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

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

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."

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?

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"