Pinned Down by a Man

Mike ranked a weight-class second of two in the Chalk County junior wrestler's league. Holding a blue ribbon meant you know how it feels to be slammed down on a mat and pinned by the ribs of another man, a young adult barely clad, dizzy with his own new gristle.

The moth, having known nothing til then but wild abandon, submits to druggish capture, is still alive as the contents of its thorax open for a relentless poking into the satiny cardboard backing. Some necessary stun hormone kicks in when the last resort is capitulation.

Blushing shame or exertion is here nor there in a situation where yor being observed by official recorders. The victorious moment that you shared has been photographed and keyboarded into the informational mist. But it's not return via archive for which Mike tenderly yearns.

To be there again with so much to learn, worlds bursting everywhere. To have everything to try, to pretend, to eat. To choose the loveliest of all the denigrations. You shall be roughed up by a buff teen virgin and breathed  upon, weighted down by his chest, and then must undress.

Ghost Ship

I sublet a place up the street from something called the Ebbtide Show Lounge, what looked like it had once been a last-chance suburban strip joint on the highway out, or walking from the stockyard train, a square cinderblock sugarcube with a single window pane, in the front door, where the bouncer could see you and bang the glass if you peeped, and then the beckoning green and yellow tubing of the sign, which really did still make you want to interrupt your motoring, may have culled some from their sleep. The name and the timing effects suggested you may be sucked out to sea in a sweet and brilliant reverse gush of sense. Now it was blight or an ethnic social club, hall of dance depending on if you asked the neighbor homeowners or the occupying tenants.

Neighbor Jazzy, who cared for a spittle-babbling mom in the quarter-million dollar cottage with mattresses in the window frames next door, owned a driven bullring terrier mix called Shab, who was hellbent on raging its way through the slats in the fence between the sideyards. Shira’s baby would be playing only inches away from most of a slathering groaning muzzle jamming through the holes it was gnawing. So Shira told Jazzy to repair those boards or she’d have out the animal truck. She didn’t feel bad at all about her tone, even as a recent college graduate because her daughter, Elyxir, was so much more important than an earnest, grubby single-man’s gut, though she had been trying to spare him til then by not showing stress when he ambushed her talking too much at the curb before she’d even had a chance to bar-lock her steering wheel.

On my second night in Shira’s bungalow, an alarming urgent illexical or trance-tongued screeching began ramping up out of the dark and then more of that along with the sound of Shab growling frenzied you could tell with something fighting in his mouth. It couldn’t have been Elyxir because Shira had taken her along up the coast to get a divorce from the daddy who should have been there running security as he’d promised when he decided to dig a family into the lower chanks. His baseball bat was left behind next the front door on a mop clamp, spanning the length of all the dead bolts and chain guards. The rent I gave her paid for the trip and part of an attorney, but I couldn’t feel good about that hearing the guttural, stinking banshees and their sinuous deafening spasms of death inflicting and stubborn resisting just below the window of the dining room where I’d converted the table for eight into a space-encounters-online central command console.

The next morning there was a raccoon the size of a baby calf rolled over on it’s side like it had eaten too much, but dead, on Jazzy’s porch, where it had been dragged judging from the chitlins drizzle up the steps. Jazzy came out and wanted to talk about it. How Shab had been mortal enemies with the coon for months, since it had started its rutting and slutting and garbage hoarding under the house, and how maybe Shab could finally now relax, and he was indeed lying out, not breathing hard in the hard dirt out front, but with his back to us, really more like sulking. Jazzy said the coon was full of cubs, which explained both her size and ferocity. He added that he had not yet decided what to do with the losing beast or her never-to-be born, which itself begged a bouquet of inquiry.

