Pins n' Buttons

Tom wears a home-sewn vest over every plaid shirt every day. It's covered in commemorative pins and slogan buttons. Even as he lectures, its beige suede rocks against his arteries. His half-naked students find it obscene, but a heart on his chest puts them at ease during drills and bloodletting. K chicks will often leave purple stains on their seats.

Missy is out on suspension for off-limits vittle. Every re-creature must be protected extra much because they are most likely to be eaten with the smallest pang of conscience. Because they come back, because they must, it seems a venal abuse.

Tho flakes are other matter; academy classmates even graver. Flakes are food for bloodsac only; the grrl in the next seat is your sister in pain. Had Connie stepped in The Crack? Were her tertiary characteristics driving her onto the waiting list for shiv clinic and guided skeletal bursting? Had Connie in fact been a casual associate of Reptily among the rotting alfalfa bales of the Low Chanks long before the filter and the MPS? We measured time in WD then. But it lied.

Imagine all the singing night birds before wide feeding. Now there is only one, and he mocks. Fecundity only breeds more episodes: thumping, wailing, spines. Flakes disappear like soap. Soon only those who rule the skies will have a strip of land. They are proud and unsentimental or grieving. They have paid with burning; they have paid in change. They are tired of thieving, of treating. Now we are their petri dish. Death is a privileged doctor.

Phyllis
Lit-Crit Contractor, Embedded
for Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle

Mike's Swimming Blog #80

When the Hot is on, you step into an embrace with the liquid and keep frogging or gatoring in languid ballet strokes. You have to fight going into a fetal position. In Donna's salt pool, I don't get chalky. She's been working on an autopsy in the living room. My loins feel sore for lack of Winter Stroking. Something about this environment really keeps the buttocks training. I did tri-ceps on the cement stairs holding my knees in the air just Above the Tension. Then I heard her laughing through the sliding screen door. She'd found signs of fatty liver even though it was Mostly Missing.

My World is Shit

Now that I am in the Final
Stages, change seems dumb.
Some say there's been an
encroachment of a parallel
universe, but I fully doubt it.
It's just the ground churning
under us, belching new souls.
My world is shit because I'm old.

Once I had a game, an angle, an exit;
I was up for an ambit, didn't need to score.
Now every lit-crit babe with a publishing credit
Thinks I'm a door to the afterlife.
I can only leave maps and things;
I don't really bring much to the way I live
except my body and a knife.
My world is shit because I murdered Connie.

Missy

Scald Lines

Reasonable Person

I sometimes call upon the powers of the universe for no reason. But six nights in a row we smelled smoke curling in the blow hole. Six times we felt our bodies screeming NO. But we are still whole. Connie

Affective Filter

While the Chama is in training, I do reconnaissance with flakes. To bring down the affective filter, we build caldron platforms, watch the aurorealis in the twilight, passing giant bongs of shish. All the while I can take the temperature of the chillun while tickling them, whispering passages from Northrup Frye into their pointy ears. Some days She'll ply me for coordinates. After feed school, I'll be using her guide data to find the colonies. I give; the Chama takes. We'll help each other. Phyllis

Wind Quake

A cloud changed into dragon shapes and we must have been experiencing some high winds because the whole chank system quaked, and the shadows seemed to turn down, swooping into invisibility. This is the current that rules our skies and protects the Homeland. When hailstones the size of medicine balls start splashing the soup, they make scald lines. Flakes are making bets on target-shaped diagrams and debris field calculations. We expect a big attack soon. Mike

Dogreeve

Chemical Prayer

I can still think even though most of my muscles are under remote control. This reminds me of an office job I had while I could still cover my spines. Repetetive movement. I could staple six reports at a time. My finger muscles got strong playing canasta with Sylvia and Tom. If they could see me now. Soaring over a canyon. Bringing home lost ducks. Men. To my nest. To PharmSupply.

It started as an offering, because I believed in my culture's nirvanic system. Here, look what I've found. I am a cat with a bird, but no. A bird with a cat. Then the Mthyuh Preservation Society ruled to let the corporations infiltrate the Shiv, and then... It doesn't matter if you are a lesbian when... they are force working and resting you, cramping your style.

My African-American news anchor husband and mulatto kids: waiting in some hiya-percha. I am employed, enslaved, an appliance plugged in. Retrieving robot falcon. I try to be gentle, but they have fitted me with metal. Plucking an individual from a park or deserted place, there is almost no sound. One must clap one's beak around those who insist on retreating indoors.

All I want is to get my puppies to safety. You implanted your motivator chip right near that instinct. Sometimes they dangle from my toenails and mouth both as I sightsee my worn track. One day I'll find my kids and have an operation. I'll go back to them and explain how tied up I've been. You told me I could retire in a temple and invite all my friends.

