Empty pool

Mike's Swimming Blog Vol. II, #6

Rcvd from Donna this am:

There's no swimming in jail. That's how we made the most of the low chanks, isn't it? Your beautiful nips, my statue of liberty in the deep end with a glass of wine. Or you and was it Ken? standing on the bottom with hoses for the winter drain, resurface and tile fests, echoing bitchiness.

No swimming and no love in jail. They say one's lips grow thin. I remember waking up with you beneath a surgical gurney in a sea of boxes of No-Shiv. The treatment worked on you. Miss the glowing and bumping tho. There was a chick we let out in a cove picked up violin melodrama by Chausson and St. Saens. We think its how they interact with the Filter now; they are receivers and interpreters more like bats than fowl. If you had allowed yourself to develop fully you could be clawing, right now, through the bars on my window.

I don't expect you to get back together or say you will just because I'm here.

D.

Mike's Swimming Blog, #6

You are anticipatory, yet
you want the days to undulate slowly,
even anxious to reach a day that's slow,
so anxious that the day grinds by.

We thought time was the
difference between today and tomorrow,
not how you resist or move in space.
We were wrong. But are we dorky mimes?

Two nights now I've fought a permanently
duct-taped vacuum hose, a sea monster or
reef, after only one and a half strokes.
I am not comfortable with my nose underwater.

The pool in that house is for show or
soaking, not to swim. Only the Mexican
understands this. He came with his
blower at 6 AM, or wasn't that him?

Now that all that was mine is repossessed,
Water stalks me, even as I try to stand
free, to remind me perfunctorily of its
disillusion and ravaging suspensionship.

Where are the bats and leafy, hairy flotsam?
How can toes scribble nonsense without algae-
filmed walls of bathroom tile to record each
grateful and confident, leveraging touch?

You and I look to swim in each other, fools.
There will be better times when we cast a
glance backward and see what we've written
in these caverns, once they are still.

Mike

Empathic Implant Report

Empathic Implant Report: Birth Boot
Mod#GAYSHINER89.1-6.10 Glass n’ Foolz Gold Filament
WD40

Sun about 80% of the way down, straight ahead. Visor employed. Two men about 20 years apart stand close enough to touch in a V facing me. They both have long goatees: one is grey, and the other is red.

A trailer with silver stripes frames them in back. A campfire oranges up the nic-stain faces. Subject A waves. “Hey Micah howya doin!” it says. It gives too loud and too fast even at 50 yards, its movements cartoonish. Pfist is projecting a man who is giving himself to you and fighting you. He acts as tho he would perform fellatio and shoot you for having let him do it.

Flakes can be found easy in trailers. Rolling up to the big one, made clean with stucco, there were the bitches. La La’s eye fur is bruising in mocking tear blobs. She sports a fresh jaw bone from the carcass of an escaped embra kid. M’Lady comes fullallopping up to the truck and scratches the trim with her gnarly black foot pads. Amygdala has some degenerative hip going on and smiles her painful greeting with fangs.

Sometimes her eyes glow red, as if she’s in a spoiled foto. She nods her head toward wherever there’s trouble, never taking them off you. Her front legs are permanently mangled into a hug. I, too, have a disease of giving.

Mike and Jan came out to help lug groceries and my cameras, tripods. Pfist runs up pulling out a gun. I’m caught with sun in my eyes for a moment-- too many glinting metal objects. Jan and Pfist take me down to the vegetable garden and set up an empty 2-liter PowerShiv bottle. "Shiv" is any worldly comfort that simulates death.

Jan’s clothes are apparently meant only to constrict her hottest parts. There is not much warmth or protection. She feels this intimately when she shares her eyes with you. She is always scrubbed clean and ready for sex. She passes out $100 bills coming back from the casino. She and her kids once lived with Wayne, or Jack. There she is posing with the tiny Colt Automatic 25.

I get my training with a beer and fire off the only copper pellet in the clip. La La & M’Lady’d followed us down and laid there patiently in the rows. I’m standing like a cap’m on a ship or ready for a big-star bow while jazz dancing. Ball went high on the kick, made an explosion in the sand, and the girlz jump a good 10 feet. From there my moral standards were set for the weekend.