On the third night, I thought there was an x-mas parade or hollywood eminent domain incursion of dressing wagons, boom dollies, mess trailers, grip cranes and hideously obnoxious assistants’ assistants busy putting a brand name to the thuggy authenticity of the barrio. But then i could hear very clearly, “We have the building surrounded. Come out one at a time with your hands above your heads, or text my cell.” Though it sounded Industry-generic, you could tell the whole neighborhood was reverberating with the decibel level of real police on loudspeakers under helicopters, not studio lighting, even though the drama and oppression reign the same. The lawmen bellowed their side of a negotiation between land lines and social media devices to dedicate a contact with...  the lead go-go? ethnic socialite? on the inside of The Ebb. In about an hour the squads had skulked away, no one having appeared in spotlit surrender at the front door. That’s when I realized of course most any reasonable person would be inclined to take the more discreet exit out back of that place.

The other vestige of Elyxir’s estranged, hot young drinker dad was all the wedding portraits, which most people would keep in a large binder on a shelf, instead hung on every vertical, set into any dioramic dimensional of room after room, lovingly magnified, glassily framed and further adorned with dried natural plants including cat tails and spray-painted reeds and monkey pods, silk florals and bows in a variety of lace polymer and metallic fabric blends. I had to catch myself almost hourly spending too much time positing attributions of cousin, high-school bff, disgruntled gay uncle to the faces repeating across the surfaces in so much tuxedo and gown leitmotif.

I was out back smoking deeply and watering the lichen sprouts one afternoon after the first week of my residency when i discovered a flagship, ghost ship, of the commitment-day wreckage: a trellised arch, nearly faded from view against the back fence in the hoary return of spring, not meant for the adventitious hedgenettle running up its coarsely whitewashed staves, but for wire-boned stems of blossoms: permanent, inorganic and twisted in place to cling for a chance to drip wax petals on altar pilgrims, just as the generous licensing of mistletoe, whose berries’ storied charms drop the first puckered rings that open pools of generations.

Found out someone in the Q-for-Questioning Room of space-encounters-online lived up the street and that he might want to greet real time, real place. Was he renting a service entrance to the swank cliff-stilter on the hill, or was it all his raven's-view nest from which he’d clipped superfluous wings for comfort in a cockpit-like enclosure? Didn’t matter, cuz it wasn’t a date. More all like: “Here have at this, and omg yeah, and oh you too huh?” Not art-- handicraft, but with lips, and water glasses working in, feet on pillow, head hanging from side of bed, rolling over into candle wax. Tensing, resting, repeat. Me: Why are there wine bottles everywhere? Phillipe: I’m a pilot, and those are the complementaries the ladies sneak for me in their security-exempt wheelie packs because they love me when I’m riding shotgun. I go everywhere. It’s exotic, a life with spa homes in every port; I just furnish a room of an elegant pad, say on Mount Everest, Burj Khalifa, anywhere Liz Taylor might have liked to be. I take my friends with me. I know the owners of the Federal Reserve.

I nearly wept at Phillipe’s story of boarding schools and being present for the invention of the NASDAQ, only to be car jacked, head-bricked and dumped on a lawn in the middle of the day behind the health food temple on the way home from a trippy Lanzarote-Vale-Diamond Head run. His subconscious heap was nearly stepped over by a woman who’d just finished praising to her cashier the benefits of multiple bowel movements in an afternoon. They had to reconstruct his cranium, but he'd kept his glamorous job because the most he could remember was how to fly a Jumbo. I asked if we could drink some of the wine, and he said no. Each vintage he’d previously assigned as re-gifting to various diplomats, crazy millionaire Japanese girl coolat designers.

Yet I still recounted and desired to share my own burden of being away from home in a place I’m not known and alas, on a decimal birthday. So would he please accompany me on a jaunty circuit about town, a giddy breeze through the many fabulous establishments he must have known so well. He joked about swinging through the Ebbtide on the way uptown to the absinthe parlors and martini salons and patios with stroller parking and micro-ales. For me the tube-lit strip cube and its blank marquee sent the undertow of imagination that night, though the both of us, having been honest, could have wagered that a back door departure from the Show Lounge would set a dark and stormy sail.

To our grower

Without flagellation, you seem to want to sing wry about the microtubules that never got through.

Too bad that the flaw means the culling of only a few. And the gravity of the day when you share them.

