brain-gut connection note

Why would I say out loud "that was awkward" while turning over once again a moment from decades ago. Schizophrenic people at the beach do this in their deep tans, taking both sides even switching places on the bench. If you listen, they are ancient squabbles. 

My gut is fully involved in the self-torture sessions including empathizing with and imagining people all over the world being tortured. 

Some people pick their nose or cut their skin for relief. Some self-hypnotize with sports or nature. Some like listening to the sound of a mouth working a lemon drop in front of a microphone. 

When my mind becomes satisfied maybe by resolving a bitter note, a small section of gut releases it's grip. It makes a noise. 

by Missy
from Jitters On The Night Before Full Release

sunhole0808

 

 

EMERGENCY FOREVER

 

Playing dead but listening

 

Man Tips #823

 

Central altar

here we are here i am

i wondered once why

as soon as you go in

my neighbor had a can of

spray disinfectant

just sitting out

all the time 

even as guests arrived

by Jan
Table 4: Adults
Poetry Festival
Days of Destruction

I wanted to remain a primitive

Before i step back into the bush

I turn and squint at the skyline

A derivative of where i'll be

Your refinement of minerals

Means you want to make fine

Again what was once fine

Fine as can be is my destiny

Perfect in terms of an ending

A finish in lush abrasion

by Jan

Final Release Poetry Festival
Table 16 Prompt:
"Write a poem of not more than 10 lines imagining what Peg must have felt at Final Release."

 

singing dog bowl

 

He said mmm

i am repeating it i'm digging on it because i like it

he said mmm and I said mmm he said mmm and

it was a happy moment and i'm replaying it

felt so mmm after all this time i'm repeating it

because it follows a track going half way 

down my back eight billion cells have

passed away since then but when he said 

mmm not a molecule degraded he said 

mmm and i said mmm and he said

by Missy
Junior Scholastic Table
Poetry Fair
Days of Destruction

watery

 

 

 

immigrant house

Enjoy

 

celebrity

in exchange for allowing me to

stare at and fantasize about you

i accept my life to be hollow

saw you up close in california

body and soul in oklahoma

having you want me was macabre

by Peg
from: 

How I Met a Blue-Eyed Black TV Anchorman With Silver Sideburns Named Ted and What Happened Next

cumulus fractus

 

They can't handle reality.

The ladies are a little out of breath after tromping around in circles, their feet laden with muck, until they've destroyed all of the old tree stumps, especially, that were keeping them from comfortably lying down. It is warm and pleasant there in the swamp. Releasing their urine into it, they settle in, chins on claws, for some fun "philosophical forum" time. 

JAN: You sound like you think reality is just this one thing, this one way we've always defined reality. 

PEG: You suggest I should think of reality as many things. 

JAN: No. It's only one thing. But you may not find that one thing unless you take a pull on the shiv. 

PEG: The shiv is a spiritual tool, a sacred ritual that has been bastardized capitalized and stylized into just another mind altering joy ride. 

JAN: But that's the thing. That's reality. The joy ride. 

PEG: To find the rule you must partake in an exception to the rule? 

JAN: Yes. 

PEG: You are probably going to say that what conscious animals have created, have turned the world into, is irreality. 

JAN: Yes. It's essentially a takeitoutist philosophy. First came the simulationists and their what-ifs. An actual simulation of reality was being built all around them while they pondered. Remember that the K5000 was still very much a part of our airspace back then. It allowed MPS to build their fantasy society and make the rest of us think it was our idea. 

PEG: The world as we know it: a simulation built by conscious animals. Who are terrified.

JAN: More than anything. 

PEG: And they are officially against pulling the shiv outside temple grounds because

JAN: They can't handle reality. 

PEG: They can't handle everyone having access to reality because it would destroy their brand and their business. 

JAN: I've been pulling the shiv all morning, how about you? 

BOTH: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

The hearty enjoyment of these close friends, as always, had tragic consequences. All life forms within a wide circumference, any that enjoyed the gift of hearing, including a small troop of MPS scouts on an airboat tour, were rendered permanently deaf by the ultrasonic cackling. 

How touristic desire drove evolution

Of all the organs, a brain most likely makes the most requests and also has expectations about how you carry those out. It might seem that the brain's needs are few: sleep, physical safety, substances. When we look closer, we find that just about everything we do is being manipulated and maneuvered by a slimy blob that makes up a negligible part of a body's weight. 

We know that the brain includes an archetypal inclination toward surviving underwater. It's clear from the structure of our lungs and the constant squeezing of liquid through the heart that we were once jellyfish-like animals or barnacles, either propelling ourselves along involuntarily or constantly gulping and spitting seawater, as a way of life, while stuck to the side of a rock. 

