Friday, December 30, 2016

How to feel about Mexicans


I feel resentful as I, an older American from a long line of Americans all accustomed to a similar standard, a growing standard of living, stand in front of a class, a class offered free by the government and paid for with my tax dollars, a class full of Mexicans in new clothes, because they make enough money, and I'm wearing clothes that are three years old because I don't make enough money. They'll take over the body shop business, for example, in a community. That's not jobs we don't want. They just do it cheap and they have big families and it's like a mafia.

These are Mexicans who call themselves Mexicans and not Mexican-Americans or Americans whether or not they are here legally or illegally. Many Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, Americans with a Mexican heritage, or anyone I know who is familiar with Mexico would agree that Mexicans consider their blood to be a race, their nationality a blood even more than their color. Unless they are Mexicans who call themselves Spaniards. These are spoken of, but I've never met one.

Mexicans are proud and their pride or machismo whatever creates a particular sore spot around anything involving language, especially the Spanish language. Mexicans are more self-conscious about their Spanish around Americans than Americans are self-conscious about their English among Brits. I lost my virginity to a Mexican man named Andrew.

He took me there not quite willing because not quite understanding but would have been and acted as if willing and became more than willing again and again and again in the coming months and year. He spoke an ancient language, studied French and philosophy and told stories about riding whales and shitting in his snowsuit to stay warm having fallen into a crevice while scaling Mt. Whitney.

Another Mexican man convinced me to move 2000 miles to be near him, forbade me to drink at the cost of immediate homelessness, would not allow me to cover myself above the waist while in bed, and infected me with hepatitis B. After meeting me for lunch in Los Angeles's "Ragland," his boss pointed out my splooge on his designer pants.

Finally I met Vic at a Silverlake AA meeting and by the end of it we had our hands on one another's knees as if we were already going steady. It was pure, beautiful lust. He got out of the car to take a pee near a cliff and I put my arm out the window to hold his dick for him. Vic's mother had a tree dangling with doll's heads. He handcuffed me to a bed and opened his bedside cabinet, which contained a hatchet. He took out the hatchet, and I said, "Now you're scaring me, Vic."

But before that we had a couple of years of blissful cohabitation and some hot, nasty sex of the variety only two gay men who had survived the 70's could know and appreciate. I moved out of Vic's for a reason I don't remember, but it wasn't because he tested positive. But he thought it was because he tested positive. Even though I told him it wasn't. We had the hottest sex ever, and he was at least 9 years older.

Then briefly was the boy I went out to dance with in the heyday of Chicago dance house clubs of house dance. His mother made us turkey with onions. Sorry. He was from Bolivia. I could segue into the most beautiful man of all, a Brazilian, or an even more beautiful Cuban man I dated after an encounter in a marble and chrome department store men's room in Madrid, or the Mexican-American Blackwater goon who was so beautiful I accused him on the dating site of being a sham, who bought me an outfit to wear around with him and let me make him cry at my kitchen table.

The other really buff Mexican which was really just a short term relationship was a pro body builder on some serious steroids with a temper so severe he calmly described beating up his neighbor simply for stepping over the property line. He drew me a bath once with one of those tub jacuzzi mats lying on the bottom of it and plugged into the wall and I did not want to get in that thing. We went on a trip to Baja and he got mad during breakfast, dumped my duffle in the parking lot and took off with my house keys in the passenger side cup holder of his jeep para la frontera. I had to return hours later on a tiny crowded bus with a dirty diaper stuffed in the seat-back ashtray.

The last significant Mexican intimate I can think of lived with his siblings and mother, the youngest of the family in her 30's, all saving and or spending their grownup incomes on whatever they liked, none almost ever home to use the pool or the immaculate bathrooms. Again it was all about this guy getting his papi in and that's that. We were in Palm Springs and he got out of the car to talk to some tawdry foot cruise traffic and disappeared.



by Hoolie
"Thanks for the memories Vic."