Everyone, meaning I, knows that the final result of surviving your method is a gateway rising lighter than our atmosphere.



from Mike's personal prayer blog

bankowned houseparty

Broker went or gave the keys for the house across the street to his son or associate as a holiday bone. Shadows from the fire pit were hula-ing well above the 40-something ficus hedge. Donna says she feels that life is trying to squeeze her out, not the road narrowing. Families that still float don't even have to curb their dogs and might even kick yours on its leash while they eat. Problem comes when a primate or pug doesn't recognize a distant relative, only sees red and Dr. Thong. 

Loud bankers and sons or associates, some shrill women. Then did they start passing out or learn to drive themselves home on backlanes. Now the trickling blaze becomes less a vigil or moon and gives way to someone who's got our main energy source behind a bathroom door as her nitelight. The great eyelid over the valley begins to unstuck, but sickly. Donna keeps pounding out "The Doctor's Prayer" even though she's just a flake on a test how bongoing can address anxiety.

O Mthyuh I shake beads of your monolithic face, chips of stone, not even teardrop shaped, in a cokecan rattle, army pail. So well i get the need to bring the sheep along a path to rest in nothing that will fail, i won't ask you now the way because your meaning is too deep for minor aches. But could you put me back to sleep? I've gone ahead and healed in by for of your name and acknowledge that the whole reason for a doctor's prayer is humility in the face of abandonment by higher beings.

Mike
"Am I a fag hag's hag fag?"

It didn't figure

wen we signed r domestic partner papers in the
taco bell attached to the arco thayv boarded up,
an I tipped the chaplain 50 bucks right outa my
wallet, not even in an envelope with a card, we
none of us cd've known that it'd end in disaster.

man show'd up in an open shirt an zipper jacket,
ona break frm workng at the local private prison
like nothing was wrong at all with corporate agre
-ements that married fasfood n' gas plus beer (or
that plus the lottery as 2 rich a gamble not a fear).

some men will linger like terraced smoke plateaus
in your life's venetian blinded rooms and hate you.
when you see them move, it lets you no they need
you, can't feed you, might leave you, may go down
with your ship. His name was Hoolie, as in "Chip."

by Mike

Post History

They found one of us in a bog, but here I am in the latest possible century, encouraging my pet dogs in the exploitation of grasses. Smoking something like turf in a bowl, I'm sure I wd also be swilling infusions, eating my fellow if that were something that ever caught on culturally in vogue. I've gotten better comforts and what else. Better comforts better be and are after all all. Is my god better. My god is kinder cuz he's mostly gone. Remote slumlording is something you can't take personally. And all the better in case you want to water a little patch of ground, just so the pups can see how it was in the virgin forest. Add it to their digestion, watch them puke away the side effects of modernity/ post history. After history I suppose it could mean there's no more great surprise events. You just figure out nature is this way or another; men are just so, and that's that. Whatever happens you're like yeah right whadid I tell you. That's not history, or even any kind of present to speak of, and it sure the hell ain't the future.

Mike
"Jaded."

Deep end of your back

Twin, we're slipping down opposite sides of the economic divide:
as the wings of a butterfly seabridge, we close down over what
impales our individuality: the thorax of employment opportunity.

And I can see clearly what you can't: how sexy the dimples over
Your butt crack. The way you will always succeed just by being
Who you are. Yes, that's bullshit, but no more than every principle

We live by. You see the deep end of my back; I, flat top or fade
down behind yr skull cap. We are thankful at least that we each
have skin both our own and whatnot to throw on when it's cold.

Parade of the grotesque

Fell out of escrow, still hanging on. The owner is partially invalid, peeking through the blinds in his apt, which is the room closest the office. He has an organ in there, covered in magazines. He is determined to help with the cold breakfast buffet every morning until he can retire, where, into some other all-male gay nude atmosphere.

Deeply stained camouflage seat cover. Haunted luggage cart. Corporate-sponsored parties of the lowest kind. Your eye is it jaundiced, Ken, or cynical wary. How bends a brow, time vexed by sideways-straining inquiry, counter-retaliatory scowls, discomfort of constant x-treme love pleasure to the everyday system.