Ks too have hearts that once must have pumped them very quickly through a marine environment, as many of us have dreamed of doing. They were able to scoop up massive amounts of plankton or any unlucky passersby. But their gills evolved into wings. They learned at first from the Gerridae, the water walkers, about the air line and how to break through for food and stunning dry land panoramas. 

It was that ultimately touristic desire to see more, see it all, that drove them upward. 

Paradoxically, in an ecosystem shared with other beasts, they became the biggest circus, what no one could not gaze up at, what all best learn to do for protection from the newly hostile skies above. 

by Phyliss

Why am I being kept alive

my cost effectiveness is up for debate

just when every medicine appears too late

an industry grunts and reaches up its sleeve

and i am reluctantly granted a reprieve

maybe they plan to charge it to my estate

in other words i'm permanently indentured

no matter whom i've known or where i've ventured

another data point on a ticker tape

kept alive from vote to vote like a lab ape

a radioactive slab that's been de-cancered

by Peg

Tears of happiness

Peg and Jan are feeling perky in the spring sun. While we normally find them lounging in one way or another, maybe toying with semis on a nearby highway, but never if it means getting up. 

Today they are up on their hind legs standing opposite a roundish boulder that stands higher than most gulls, for example, would dare to fly. 

"Now clench your talons and shove a little." 

"Oh! It does move. It's not stable at all! Fun."

 They found merriment in rocking the mountain-sized boulder this way and that.

"It's so warm. I just want to lean against it."

The friends both pitched forward until their bellies were flat against the hot rock surface. They managed to reach across the top and lock claws briefly. 

Peg's tears of happiness crashed down, weakening the integrity of the granite. Cracks begin to form. 

Just as the cataclysm begins, eventually burying several nearby fleke communities, Jan and Peg's wingtips dart into place with a flapping thunder that rivals the roar of splintering rock and screaming below.  

Once in flight, they learn that they can press their bellies against each other and get the same warm pleasure they'd just got from the boulder. Then they each twirl away from the other, rising briefly, and curving back down again, opposite one another, and at the same time releasing their purplish intestinal gases. 

JAN: Look! We made a fart heart! 

BOTH: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Ironically, one curious gull, a gull named Jonathan Livingston, does venture up toward Peg and Jan, attracted by the spectacle. As the intensity of their laughter reaches him, unfortunately, his brain explodes, and he crashes into the clouds of dust below. 

Phyliss

Everything is hilarious to them

Because they are so powerful, everything is hilarious to them. Ks do not have power so much as they are power. They affect the hilarity of spoiled children while inhabiting bodies that could crush a small neighborhood. 

What the flekes had failed to do with spears and arrows, the Jans excelled at with a new approach. Their armies of college educated unemployed were turned to the task of capturing and subjugating, and then coopting some powerful Ks of their own. 

Originally meant to be a decoy, the first hybrid K. was fitted with commercially available security cameras embedded in her eye creases, and a sort of war room was established for the Jansdaads to control her movements through a process they were developing called Remote Muscular Positioning. Her name was Peg. 

After all the poking and prodding and sawing and chopping and stapling and wiring, she'd ended up with a little Jansdaad blood along with a slice of Jansdaad gristle that made up key elements of her new nervous system. Some wondered if she'd be able to artificially mate and conceive with a Jan. Some others should have listened more closely to that concern, perhaps, or maybe they didn't because they knew it was the will of Mthyuh. At some level, they were all shot through with the religious beliefs of their ancestors. It was one way to make sense of what was happening without going insane. 

No one expected Peg to morph into a completely normal looking Jan self, although a little fierce in the brow, or that she would end up marrying a hot older black man with gray-blue eyes and frosted sideburns. 

He was a news anchorman, and she was in the news all the time. They were both a sort of freak in their own way. They bonded and bore at least one child. 

The most awesome aspect of the new Peg was that she could morph right back into her K self as it suited her. Gradually, her own organs and primeval systems not only grew to their original strength but also began to subsume their artificial enhancements and incorporate them into a much more powerful and independent K than ever before. Peg and Ted's kids also had this morphing ability. At a young age, they would form a cocoon and then step out of it as lucid as the grandmother stepping out of the guts of the wolf who thought he'd fooled her. 

Eventually Peg and other K hybrids learned to navigate the many holes of The Crack. Some, like Jan, had relationships and families in a number of different holes. The Mthyuh Preservation Society encouraged this behavior as a way to prevent them from feeling confined and wanting to eat flekes as the Mouths of Mthyuh. Sometimes the most dangerous Ks would disappear for many seasons as they lived their lives in other destinations within The Crack. 

by Phyllis

sunhole101

 

sunhole 100

 

LESBIAN MOTHERS EAT APPLE PIE

 

apothecurian

you have tried these
mixes and survived

we appreciate it big time

but when you die

calculation will decide

no love inside

how can we 

stay on this ship

and not touch the surface

apothecurian

fetish or mission

better than an algorithm

frag.

