Try a virtue round

virtue challenge

spend one glorious day being virtuous in the loving arms of virtue

may that your choices be borne of virtue all the virtues

may that any step on this day must not violate any of the virtues

virtues are designated as: 

virtues which are considered to be virtues The Crack-wide (see appendix)

not virtues which you think it would be cute to call virtues

start the day saying these words in this order

i am a virtue i am a virtue muffin mthyuh eat me first or send your demons

i mthyuh i am am a virtue virtue muffin your demons eat me first or send your

send your demons send a virtue mthyuh eat your demons first or am your 

virtue demon me eat your demons first am send me muffins virtue muffins  

[repeat] 

in between your chanting you may find that you're making virtuous choices automatically

this is because by chanting the sacred words you have activated the K5000

the K5000 would never harm you but it does now have access and has now

taken charge of one key portion of your Braino son so

don't stop now and i mean lidderly don't stop now because

[MPS has imperiously and arbitrarily redacted this portion of the activity instructions]

Traditional MPS nuns "friday fun day" activity [frag.]
by Phyliss [trans.]

everywhere is far

The Jansdaads are speaking with their minds only.

It won't take long, but you'll be risking your life to get there. 

I know, Jan. 

I hope you'll feel Mthyuh. 

You know i will. She'll be right there on the horizon. If i die in the hooptie, her birds will eat me. 

You know there's no guarantee you'll find what you're looking for. 

I'm looking for you Jan.

I know, Jan. I want you to come and find me. 

If i can feel Mthyuh, maybe i can break the Crack, somehow i'll understand. I'll come back and go directly to the air conditioning unit for the temporary classrooms at the Community College of Cement. I'll duck under it, hit my head, that's how some got through. 

My mind is getting tired. 

Mine too, Jan.

Extinction Takeback Agreement

FRIENDS' HANGAR: Jan, now nearly full size, stands frontally abutted to a scaffolding built into the side of a high cliff. Her feet and tail are partially buried in the dunes of the Lowchank district. At eye level, she can see pine trees, and a bit above that there is only sandstone made deeply groovy by rains. The shadow of the horizon makes a line in the shape of the mountain across her forehead. Reptily stands on the scaffolding shaking out their cape and staring straight into Jan's nostrils, which occasionally emit a welcome and full-body warming blast. Reptily is using their tiny mouth hole to communicate, but Jan, for anatomical reasons, can only speak with her mind only.

REPTILY: Ya, see this flat part on the back of my head? I feel limited by it. 

JAN: Oh why?

REPTILY: I just feel like if there was a curve there I'd feel less constrained in my thinking processes. 

JAN: That's a K head Chama look at mine!

REPTILY: But you look practically full blood when yer here. I'm pretty much stuck in the fuzzy middle ground. 

JAN: Ya yor too big to get in the hygienist elevator. But you skittered up that scaffolding like a dung beetle!

REPTILY: Ya my vestments have been mistaken for an exoskeleton. It's just flocked rayon. 

JAN: ...

REPTILY: I wanted to meet here because it reminds me of home. I was born and raised at Friends' Hangar. 

JAN: Is that so?

REPTILY: Ya there was a time when I was small enough for the lift and even rather pretty by yor standards. They called me Missy. 

JAN: HAHA! I mean, you're still pretty. 

REPTILY: Fortunately I have some options like with the head tuft, which is retractable, see? 

JAN: Ooo. You know, we all have our unique struggles of difference don't we? 

REPTILY: There's no one like me. You can mostly pass on either side of the Crack. 

JAN: And it's also not our fault. 

REPTILY: On the one hand you can blame the MPS-Pharmsupply merger for our disfigurement, but we also only have them to thank for the Extinction Takeback Agreement and therefore our existences. 

JAN: Would you go that far? It was the merger that wiped out K's to begin with. 

REPTILY: We were enslaving their people. 

JAN: We were being our natural selves in the context of nature. I hate it when the losers get to write history.

BOTH: HAHAHAHAHAHA!

"ChamaJanMeetNGreet001" in

 Genetic Histories (n.d.)

