people black and girl power

after a long pause in the combat department we find you putting up your dukes again how do you feel about that

i'm glad i've still got the dukes for putting up as needed

but isn't the real test in the delivery

yes and thanks for your reminder

there's that way they press the backs of one another's gloves together and also touch heads as a sign of respect and good sportsmanship

even though it's not sport

you've often commented on 

and there's frequently not much respect involved at all but don't get me started look i'm still mourning the Death of Shab 

...

i think i see her i still step gingerly so as not to upset her and strangely often speak to her as well right baby? hi hi hi hi whatcha doin? lala lalala lalalalala

mmm mmhmm

so having to prep and gird once again for institutional thuckfuggery may feel harsh but it may also get my proteins and enzymes whatever at more optimum levels break through the fatigue of grief

do you mean LaLa

ya of course Shab was her prototype but he'll not die soon

or ever really

correct now there's one with the battle fatigue and the heavy weight of the ages weighing on his empty saddle and the backbone that cannot withstand more pressure

but if it breaks he'll still not die

correct

he wouldn't heal entirely from that but it doesn't matter because he just changes the rules from any point that suits his evolving if disfiguring corporeal state. He updates our expectations rather than depending doggedly on ancient texts for example

he accommodates his disability into a relic of the Divine Unknowing and increases follower hits

right but we're not just talking about courtesy accommodations he can change the foundational principals upon which he and all of us have always operated under and from there down through to instruction manuals and daily shiv novenas

one difficult deity can shake the entire pantheon 

they say this power does not necessarily spring from good judgment or measured action

in his case yes that's obvious they say it is a random power

they say it is a dangerous power

they say it is a hypnotic power

they say it is a power among powers

they say he is powerful with or without power

they say he owes no one an explanation of his powers

they say the word power is insufficiently representative of this level of power

they say it is a power leaked across boundaries by his ancestors

they say it is a power he somehow inherits from his descendants who do not yet live

they say that power herself envies his particularly intense force of power

they say that even a deity will starve on power alone but what more does he have besides power yet he does not starve

they say it is an unsettling power a power too great for a single source

they say it is a power that laughs at attempts to describe its power

they say it is a power that has compassion for individuals though may be fickle at the same rate as anyone

they say it is a power that is impossible to contain exploit manage distract destroy

they say it is a power greater than language itself which is already greater than explosives

they say it is a power to which the only option is surrender

they say it is a power so powerful as to be indifferent to obedience

they say it is a power that sensing flattery will turn away so furiously as to cause the sycophant to implode

they say it is a power for whom supernatural physical mystical judicial administrative people black and girl power are not mutually exclusive but rather just a few of the categories available to the holder of this all-encompassing power

Phyllis [trans.]

vajrasana

PRESENT TIME

Ilyn is rocking violently in a bed of dry peony blossoms at the bottom of his square-wheeled cart. On his back, he watches clouds morph into amazing new ways to tell the same story. Then he becomes aware of burbling waters on the open ground beyond the walls of the cart.

Dare i? I want a drink from this crick. Shab, stop. 

Shab, a very large dog with red eyes and an empty saddle, has been twiddling his legs just above the surface of the otherwise wasted land beneath them. When Shab hears an order to stop, he stops. 

Shab, drink.

Ilyn pulls a lever buried in the flowers. It releases Shab's yoke. Shab walks around to the side of the cart and pulls a rope with his teeth. The side panel falls open, and Ilyn is able to roll down its slope and into the creek, face down. He can lift his head enough not to drown between sips of water, but barely enough to speak.

Shabubbab, dobne. Pbleabse.

Shab takes a few more sips of his own from the creek, then ambles over to Ilyn. Ilyn grabs a bar in the side panel of the cart while Shab lifts with his nose until Ilyn can roll back into the cart. His face sparkles with wet sunshine. Shab dips back under the yoke and waits for Ilyn to pull a cord buried in the flowers. The yoke clicks into place over Shab's empty saddle. 

Shab, take me to Mthyuh. 

10 YEARS EARLIER

Rocking violently back and forth in a bed of marigold chains strung with hemp, Ilyn allows some noises to come out from his throat. From his back, the clouds are telling a familiar story in a new way. 

Kuh. Geh. 

Ilyn can form words, but none are appropriate. Finally, he is thirsty. 

Shab, drink.

PRESENT TIME

Shab is pulling the square-wheeled wooden cart uphill, with the peak of Mthyuh becoming clearer above the clouds. Gravity causes Ilyn to slide all the way back in the cart to an almost sitting position. Now what he sees is Shab's empty saddle and the backs of Shab's furry ears, always twisting on their axes, scoping for any danger or pilgrims. The path ahead is lit only by slivers of moon and the reddish cast of Shab's eyes. 