Finally we couldn't extract the dishwasher. It seemed to have an umbilical cord connected to the Mthyuhphkn trailer. And between those built ins, we couldn't have even hacked it out. It was that snaky galvanized steel tubing and puddling water. We put a warning sign out for any literate and not too rebellious pervert.

Mike

My alarm, his fate

He goes humming in and out the door now. The screen bouncing on its base makes the sound of industry, another mold being cut. Off and out and onto the porch to get another smoke done before the laundry ends, Roy has apologized for threatening my breath. He has explained it satisfactorily in terms of disrespect, but also mined its more intimate fingers in body chemistry, parentage and temporal insanity. One daren't meet'n the eyes of such a life sluffing off its earnest lies as an impatient foreskin will shed selves. One can't decide if it was much hotter provoking and inviting it that morning, shirtless breast against naked titties, flushing pecs at only seven paces, calling and responding along a most ancient rut, deep into which pleasure gurgles on its storied path of sorrow and shame, to a level of normally phone-only verbally pornographic violence. But as the bottom, I guess, I got to ride defense, still showing a stag horn. Roy had to make the cruel decisions for both my feverish alarm and his fate.

by Mike

Painmaster

military guys have a detachment from their beauty,
which maybe is regarded as one ant to another ant.

you might run into a buff kid but whose mind is al-
so worked out, elaborated but by horrors, not folios.

He'll love the forest, skimming waters, moto-biking,
easily switchable to emergency alert overload pangs.

This gentleman can never be your friend unless you
never know, try to kiss him, listen, coco-oil massage.

by Mike

pyrus calleryana 'Chanticleer'

It started out as a good dream because even though he was homeless he was sleeping heavily in the loose saffron folds of a muslin sarong on a mattress of moss and hearty dichondra under a bud-laden pyrus calleryana 'Chanticleer,' the ornamental tree that smells like semen, in a lush mediterranean cancer survivors' park. Green bottle flies the size of hummingbirds droned their white noise of optimistic dirges and lullabies, as if to lay paving stones for oblivion to rock along down on its squarish wheels. A grease that acted as courage-in-a-vessel for Nature glugged sloshing through art-ceramic channels to every life in a nirvanic system which bid a deserved nod of its fertile date palm fronds to the stylized irrigation ditches at Al-Qal‘at al-Ḥamrā’.

But next thing you knew he'd found a length of masking tape blown from one of the costume trailers in the sanitation district's haunted village. With a chunk of abandoned picnic charcoal briquette, he wrote in caps with the sticky side imobilized in grass: I WAS A COLLEGE PROFESSOR.

We found him sitting in his own shit, autobiography unbecoming as a headband, speckled with the organic spray of chaff and seed and grit that invisibly sandblasts the open night and all those who may be closed up in it.


by Mike
"having encountered Ilyn in the midst of an expression rarely sensed by humans. Just by luck. On the way home from a medieval-themed piano bar near the run-down shops along the sea wall."

Cuernavaca

Cuernavaca, under key and lock, a
passenger in his own custody for
so many gin-rocks that his massage chair
could have flown to Mexico, but they
wunt be enough air in the city for he
and his ex, who would talk about him.

They'd met at an enchilada party, shared
an edible guac basket. They breathed the
smoky ambient grease in and out and
bobbed in their pelvises to a dvd-rom.
Mouth-rolled cigarette filters littered
themselves freely on small lamp tables.

Who does it make you, a pino with no
woods, Cuernavaca? If spring birds
never seen you then what's yr name?
Are yor lungs still clenched with the
wisp of char that yr breath took away?
Cuernavaca, la enchilada ya no te quiere.

Maybe You'd be Happier with the T-4

1) Here's my fashionable address, and
2) here's my extreme mint antiseptic mouth rinse.

MIKE: Being sent spanking back to poverty, we expected scenes like this. One feels that the windy neighborhoods are more exposed to the way the planet spins. We may have used this cutting edge pool robot for two seasons. It needs a little tightening of screws. Come and see us in our new location: Mountain Hill Wheeled Estate Homes for Those who Can't Get a Loan. You know the route.

RESPONDER [well-off immigrant/ other race]: Well I see that the Morbo T2 cannot crawl on your slatted floor. Fish out of water so to speak. I think I'll leave my wife in the car, as we are outside the range of tweet. And you live here? All week?