Thursday, December 29, 2016

Monday, December 26, 2016

fag palimpsest




today's date seems hyperbolic, out of control
that the rush to this number made a whiplash

yet i'm a fresh ingenue on the go in the know 
the limber can bend to degradation and graft

i hear this howling wind at civility's warm tip
no executive function to animate my skeleton


by Hoolie

Monday, December 19, 2016

Civilian Parking Vigilante

Hello I'm a CPV and I don't particularly like the way you're parked.
No as a volunteer I merely observe and report.
The word narc refers to an anti-narcotics officer, of whose numbers I would be proud to serve.
A snitch is someone who is involved with the perpertrator; my only involvement is patriotism.
Choose to use that type of language with me and you'll end up in a cell for a very long time.
I already know that the combined force of the PD and court system is on my side, same team.
I would not wear a body cam even if I were on payroll; it would infringe on my workplace privacy.
Yes I suppose that does have advantages for both sides; I mean either one of us could...
Shit no...!

Sunday, December 18, 2016

They II

They relish the hope-to-die thrills of off-roading and extreme pain relief.
They'd rather burn down their city than see it usurped by other citizens.
They hold tradition in high value or contempt per their convenience.
They resonate with team sports, commercial mobbing.
They see entitlement in wealth, greed in poverty.
They're enraged by windfall and celebrate loss.
They foresee outcomes, not repercussions. 
They favor the red ant/ black ant analogy. 
They find merit in ends, not means.
They conflate truth and emotion.
They're sentimental about God.
They equate fortune to merit.
They equate merit to fortune.
They think they do God's work.
Their emotion is also their truth.
They see smoking to their own ends.
They reach out to color not lack of color.
Their caution gets trumped by brute force.
They are indignant at loss but not built to win.
They mine poverty and privilege alike for riches.
They cycle, golf, jog, for real or on machines, joylessly.
They trace precedent before each step but don't foresee a rest point.
They let the city burn itself by tearing down its walls and holding noses.
They might parachute, sea dive, or helicopter through the Grand Canyon.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Baby jesus in a ditch



the tiny arms hurt
seeing that, infant
civilization that
seeded, cashed out
between the rest
stops eighty sixed
full-of-piss peanut
butter jars adjacent
his tiny dick, white
glow in the culvert
your face is slapped
too clean to grift
just a comic waste


Sunday, December 4, 2016

Temporary nature of art



years later they see the light
but only the largest quasars

one wrist so soft it lasts a life
quiet as the cattails where a

baby can float, be found, not,
become king or food for lions

lose touch with human bodies
that belong to who you know

abut and cooperate in pods of
nobodies, also talking into air

race of the elders, some ugly
these are my new spirits now?


by Ken
Wigwam #3
Webelos Wolves Weekend
Chukkachank

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Methane


it burns to speak or to be silent so speech is not the fulcrum but rather itself the burning. the burning is the enemy and the enemy must be burned. burn their speech their silence while watching silently.

watch them secretly, whispering their frailties; they will fail. Fail them openly as a sign that a limit has been breached, a singularity. H/she whose issue burns need not be burned if flammable but not fire.


Illyn
"I'm short for Illinois."

Sunday, November 27, 2016

War is taught


my communication is fraught

and bare naked of tv or drugs

this night wanking breathless

unto some cruel Jerusalem...

but back to you and pen me:

swarms of wasps couldn't be

more attentive to utterances

if they reeked of fresh muds;

through battle, war is taught


by Missy
"I'm big now."

Saturday, November 26, 2016

cathexas




what if you don't want everything to connect
you just want each contraption to work right

what happens as they age is consciousness is
an awareness that vision happens inside your

body, not out there; or that there's little to no
layer between out and in, and what you can

see includes throbs of blood bending sight
copied and pasted optical memories fading

it's a world of ghost images and representa-
tions of solid matter taking on the machin-

ery and personality of perception, turning
the self into a strange otherness of objects
 


by Ken
"I'm on medical marijuana."

Saturday, November 19, 2016

furnace vents



furnace vents clicking
is it degradation or ex-
ercise, popping in and
out? galvanized steel
or aluminum, and can
it not quietly put heat?

Ken

Had it tough/ made it tough

relative to your culture
you may have had it
but you also made it
tough. that's why they
are after your hide, not
so much now for labor.

if everybody's tough it
means you'll have it
make it tough together,
on a ladder, as brothers
in survival, all striving
to get above the other.

when they make it
tough, they teach you
how to make it rough.
you make it tough but
then you know how to
be rough on others.


