Body capacitance

you can see from hand mixing hamburger

that even dead flesh wants to stay together

throughout their existential disaster and

beyond, cattle wanting at a cellular 

level, same as drinking from the same 

pond, to bevel individuality, 

to fill the tank with commonality,

a temple of identicality that tempers

diasporic fears of wasting anger

at exploitation murder and dispersion

when everybody has a different version

of neutrality, destruction and creation

the ties that bind the stories of a nation

by Peg

Cruel facts of longevity

just sitting here, thinking about what i'd

like to share with a world of strangers

all of us floating, untethered by space or time

perhaps just that i hope your

landing place is kind if there is one

or that any endlessness refreshes itself regularly

 

when just floating one hopes to be in a 

company of well wishers if not wishes

coming true in a constant strumming

we must realize and gird our instruments

seek out the good luck and opportunity

already waiting in our personal associations

Dr. Donna Thong

"Recredentialing imminent."

Today's dog walk

you have so much you have to sort through what you don't want

possibilities are stacked in spilling-over boxes

each moment an opportunity to move forward

 

trapped in a mind a body that doesn't want can't won't do

sealed in brick and snowed in at the dead end of a 

street in a tiny imitation of urban settlement dishevelment

you need legs even to get the laundry accomplished

how to break out of the disuse overuse injury cycle

mix your targets among the physical virtual geographic

a hungry mind that prefers to eat sleep

a jaded palate that doubts and postpones

a vehicle loathe to cross emotional landmarks

by Donna

Today's dog walk

now she's an anchor on the leash

while i jog in place

low brown cloud layer but bright

long pees with the shoulder hunch

boys look at us

through the grainy snow mist

 

 

by Donna

Tripping

telling about a time when i was a

man fully loaded

is really sideways disrespect for the 

kind of stud i am now

one stem into reminiscing could also

draw a stream of horror at the

hungry animal its disregard 

for self-regard estate planning

this life wasn't yet a paradigm only

anti-paradigmatic yet

organized enough to fool a boy into

thinking he had time

my boot tracks in the snow are like

the bodies each a new step into the

cold delight of warm palm islands

we were an intimate crew

i have my colossal straddle over those

old-timey train towns and worn goat

paths in the gardens of other capitals

lonesome memories

now i am tripping off to glory

on the heels of my dad and mother and 

so many countrymen

so that the past may keep being fed

 

by Ilyn

 

Template

once your personality begins to blossom

you become more annoying

although you may see your

religion in all that you survey

that doesn't mean that 

religion must be affixed to everything

what is a handout

a handout must include public 

education, welfare, corporate

subsidies christmas and birthday gifts

litter to those who would

eat it

or honor honor that comes with no

religious affiliation or

indoctrination except for the belief

that government can run parallel and

not entwined with religion

though the law may have 

come from religion religion

is not the law

and the more you sing His praise

the more this becomes a scowly 

silent car

with passengers who'd just as soon

plug their ears with silence

mood agents conscious managers

want the poor to be less so

not that learning and learning to believe are the same 

not that they birth and suffer more

which is a religious notion

put forth and then abandoned by

religion religion when it was

all we had or when it was the 

government government that was 

the stick to the holy carrot

either of which can be fashioned with a

phallus but is it

godless is it godless if it's 

not religious

or what if it got started by

religion religion supposedly 

inspired by God a god who

is inerrant which must mean he

chooses the winners winners 

glorious for better or worse but

glory glory 

for better in the long run

for example would God choose an

idea that's religious over a

good idea that's inspired 

by religion and what man who's not a 

savage

is not inspired by at least one

religion and would not conduct himself

with a preinstalled moral compass instead of a

do-it-yourself one

or at least by his lower impulses which he's

going to know are the opposite of his

religion-inspired conscience

but there's a conscience without religion

way back way out there or maybe

closer than i'd like to think

a conscience born of stove touching

lingering physical pain

ecstatic sensory experience

recognizing flesh wounds pleasure

and extrapolating that to emotions like

loss bewilderment hilarity

a conscience that is and becomes a 

god by fashioning a god out of

conscience conscience that wants to use

the knowledge that led to conscience

as a templative more than contemplative

religion religion that frees and constricts

and annoys others and

steps on the rake of its purpose and

spirals into meta-perversions and

degrades conscriptively by way of 

murderers rapists

deprives minorities by ommission

grifters slavers exploiters

all the same sins sins that predate religion

religion so lonely so powerful destructive

gods that grant freedom only by dying

and quite probably not even then

 

 

by Ilyn

"Short by Illinois standards."