Peg

Yard Fulla Bullhedz

This yard held promise, yet
it's fulla bullhedz an stink c-
-abbage. Dogs trot announc
-ing their pleas, half hoping
not to feel the extra glee of
pierced paw pad n' extrusi-
on. One of them has dug a d
-eep meditation lodge near
the barbecue for her needz
on nights where everything
itches.

Hostile environment
-s breed pain alone; not ev-
en able to feed on fire-feeling-
fire combativity, a desert ca
n non-chalantly spit venom
in every direction, not even
hoping to hit a hi-pt. target
or formidable co-tormentor directly.
Alkaline passions blend back in
to their backgrounds more easily than
pollen in pus or even eels in a floating
salad. Many living, feeling sentient entities which appear
to be inhabitable environments on the surface and maybe
even maintain their status as land in some logs and directories
will and can smoke you out, stink you, burn you with special
tannins reserved for outrecular incursions which are felt, appre
ciated, and then expertly doused with too much sun plus a poi
son that react with strip-nekt beings left out in the direct rays.

Note left by one of the neighbors or previous tenant.

Thought Wash

Shall I sit outside and smoke by the last hour of sun
Or on the information highway in a cathoid-ray tube?

I prefer to forsake insects, mildew, sorrow
for a measured poisoning by light and booze.

These cancers attack from the outside,
Little Dr. Kevorkians teasing your hide.

These scabs you can't remove but at yor peril.
Death hardens and plugs itself for a while.

Pre-Mortem Lover

I heard you needed someone, heard you as an African-American. Now I bring you this white woman, freshly dead and off the grid, for it's said you can afford the latest remote muscular decisioning, which triggers the subtlest possible reflexes, all depending on the narrative.

Your sophistication exceeds even the most urbane of the high-chank natives because of what you've seen. If someone's going to be educated while lifeless, it oughta be she, a blonde, a zygote mom, related to dream deities.

Now you see my wing, like a pleather grey cape with veins, which enables me to swing high and elevate. I am, in fact, a sort of bat; my powers are sonic, if anything. Here's what Connie's pre-mortem lover said:

I lyke what they're playing at yor fyunral;
I lyte myself a pyre in yor honor.

My only chance at breath is to praise you;
My singing purges the waste that was ours.

"The Chama"
Reptily

One Blessed

Connie slumps as a broken yoga nude on office chair stuffing and horse hair.
Lolling splayed with the public oracle dispenser as primary light, she can see
her role has become guest, prisoner, client to negotiate. They have to keep
her alive. She will always rub their face in that; her loins are still soft enough
to snatch cock from any nest; her brain can scramble eggs on flat rocks; her
love is like a burning hot smokestack. As she wisens into chaff, she meditate:

As the Flounce Girl, I made my fortune young and almost forgot the sufring
of my peoples. We small, blond and humble, not without cultural misgivings.
Out of control with the free breath of living, I garnered envy n' persecution;
there was no one in my tree of friends and famly that could withstand to su
-pport my idle woes a drumbeat longer. When another is illin, you'll explain,
"oh how we make our own way, own troubles." With grace go I, one blessed.

1blesit, the Mp3

Phuket, I'm Goinda Thailandia

Whereas once Connie rose an impunate clamor carrying on in a flock, something about the way she shows up late in life and alone with the same old antics gets her sent more often than not to jail.

Whereas her age peers with higher-up roles in the global economy behave even more shamefully, no one sees how it's her prerogative to shower her wurl with boutique critical commentary, especially on a bender.

Whereas all the other seats at the bar are also occupied, those drunks have the presence of mind to shut up. "It's righteous what you say, girl-- but more so that they haul you away," says a skeleton.

"I'm just husband hunting, Jay," sasses Connie, heavy lidded, to a lady strip-search cop. "Thas whut you get for poking around wair you don't belong," retorted Chama, a goddess in policewoman's garb. "Youda nosiess dyke I ever saw."

No One is Innocent
by Connie

I'm impatient and
I jab at things and
I hurt myself.

I'm innocent and
think the hol wurl want
my prolongations.

Ery time I stick
my neck out, they hack
it. Phucking bastards.

Fire Ants Led to Warts

She began feeling as tho she shdn't even be doing normal everyday things like taking her film to have it developed or replacing the filter of the forensic bucket.

Since she'd not had to renew her Waiver and Acceptance of Social Toxicity Estimate, it still felt like a marked worl. Her society wd never regain her trust.