The next step was to run shiv for the whole mountain. It was the only thing Mike was out of except butter, mayonnaise, vinegar, salad dressing or any other balm or salve for things that raise themselves from the ground. Me and Pfist take to the truck for the local PharmSupply.

There’s a flake in the road who rents out his Caterpillar and a day’s work. He’s walking three giant mastiffs in the dust, one of them in an empty saddle. Hey, Joe! You don’t remember me, but we dug a hole for a whole lot of cattle. And a dog. And a cabron. Which went in first. It must have been 20 feet down. Perfick on his knees, a bowing pony clown. And then a Dalmatian. With the bullet stigmata. I had to fling it by the ankles. It ended in the predatory pose gravity'd chosen: teeth dead across the back of the old goat’s neck; legs struck, spread so hard as to pop the nails. We used to call it Death Farm 3000. Say—you were the one in the cockpit that time, on yr backloader!

No, I don’t remember you.

The Flake in the Road squinted into the extended cab. Nope. Who are you? I could hear Phyllis, my editor, cackling in the auditory node. On the way back Joe was walking in the same direction but about 100 yards behind where he’d been.

The liquor store guy reached for his alarm when Pfist came in and they both started laughing. Pfist starts to rant: I hate you! Everything’s free today! I want that, that, and that! while I get the libations. And one of those, please. At a discount! Pfist chimes in, then quiets down. Yeah, guy knows me. I beat up a flake in here. He was, he was touching chillun. He’s doing time now.

Get the phuck out of my store, liquor-guy stage yells. Yeah phuck you brother. I’ll see ya now. Pfist smiles like Clark Gable. Pfist is OK! the guy says. Are we all done here, I ask him.

Back refreshing remnants of our earlier cloud, we rumbled out of town again and toward the stucco trailer. Cactus whiz past so close they could give Pfist a ruddy shave while he sounds off in the open winda. Yeah, he was coming in, and me and some friends were coming in, and he says here come the snitches. I say good cum goes to things who wait. Then I was all saying shit and he was all saying shit even more, and then we just let free like when yr drinking and you get to the point where you know it doesn’t make sense, and you just feel this hate, and you just don’t care? Well we were both getting to that point and he hit me and I hit him and knocked him on the floor, and then I beat him up until he got knocked out. He was all blood and drool. And I said, “I’m a felon; I’m on probation, and I can’t even vote. I got some meth, and a gun. I’m goinda jail. I’m goinda jail.” Pfist said this in an exaggercized way that would make you think he was ready to suck your dick or mad and ready to really wail into and murder you or both. The question was when. I felt excited and sad then.

Should I pull my briefs looser in my jeans or mourn my own offing. Back at the ranch we poured the shiv into the rest of the morning coffee and broke up a box of hard brown sugar into stones perfect for casting in with some ice. Skole!! Pfist shined with his mug of beer and played a game of stealing mine at the point of toasting. We were clicking just fine as he let me claim a joke about Johnny Walker and answered Right on Micah, friends for life, or if not, phuck you!! Phuck ya’ hard and in the head!! His glass had raised to cover one eye and wink at me through it.

OK here’s the deal I say. If I die, and it’s of natural causes, you can phuck me in the head. You can phuck my cerebrum. You can phuck me anywhere cuz I don’t care. But if you kill me, no. You can phuck my stinking corpse in the ass but that’s as far as it goes. Hell I can phuck you in the nose for all I care; you can’t do anything about it, says Pfist, who’s pulled in; You’re dead. I’ll come back to haunt you, I keep on. I have friends. They know how my head’s supposed to look. Where the holes are. I’m sure they do; I’m sure they do, wavers Pfist. Man, that’s sick!! You one sick Mthyuh phucker.

Meanwall Jan is done marinating pork steaks. Ooo. What are you guys talking about? That’s sick. Sick Mthyuh phuckers. Jan, you look beautiful, I say hoping to piss off Pfist. She looks at him. Thanks. Pfist gives me a thumbs up with the top row of his teeth pressing on the bottom lip. Taking a piss, I find a bar of baby soap.

