL: For one, you are interviewing me.

PEG: Are you bitter?

PHYL: Isn't that a given, Peg? Are you I wonder bitter that your children were turned by the temple into science experiments? Ever wonder if you're compared to a family of hairless purple bats?

PEG: Thinking back across your own career though, what might you have maybe tweaked a little.

PHYL: So, it ended up with the most beautiful relationship I've ever had with anyone, including my own parents. As Missy's preen gland expression specialist, I traveled places I never knew existed.

PEG: Is it now that she's past her awkward transformational stage and screeching through skies barely recognizable as anything but that what could be named "Missy."

Now that she's gone, not Missy. That you are irrelevant, or tell yourself so. That Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle doesn't any longer have a place for you.

PHYL: They don't have a place for me; they fired me. They were bought out by Applebees.

And to answer your initial question, I find the life of a freeway-flying adjunct to be very much like journalism: traveling a magic carpet between radically different sets of expectations, philosophies, approaches, policies, operating systems, personalities, parking procedures, lexicon, jargon, argot... having to almost sociopathologically enter, absorb and reflect each mirrored chamber.

PEG: I was a substitute teacher for a while in the 80's. They stole my car, drove it to the beach with a case of beer and spray painted phalli on the backs of the seats.

PHYL: Are we done here?


Saturday, December 13, 2014

very expensive swimming pool

every day was a bald giant pounding his metal hammers
KUNG KUNG KUNG KUNG
it's supposed to be like a primitive prehistoric setting but
they have SUV's

i fight any person with whom i come in contact
friend foe blood stranger
equally, as a way to bully me up a family, i
see wrong in you

i dare assholes to try and blame me for providing a center
if there's nature to give
and the right combination of loving and wanting, then
it works atemporally


Mike
as "La Chama"



Friday, November 28, 2014

She's a monster hatched and finally fully free in the open range

***This post was the last straw for the Mthyuh Preservation Society, whose board took final action to stifle effective immediately. ***

Sunday, November 23, 2014

I beg to surrender

it keeps me from sinking into despair
to sit here and defend myself into thin air

i speak to an imagined hypothetical judge
as if she cared. My dog's jowls spread on

the carpet as it hears the cascading pleas
some nights on my knees I beg to surrender


Donna

Friday, November 21, 2014

dysexistencia

may as well, outside these walls
a vacuum, a wanderer, dreaming
lidderly everyone else human

as for other species and breed
we can look out for one another
between the pageantry and combat

the northern clamp sets in again
changes the pressure in the head
metal pops and wood groans on


Missy
"A year liberated."

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Plenty of light for one day

If we do remember previous lives that means this is everyone's first life-- how weird!
But there are people who lived and died before us so their souls must've gone elsewhere.
So one life per dimension is one thing known-- some kind of cosmic musical chairs.

Connie

Monday, November 17, 2014

People say things that don't mean anything

stay up late thinking i'm stealing hours nobody's missing
listening to people say things that don't mean anything
madison avenue with the asshole of pop culture stretched
into a crown, the rancid echo chamber, dreaming dog
i'm seeing one of those walking light storms the blind have
it doesn't matter if i open or close my eyes, both the same
that's how hard they're tripping, node tips of technology

Friday, November 14, 2014

Alone/ unique

even though we know we're not the only liveable planet out there
when you think about the distances it doesn't really even matter
it's kind of the same thing yes it is like that being alone/ unique

maybe the only reason to hate the cold is how it's like terror,
overlap in muscles seized creating a fallacious pathos transfer
don't you see it's warm enough to survive inside each one of us


Reptily

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Two kinds of muscle memory

One kind of muscle memory is after you wash a dish x many times. The memory lives in the nerves of the muscle rather than the conscious mind, which can now refocus or wander.

Another kind is when muscle reacts to an acute shock to the mind or the body or a chronic series of shocks that motivate regular squirts of cortisol to enter the bloodstream.

The muscle develops a knot that when touched or manipulated will release the memory of the shock and/or a sensory and emotional reproduction of the time or times.


Thong, Dr. Donna 
Journal of the Metacognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement
"Re-licensing Imminent"

What it was like to wreck my SUV at 70 mph

a very stiff jagged branch about the grain of rebar and its accompanying twigs and leaves
impaled the door behind me and into backseat sitting space about two feet.
the driver-side mainframe was buckled in where it'd nestled against a limb

(the part where in a smaller car would be the driver's head).
what it was like was the bladder dip at the point in the
car wash where the machine takes over and you are seated at a dead console.

no contact is being made with a surface, so the wheel can turn
either way without avoiding a dreadful consequence.
the optional on off slide corrector was not on, and a wide, slow spin began:

ooohhhhhhhoooooowheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekuh-kuh...BAM!

after a microsleep, and that not before feeling my head slam,
I found my phone but someone had already called police. I
walked uphill to the squad with an umbrella, climbed in back.

we watched another gentleman doing it, except his bumper flew
off, and it looked like a body on the road in the blur. soon he too
came up to the shoulder, and we sat on the same warm seat.


Hoolie

Monday, November 3, 2014

Going, not been

Suddenly my directional hair growth pattern is a vortex.
There is a calm, bare center, circumference of a walnut.

I buy and lose a hand mirror oh once every ten years.
No recollection comes to mind of this severe a design.

Unlike the barber who found a hippie veteran's cap, a
Living map tells you where you are and going, not been.


Tom

Sunday, November 2, 2014

7 barbara

KEN:
We used to play a game and instead of saying seven billion we'd say seven barbara. and now when I say your name i think seven barbara, or i silently think seven barbara. you're not just any one. he'd say i got a pirate, i got a mustang, but my retort was always aint got a seven barbara.

JAN:
He already wasn't himself before I even met him. Yet I fell in love with that former self, what I could recognize that his familiars saw as person half empty.

KEN:
Self a lot. Are you trying to self me something? Shouldn't you be out selving crimes?


Dean Roy Dukes

Saturday, October 25, 2014

drudgery of fashion

his precarious mid-century recliner
bought of the drudgery of fashion
thinking good news would protect him:
a torture chair, with knobs where your
elbows would be and a loose ratchet

rickety and in the style of Monte Carlo,
this furniture is mild to the eye but does
not meld to your body on it if you dig
may have been a her chair, something
not so comfy as a reminder what to do


Peg

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Hell Burns

Hell burns the entirety of the spine.
Organs hang and collide.
Eternity impends.

Hell burns it well and frequently,
Takes in the scold, the suicide,
Won't open up even.

All this is ashes kep' aloft by heat;
Clouds have no gravity beside
The molten stone pit.


Mkidza Mlaf
"Mama of the Chama"

Sunday, October 19, 2014

they list, in progress

  • they want to go slow until you try and pass them
  • they claw and backbite for tiny differentials
  • they think all food is their food
  • they draw you close only to flinch at your over-familiarity
  • they move in packs with self-loathing at the sight of a free agent
  • they are only pro-their-own family
  • they exaggerate themselves until you accept them unconditionally
  • they believe life is for fun at your expense
  • they don't believe in the concept of sophistication
  • they suck up the world's hatefulness
  • they burn the world with the world's own resentful burning
  • they find and rest their righteousness in history
  • they hold smug claim to a future century
  • they steep in the dramas of their class oblivious to real pain
  • they log in to a web of associations that transcend law
  • they speak and behave in an intra-signaling manner
  • they stand behind your back and make faces while the other one engages you in conversation
  • they spoke like first ladies as children and then proceeded to obstruct and deaden
  • they act like money is some kind of degree
  • they used to be filled with delight or rage and one was the other's medicine
  • they zip in and out but break into crawling straight in the face of authority
  • they look one into the the other's eyes with knowing murderous
  • they've already pinched off from the earth in a bubble
  • they still siphon out what we work for
  • they orbit us yet they make us seem peripheral
  • they make you forgive them by their intransigence and your need to be free of resentment
  • they find me at my weakest moments
  • they circle and eye and buzz as if your suffering will fill a need
  • they pick off the guards and isolate me in a context of freedom
  • they learn how to twist and bend and howl for love
  • they each have a sense of individuality and furtive complicity with self-interest
  • they look out at the arc of a globe in wonder
  • they shill in the first person plural as if they speak for everyone
  • they say things like we all love a locally sourced burger
  • they trademark phrases like we learn important things in life
  • they didn't crawl out of the sea and turn into people here
  • they take lands either habitable or uninhabitable and build cabins
  • they need somebody tell them whats up   
  • they build castles on live burial grounds
  • they say they're giving when they're taking
  • they say they must first take to give and then give nothing
  • they give nothing and explain it's that they didn't get enough
  • they smile as they're thieving and lock up the good for not smiling
  • they lead you singing off a cliff without themselves dying
  • they put their dogs down when they move like you'd turn off a utility
  • they claim animal suffering as a crusade and themselves royalty over all strays
  • they believe their connection to the non-human to be more profound than most
  • they take refuge in a killer's house and act surprised when they're targeted
  • they get killed by making killers kings
  • they share enjoyment in morbidity when it's warranted
  • they take their private pleasure in all kinds of morbidity at every hour of the day
  • they beg forgiveness from a terrible conjuring
  • they conjure punishments and rewards and go on uneasily with neither
  • they counsel that it's choices get us where we are choices
  • they've made all matter their monument but won't let you cry on a shoulder
  • they murmur sentiments only meant to hypnotize you further
  • they hog at light with anachronistic agrarian vigor