It had been a healthy communal impulse to stand in the front yard with a hose. Nodding. To neighbors, passersby. Fire ants are so tiny and light that you don't feel them coming, but Connie felt the mist of a spurting rubber leak along the fronts of her ankles.

They kept biting and biting and pushing their announcements sub-cutaneously. Connie remembered a documentary about Africans who went insane and fed themselves to muddy river crocs at the itching created by some parasitical worm. It wd hypnotize cobra like before attaching to the neck or rectum and pumping its load of larval serum directly into the esophagus.

Connie looked down at her bloody fingernails in the observation room at Pharmsupply. She'd been clawing at her ankles and forearms in a blackout. Then she looked up into the unforgiving Diagnostic Mirror. The insects were gone, but a single HPV wart had been able to spore across her entire hide in sprays. Infinite beige ellipses, slightly raised, now monumentalized a paroxysm of histadelic rage.

Connie Soda

No one remembers me, I am a sister.
Sometimes they call me Commie Splices.
Bearded Lady, Zygote Birther, Goddess of Propriety,
Muff of Fur, Topless Coal Walker, Native-American Squaw,
Mucky Muck, Two Decades of Feminism: Dual Tank Treads;
Food Covetor, Wisdom Mist, Virgin, A Sentence Said [A.S.S.].

• I could have made my way up. There have been investigations.
• I got left aside, maybe the story strangled me in its turns.
• I have a weight as a One Crossed Over, but even the boatman trumps.
• I have no control over the situation beyond the sweater I was wearing.
• Ted found me dead weight or weightless on a very good mattress.
• My first husband was a scoundrel like all Southern men.

Father bleated on preaching of coin-slot plotters and drones,
They impeached him in the middle of a Period that was Misunderstood.
Show respect for the drifting cadres, growing, of Robed Men sifting in
from the forests and deserts and Fallowed Lands.
If you see a One called Ilyn, with a Red Afro, tell'im I'm his chillun.
Somewhere along the road, I could be Born Again like an albino I know.

Hoolie Discussion Board: Connie's Funny Demise

That time Ted came home and spoke to Connie's cold rotting shell, even tweaked a nipple without noticing her death, was a time when Ted was not conscious and not on a path. Thinking it had been his fault was the beginning. Connie was just a drifter trying to fill her hole, as were many of the foreigners who happened by when the Preservation Society was still in operation. He found he cared for others, though. He had senses of justice priusnear that of a prees. On that night he imagined himself a hideous creature with four arms, two of which should always have held her, no matter what else it was he was doing.

Connie had died because of the miscalculation of the most holy and misguided of deities: Peg. Her recklessness, her carnal nature, her powers are unpredictable. She is ditzy and from her indecision and avarice and folly comes the milk we suck to live.

Connie's pain took her over. She could not lick shiv and be pure for her fugitive mom and also live beyond the pool, the gravitational distress of the beacon. Peggy has a dark pool, and the beacon may be so dim that there is not fire enough to reach her whole. This is how Peggy sacrifice her chilluns without that goal. She holy but a flake.

Cavern in the Back

"Hoolie's problem always was that he was misunderstood by classmates at the junior high. They'd be like, 'Who's that kid?' and Hoolie'd be the kid who is dancing over in a corner all by himself, or maybe even in the middle of the dance floor, all by himself, but really spazzing out. Like totally oblivious. He comes to a dance, he doesn't realize that it is a social event as much as anything. Sure, you come to move, to interpret in a way, to appreciate the music; but that is generally considered to be only a template, platform, subterfuge even, for grafting rites. Hoolie wasn't about that. He really got into whatever he was doing.

Also I heard a girl tell him once, 'I don't dance with white boys.' So."

Shrugs eccentric cafeteria manager Soupy Witness at St. Chang K. Chang Chank Elementary, former kindergarten of a sullen and embattled go-go nightclub dancer Hoolie Johnson, arraigned this morning at High Shiv for manslaughter in the death of Connie Rehenes, debutante and drifter. Johnson often claims to have been a son of the High Priestess Pegyuh through some sort of goofy-talk "wrinkle-in-time" coincidence. A Wrinkle in Time is the book that will be written in the 1960's especially for children and adolescents by Madeleine L'Engle, renowned mostly for that title. Upon learning that it would be hundreds of years before the technology could be developed that would at once vindicate him on a murder rap and prove his lineage to a priestess, he began diagnosing hidden illnesses, some of which they didn't know they had, in the members of a Canadian camera crew on the scene. We are standing by to determine the outcome of the epsom salt baths and prayer he prescribed for each of them in varying doses before slipping into a shit-faced trance.
Coolie Sinbad, Chankside.