Heroes of Sacrifice

La LaChama-la 

symbiotic and/or transactional

 

Shab has lumbered along for nearly three days not even stopping at the babbling streams nor accepting any of the boiled chrysanthemum wrapped in pig crackle the pilgrims offer as they walk beside behind and ahead of him.

He is migrating like a lower beast. This is the season and the moment to simply magnetize toward his lord, the Begging Rajah. 

Shab sometimes believes that Ilyn is the Begging Rajah even though Shab's saddle has not been filled for many seasons, and even though Ilyn always rides instead behind him in the square wheeled wooden cart. Ilyn's bed of marigolds is only dust at the bottom of the empty cart now, but Shab still bears his yoke patiently, knowing that our surface is tilting once again toward the miracle. 

Soon Ilyn will be spotted wandering out of a canyon or lying as if dead by the side of a road wearing nothing but his scars and the markings of marigold paste the pilgrims have stopped to anoint him with before moving back toward the hill caves to smoke the vine and say shiv throughout the night. 

Ilyn and Shab would pay their official visit through each town in turn to thank them for their faith and offerings and help to celebrate the cycle of destruction. 

It seemed like everyone has rings on their toes and as they gather the dusty floors glistened with tin, cadmium, and peridot. Some of the villages have diving competitions to honor Ilyn's sacred moment of glory at Mthyuh's Diving Board. Some of the boys even set their hair afire before jumping just as Ilyn's long red mane turns to actual flame as he plumets toward the boiling pit of lava. 

The fields orchards even varmints will go dormant until Mthyuh is paid back for her bounty so that she does not send her Mouths to prosecute their debt. 

Still, as Ilyn prepares to dive, it is customary to shout eat me first! Missy has taken to circling this ceremony coasting on the foul volcanic gases and listening for the cries to strengthen in fervor and therefore in terror. 

by Phyllis
embedded

 

powers

moon enters my house

uninvited unannounced

yet i need its powers

by Tom

Large monuments, people on drugs

large monuments

people on drugs

laughing and drinking 

at work

cries are dim

cries from within

are dim

the same needy creatures 

need as much

want as much

as before

looting

degradation

of monuments

miracles 

are withheld

looted 

down to the foundations

we have applications

disconfidence

plentitude

panic

a monk

who might have immolated

walks instead 

on a plane

a spy

a gang

looting from within

cries are contained

laughter

derision

intoxication

natural death

some creatures thrive

others fertilize

the firmament

the core

the reason

the ancestors

all looted

by Missy

Creative Thesis Option, p. 6

what

I looked toward the heavens and asked what

I looked inside at my conscience and asked what

Aloud, I asked the room, which was empty, what

La Chama-la
Fragment: Days of Destruction Address

Strings with knots

like a puppet's hands if the strings had knots

to open up is can't, not to not want

these unwelcome growths mark time and effort

thus stories have been told by peoples not

wanting to forget but in recording find

that media as memory is more vulnerable 

than a memory that has built its capillary 

knots cranial cathedrals dying kings

there are the last knots ending in fringe

there are hair knots ironically created

when attempting to impose order on

the sort of chaos that guarantees a knot

you can roll a knot on the tip of your

finger with some spit, a knot that can

hold the entire construction in place

by Missy
Table IV: Free Verse
MPS Gifted Fair

Days of Destruction

 

Own-brain dialogics

I was waiting in the garden for Mkidza Mlaf, mistress of the dance, and I happened to notice a fleke walking his hybrid in from another neighborhood, a mini-K male like the ones I've been seeing off leash in Jansdaad Park lately. Well, I decided, it won't be for long. That K is gonna end up in a shelter on a kill list and that fleke is going to be in prison prolly before that. 

Then of course I had to take myself aback, listen to what I was saying with a critical ear. And doing this, I felt ashamed.

Then I started plotting out how to call the MPS on the flekes while they are still there, in Jansdaad Park, with their K's off leash, without them being able to guess that it was me who called. 

Then I began to wonder how long it's been since a Jan was ever even present at Jan Jansdaad Park, maybe not even since the ground breaking way back before The Crack got opened. For years it's just been gypsies and now that the gypsies have been driven out or terrified to go outside, the flekes are filling the vacuum. 

The Ks have even more right historically to be free on this surface. Letting them off leash is a symbolic act aimed at the rest of us and probably lost entirely on the pathetic "reimagining" of the former kings of the planet. They glop around on rubbery feet, and their once mighty wings are token bone and skin flaps that only create eruptions in the sweat glands beneath them. Mini-K males feel permanently ready for a fight, but they don't know why. Of course their teeth can still tear flesh, and their tongues can pin down a varmint even if it appears a spear's length behind them.

I've ended up taking no action at all. I'm glad I've discovered the power of own-brain dialogics. 

by Tom