TWO WEEKS EARLIER

Ilyn is sucking on a shred of ginger root, and Shab is chewing his like a cud. 

Shab, think. Where were we grng to stop crming back thrs way?

Shab has either been forbidden to speak or refused to speak ever since the fabled incident with the Monster Poinsettia and during which the only and last rider of his empty saddle, the Begging Raja, lost both of his hands, and painfully so. 

If you could speak, i think you might tell me there's no point in remembering anything. Or perhaps now, suddenly, you decide to speak, and tell me that i couldn't be more wrong about your view of remembering, how i've underestimated your character not to mention your mood. 

Shab: ...

PRESENT DAY

It's nearly just noon and the violent rocking of the cart makes fiery trails appear in the sky. Ilyn tries to focus on the clouds, which are at the moment just a palimpsest overrun by the side effects of technology. Soon it will be time to stop and ask some woodcutters to hew a new set of wheels for the cart, which are starting to lose their traditionally square silhouette. 

Shab, listen.  I think I can feel my strength returning. I realize you would have started to notice. But we must not let on, must not share any mention of a recovery, not to any pilgrim, not to the MPS, not even to La Chama. At least not for now.

500 YEARS LATER

Ilyn sits up in a deep bed of star jasmine and mint greens. He assumes a vajrasana pose, for greeting pilgrims and children who follow behind. Actually, their normal walking speed would carry them past and well beyond the cart, but they slow down as a sign of respect and humoring to the deities. 

Crowd: We wish you a bountiful banquet of many assorted vittles and then to be eaten first by the sacred birds! May Mthyuh swallow you up before you barely reach her lips! May your rice be soiled in a highway tavern by the survivors of Fire Shore...!

Ilyn tosses swollen, bluish roses from the back of the cart. They are gradually passing a sign for Kareer Kesh. The diving board has hopefully been repaired after a small molten avalanche. Ilyn's hair is soft, long, and flaming copper. 

 

 

 

Phyllis [trans]

wigged out baby

I am not ready to start my journey

in fact i hesitate to breath, lest it hear

me i brought yesterday to its knees

today's resistant to change

it was a rubber band, but it

flipped like a locust from my

ear to my elbow and then

hopping against the foot

to the floor, wigged out baby

you call in an interruption

in order to prove your 

borderline designation

i do not wish to cross over

my stand is here, on my ass

have no purchase only sass

have no sass, only a penchant

without a penchant i'm

lying down with other species

bleeding into the upholstery

wigged out baby

i make my stand at home with Shab

a place of great humor and tedium

coming in we have to check each other's

eyes to see what wild remains attached

by Ilyn

"Which Cave is a Home? Which Home is a Grave?"

Mthyuh Protection Society

Phyliss [trans.]

Good luck with that

Peg and Jan are hunched over the remains of a fascio-religious scout troop their leaders their dogs and their shiny suede saddles. The thirty-odd children and adults had been on a pilgrimage to Ilyn's diving stone at the mouth of Mthyuh. Jan and Peg carefully pick out the bits of non-edible clothing and equipment and toss or spit them off the cliff. Same with the larger bones after sucking on them for several moments, even as they chat. They are able to form, understand, and communicate language with their minds only.

Jan: Watching you and the other full-bloods i can't help but notice moments when you emerge from your face. Normally your countenance to my nose is mask-like. But maybe i'll mention my husband or the restaurants on the other side of The Crack or ask a stupid question about the Greater Chanks Phenomena, and the mask becomes animated. I respond especially to the muscles around your eyes, which normally don't move at all unless theyr being prodded unexpectedly by a tree in a cloud or an airliner. 

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Jan: Yes, i see you now!

Peg: Oh honey.

Jan: But i mean i say that because this observation also reminds me of how different i am despite my putative species how my face compared to yours is overly expressive clown-like hypo-manic. 

Peg: ...

Jan: I mean how does that affect the outcomes of everyday encounters how does it

Peg: Yr trying not to do it now aren't you. So i'm not sure i can provide any feedback yet. I'll have to catch you at a less self-conscious moment. 

Jan: Oh good luck with that. 

Both: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

 

 

Trans. Phyliss

My favorite surgeon

this surgeon was into plastics and he

sewed me up in tiny careful knots

that one almost bursting in anger

seemed to be so afraid of the nodule

he dared not insult it til the final moment

another claimed no students were involved

but he was one day a kid with a drafting table

and the next an umbilical slasher 

my favorite and i conspired to decline altogether

and send him off instead to the cayman islands

 

Ilyn

Ilyn on Shab/ Shab Under Ilyn

Ilyn on Shab Near St. Dick

Shab's mouth is splayed, consuming the environment as they go

Like the former rider of Shab, Ilyn's hands are missing. 