Russ T.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

mr boy

watcha wanni mr boy watcha wanni watcha wanni
mr boy watcha wanni mr boy
too much money too much money mr boy mr boy mr
boy too much money mr boy boy mr mr boy
wachi wanni too much money mr boy mr boy
mr wanni too much money mr boy


La LaLa

K's fly spread eagle

They have the humanity we selected out of them;
Less intimate species run parallel wild.
It's what makes K's special.
K's are tools hunting companion.
K's fly spread eagle.


Missy
"Full sprout"

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Sweet luck

thank you, thank you, i feel unworthy but thank you
i know it's not because i'm good i get such bounty
count of all the good that go with nothing
it has to be sweet luck or grace but not reward
maybe as a rule life on a mean is better than what i was getting
and this is just what other average joes expect


La Chama

Weak of neck

I let 2 of hell's demons
bear me sleeping in a chair
hold, on bleeding wings

a mortal gives up and not
of his will and gravity
ceases to apply as he lives

one's head might loll on
weak-of-neck passenger
who may yet banish sin


Peg

Friday, September 12, 2014

I have everything

All Channels
God Mode
spouse, lover
leather
live, fluffy pets
rugs and paintings
maybe not so much silver
distinguished barware
country, race, height
sex
wallow of enlightenment
medicine spectrum
association
name, address, year
a great generation
work mode, a sleep
context
conscience:
emotion rainbow
millions of colors
available
hemming
30-day window


by Ted

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Interior home lights flicker on and off all night


We tried to make sense of the day's two parts:

A sunny normal summer day with tuna fish salad
on soft yellow bread, canned pears in tangerine
gelatin; sounds like someone hosing out the
eaves, but it's rain flying in all directions,
trees split in half and squirrels running mad.

This we feel led to dirty fantasies in which
we are indigenous peoples enforcing nature on
the bloodless uprooted ghosts of future lands.
"According to these statistics, you're going
to need an abortion in 5 minutes, white man."


Ken and Jan

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Something unbloody

The Earth kept cool all the way past the opposite stitch
and is now rounding back to frozen via fresh tap water

And everything that happens in the year's second half:
we are diminished, underweight against the bloodless.

Even a plant, with its legs down and in, is a cold polyp;
even reptiles must gift a salutary response to the Sun.

A planet can only be the dirt ball, fecund gutter nursery.
What makes you blush is an orbiting belt of griddle spit.



Ilyn

Thursday, August 28, 2014

I Was Scared


A clenched moon, half
my body bowed to the left.
I was scared by how I lived.

Gut and the environment are
playing at mimes in a mirror,
but who moves first is unsure.

I was scared knowing God
could come down on either side
and wouldn't like what He did.



Hoolie

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Separate self

What you get are all the effects of having that wanting to clamp onto someone.
Shear off the antlers and they look like a trophy, a crown, but the head is a horror.
To be an actual vise for gluing or detailing or an industrial staple would be more useful.
The trick is to send them your loving without ever losing your sense of separate self.



Mkidza Mlaf

Monday, August 18, 2014

Adjustment of posture

hard purple glasses case matches
the crown royal bags

we find that felt with
satiny golden rope

is a concept, makes a statement,
as does my new eyewear

more like architecture, graphic
design, than prosthetics

the graduating lenses present a
world that's clear but convex

getting used to this falsity plus
potential adjustment of posture


La Chama 
(with Miss Dr. Donna Thong along)

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Additional dimension

 

I've created an additional dimension
by pulling out furniture and
setting up the prying eye for illusion

The wall ends here; it ends there.
What was once flush now floats in
air. My command is centered between

When I first moved in and this was one
room and the future, where it's two.
If you stand near the door, I disappear.



Dr. Donna Thong
"Back in the back office."

Friday, August 15, 2014

The thing has not dislodged

the work is done but the thing has not dislodged
its feelers wriggle as though it's typing a novel

in the next hour until the shuttle comes
it may cross paths with an exterminator

ever more determined to be selfish, it
begins to foresee strategies among new hosts

Monday, August 4, 2014

Your and others' days

Dancing at one of their concerts was not so bad this last time, more like what it was when it was good. The time before this last even that was a reunion show and it felt like going through the lidderal same bump and grind. We were jubilee whores dancing promotionally rather than jubilant liberals.

Me my beard now styled into oblivion, the work you've had done on your face-- what a parade and hard to feel truly celebratory. To be fair even in the day the choreography was often thunder calling, two-dip side changing, crestfallen. You could go there to work out your and others' days.

You and me are holding on tight to the life
It will and's always been a go-go march
We didn't need a potluck or a people's park
You participate on the floor for what you like.



by Hoolie

Slipped a head disk



I'm sorry to keep turning the conversation back onto me, but
I'm suffering from ptsd from a series of painful work-related
Incidents which I commonly refer to as my "career." Whether
Illness can play a legitimate part in excusing one for a lack of
Interest in others may be debatable, but either way I find I am
Impinging on the limits of any faculties I still have available.

What to do for someone like you in your situation-- that's ex-
Actly what I can't say because... what I've been telling you.
If someone kept offending me with their natural ass-ishness,
Even if I knew them different and/or knew they couldn't stop
It, I might just have to set up some kind of block-- for my own
Sake. You see even when the self votes against me, I don't fret.

Slipped a head disk, smashed a conjunction in the mind, or it blew.
Thought that today it's ok today today, but it really took a nose dive.
Is everything going fine? When you grow up you find that it both
Is and not. This learning is so deep that even when the supporting
Vessel is broke, it keeps swimming in the chum: some people say "It
Is what it is" fishing for existential sympathy, but it's actually true. 



Dr. Donna Thong
Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

Lesbian with a Penis Fetish

I am a lesbian with a penis fetish.
Not a straight woman.
So when I hear sirens I get paranoid.
Because I'm guilty of that.

I'm a gay woman who wants dick in her
But I don't get passed around.
Even so I feel society's vague scorn.
If I speak out, I am self-absorbed.

I feel shame. Not everybody has
To look back on their day, always
Examine. If you want to try and
Learn how to live with others.


Phyllis

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Wayside International Modern Wayhome Hostal Inn: "A Modest Home, An Open Waypoint for Any Wayward Male Homosexual, No Matter How Hostile or Where You've Already Been"


Match the characteristic with the character:
  1. Mike
  2. Donna 
  3. Ted
  4. Reptily/ Chamatilly
  5. Jan (daughter)
  6. Jan (father)
  7. Mkidza Mlaf
  8. Tom
  9. Peg
  10. Hoolie
  11. Ilyn
  12. miserable smoking child cardiologist
  13. Connie 
  14. Wayne
  15. Kevin Reynolds
  • refuses to shower in "landlord mist"; will unscrew head and stand in full stream of open pipe
  • "psychic" who answers everything with "I know"
  • steroid guy who once considered electrocuting a 3rd date with his therapeutic spa tub insert
  • stroke recoverer who goes off on people out in public who are being nice
  • ex-bus driver with destroyed hips, no insurance and a permanent Darvon jones
  • jumpy pigtail fetishist scarred from a series of junior high pencil stabbings
  • forgets to ask how you're doing
  • talks to you dirty in daylight hours as if it's a compliment
  • navy air captain who just wants to open-mouth kiss for hours
  • same person, will actually open his eyes and try to complete minor, unrelated tasks around him without breaking lip seal
  • has been stripping the wood trim in his dining room for 30 years; table and chairs covered with newspapers from the 1980's
  • often followed home by a cop
  • refused to come out of pool on 40th birthday, submitted to hospitalization only after full drain
  • seems to appear in two places at once, nearly impossible to locate by one individual searcher 

by Dray Gnaim

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Upper Chank Murder Mystery




One of the tales was a child who experienced death as a rushing river, but her not moving with it, just taking the weight of the water perpetually against her. You'd think that would make you livid, but she had died before there were even horses. She would bob up from time to time and try and dunk one of the dry landers foothill dwellers who peopled the vertiginous geographic swells in the lips of a voluptuous extinct volcano, in hopes of finding her dad, who of course had long before taken leave of all the hurt in this crater, including the loss of her, a daughter. Jan Jansdaad and her dad shared the same last and first names, as had their ancestral dads since before even a fox had crept across the green shag carpet of the storied, some say enchanted High Chank glade.