Reptily





Monday, November 14, 2016

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Clown



i get all sentimental for hard days
when the battle was out there but
in me too, those fierce hot interludes

can boxer and ring recede/ withdraw
simultaneously; have i just explicated
the next law of the universe and time

no it is only i who hesitates to resume
my sinking resolve is counterweight
to gloom when in company of the tired


by Ken

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Mansion



they're not offering protection
just striving to recuperate sun
from where we laid the mansion

they want their slain neighbors'
share although it's really yours:
the proverbial wild v. colonizers


by Donna

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Slave of the Chama

It's only 10:00, but I'm so tired, but if I go to bed she'll probably attack me and if I sleep in the other bed I may toss and turn, and she'll take it personally and feel lonely during the night.

In theory we are a sexually active couple but the boundaries are difficult for me to negotiate sharing a queen bed. What if I really want to take a non-euphemistic nap?

And it's not as if I'm a rock; it is in fact distressing to have only 4-6 hours to sleep before the alarm and trying not to get started into a drawn-out love act.

My doc, admittedly swish, says it's a weekly necessity at least-- or you could be risking any number of invasive/ interventionist consequences. 

Yet I resist: that it be my discretion, my first strike option above the will of a frequent fertilizer, that the pleasure first is mine.


Tom
"Don't ask."

Repressed hallucination





Friday, October 21, 2016

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Epilogia


So far dying has been a dark quiet encounter;
heartfelt words you'd think might end it all:

beacons for liveliness oaths battle the blood.
Coming down the other side blends epilogia,

bittersweet memory, stun of what's this now
crane back from down the tram and tree lines

Once a fear and then another's made you say
goodbye, you see it all as practice for 1 event

All the times you've trained gymnast like at
each meet and fight, sickness, fail, emptiness

Makes moot the eyes any sense but common
jaded less betrayed by lies than to move along

to actually pick up and gone the humiliation
worse than the bothering worried cohabitation

close-knit breed, take me into your free land
where wind blows the goatees of noble faces


Mike
"Please, Hoolie."

Saturday, October 1, 2016

i'm trying something new

i'm trying something new
i'm telling them I believe
in their abilities but only

some maybe I should tell
them all I believe, that
you can tell the story right

you can use conventions
as a template for audiences
to understand effortlessly

is there no one in your life
with whom you speak in
this way, laying out your

argument and hammering
it home relentlessly hoping
to strike or gain or move?


Dr. Donna Thong
(relicensure imminent)

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Gender as skillset





this alibidinous moment
to me seems androgynant

what astrological wisdom states
follows his or follows her fate


Tom
"Come back to me, Sylvia."

Sunday, September 4, 2016

Halves not had

They live half as long because they
live while they're sleeping with no
distinction between the conscious
states and therefore life is doubled.

And sometimes they awake or only
half so, while staying in both worlds
they straddle this line, fly and drive
with half a mind, and half that mine.


Phyllis (embedded)

Monday, August 22, 2016

Cliffe Suites Mom Late Night Felony


back when i was
legally responsible
for naming people

a glitch, a bulb of
cranial pressure
formed in my head

i could do it then
out of babies you
give up psychiatry

so i explore skies
away from all eyes
until i crack dawn

when it flows lives
perch on hot wires
while it subsides


Peggy, Volunteer
Table 5
Poetry Day
Center for the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement


Me, master

I've already trained the dogs not to go past the edge of the woods
so when we install the wire,
it'll be a violation of their conscience if they choose to go there
as well as a painful anti-bellweather peal and a vote for me, master
come future forks in the proverbial choice path:
one way, freedom-- the other way safety, comfort, structure


Donna
"Enjoying my patio today."

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Shard 3





are we not all
do we not all
well I hear voices, others' voices, in my voice

so I'm not all one or composed of other voices
not everyone
or not no one


Chamatilly
Shard 3
Fordamall Chank 

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Spots



Raised on open-ended talk therapy, they began to want a face to want their feelings and so began to feel unimportant and uncomfortably swollen with emotive language as the sessions ebbed.

They began to wonder if they'd ever find the kind of begrudging rapt attention that a specialist, predisposed to listening and to caring, could give them; if they'd been genuinely interesting.

