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

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

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

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)

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."

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

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

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