A gold miner's wife left to her own devices, a quill and paper, told the story of her life keeping the home's burn firing and some not unsordid tales of a land where law takes new shape. After passing along this same place, she was only ever heard again from letters continuing like clockwork from the grave. While she described events current and true enough, there is no trace of her presence anywhere along the length of the Chanks, much less by the chrysanthemum beds, which have been heavily guarded monitored for millennia. This clever woman had an anonymous proxy filling her in, or this late Madame Late doesn't let a reaper dictate her contributions for debate. Go believe in ghosts, good and therefore evil-- or only that this singular horror persisted for seven grisly years.



Phyllis
"Trying some special software."

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Upper Chank Murder Mystery

On the way up to the chrysanthemum garden you rarely pass anyone who isn't sitting and resting or if you get passed it's a persistent jogger who isn't in the mood to take no for an answer. The souped-up, gravity-defying city bus on busy High Chank dominates all attention up and down its route. One wonders what will become of the thirsty spotted babies trotting along the pavement at their single-deer-power gait.

She was walking straight down, reward of easiness pushing. It's hard to keep a moderate pace. Looked like she was picking tobacco off her tongue tip but it was rather a bit of tin foil from a difficult-to-disengage package of the hard cough drop with creamy Blast Gel at its center. Then as if a shadow'd quickly splayed past but taken her along, she wasn't there. It was difficult to accept her disappearance.

But come to find she may have been trailing me or someone nearby because she was a spook as clear as day.  Do they get yanked from a case like that. Why. Freedom of Information Act? What to say. I am a lesbian. I liked this spook you had. Her ass was very strong because of where you put her in the street. All day back and forth to her car fake forgetting glasses camera keys. I liked the shoulder sweater, scarves, pearls once. I've come to call her Olive and you Killer.

No, that wouldn't work either. How am I to use the power of my certainty of their complicity to my advantage in the war against their innocence? I feel warm speaking of her, maybe because it didn't hurt enough or even happen officially enough to be a bad memory. The bad memory is finding out about the thing itself rather than the thing itself because we don't know what that was. Lots of persons show up up here who could be anyone.


By Phyllis 

Friday, July 25, 2014

Upper Chank Murder Mystery

You had a smug, full ass from these hills,
Goats on diagonal street sides, surfing
the horizon, an ear-splitting fulcrum.

You could confidently turn and shout down
to your two kids beginning their ascent from
the car, hair blowing vertically. "Lock it!"

Then you must have moved because we
lost you. Other proud gam sets have summited
and conquered this neighborhood, but.

Only evidence I have leads to this, to which
I also bring imagination. What I think is that
neither of you had to work but for society says.

There was a baby and something to keep daddy
busy. You get reward points for balance here and
down on the land of the iron-cross gyroscope.


Sunday, July 20, 2014

Lidderly breastfed on preacher money



For us missions seems the most defensible shill for preacher money. Even if the missions are no more than other churches and we their missions. It's not unlike a private health maintenance organization.

For mostly religion's for health, social spiritual as in keep your spirits up. The community can support a staff of persons whose job it is to reassure, transmit kindness along with rules interpretations help.

And this is when then you elect a count dracula. The community's wealth is raised at his feet as if heaping a pyre. This unfortunately not the case with my daughter. Unlike kings, she obliges us to beg.


Mkidza Mlaf
"Mother of La Chama"

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Pose as if paid



i wasn't taking pictures of your house
but rather the deer;
can i find my sense of self
in suburban natural life?
now only a merchant would
claim to know just what we are.

it's a cheap fur, and more so
when a spade of ivy is rocking in its
teeth and the eyes are not so much
wide but rather huge and half lidded.
the spots could have been spray painted
on. They pose as if paid in your yard.


Connie

Friday, July 11, 2014

Hearts blood pumps from

there's some kind of exotic bird
clucking on through the intersection
noise, maybe imitating some tails
squeaking up and down the hill.

He notes the lags in traffic with an
all-clear pulsing signal, hides loud
kisses in the bouncing of a giant
truck laden with deconstruction.

Birds like these stimulate a sense of
Visitation, but from a human beyond.
Near he whispers, coos quizzingly.
A kinship of hearts blood pumps from?


by Donna

Partial days

fog coming in from the bay,
conveyor belt of useless white globs

as from between two coasts,
from two loves I am locked away

I want to deal with life for
partial days, then sleep with the ghosts


Hoolie

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Ted and Peg's son

When you take a walk at night we hear your coughing all around the block
and strongly back again to your room, adjacent to our room.

We know that even weekly in the New York Times you can lose cancer and
get it back again, but what's eating you is a permanent negative.

You might be feeling like you've hit the disappointing pinnacle of
what it's going to be like compared to what you thought it wd look like

But the stars are mounting to a different racket: getting you to safety in
the hands of Jesus. And we say Jesus and we mean so to speak.


by Ted and Peggy
for H.

Dr. Thong reads Phyllis [embedded]

Maybe it's okay to make points with a shaved open armpit, maybe leaning decisively. Most of my colleagues go with either total scent killer or noticeable processed fragrance.

Sleeveless at work to begin with though makes me feel gastrointestinal symptoms. Unless it's a publicly-traded incorporation where office underexecs are paraded whorelike before clients.

Bottom line I would bear uncomfortableness for your right to free dress. Who am I, a structure-within-a-culture-of-freedom adherent, to question your template of liberty.


Dr. Donna Thong [reinstatement imminent]
cc: Phyllis [embedded]

Saturday, July 5, 2014

Overheard through tile

Tight hanger hooks behind the wall, and then your voice coming through:
"I think I'll go professional."

Then in the shower, somehow permeated tile:
"The question is do I want to smell like Dr. Bonner's or."

"Or is this whole tilting structure, on the edge of a house on a hill over the City of San Francisco, going to sheer-face bobsled downward after the next shaker, 'n.

N' end up ski-ballin into the Bay? Are those fog horns roaring or a train. Now the buoy-like clanking gives it away. And how it comes closer than a ship's signal ever will, so.

I've got my secret weapon back on the dressing table. Sometimes
scent's all a gal's got. I've put together a look and feel over the years."


Phyllis
"Donna, I would never give you away."

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Freedom in song



Song, from the impulse low and avian
Finds its lodge in the same fire-engine
pain as a baby crying too high in the craw.

We know of articulated howls, moans.
Music can't but make it rise as heat, gay;
You are here to sing and leave the stage.

Not as a shill for predetermination, but you
are literally born at a point on the compass
and there are words that come along with it.


Chama (Reptily)
"Consecration of Chalk Chank" [frag.]

Sunday, June 29, 2014

storm has passed over

storm has passed over
like a stenciled cylinder
spinning round a bulb.
as wood become cinder
to an educated guesser
light from a rent is true,
but aint nothing temporary
don't come back to visit


Donna
"I had to bungee into the sinkhole where my house was. I am on a catatonic vigil."

Friday, June 27, 2014

Every eye is a witness



Every eye is a witness
The sky plays falsely as a lens or mirror but neither does it opine;
Define it as stretching from the first measurable unit off you and on up.
Every other person place object has a judicial aspect skill effect
So a hill might emanate approval. A rug, admonishment.
I release you, heaven, from my claim and thereby to Earth myself betroth.


Ilyn

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Cinematographic depth



Shadowy smoking volcanoes litter the backdrop, which curves upward into infinity. If John Muir and Ansel Adams had a baby. And the baby was cinematographic depth. Peg and Donna are sitting catty-corner at a stained cement patio table with fajita steam rising in their faces. 