His spine is scrambled, his stomach distended, face swollen, ears like a bat.

The Begging Rajah

You say that Ilyn is Shab's "new" master. Who is the old one? 

You might have noticed that on Shab's back is an empty saddle made of the finest mantua. It was the seat of the Giving Rajah who became the Begging Rajah but is now the Perpetually Sobbing Rajah. He was so giving of his riches that he even tried to feed gems carved as lady bugs to a living monster poinsettia, which of course bit off his hands. For a while, the raja tried begging from the back of his formerly proud and now ashamed dog, Shab, but it was no use. Shab's eyes only began to glow red with the shame of his master's indiscretion. 

Finally the begging rajah was able to give up begging and live here in this place of death and peace and learned to take on sorrow as his only sustenance. If you look over there in the shadow near the gate, you can see him holding himself up in his grief and sobbing against the stones, having just seen Shab wander off once more with the cart and the redundant saddle. 

the rock method

the first time i climbed to the top of Mthyuh my hair was still long and very red

 

i was still barefoot from dancing shiv on a slab of ancient desert pavement scrawl

 

i had to see the top and what her raging bottom looked like from the highest chank

 

summiting and launching and diving in were a single stroke, an ancient character

 

Braino knew my arc would blend and assimilate The Crack's northmost fissure

 

instead of bouncing back on the sheer force of rejection by her drumskin i rolled

 

and entered a natural vent, tearing upward through rock and sand and insect nests

 

red like magma my hair and blood left pooling on arrowheads and pots not touched

 

by human hands since before there were summer thaws and green tendrils to munch

 

that day i felt the gravity of knowing that stopped the endless stasis of my cart

 

and let me out onto the landing strip of time the frictionless rink of deadened glass

 

my feet still green rinds, sticky pink pads, gotten slick with the dust of monuments 

at the center of the longest day among the range of moments contending for noon

 

i wished Shab well and his eyes glowed red in recognition of the end of our scam

 

 

 

by Ilyn

Combat pay

Worst tourette's in 30 years
I'm praying to god and then
try Braino and i'm back and forth
when somebody says, This is what
i can do: and a hand grips a lever
like you might see in a cockpit
and draws it down along with
every tic in my face neck and
shoulder, the whole circuit through
which i communicate and suffer
and click and point and decide, all
burnt out from the deviated septum
at the top of my nose to the preter-
connected jaw bone that won't open
and close right to the cervix in the
neck whipping around to the wet
wing-like struggles of the shoulder
blade to be free and finally dis-
located, all calm and moved only
by natural breathing and settling in.
Shab sits by arguing for extra
everything as if it's combat pay.

by Ilyn

Kick me out, and keep me out!!

I should have known there would already be a gay Paul Bunyan & Babe the Blue Ox series of X-rated adventures.

The reason I didn't know is that I hate reading gay fiction as a genre which of course also makes it hard to write both since I hate it and also having to reinvent the wheel.

Lesson: Every wheel has already been invented. Playing naive nobody will buy it. That you are so un-read. As to have no idea about it and also arrogant.

Once again I swear it's alright if you want to cancel me do it now, eat me first. I want to take full advantage of the benefits resulting from catastrophe.

Stop me while I'm still sizzling hot, boys. I've grown exponentially more irresistibly rugged (although now i'm reaching the top): Because too many bullies in gladiator camp

I'm a dropout. All my training has been direct and in the field, them or me, and when society was a child. A man's got no choice but to go it alone when he knows that

Any group he joins will have a remarkably similar percentage of bullies looking for a long-term relationship, and they will smell you and they will come to you.

Better taking them as they come on the street or in an office and take them unsparingly, as if your own life means nothing to you, in fact less to you than it obviously does to a bully

Neither those who are infatuated with you nor you yourself are a gift of or to society; we are the necessary triggers that build natural defenses that make pearls from

Grains of discord, hot with hate, covered over by hardening slime, an anti-semen, shadow excretion that enrages men, makes them crazy for about on each other.

And then there is Paul, alone with a super-human animal, which says it all.



by Ilyn
(and Shab, of course)

Somehow, I have to cry

if the id or whut?
could at least let
me a) cry b) read
c) exercise every
day I'd be healed


Ilyn
First Words
Gravel Emergence
(Oaxaca lime pit)

pain skull

i felt something come over me
looked and saw it floating in front of me
a sinister pain skull back lit with red

wake howling from a night of not dreaming
many have tried seeing clearly with their
spirits draining into pillows behind them

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.

Dog cart

Harsh Sunrise

Like grapes, it peels my eyes.
It's no time to shine a light on.

They say radiation splinters t' kill,
That death is a smoothing guiding.

But here is what the night's been unable to heal:
an accumulation of daytime crusades n' missions.