They noted at some level that it worked on one another but it felt a bit like incest, which it wasn't. The world out there was relevant while full of spots that wanted to defy them an existence.


Donna Thong
Registered Recertification Intern
Highchank Spa 
Highchank

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Hard heart



if you were born with one side of your jaw fused together
it would feel like your face was breaking when you yawn

i want not to learn more but for learning to leave me alone
it gradually stops sinking in and you know enough to hide

when you came out of the coma it was on the awkward side
fate too I chose to leave as if it were as it was, accomplished


by Hoolie
"Sorry Mike."

Saturday, July 23, 2016

You warp quotidian



brusque post-noon sun gives over
to cooler evening breeze creeping in

temperatures sway on the spine of
shadow, edge of volcano whipping

torn outline of ruling hedge above
you warp quotidian dark and light


Illyn
"Short for Illinois"

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Optimistic flotsam

They have to kick balloons to walk
Before the help with popping sticks
Fans through aisles and over stages
Jabbing in competition with a child
To quell the last optimistic flotsam

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Self-loathing and hate, exasperation, fatigue



Mood was fine, then
bus driver aimed the door to stop way ahead
and even though it was a white person getting
off, I held it against her and didn't look her in
the eye as I put the money in the slot. Then I
couldn't get out and she said press the button
in the box, and a black woman behind me said
thank you to the driver and pressed the button
for me and I did hate everyone for a while as
I walked up the sidewalk. Then finally when I
went to check out with a protein shake, I asked
nicely for a couple of fives to take the bus and
the cashier said sure no problem and my whole
world became again a dreamer's paradise. Now
however, I recall the part I've blanked out: an
earnest prayer said just before through a storm
of self-loathing and hate, exasperation, fatigue


Jan Jansdaad, Jr.
Dr. Donna Thong
Case Management Intern

Monday, July 18, 2016

Saturday, July 16, 2016

chank excavation

heeza kanga the thangah

Monday, July 11, 2016

READ ME

I AM A NOTE INSIDE A WALL
FROM 2013

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Apes on turtles

phone for sophisticated luddites
carrying on unto inconceivability

replacement of modernity by tec
hnology: more hustlers in stores

we see apes rolling in on turtles,
arthritic metacarpal-phelangeals

Sunday, July 3, 2016

Choking Technocratic Layer



Sorry not to have more carefully parsed the sticks and noughts
As regards your proprietary and/or franchise participating eggs
to step across guiding expecting evaluating eggs spouting their
instructions admonitions hundreds of modules packed with the
blood and sweat of someone in the bowels of the grift platform
who churns out help materials so offensively unhelpful that the
product makes more neediness for real help from sham helping



Tom 
"You can be older and still on a revolutionary vanguard: against mandatory yet fraudulent embetterment."

Saturday, July 2, 2016

Anew

a forest's waste
hangs and tumbled
junk. dripping,
waits as forces suck
the black paste back
in. frozen, from an
elbow swings free
parts harden to a
finer end. animals
that participate add
vim to glue but then
but recreate anew.


by Sylvia

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Deepest place



for a moment I saw my psyche as a piece of real estate,
the architecture of a tree house with many round shades;
and this it appears to me means it's an inhabited system
but also that the tyranny of civilization applies, even
in that deepest sleeping place you can go before a coma


Love, Donna

Saturday, June 4, 2016

Friday, May 20, 2016

Angelique Carmina



It feels like the whole
human race: go round
thinking it's my party,
wreaking havoc, the
fame-to-shame swang;
night is not a reward
but a defeat; anger is
a way that I can exp-
ress my sexuality or
gender for all to see it.

It looks like I'm onto
getting an object done
getting on hard effect-
ting a one-thing-to-an
-other change, or just
really pumped up and
that works cosmetically
for me; my partners ev-
er play the victim, but
it perpetuates attraction.


by Angelique Carmina

Saturday, May 14, 2016

we're equidistant from the gate and each other



we're uncomfortably close
except when playing this
intergalactic starship game

we've formed a fleet and
move synchronous stealthy
toward the warp apparatus

missions are ridiculously
easy now less strategizing
with the brute force of two


Hoolie
"For you Mike"