PEG: We'll have to put the umbrella up in a minute.
DONNA: Afraid they'll see we're lesbians?
PEG: Yes. I'm afraid of that.
DONNA: It stinks out here.
PEG: In the West things just fester.
DONNA: And all these once new chic upscale fast food places are now equivalent to old grimy bus station cafeterias.
PEG: They do need a makeover every couple of years, or.
DONNA: They also stop caring about the quality and presentation. Look at this slop.
PEG: And the jobs? Look there's a guy dumping ice into the top of the soda computer. On a ladder.
DONNA: Huh. Do you think it's true we're living in a tiny and not particularly significant sliver of human history?
PEG: I think the centuries are ever kinder. Ask me how. We get served food that came out of a freezer heated up in a microwave, but it's generally calm. Random shooters occasionally rampaging through, but then nothing.
DONNA: Do the centuries get ever better; does that play out in history?
PEG: I'd say yeah.
DONNA: Sometimes I can't remember if you're my mother or my sister.


dancing skeleton


Of all the things you want to fast forward, a dancing skeleton.
But what, to hasten its demise? These guys are here to stay.
Sorting through the images of the day, it's the most vivid one.


Ilyn

Sunday, June 15, 2014

He, She, They

No one knew they were half twins but for their commercial behaviors. In every city, it started this way:
  • He would start muttering under his breath out of frustration while darting about a shop interior, unable to find the satisfactory item/ price/ employee/ response.
  • She would buy two of whichever size or brand of cottage cheese was on sale at the most convenient local grocer.
That might repeat in graduating and widening frequency over months or years. Then
  • She would be at her fifth different cottage cheese supplier, this one in the next town over, purchasing up to a gallon of cottage cheese at a time, and sometimes finishing it off in the car before driving to the next market.
  • He too would have to start adding to his avoidance list not only merchants but bankers, box office clerks, tailors, virtually any and all types of businesses that require human interaction and even some that do not. In fact not any that do not. He refuses to speak to a robot.
The city seemed to be rising up against them.
  • Her with a calcium deficiency. 
  • Him an incorrigible asshole (fear). 
They crossed paths and commiserated and tried to make it seem normal but the big and growing picture was troubling. Leaving town was wrenching and cauterizing. A new town like a new operating system: same humans, personalities: two persons wondering about wasting time learning to do it different just because somebody needs a job pretending to make it better.
  • He, especially, empathized with foreign bodies in an ecosystem with the antibody feature. 
  • She just didn't want to stick out.




Friday, June 13, 2014

Gonna be mindful

Gonna be mindful, better get ready for some mind.
We are relievers that can help all others of our kind.
When we meet together we consolidate our goals;
Peace and love are like carrots in moving bowls.

We get energy from believing
That being in the moment can soothe;
Pray not for delirious abandon, but
Slow into feeling this groove.

Gonna be soulful, better give face to some soul.
We are achievers of gladness who sell truth whole.
It's your fear that blinds you from behind
Not the brilliance of our method inside your mind.


Chamatilly, 29th Inaugural
[frag.]

Grabbing clips

DONNA: You came across as very grown up, confident, turned out dialecting past, complicated relationships with a gender-churning circus of lovers, hanging your hair here, then there, spreading your fingers into an explanatory fan. Grain liquor handles ice the way your turtleneck, by itself an overstatement, absorbed confessional narrative resonance into a plausible argument for beat realism.

PEG [blurry memory tape of]: I had to ask myself do I want this feeling, is this what I'm going for, over and over again. Do I want to repeat this, is it good enough or does it cross the line into... yuck. There must be a whole chapter in the Physician's Desk Reference describing that gastro-amygdular impulse after an intimate and not entirely welcome event. How many social norms are you violating is one thing but the sickening one is how many personally held assumptions have you challenged or oaths broken or whizzed past on a highway where speed limits never got posted.

DONNA: Even to a child it was sordid what you described, but you rose balloon-like above the details as you flexed your ability to articulate, to construct, to train a wild pack of memory keratoses to interact and create a home for themselves, validating your own existence as essentially reproductive.

PEG [pixellated memory tape of]: I was humoring him, I thought; that I was letting everything left unsaid between us populate a whole busy little love town in his head and if I just split one day, he should be the one to examine himself. Then I considered wait, who's doing what they want to be doing with who they want to be with here even in my own paradigm? Him, not me. He's taking the risk, he's pushing his skills, he's bettering himself to keep up and I? Can only grow lazy and uninspired. Yet I feel guilty that I'm "leading him on."

DONNA: Or you would toss your hair, toss back a drink, toss aside a magazine. In a bell-sleeved madras cotton. Without hair and hands, you are truly hideous to envision. These are God's gifts to everyone, a covering. Grabbing clips. Of course without hands no one would live long. You said you felt like a woman with no hands in this or that marriage. Selfish, passive dominatrix? Or slave.

These were very adult questions that we'd so far blissfully been as able as babies rolling on breasts to ignore. You'd been there and back, and you were still pretty. Ready for a serious and full connection with someone you could meet at the airport and stare into their eyes for up to 90 seconds. What passes between two minds during such encounters? Is all of that forgotten once love again self-consummates?

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Pharmsupply's Prolabique LipLine Master-Lisp "Lipstickventory" Name Galleys 14



  • Beat Realism
  • Broken Water
  • Bud o' Glee
  • Bunker Bomb
  • Catatonic Vigil
  • Costumery
  • Counter-intuitive
  • Cracker Maker
  • Dancing Skeleton
  • Essentially Reproductive
  • Flaming Avenue
  • Ginger Sadhu
  • Goodhearted Vainglory
  • Gypsy Whistle
  • Hypnoid
  • Leather Toboggans
  • Lie of Passion
  • Mud Chank
  • Panopticon
  • Pentecostal Coal Walk
  • Polar Vortex
  • Quick Minute
  • Snapping Anemones
  • Topless
  • Uselessness of Flesh
  • Victory Lap
  • Warp Exhaust

Spadelike



For Illyn it's not suicide-- how can it be? He has memory of what happens each time. If he wanted to kill himself maybe he'd choose another method. Jumping into that volcano is jumping back into the craw of the goddess, who had originally vomited him up onto that launching spot. He realizes that beyond a period of indeterminate unconsciousness he will be brand new and freshly re-entering the scarification process, awaken to pushing through the earth and stone within the mountainside. Eagerness for the first breath has long ago disappeared. It's not even faith anymore but a fact proven over and over. His skeleture is bamboo-stiff and spadelike for those hours.


Phyllis
Adjunct for Mthyuh Preservation Society

Monday, June 9, 2014

Spitting Dragon

spitting dragon carry on
spine continueth invisibly
down to the Earth's core

kick box all assaults of
nature and/or artificiality
and burn the whorers.

trudge on flaming avenue
great cauterized city
your warted chain mail


Illyn
"For Juniper"

Thursday, June 5, 2014

How you'd negotiate using my system

  • I give, I'm gonna have to, I'll offer you... eight fours for that. Eight fours and that's the change.
  • I'd a expected prolly one-oh-one oh-one-oh dot one oh more on the opening quote honestly.
  • Well if you are going to pick a nit, there's not much ground to hunt tho, huh? So in obvious terms what's left but four-nine-four four nine four punto 49?
  • [simultaneously] Punto 49. 

Phyllis

Friday, May 30, 2014

ginger sadhu

white bowling ball in flames
black smoke column torquing
into gorge, throwing shadows
against shorn concave faces.

yes, cliff panels
the shape of blood cells
the total of whom beheld your trip,
another career into molten Mthyuh.

they'll keep lining you up with the novitiates
and foreigners at the back of the bread line:
ginger sadhu taking a stand-up nap
propped by other naked sleeping men.


Illyn
"Short for Illinois"

Thursday, May 29, 2014

sadhu poem

down by the border the rocks are rounded by the weather
it's as easy as popping your face up through packing peanuts

either place are they mountains or rocks, piles of
rounded or jagged stone the size of mountains?

here my face is wounded in the new shards
yet i plow compelled counter-intuitively toward the sun.


Illyn
"sadhu poem"

bump at warp speed

tiny sins number as cells in the skin scaffolding of any member
society's limits don't begin to get fussy past the second column over
at the layer where personal discomfort is the greatest matter

all flesh is in time-calibrated centrifugal tension
big picture allows free sprouts to meet the cutting level
all else mulches down among the living's ankles

bump at warp speed, you know it should be something big
not just the worm hole ribs torsing by nor structural flaw;
another dimension pressing in could drastically alter being.



Illyn
"My face is torn from being born of rock."

Monday, May 26, 2014

To all Fanfest participants

You underestimate my numeric system for buy and sell orders.
It could not be more simple or devastating:
single numeral. or alternating numeral.
What power does this give me what power this gives me is
High-relief visual trackability. Sensitive bug detection. Brand recognition, fear, loyalty. Fractal beauty upon processing. No charge.
Psychological Mind-Ef: If you tried to copy me it would be like you loved me or something.
Some try and get burned out by numbing sameness of it, seems only decorative, lose self-respect.
Don't see how it cuts through the false and arbitrary 1's-5's-and-0's waypoints of the decimic logic paradigm.