Ya’ll have littluns yr not tellin’ about? Nah. Just my baby. The girlz caught her mousing in the bedroom the other night and now she ain’t right. They got her in their teeth. And shook, chimes in Mike, staring at the beets in the salad spinner.

Mike, yor a scientist; why don’t we all go down and have a look? You can tell us, on a scale from one to ten, how grave it is. Pfist wants a wager. I’ve got 8 and 9, him one through 6. Seven is the Wild Savior. 10 is dig a hole, Chihuahua meets its maker.

So after dinner we all tramp on through the stickers to the silver trailer under no moon, just torches. You can see the fabric of stars and boobs and thongs and hear Pfist and me working through the conditions. There is no payment unless my numbers prevail. We call a vet. No responsibility is required in the unlucky event that the scientist pours his tube in the direction of your fate. Mthyuh will be in charge then. But we don’t know yet.

There is a tiny, dobie-like bitch trembling in a pool of yellow light on a 99-cent astro-turf Welcome mat as a space-age altar to the sofa on the mauled and hoary w2w carpet. Get out or pipe down; we can’t hear anything, warns Mike. Yeah you guys, says Jan sitting, looking up and hugging her own naked brown openings. We can’t hear a thing. Get out.

A casino girl and a scientist through an oval plexiglass window. Pfist and I smelt glowing acorn smoke and an accordion RV hose dumping slowly under some oak. Mike'd got his training with a swimming scholarship and a grant from the Preservation Society. He was stroking the pooch and listening hard for a job or sounds of protest when he pressed for trauma and/or seeping. Ouch! Pfist barked at the sill. Bitches get all the attention. The night was still.

Micah
with Phyllis, Embedded

Inorganic Mechanisms

Why would I want to go to bed if I'm feeling good. The surf is rising not ten feet from my window. Or rather the poo heater came on. But it tends to scare the bats away. They'll strafe the surface, even if you're swimming. They're sonic; electric-motored drones are not bucolic.

Who would want to leave a night to be run by inorganic mechanisms?

My future is a world where the light of sun is borne by alloys only. Only you will be allowed to toast me golden. Humans ought sleep while Mthyuh's organ fires turn the cog. This is time for play.

FOR MIKE
Donna

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.

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

Come Down Mthyuh

I stay up in Pennis, near Ground Bay. There's some RV resorts and a gas station with a POD. They have a golf course and some cows grazing moss on the Dirtiest River in the World. Mondays Mike comes down Mthyuh for feed and takes the pups while I work cement and watch cable at Chank Suites, 60 hours a 4-day week. I drop about two-fifty on booze and groceries and lodge it against the back of the bed. Don't need much hay. Llamas ran off with a minstrel. This is just until he can get a second mortgage or some family help. Then we'll build a fence the girlz can't chew and still have gophers on their plates every day. We used to call it Death Farm 3000 for all the graves. But Mthyuh turns up her babes and they walk away. When the filter's up the sky is clear of pests.

Come down Mthyuh with your truck,
Come down the mountain
Where life isn't measured;
Bring your extended cab full of dogs.

Kev

Idling Caprices

Now that the swimming pool had been drained for good, Mike took up with new ways and associates. One amante at the Preservation Society, another down at Shiv Council. A scientist, an accountant, a bum. Let bloom a goatee and a black, open-shirted look. Got into trouble with rents and men all the way to Cliffe Suites. Until he showed up here one morning.

"I'm looking for Julio."

"Do you mean Hoolie?"

"Told me he lived out back in the shed."

"We don't live here at all. We..."

"Julio." He was looking over my shoulder at I guessed Hoolie.

"Mike." Hoolie says behind me. I step out of the way and they say,

"Just because there's no water, don't mean you can't dive."

"We squirmed like eels in another atmosphere."

"Even while lawn salad bobbed on top."

"But now it's a neck breaker."

"NO. We've got lungs now. Ears."

"We've got the Filter down and K's rampaging."

"Yeah. I let 'em out. One of my pranks. Come dark-rule the chanks with me."

"NO. Come with us. We're deities."

"NO. My life is free."

"NO. You are a slave to shiv and idling caprices..."