Grant me one more hour behind the screen,
No inconsequential might from worlds away.

When my features have realigned
, it will be time to hunt and forage.


Illyn, rocking in a dog cart without a rug

Illyn's Dethbed Soliloquy #16

I've been a wandering fool, and it was amazing.
Popping up though gravel like a science film--
what if every frame were an entire short life?
Somehow Shab and my cart are always waiting
; so whut is my purpose circling through here?
Both my eyes are featured too low in the face.
What's next? Skin over mouth and cheek lips?
Every rebirth takes a toll on yr body cosmetics.
I keep passing through I guess because I jump
over and over into Mthyuh. On this entire mo-
untain in fact every expiration is rewarded in
a stinging revisualization of all that was sacred.

Hut of Saints

Clear in the middle of the preserve sits a Hut of Saints,
Where you can go and behold figures of the Holy rising
From a species of Xmas tree wheel projector or fire log
Simulation; There goes the Admonishing Spinster: look
At me, my hagg'rd creases, take a clue! Now th' Soulful
Maiden, in habit ascending like a rocket, so benevolent;

Therz th' Chama, Reptily, the only topless one, a clayish
likeness but for her breast; Oh Chamalamalalahamacha-
lamalachamalalahamala, the living one, where you roam
is our peril and our fate, chalalalamahamalala. N' behind,
a dog sillo'ette, waving up across the tied stick and hemp
string structure singing in a Squeakin' Hula with the wind.

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

Shab

Flakes are most likely to repent as the shiny copper fades.
It's easier to trace a downward spiral from a downward spiral.
Still some would seek healing every big top revival come to town.
But Illyn came in the cage of a wooden cart with wheels hacked nearly square.
This home was powered by a dog whose eyes glowed red, and wide enough to wear a saddle.

Flakes wandered up and formed a circle because it was something maybe they could eat.
It was grotesque, especially cuz its look was fresh, a bright moon gnarled and pocked.
Illyn appeared to have broken through the atmosphere and swol'n from the friction.
How many times have you rung Our Earth? Do you even know what part of you is where?
Your tears spit onto a face we can't relate to; now you need to share our soup?

Missy

AWKWARD MOMENTS FOR CHAMA AS A K FLEDGLING

First Service Requirement

Here, if you plug this receiver, you may get what you want. The second receiver is what you should plug, always. If you agree with the contract, you'll be guaranteed some of what you want. If the contract is productive, you'll also receive a medal.

Couldn't any animal do this?

We are not animals, missy.

Are we dumber? We need incentives?

Without a change of attitude, you will start to discover that you no longer feel physically comfortable in your work environment. Picture shoulder blades so large as to prevent operation of the filing cabinets. Spinal curvature. And the less you'll be able to accomplish. It's a vicious spiral. Your skeletal system requires room, just like a goldfish. Goldfish are animals.

You mean I won't make open release?

Chapel of Forgetting

I'm sorry for leaving butts and halves at the altar, Peg. To tell you the truth, it wasn't sloth. Even though my fingernails by nau do resemble... Anyway, it was avarice. I know I won't be able to infuse one day. Smokers have an instinct not to throw away the shiv. Maybe I'm out and I need a puff. I can come back here. A prolonged dose makes life easier, even though you're back and forth to the fire a lot. I've got another stash over at MPS. They've repaired the Likeness of Mthyuh's crack, and everyone wants to kiss it again.

Soon you will take or spare life according to your bowel structure, decide the fate of flakes, entire families. It will be your scars they bear from the boiling cauldrons, splashed from your plunking judgements. It will be their fires, your bellow, your dunk, your douse. Your mother may have pushed you around in a baby carriage in a fur coat with a butt hanging from her mouth, but you are Mthyuh's only protector. MPS can only exist because you are the enforcer.

Am I forgiven?

I ask you to leave everything.

Shiv is for flakes now.

Shiv is for flakes only. I ask you to fly.

Shiv is... I am free?

All you have is space. And you must find Ted and the chillun. Secure a hole in a high chank.

Live feeding can begin.

No. First we must hear your screeching wading at Fire Shore. The first flake you see will be safe vittle. When you land, you'll be able to walk again, but not without full spread.

K's fly with their legs spread eagle.

That's why they call 'em K's, missy.

One Windy Night

One windy night, a kitty appeared at the mouth of the office. He was four colors, all separated out to indicate the hind sections, flanks, forearms. To the Chama, he manifested as an Ambulatory Meat Diagram. For a blurry moment she turned into Shab, the red-eyed dog who is mad and goes with an empty saddle. Her salient features returned in time to knock over a combination tie rack and shoe tree more than 50 feet away with a flick of her elbow, trapping the vittle. Chama gave into pecking furry cat liver out from between the chrome prongs and rubber-tipped clamps.