7,777,777.77
1.11
23.23
191,919,191.91
666,666

Ayre Fromme Diaz
[Phyllis]

Saturday, May 24, 2014

hypnoid



I started out by developing a test that would diagnose any individual with the most horrifying universal aspects of human consciousness stated in the most disturbing possible fashion. It was a pyramid in the sense that no one was sacred or untouchable if you wanted to succeed or the alleged auto-glass business model: break out car windows to drum up business. I knew it would work because I myself am hypnoid. To an even higher level than the average sucker, I am stopped dead in my tracks and drugged in my own juices by a voice, a face. The audio cassettes of my great aunt with their hand-typed labels, her missionary sound letters from Taiwan, had a hoodoo on them. Would flip a switch. And I didn't really know what she was saying, but we mustn't let it stop. Her goal was to narcolepse across continents and generations from beyond the grave and the Iron Curtain.

Would that you be looking through my eyes at the children all in white cotton blouses with their slates and ribbons and scholastic badges. Would the street dog, the sadhu, plaza fowl taste their pure lunch broth and noodle. Were to be so young again and given the choice while still in my tenderness to receive Christ unto me into my soul and spring strength up through the whole and length of my body into my arms and legs and feet and hand so that I might too lift others up into His mightiness and glory forever and ever.

But because of the restraints of my own moral structure I could not profit and grew to use my design as an auto-mocking performance artifice. In this way I could retroactively focus my labor into self-illumination piercing enough to drive me toward virtue. But there I focus as if upon a star and I upon a noble and impossible voyage as Earth grows smaller behind me, and the star remains exactly the same size, if not dimmer with the thinning of the atmosphere.


Hoolie
"Here, from decades into the future."






Wednesday, May 21, 2014

eyelet screws



can't... bear... wakefulness
today the bad is any news
seeing even double in twos
send me on a path I'll lose
hang me on a nail or use
wire and some eyelet screws

shoot me with a tranq dart
from an elephant gun
for the present i have no art
and it isn't fun
get me right in the neck... part
ere I can run.


Reptily
"I think I am Reptily."

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Disciplinarians of conscience

You
seemed like a decadent
distraction that I really couldn't
afford at a delicate time of
transition.

I
Could swear at least I'm not
sitting around spending energy
on pasatiempos that snatch at my
attention.

There're
Snapping anemones
in eight bay windows of the building
starring as disciplinarians
of conscience.

It's
something I'm finding in
myself and projecting you
at will onto the forbidden scrim
horizon.


Donna
"Spin, vajra"

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Victory lap

prison break, five months out:
warm's finally won, desert gone,
one-hand driving home, windows

down. rays of sun from behind a
cloud, my head, a crown and
the harvest sure now as a weed.

celebrate, let hounds run free, but
in only moments from the yard
there are squeaks, the loudest able

baby alarm. a flashlight found the
nest blown, grass strewn with tiny
leporidae and what they bleed.

as a rain begins, I shuttle ear kits,
nine fur packets one at a time, like
a bitch, to ground cover, also new,

across my neighbor's fence. elbow
in tremors, the contrite older dog
helps me find every doomed one.


Phyllis
"Planets turning two ways at once."

Monday, May 5, 2014

Oops, actually



Intentions were all we had to fall back on:
Naive, goodhearted vainglory.

Not because the outcomes were whalecrap.
They floated like miracles, to be true.

We're successful at what we do, rather.
And not sinister at all, on a spectrum.

It's the meaning we always get mucked up in.
If you only knew how little mistakes mattered.

I work in my own private panopticon.
Work it till I've spent the last good drop.

Then I slumber against the bricks under where the eye's painted,
the open eye on the wall I laid with my sweat and a trowel.

I wake in the wool of the sheep who eat the grass I planted,
wondering why so many creatures would stick around.


Reptily
Kathmandu, 14


Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Mine canary



when you were done you sat on the edge of the bed looking at yr shoes and i dismissed you by closing my eyes but your outline stayed, and a shadow, dark maroon on light maroon. my mind is an instrument that works with or without the input of light and a blind whore once told me a mind will still produce its own color projections-- what, with no optic nerves at all? If they are dead or even missing? This man was completely blind, I had my eyes closed to dismiss you, and yet your shadow was in my mind staring at the floor as if your shoes would walk themselves over and climb onto your feet, and I knew anyway you were still there.

i doubt it's true what we think of as clarity is just a point on a spectrum of perception-- that's hocus pocus; it's bullshit. there is such a thing as seeing clearly, not seeing clearly, seeing but not wanting to see, wanting to see but not seeing. what i saw when i closed my eyes for example was my vanity, my horrible insensitivity toward your innocent fantasies about our love. with my eyes closed i could see you sitting there seeing and not seeing, with your back to me, seeing me better turned away than straining your eyes to look up at my face when yr crouched between my knees. i don't really know what you knew but i can guess from seeing.

i don't even know for sure what drugs you're on or how they might affect the type of functions on a space travelling telescope that go wrong or get enhanced through fine tuning from an earth station or hits by gamma rays or junk or rock and ice mists, whatever it finds beyond the farthest layer of what we can slough off tho not too far to project signals that can travel but few scientists even know i guess if such messages are really matter or just waves of stuff that's already there hopping in a different rhythm from a chain reaction you can make with our advanced machines that supposedly started by smashing bones with different kinds of rock.

clarity and metaphoric light come from all kinds of senses of course, pheromones, the pitching of the voice or when you hear me scratch or sigh at night or how many rings before someone does or does not answer a phone or a pause in texts that someone inside you knows is different even though your main operating persona is officially a sight beast, plain talking, private man who expects everyone to keep their peace on or question their vision at the peril of loss or retribution for the antennae who knew too much and got cocky with their secret knowledge no matter how available it was the whole time; i respect by not thinking much.


Ken
For the Chama-Tilly 
Fordamall Chank Motel

Sunday, April 27, 2014

< b >Meaning = ?< /b >

Be clear
Feel clear (lucid) (no emotional storming)
Speak clearly (pronunciation) (logic) (reason)
Clarity
produce v. encounter
difficult/ easy

dogs feet on laminate sound like tap dancers
dancers tapping seem like gloating animals of prey

truth:
problematize/ catastrophize clarity
see: Dr. Bro. Cornell West

Problemity

Clear path to objective = + ?

9:30-10:06 pm: mostly eating strongly-flavored Jelly Bellies both individually and in random combinations, twitching nose, attempting to name discrete flavors while staring at unfinished course outline

Clarevity
Clareol

Enjoyment of fog/ privacy
Ambiguesstine

Pedestalation
attempt to spectacularize realistic flavorings and believable generic texture placeholders as example of few modern inventions to live up to childhood expectations of Future (source: A Wrinkle in Time)

To deprive, deceive or blind in order to inspire
Sadistucate/ Masostication
(hairshirts/ witchboarding)

Yellow cake flavor tricked me into drinking milk
Nourishion

metaphor/ simile = path to/from light?

my face smells like skunk even after my shampoo
to catch a cousin who knows my smell I roll in doo

Drug free:
schizoid: bad/ ambien whore: good

Drugged:
good: communion wine/ bad: vat of communion wine
bad: thorazine; bad: heroin; excellent: heroin; heaven: heroin; destruction of all we know to be good: heroin (crack, meth, pcp, kids smoking pcp, crack whore, designer drug, designer whore; drugged whore: good?)

Drugs that will clearly be available in heaven:
Marlboro, Black Label

Future = Heaven? Clear path = +?

Low visibility slows traffic/ grounds flight
Clarity = grounding? Clear intention = outcome?
Can happen what can picture = +/-/ Can happen what not pictured = bad?

Love of dogs> love of people/ dogs thoughts clear/ unclear?
Legitimable?
clear = simple? gray area between simple and complicated = clear?

Light/ burn/ sunglasses/ dark/ clear/ W. Blake/ racism/ clear black = clear dark?
Whitecade/ Clarior
Blindness-sun; nightburn-? solar eclipse = auspicious/ lunar eclipse = ominous

Hell in Drugs:
Thorazine, MD 20/20, Rabies

Opposite of clear: foaming at mouth/ or you can't handle the truth

Tap dancing: produce = heaven; encounter = ?

Carnivorance
Claws curl under to gouge at food/ prevent efficient travel on sheer surfaces

Meaning = ?



Phyllis
"Stuck at Peg's all week, beacon down."