MIKE: Yes, out of sorts. It's where we are put, we. And I hope that you'll be happier with the T-4.

RESPONDER [couldn't be more than first gen dog eater]: You know, I didn't figure out until like the 10th lawyer that they want to be the judge and you have to make an argument there, on the cold call. You must be a performer, a courtroom savant and courtesan. Nothing bureaucratic can save you now. Nothing bureaucratic can save you ever until it's already too late. In the real jungle, there is only jungle, jungle acoustics. Prolly not, but one day a kid in career apparel with an electronic pen might attempt to trace a pattern in the trees on his tablet screen that looks something like a thing you said as one would lazily outline a Sears in a grainy black and grey satellite square. If you respond automatically as the powerless, suspicious consumer taking supervisors' names, you will get played, and it won't be fair. The Better Business Bureau is only a fun house mirror lane for we sillies with kid thoughts. In the same way, you won't sell heck with your take it or leave it to beaver snide attack. We live in a world of ideas, missy.

MIKE: Of course you're aware it includes a remote control, and the gentleman selling it in the back of NYRB still has access to filtered water. N' prolly dry ice. Must be nice. Need to be chemically burned to feel fresh? Walk out that door. Frame. Or fork over less than thirty percent of the original purchase price with none of the hassle and call it your. Morbo T-2.

Prince of Alba

We met Hoolie one night we heard the dogs barking again, and Mike had just about had enough of those guys from the Casa Medio Camino passing by and insulting the bitches, so he went out like he was gonna rake the pool but then he ran up to the fence and starting shouting at this poor felon "hey you have a prolm, come and work it out, it's between you and my dog," and the guy comes up pretty calm, but what choice did he have really, of running ahead to his group home, what a humiliation, or facing La-La's daddy. He's coming up about the pace of a field hand over furrows, and Mike says "you have a prolm with one of my bitches you can just come on in here and work it out in person," you know? The guy tries to say sunthing and Mike just says "no, no, it's okay, I'll open up the gate, but no fair bringing weapons." He says "no fair bringing weapons so you'll have to come in all naked and defenseless just like she is." Cuz those are the terms upon which she is willing to engage you, sir.

Then before you could even have time to ponder it, there is Hoolie ass to the moon in the yard with La-La, just standing, facing off but askew. Not but the next frame they are rolling into each other, billiards like, in the sand. La-La, who everyone knows is the biggest joker, act like she's trying to hump him, then she bites his ankle, Hoolie shakes his head like a madman, flying ropes of spittle... too bad we don't have pictures of this! They were good buddies all right, so we trusted him too. He still has never crossed the threshold with a stitch of clothes. But if we're ever in danger or wonder who it is there, creeping up through the desert from the liquor store late in the evening, it's Hoolie. If someone ganks our license plate or swipes the power washer off the driveway, if it isn't him we know he can help us think of "whom." We call him Prince of Alba because he's so white. With the whole of his flesh, he's enchanted us and rules yet.

Mike and Donna
[when we were together-- D.D.T.Ph.D.]

Ruses versus Perfidy

Until we can manage a Butt Wedding, I sit outside the moonshine in the shadow of the house in the sand with the dogs. Until we can get Ass Married in matching pajama jeans, the bitches and me will turn our heads at the exact same moment when there's a noise in the bushes, and I may let out a tiny, low, preliminary "bruff," involuntary-intermittently. Until we can consecrate my Man Maidenhead, all other activity is dull and domestic-animalistic.

by Mike

People are Hot on TV

I was interviewing a sex guy who likes other sex guys.
He says it's paramount to get them on their backs
'cause then you've got the choice of either being on top or
being on top. Even better: dick/hole/dick/hole/dick...
Is it a values question, say if the only choice was embra.
Yes, he had to admit, he would choose the vadge. One
can't help it-- it seems cleaner even tho each opening is
nasty in its own way. Anything, in fact, seems nastier if
it is attached to your non-preferred gender. Also consider
the het-fallacious bias for reproductive essence in love
paradigm [RELP]. How it leads to dissociative fixation on what
penetrates. Reality contains, we contend, one set: conscious
beings focusing their targets of desire. Intercourse is a term-
inal object in a panopoly of toys/ instruments/ expressions.