As the sun set, the two worked out their issues. Silhouettes in pink on the listing log cabin porch. I, a woman, could not intervene. I wasn't even sure if Mike had the right guy. Hoolie isn't Mexican.

Chama-tilly

They Say a Shank

Covered in what's accepted as amygdalar care these days, one can take the therapy and writhe against it at the same time. This is an intimate interaction. If you are symbiotic with your interlocutor, there is a dual yet pure inter-protrudence we would like to introduce. Results that suggest indisputance, even in cases of inappropriateness: pubescence, any sign of leakage? These wd exceed natural license. Tho we a fiction house.

Hoolie wind, unwind. Bound to introspection, by the shiv, which was within. As the Twist is to the twisted, it's a way to work things out.

Way out would will more wild, could be involving major wiring, or a whole nerve bio-mesh quadrant retiring.

They say a shank is your last tank, Shane. Yud need a 3rd-A-Genda Witcha-Dokka. Name of Wayne.

MPS, MPS love, MPS name.

Taco Party

Hey youse feeling ennui or tragedy but might be wearing developmental pasties on yor nips, Spike TV, mirrored embroidered Rajistanic bedspreads. Yo pet adopted greyhound is running circles around dogfarts in his sleep man. This is the end of his line. Do you feel the wind? Put yor tops away boy. This street is cleared for wide tires and vice sweep only sweetlips. Do you hear his epileptic claws scratching your plastic office chair pad? Here's where you trade mainlined Scottish peat burns for a frozen Mudslide: time for a Taco Party, playboy.

Ken's rash note to Mike after the final swimming blog entry

Jaula de Espaldas

Kevin Reynolds lay on his back at the bottom of Mike's foreclosed swim poo echoing, sobbing. The sound reminded him of la musica chanquera, the rustic kind that twanged back at your song. It was a form of prairie yelping, wailing known in oldtime saloons. Now his world was cement, a drapery of shunning, much as original ropeswingers saw night as a vanity curtain and privacy overkill. Most of all, there was no Mike: the most un-metaphysical man in the world. This had been a place where they could move in and out of one atmosphere and onto the next and up and back from one surface to the other together. Kev just couldn't help belting out,

"A circle of backs makes a cage;
all the asses seem flat this way;
no matter how much I ballet,
they snatch, trap my gay rage.

"Jaula de espaldas,

albergue de silencio,

aparte de mis amargas

lagrimas, gotas sinceras.

"Zif yor on a big-top lion's den
expressing your nails, glands,
in a trade of begging, demands
with chairs dressed as men.

"Cerrajon de esperanza,
Cojonudo de fortitud,
Menos carne indefensa:
unica arma, boca inmensa.

I'd Like to Hold You Once

Apparently, women really
want to have sex.

But you and I, no
one will suspect.

Let them strut their
glossy trappings

While we steal a
caress and longing.

Brash fruits drop, ho-
llow in our ear;

We mutually suckle
underground.

Would that my
branches could

Find you in air, in-
hibit yor career.


I'm y' baseline, baby!
Kev

Guyz Like to Pray Rocking

Guys like to pray rocking
because it pumps their prostate,
and it gets them off
even if they're not hard.

Before you eat chips, or
in a stadium seat at
a summer pogrom,
let us be 1 body.

Part of your hotness is
the way they have you dangling
over a pit of
fiery death reminder.

summer crotch n' cotton

bird chirps at night
three dogs listen

candle in a pot
spewing lemon grass

lights on in house
mean safe outside

stanky sof cotton,
nachrul melody,

we peel it off
while ogres sleep.

To: Mike
From:
Dr. Thong

"I'm Yo Scrip, Baybee!"