Friday, April 25, 2014

Foundation of society



My abductor was hot,
I went along to save my life,
And then they blamed me.

I love my kids but they were
No help as prerequisites for
Whut? Beach house, husband

Also not plugs for a bottle of
Nasty funtime perpetrator jizz.
Can I be held guilty for cumming

All those nights and waiting for
Him alone at the motel? I was
Mortified and trembling horny.

At least I didn't take a drink and
I have preserved my sobriety
Date. My sanity map is intact.

All I ever learn is don't get in
Trouble surrounded by idiots.
Right, mom: think it through.

But then if our society were not
Vapid and trite, wd I even be in
This rifonkindonkulous situation?


Peg

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Dead Family



Tomorrow is a place of mind
Where we can fade together
And disappear at the same time.

Dead family don't split off,
Don't wander away alone;
Thank you for not leaving me.

Grown-ups and babies one,
Today it's no matter where,
Know you can always call.

Dead family may choice out
But it's a package deal, and
I'm so thankful not to worry.

I feel good, dear family in a
mode of thought that we're gone,
already safe from what happens.


Dad

Monday, April 14, 2014

Snow on new grass



Thank you for going on record as my associate;
It is a good feeling being peopled by the proud
N' strong, warms like a text bong for the illiterate.

Blooming all over, from the breath of the young,
Unfortunate flowers of ice layers are going down
To remind us of dogs and that their shit is brown.

Thanks for taking a moment to click on my icon;
Me I can't find one peer who merits their full-time
Collusion in this paradigm of queerbait jobmakers.


by Ken

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Springtime of regret



Eyes of twill, goddess like-- she may not answer
Trailing warp strands of wind from the bluing pupil,
Drapes her finer bands of woof in cave, out wood.

To a boy she gifts a turn of earth as if she'd forgot,
Like God above, she decides, she may not answer;
Giving cover is to suggest or hide uncertain luster.

He may not ask her what has died, so if to mourn
And might himself unlace as if to smoke, to roam,
And being out of place, find in her wake a home.


Phyllis
"Find me on Paul_Verlaine_Cam.net"

Useless privilege

Holed up litterly back in a high cave with dogs and jewels,
the last few peridots and silver horn rings, I face the lee side.

Not even a slave to sit and remember when entitlement
worked because it bled into the guests and wandering.

The armor tilts against a charred, greasy corner dripping still
the mists that bore us in defeat on sleds with baskets, data.

Debtor, inwardly I exact a rage and skillful path line hedging,
tuned as a noble corpse's concubine's, cuckolded by virtue.

It starts with an eye painted against the central peak, awake
to every sip of wine, hate, sloth, neglect, indulgence, swim.


Peg
"For Mike"

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

The 24 hours of natural sleep

Prior to my abduction, students merrily gathered in
chambers clustered along passages, and my breath
swole all the apparatus of the university hospital clinic,
savior of wayward intelligent and other rural children.

Then blown like knots of mucus, teenagers through
crash windows, ashes rose to mix with snowflakes,
the suddenness of my absence was the bunker bomb
that saved only conspirators and their empty victory.

Now my dogs patrol with their noses in the curtain folds
Blind as moles to real criminality, claim only movement
unsanctioned, sounds that are free and wild, productive.
Dogs sniff out warm terror and target soft, darting beasts.

All day long and through the night they lay in wait at a
tractably ebbing and spiking unwakefullness, one eye
or ear, a whisker as lonely drunken antennae, the mind
sifting through other years, categories of intransigence.


Dr. Donna Thong

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Polio

Connie:

I'm writing down this dream about Peg and Ted because if I try and tell it to you I'll prolly start crying. And it starts with you. In the back seat of the Galaxy 500. You sneeze, I blow on you, you blow on me, etc. but it doesn't end with violence. It's actually fun because you are your current self at your present age.

Ted is there back from the grave, why? As if there is no Ken and the same young Ted is our dad, Peg's husband even though the rest of us have grown old. Except for Peg of course who is pretending to still be as young as Ted when he died. I get into it with her about like, well, I'm sorry if you forgot, but I already told you I have to drop off my prescription on the way. On the way where? What prescription? Ted is driving us around an anachronistic Anaheim, California. There were druggists and a storefront post office.

We get out of the car and I am walking ahead still pissed off at Peg and Ted follows behind trying to place his (dead) hand on my back. He appreciates, understands my efforts with Peg. Maybe because he's no longer really there and I am. His black skinny-tie suit is way out of date.

I squirm away, feeling bad about it but can't accept his comfort. As if I blame him. Easy to make him feel bad as a way of lashing out at life. I realize it's a boyish thing to do.

Turns out we're stepping inside a yellow-brick clinic with white letters stenciled on the door as they used to do. The patient is me, and I'm on the same stainless steel table where I was born, with those aquamarine rubber sheets and gloves, and the nurse standing behind me is going to have to insert a very large needle into the back of my head. Why?

In a fetal position, I feel the needle go in and it's the most actual pain I remember ever feeling in a dream. Was it LaLa behind me in real life gnawing my scalp? It goes deep, and I hear the nurse apologizing and then gasps and says "Oh..." and starts crying. She has apparently hurt herself, but so badly that she is actually sobbing. Then I turn and see the doctor coming in, the nurse going out saying "That's the most I've ever cried-- not just at work, but ever."

It's become a little clearer why we're there. It must have been from a letter in the New York Review of Books about Syria, because I've got something like polio. And I'm a boy. With polio. And the doctor has invented a contraption where he can put me in a hanging net on a track like a rollercoaster/ centrifuge and send me flying around the clinic. In some sort of multi-purpose room. Remember those?

Then the doctor is Dick Cheney and then he's Ted again. He tells me I can pick any gift I want. I say I want this and take the thing from a box, a taped-up moving box or the one you keep Christmas decorations in. I have sovereignty of movement now, and we are rich. I sit down on a free-weight bench holding the thing I wanted between my thighs trying to figure out how it works.

Very heavy dream hangover surfacing from this. Whut? I kept saying. Oh my god whut? LaLa is by my side staring patiently but she is a bitch. In truth I'm single and I dream about my nuclear family from 100 years ago. Is that the same as having polio? Did you infect me when you sneezed? Ha ha just kidding. Mostly I'm disappointed we're not really rich.


Love, Hoolie

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Stop My Body



Dr. Chermin:

You may recall my scheduled release date to have been long ago passed.
Please respond by a means and in a way that demonstrate your receipt of this request.
You are a highly skilled administrator who can appreciate the weight of a key's turn.
I don't pretend that it will be a safer environment for me or others on the outside, only
that a promise was given and what do I have through a barred ceiling but that which is into it kicked.

Sometimes an object goes skittering across cement, stops out of friction but loses touch and,
adding its own earthly mass to the force given it by mystery, crashes into a woman's life.
This can be bread, bobby pins, empty match books, dead phones, small creatures who continue at their pace on a new surface like it doesn't matter, or makes no sense to try and go back so they keep on.
But I can't fall from this baseline. Out of chemical jail doesn't mean it's ok to stop my body.


Donna

Thursday, March 20, 2014

She Rides a World Economy

"It's not the first time you've let me pass through these doors naked," I said in perfect Foreign, the Devanagari script falling from my lips then lifting up to his creased sienna face on wafts of al fresco samosa smoke like notes on an undulating staff. There he stood in his soiled turban, the lifelong portero of this particular row of fleabag albergues, long ago twist-tied together by mutual hallways, cat walks and trolley tracks. Despite an instant and matter-of-fact recognition after my absence of more than a decade or three, he stood there bodily replacing the prodigious cement barricade he'd pulleyed aside, uncertain that I really meant to come in. And I had my sponsor along, and there was a loosey-goosey policy about visitors after 10.

It wasn't yet dawn, so i wasn't quite lucid, but I knew this place and this kind, lower-caste gentleman who had opened this same door to shelter myself and others in the past from jarring nudity and baffling poverty, and then for many days or years consecutively after, while I and my briefcase, in recovery, had zipped about the blocks and streets between sacred animals and motorbikes and tuk-tuks and saris and men hoisting onto their shoulders or backs and carrying to market giant smoking babies.

I remembered having been out once more celebrating the end of a long sobriety by drinking glasses of fake scotch in all the tourist joints up and down the high street, and then some off the path, and then losing my path between the spoke boulevards jutting evermore barren and outward from the center, which twinkled in the distance. But I was giving into the urging sweetness of sleep, removing the navy corduroy suit I'd just purchased for interviews and laid it down as a mattress on the filthy, potted walk and snuggled beneath a thinly knit but charitable covering draped across me possibly by some passing matron.