Phyllis, rovin'

Aquarian song

i used to rilly morn my swimmin' days,
but now that i cn post strokes to the POD,
i can sweat both sloth and malaise
so long as you can hear my aquarian song:

you gonna make my crossed-eyes cry nau,
break me till i can't buy ice or cigarettes.
ima gawda liquids baybee, with one regret:
that we dint goda the lenths that we coulda had.

Mike
"For Hoolie"

Mordon holy star

Spittle forming on his lips, Mike feverishly tries to force his sturdy plastic tubing neon-look Mordon holy star, with its loose and twisted cabling, into a cardboard box. ERUSOLCEROF FO GNIRFFO is spelled in backwards letters on the translucent paper sign taped to the picture window behind him. The points of the star are making every angle impossible. Finally he whips the star back out of the box, hitting himself on the forehead with the plug, drop kicks the box into the fireplace and storms down a long hall to the sliding glass back door and further down wide stone steps and onto a cement patio from which he discus-hurls the star into a low puddle of yellow foam at the bottom of the pool. As it flies, it resembles a spiky brain and spinal cord set free.

SIX MONTHS EARLIER:

Doorbell rings. Mike, wearing nothing but a denim shop apron and flip-flops, hears the chime from a backyard loudspeaker deep within a nest of scarlet bougainvillea. He drops the pool robot, whose tank treads are already turning eagerly, into murky water. He geishas up the stone steps and the long hall and to the front door, near which a glowing blue Mordon star can be detected from behind the living room sheers. The open door frame reveals a middle-aged couple smiling quizzically.

Hello. We noticed your star. Are... you a Mordon family, and if so, what are you doing for No-Shiv? Hmm, we are the leaders of the Mordon community in the chank, and I have a red box gathering every year at our home-- it's a Chalk tradition. That's Dick, and I'm Embhra.

Dick, Embhra; Mike. Well, I'm not a family, or-- we're not a traditional family. By the way I am one-sixteenth Mordon, and on the mother's side, but I am Shiv, brought up Shiv. Uhm, for many reasons, including the obvious need for diversity in Chalk Chank, I decided to show respect for the other part of my heritage this year. When I say we're not a traditional family, me and the folks that tend to live in this house, I mean there is no legal contract, and we are of mixed and questionable gender. I'd love to come!

Mordon holy star [the Mp3]

prison snitch

ladies, when you took my boyfriends, I told other women.
gentlemen, i saw whut you did too, but why so violent?
here we must all swing from pole to pole, but so much friction?

like an embattled civil servant, i skulked through the lunchroom.
can't sell my tics, my shiv's a pacifier, can't get my mind around it.
where was all the love i knew with mike and ken and stu and...

here in prison, they say it's *a* hard life when really it's a whole
hard life, longer than most flakes could ever notice, and then,
they say, in retrospect it won't have been that long in the next life.

i'm sorry you stopped buying my tics, but a woman has to hedge herself,
and sometimes it's shrill as a scream. it wasn't like i was running a
racket. you only become a prison snitch when all hope has soured.

Donna
Incarceration, Hour 3
"Please come for me, Mike"

siberian rent discount

The worshipers have cleared out my home, split up the bitches. One of them, I hear, is fed on canned corned-beef hash and Hawaiian bread. If it's La-La, she could get bloat.

The pool torches, the Yukio Mishima collection, all gone. My pants suits, stethoscopes. Do you know why I'm not bothered by your pictographs in flames?

As long as they burn here, for me, they are good to no one else. Your hand on my breast was spit-blown with oxblood all around like a dissolving turkey star.

No rent to pay, no dishes to cull. I am on cement detail for a long career. The pulsing glow of my ankle bracelet is your good eye, the one that only looks this way.

I take my moles wherever I go. They were needled into me by heaven. All my attempts to extend into space from my torso, however far, have sprung me back to a single cell.