Lush in a Poo

Mike's Swimming Blog: Summer of WD: Endless

I've never seen anything like it: Dr. Thong becomes this water satyr when in contact with water. Earlier, almost drowning herself, she back paddled out to the middle with a glass of vine held high above the surface like a liberty torch. She then to the tune of a number of imagined tom-toms proceeded to execute a series of very geometric, 70's tribal bonfire dances using the grail, its ruby contents, and the tension of the deep end against her musculature as props. An entire victory lap of sorts was then devoted to what she called her "pig-dolphin movement," a super-undulation of great strength, gall, and poor taste. Coming to an abrupt though not unwelcome stop, she had her hands on her own raw hindquarters as if for the first time. "I can no longer bruise my pelvic shelf," she marveled; "my ass is now so big I can't feel any of the bone directly. I have a big ass, so I'm going to use it," Donna continued, still out of breath from her last performance while gaining emotional momentum. "I can... watch this..." Donna banged her hip up against the side of the poo as furiously as she could underwater. "I can throw my ass around and bang it on cement and it doesn't even hurt! I have a big ass. Yeah! It's big." Dr. Thong continued, banging ass violently and sipping carefully from her plastic goblet. Then the wind started to pick up.

Mike's Dogs

Three are quietly going mad for
lack of purpose.
One is so needy and questioning;
Four are hurdling forward
on our planet's surface
in Ted's back yard.

Mike's Swimming Blog, Day 16: It Evens Out

When it's very late trying not to
disturb the neighbors much, and
when it's more than 110 degrees
one tends to just stand in the
water. Algae can take hold and
the robot slides down the sides;
Hoolie, life must get our reac-
tion. Life must not persist in
these salted waters. Life is bar-
red except for one main life.

But when it was hoary tonight
I had the reaction; it seemed
to feel at home in the suspend-
ed life-bloated filth and teem-
ing nutrients, bursting possib-
ilities for sustainability of an
eco-system. My abdomen
grows green and purple scales
like a beautiful crustacean. It
propels me like a strong fish.

Swamp Rascal

Mike crept through the high grasses and foam of dry salt cedar sheddings. Even the brutalest foul prongs of Nature seemed fair, while with man one wanted Payback. He kicked at beer cans and charred camp drudge. No surfers here. They hung out in the sand and looked out at the sand these kids. Surfing the tailgates on their pickups. Corncob bonfire shindigs after dark. This all would be flooded soon. Just big dragonflies and crocs. Bubbling mudtowers.

He Reaches Out by Reaching In

When the arm of the phonograph reached its trigger point, it lifted itself and re-cradled. The speakers went dead.

Donna and Mike each took a moment to gather their breath and have a few thoughts. Mike's receiver, in fact, was under the dining room table while he rinsed his face with cold water at the kitchen sink.

When he got back to the phone, Dr. Thong had already begun to cautiously pursue a preliminary and furtive line of questioning.

"...if this was the first time you have had an experience such as the one that we, that you... um."

"Doctor I'm sorry I'm back. I was..."

"It's Mike, isn't it?"

"Dr. Thong, I don't know how to tell you, but I hope that maybe now you may already know."

"I like music, and it did actually... carry me away."

"Of course since we're on the phone you can't really see for yourself what's been happening on my end." Mike glanced down at his shimmering abdomen. "I don't know yet, but I feel I could really swim."

"Mike," Dr. Thong began, recovering her courage with a new-found, no-nonsense attitude, "are you referring to photodelic re-engenderation?"

Lair of Dr. Thong

Dr. Thong was just polishing up the abstract of an article she'd just finished, "Discoethnology 1984: Dance Floor to Gymnasium in the Grim Aerobics Dawn," for an important medical doctor's world think tank quarterly journal magazine when the telephone rang. It was that guy who'd come by earlier that month for a kill shot.

"Doctor."

"Yes, this is Dr. Donna Thong." Dr. Thong always smiled on the phone because she had an awareness that facial expressions could resound audibly along the vocal cords through facio-cranial acoustics.

"Dr. Thong, I..."

By now, Mike considered Donna to be someone who had become one of his regular interlocutors.

"I was just wondering if..."

"Oh. Mike, isn't it?"

"Yes. That's my name."

"Well Mike, you silly. Why don't you tell me how you're feeling."

"But Doctor, don't you see-- it's just that..."

"Yes, Mike?"

"I'm feeling so HOT (hot)."

"Oh, pardon me? Sweetie are you there? Did you say hot two times?"

"Oh, doctor... doctor..."

They could both hear the music. It was overcoming them. They were helpless in its spinning thumping groove.