It was really too short a nap, but soon I was up again in my white undershirt and briefs, wrapped also in the bone-white Chinese sofa throw, it turned out to be, wandering in a circle, conjuring a map, then remembering the suit and finding my wallet still intact but no keys. Then I just stood still, holding the bundle of nearly all my earthly goods as close to me as the man from Tanzania with elephantiasis in his nuts. Who knows how many more moments were lost until by supernatural providence or chance, my very first sponsor into The Program, "my Eskimo" as they say, happened along on his way from a meeting. He led me by an elbow, similar to the way he had pulled me along behind him the first time, on the identical road to the exact same salvation or slavery, though I still thought he was selling Shaklee.

"Been out having some fun?" inquired Karlos, with a K. I said "Oh yeah I drank a lot of whiskey." I remembered drawing glass after glass to my burning mouth to keep up with the rows of colorful bottles against their mirrored plenty and wanting more warm burning even then to warm my own bilious burning. The door to the rooming house was so massive as to appear immovable, and even I could barely reach its monumental ungalvanized iron ring rustily bolted into the quickset to serve as a knocker or carnivalesque game of strength.

Then there was the seismic ride up in an elevator which eerily seemed even itself not to believe its own forged and re-xeroxed inspection certificate. It stopped on a familiar floor, but there was an awkward moment as Dan, the portero, as if waiting for a tip, was actually hesitating politely for me to tip him off as to my present state of financial solvency, which would determine which way he'd lead us down or up the dim hallways/ catwalks or onto which trolleys. He started us backwards up the steps from which streams of forlorn past and potential co-residents climbing down with their towels and visibly dreading the communal bath openly advised against that direction, those lodgings. So we boarded instead a pre-war electric train on stilts that seemed thumb-tacked to the walls above the narrow, crowded street toward a dead end-cum-cul-de-sac of more upscale private rooms with windows and struggling, infested houseplants in coffee tins and maybe a working sink.

On this short trip one could not think but to imagine the range of imminent and catastrophic incidents of both predictable and total structural collapse, reports of mayhem and death of a level and volume that would surely reach screens on desks at the like of the International Herald Tribune. The tracks of recycled beer cans and structural decay of an originally flimsy and corrupt excuse for scaffolding made the whole contraption sway with the weight of its human slurry, a precarious conveyance that each moment threatened to rock against its upward-cranking counterparts, like parallel boulders careering on rope bridges.

Atop the upper deck of the carriage flying toward us, a scene that made me breathless: the billowing scarf and ironic double-breasted beige trench, the lovely blond CIA sergeant who'd come roaring up in a freshly washed and minted Land Rover while I stood taking mpg4's of a local drag star in a crowd of the broken and curious at a benefit for World AIDS Day in one of the city's squalid, dusty, clay-bottomed squares. She hadn't said a word as she stepped up alongside, as if at a curtain call, to more closely examine my awkward, ugly Western dorkiness jutting up at least a foot from the throng. I acknowledged her somewhat invasive proximity and our relative physical resemblance by muttering to her as if to a tour-bus companion how the dancer on stage represented a local gender-minority NGO and was the great hope of the organization. In the middle of my detailing their upcoming international itinerary for the agent's well-groomed but officious muteness, she was already roaring off again with her driver to vet no doubt more intel on spotted countrymen who hadn't checked in with the consulate.

She appeared to me now, standing boldly ignoring the handrail of her trolley-top, as a figure fit for the back of a coin or ship prow, a noble symbol of chin-high, first-world caretakerism: we, victors, missionaries, models, guides, monitors navigate, show the way, in ceremonial stealth and humility, arrogant yet inspirational of security, hopefulness, and to always titillate. She, who could live anywhere, have anyone, had chosen a post (no doubt and nevertheless quartered in a microdot of be-marbled and T1-cabled gas-generated luxury) in a land of relative misery, where she would walk among the ancient and the simple, brush against the untouchable, but interlocute and mingle, in hotel back gardens and high-walled compound suites, with kings instead of mere gentry.


Ken
"On assignment."

Friday, March 14, 2014

Conceal and carry

My phone found a way to my ear during sleep
though i'd left it charging in the living room:
A junk call, maybe it was political, offered the
option to press Exit 8 to hear a special message
while on hold. I touched some numbers, maybe
mixed it up with the TV remote; but it was dark
and late and i was confused. I got angry, but
then a young male voice came on the line, live,
but muffled, and said to me yeah we're calling
because; I said what, i can't hear you, i was try-
ing to get a special message. His throat seemed
to clear and said we're calling because someone
reported gunshots. There were gunshots near you.
And then I was being held very tight from behind
and/or my heart cage was caving in, but i could
tell for sure that there was another man in my bed
who was locking me very hard between his arms
and knees and wearing only a t-shirt and briefs,
and i struggled to get free by elbowing toward him
because i live alone and haven't slept with anyone
i want to say it feels like since the days of John
Wayne Gacy. Even mostly awake i knew that my
bed was turned the wrong way and i had to find
the knob on my lamp to orientate myself and to
identify the snoring of my dogs, which can often
sound like the results of a horrible crime amidst a
crowd, an urgency of mass panic in progress. I'd
spent most all the evening on and off between the
the normal responsibilities of an unemployed day
hypnotized absorbing the entire wikipedia page on
John Wayne Gacy and checking especially for
places and dates and names with a morbid com-
pulsion to know how close i'd come to the rope
trick, the chloroform, the quicklime or one of his
purported thugs, and feeling the chill of a narrow
escape. I even found a story on the deco-Uptown
hotel where i worked my first outta-school gig
where a cavernous ceramic basement rivaled the
faux Spanish facade and drifting clouds and stars
over the dance floor at the fabled Aragon Ballroom
for phantasmagoria, an underground pool grand
enough for fey, mustachioed servants to maneuver
about brimmed still pumping chlorine and steam in
the late 70's when i was a dropout teen swept in
there, by a slimy mob net, massage setup, a cum-
and-go for married fags from other neighborhoods
or travelling through town on a party, or a younger
man with the simple misfortune of a dick turned in
the shape of the archetypal snake chasing its tail,
a mobster operation with a cash register and a coat
check, decorated with seashells and framed pix
of the swarthy underboss who kept the books legit,
turned out the kids on how to give handjobs and
where to hide cash if you're naked, how to keep
him out of the transactions, a mobster type who'd
hung photos of him with aldermen and the mayor,
political coverage under glass, just like Gacy had,
and sure, JW'd been there, but not lately, having al-
ready been locked in a cell for our job-site safety;
photos like the one that humiliated the Secret
Service with John and Rosalyn Carter at a Polish
Day parade. I really couldn't tell if the man behind
me in bed had me in a wrestling hold, a manacle
of flesh, or coming back from the dead, maybe
someone i knew, to love and protect me from that
superbad moment half asleep when someone was
warning me, on a phone i don't even have, to be-
ware of gunplay in my vicinity. Even tho we don't
believe that Pogo murdered anyone with a firearm,
he did abduct some boys that way, and where I'd
been to dinner earlier, an Irish pub, they had one of
the new no-conceal-and-carry stickers displayed
prominently before you stepped in through the Chi-
cagoland outer weather door to stamp the frozen
muck off your feet and then in toward the scary loud
and spirited drunken camaraderie or outpour of re-
lief in the eye of a polar vortex, cries of horror-glee.

by Tom

Friday, March 7, 2014

Your Ridiculous Rage

What was it you said your entire class, country, county's eating wooden nickles or clanking along the road like tin cans tied to the 1%'s marriage vehicle? Like you can compare yourself and most people to the worst kind of traditional torture normally reserved for minorities sexual or racial? That a whole 4% of the population is sociopathic but only a quarter of them have figured out how to literally indenture and slave and drug and maim what was it, the great plains, population, planet?

But look what you're getting where you're standing as you complain. Free internet with your paid subscription to all your other property? Isn't it a little overwrought to belabor the work you'll never stop unless you stop working and rot in the revival tent of a target parking lot? Who says just because you love so hard and your people come from earnest good stock that you should get a piece of land or a pet or something to eat; are you a prostitute that goes around selling faith and honesty?

You say the little bitches from like 5 colleges in the usa get to learn how to charge all the rest for every part of nature we touch and the right to even wear our own skin to a backyard birthday party? That your grandmother's last three teeth throb so hard she can barely moan the last four of her social into the ear of the slob sucking off some middle-managing coupon fluffer? How did you explain the way to save up the refills for your pain meds the next time you get shot by a gunmaker and hold a drug sharing holiday?

Ken
"I'm waiting."

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Black Boy

there's the street my father was named after,
but his father's spelling was weak. Despite
the error, we both carry the same initials,
but I'm not named for either father or street,
but rather the names of my mother's father,
two words so odd that he went by the letters,
so even i mix up my name with these others.

that's the building where an old boyfriend
lived to complain about the poolside clique,
and tonight i met a boy who lives in that
building, and he says that yes, there is still
a clique. But it can't be the same one now;
i said of course, pool buildings everywhere
must have cliques, and of course his does.

here's the school where i attended a class
on blake: black boy, urizen, the fat boy
sitting next to me seeping farts and going
out after to coffee with the professor; i'm
passing the gate now, and i look through
the bars on the fence, and it's not a school
at all, but dark rows of chiseled headstones.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Pathetic briefcase


When Letha wed a farmer aphid who tapped and bled her chi,
Hooked by the tender feeling hairs on her wrists to his wiry mesh,
My long career would finally end a constant homing back to me,
For a hero's arc, the way a whale shark blocks green the deep from sun,
A murky shade where only the good can see a blackguard run.

Now in this dusty corner lists, strewn with cables that fed a desk,
A pathetic briefcase kneeling on its own tanned flesh like a routed bum:
The number-coded clasp, always set for triple six, but by mistake;
The single stitch intact to cinch a handle, the yoke of a shoulder strap,
Drift blank as in a fog against the wall, not taking note of it at all.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Viking fart

Letha was born when the whole arctic cracked open, broke its water on the heartland
She skidded onto a rock with the waste of a crystalline breath settling in the trees
We found ways to keep her warm enough to breath tied between pack asses and sheep
when the heat of any one walking human body was not enough to support and sustain a baby.

We kept moving in the direction the grizzled elders read somehow seizing hungry in their sleep
When there was a conflict of opinion we chose the one whose eyes expressed the lesser horror
The lights at night were games to taunt the fools who prayed for riches from the colors
We ate the ones sliding toward us from the opposite hills sitting stiff in their leather toboggans.


Wednesday, February 12, 2014

The Magic Rag




The saran-wrapped salmon fillets at the top left of the heap were starting to turn soft and too dark a pink and I figured out that the whole opposite wall of the compartment was standing propped open, a feature that I was not even aware existed, but it concerned me more that someone other than myself had left it that way after helping themselves to my freezer and/or its contents. Upon further investigation it became apparent that the contraption had a number of other doors, almost like a snack truck. You could access it from any angle, brace open the various padded aluminum panels and even step inside, where there was a place to sit and a desk with some paper and pens scattered on a smooth, cool writing surface.

A clever looking woman was helping to point all this out just by following me with her eyes and the occasional directional gesture or fragmentary comment. She was down there in the basement, a marvel of cement beams and cantilevers and stairways and the type of square window panes in large sets you'd find in a warehouse hanging out over a river or one of the abandoned laundries at Alcatraz. The woman seemed to be not only clever but also very nonchalant about what she was doing in my apartment, which had become more like an impromptu immigration slum or silent squatters' co-op in a rusting high-rise construction project. Her hair was plain and straight but fashionable; her shift and flats clung to her like a ballerina's.

I had given up on the salmon fillets and begun to wonder where was all my furniture. Around back of the fridge was my front door and I started banging on it to find out who now lived there. A swarthy, mole-covered man lounged on some nearby steps with his knees spread, creating a slow shower of nut shells, some sort of loafered Romani pimp. I guessed he was in charge of assessing and collecting rent, and yet that he too had knowledge which could help to resolve my disorientation. He didn't protest as I pounded on my door, now a thick, deeply beveled salvage item from a ruined block of the formidable row houses you might find on one of those gracefully curved boulevards in London, a street you might assume continued on well kempt forever because of the humane manner in which it limited your vision.

After a very short spasm of unnecessarily dramatic thumping and shouting, another woman, less clever looking, opened the door. She seemed frightened less of me than by her humble situation in the space that'd once been occupied by my home, my belongings. I launched upon a speech which invited her to explain the plausibility of my entire living room, cataloging its contents, being carted off and replaced by her shabby and unfamiliar odds and ends which seemed to have been dragged to the site in haste overnight and left to sit and be bounced upon by kids without regard to either logic or aesthetics. She had her own problems without trying to recount how she and her entire single-mothered family had displaced me during the few moments between that one and the one in which I had decided to look and see what was around for dinner.

The clever woman had been busy folding and shuttling her ironing from one odd-angled cement alcove to the next in her arms or on a squeaky chipped and dented cafeteria cart. I suppose it was on her suggestion that I rocketed off to an open-air market in the clouds where, at the end of such a miraculous journey, no one seemed any more enlightened or concerned but for the everyday drudgery and meager satisfactions of life than they had been in the bare cold bowels, the modernist tenement, of what had become of my former life. I approached the very first pair of vendor ladies, resigned and sedate, their hair pinned up in back and casually scarved and ready for a day's business. I explained my situation a little more calmly now, already becoming lulled by rhythms of normalcy in a milieu of the strange. They both knew right away what I was trying to describe: my things, my place to live being stolen or having simply dissolved and reconstituted as someone else's just behind my back or in the visual periphery. The larger figure, in a colorful flower-print house frock and sensible robin's egg muslin apron motioned toward the woman next to her, a shriveled and perhaps later, happier but sclerotic, more tragic version of the clever dancer I had encountered earlier. The latter nodded politely and pulled open a light, wide drawer which had until then been hidden behind the polyester lace that shrouded their folding table along this avenue of tables where scavengers wandered up and back purchasing skeleton keys and weather vanes and pitted crystal balls on cheap plastic tripods.

The shallow drawer appeared to have been designed for baby linens or lingerie; the vendor, with all her dark and frail confidence, lifted out an embroidered sanguine cloth the consistency of a chamois, maybe with some added beading or faux-rhinestone applique. Her eyes, in their way, and with the help of her stronger and saucier colleague, explained that someone must have spread a similar square of decorative fabric over my head, perhaps while I was sleeping, causing my environment to be disappeared, to stubbornly recomposite itself, and that all I could do now was to purchase and to wear this corresponding instrument. A magic cloth.

In contrast to the long-obsolescent and weakly assembled scraps of 21st-Century ephemera the contemporaneous population had to work with for the plying of their trades and to stitch together a typical day, the mode of transportation back to the surface of our mother planet had evolved beyond my wildest dreams, and so punctual! Akin to the shape of a subway car, yet with a hydraulic door of the size you'd expect on an airline hangar, my coach, or what I could spy from beneath the rag, roared to the fore. I stepped in not in trust but neither in alarm because I would live to see what tomorrow would bring, even if with no more protection than a sham of a covering, a caul of surrender, a shrug of easy belief in the crap you can run across at a flea market when you've nothing to lose and the true riches of the world are being hoarded irretrievably by the future.

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Gypsy Fire Smudge




Pinpricks across the county smoldered by way of wide-stepping colossus,
Average heathers and jims had to shoulder the debilitating explanations;
Widower parked at the laundromat complains she ding-ed up the bondo,
Should've tipped twice again the charge of her job on his fender-less ride.

Maybe her space heater burnt down the stands at the track after shoeing all season,
Fifth-wheel gone as in religious pursuit of the anonymity manifest in self-profiling:
The corset tube and patched raiments, cauldron of highway-killed stew meats,
Roses and twenty fingers in your pockets before you can say I don't want it.

That kind of smoke makes you a hoarse that's tied to manners of voluntary geld,
The acknowledgement of a truer husband by which she too's held in quiet mesmry.
A stiff lock of curl in your face begs the questioning of your own black fiber;
Gypsy leaves a fire smudge where she's seen entropy on those behind her.


Ken
"I know."

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Dark out, north in



The orchestra to fake the house noise would be piccolos for the turbine: wind instruments to vent the attic dinge, drums grinding, the vent spinning lopsided. Is it a hound's cry, a jet drying its wing tips, the hyphens that begin the digits, metal road plow, slide whistle, toboggan ride that make the heat slip, even in the sunrise? The gas star shines in vain against the brilliance of its own mind: flames belch miles high while a clenched fist, lung grip, won't just trace your breath but claim it. On a quick pee, if the family pet jumps a low fence, you take a big chance going after it. Timpani, wooden sticks, loud flap of tarpaulin, violin to make the monster grin, then taunting him with porch lights, which simulate an angry crowd. The fist blows with a slow pound. The vents spin, there's a long howl, the middle splits and pulls the north in.