Journal of the Institute for the Journal of Metacognitive Talk Therapy Apologists

losers

i knew The Crack was opening and i was selfish i wanted to reach out and grip your faces

already too many of you were caught in an updraft spiraling toward the stadium lights

i'd try and grab your sideburns and let go of her pigtails by doing so

they shouldn't allow friends and family over by the air-conditioning unit for the temporary buildings

not when lightning bolts can crease a sky and stars with no clouds

when the filter is down but not the beacon and the flekes at their hill fires start drumming

a thrill, fear, ice rises from the heart area and perhaps it's a meteor but also a gesture

then it seemed as though we were lost but it was only from each other

we looked at the faces around us and there was newness on both sides as well as being losers

 

by Jan

First transmission [frag.]

Welcome day frag.

I myself remember plopping down this end of The Crack. 

I was a kitten in a birth sac. 

What poked a hole was the beauty here. 

I found a functioning society

paradise and horror side by side

infinite replenishment

We learned in order to survive

to keep our privileges close by

or risk adventure in the boundarylands

Jan Jansdaad

Welcome Day counselor

Poetry Fair, Table 6

n.d.

Hard scrabble

 

JAN: What should we do should we make it so the genders are a grab bag that one can assign oneself in any combination, or are we saying these were assigned divinely, not by choice, that it's the Body that came out wrong. Or not that at all. How shall we know. What can I ask that doesn't put me at a disadvantage. It's supposed to make me vulnerable. That's so I can understand. I who don't understand. The understanding stands in the soul of the haver of the identity. We know from years of being referred to as it/ that that it seems maybe to us petty demanding the gender after you are already distinguished clearly from other classes of ambulatory sentients like the grasshopper. 

PEG: It sounds like you've been thinking deeply. Why? 

JAN: ...

PEG: I was listening. I agree you're vulnerable, but not because of the new gender directives. They are only asking that you be sensitive and thoughtful. If you're already that, you'll have to do shiv all day. 

JAN: They're asking for more than that. To get a W.A.S.T.E. I have to say that I've earned nothing if everyone didn't have the opportunity. That obviously counts out all K blood because as enormous soaring reptiles there are gigs necessarily exclusive to us only. 

PEG: What's really lame is the whole premise that we're included now since we're not going to kill hunt or eat so what have we really gotten in return.

JAN & PEG TOGETHER: Friends' Service Hangers! 

JAN: I feel a lot fresher in general. I focus on the day to day. There's some good kibble and fruit snacks. 

PEG: Tell me in a thousand years. How content you are. They think we're vampires just because of our lifespan is long and theirs is short. Because you're a seroconversion, you're not all K, and you're new anyway. I don't want to bring you down. K's fly spread eagle. 

Peg and Jan have been lying back sunning their tummies with their elbow spikes holding them up with their dorsal flaps unfurled in the wind. It's an ancient river bed. Their spines have broken through the outer crust of sediment and leave canyons of shadow and dust behind when they each roll to the right pull up their left spike and slam it in again way up pointing toward the cliff face. It looks like they're about to ski, or fly, but instead they leap at the rock horizon with their toe claws and scoop the air behind them and scrabble craning their necks up the cliff to their hangout. The rock has been hollowed out and boulders pile up at the base, which is also where they drop the extra bones. 

JAN: Is it because you're a lesbian you try to discourage me? I have joy thinking of my husband and wish we will be together? You want me there under your dark cloak? 

PEG: Haha bitch shut the fuck up. 

PEG & JAN: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

JAN: They is some mens around here an my nose is open.

PEG: There is no mens. Just more gender question marks either being ported by pharmsupply or coming in wild like you through The Crack. Now go back and read the directive. This is your life now. Jan is far too small to have a meaningful relationship with you anymore. That's all in the past. He's tiny; you're big. Doing this is not about that. You have to represent the boundary-lands. 

JAN: No I get it it's not even about like I'm here with you or you with me or we're here together. It's more about this rock shelf and some snacks and the open air and the mist and what we mean and what we can do but don't do. 

PEG: But also what we did do history and what we do do because of our air skills and gravitational importance and in terms of fertilization to all the chank communities.  

PEG & JAN: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

per Phyllis (embedded)

Sports N' Sex Crimes Bugle

Paroxysms of sincerity

Jan Jansdaad is driving along and thinking what if I lost this hooptie. What if anything happened to it at all. We'd be on our way to the next lower rung of economic class hell... 

Wait a minute. I'm back. All the while La Chama must have been leading me towards a hole to The Crack. She knew I'd have to return, at least for a moment, just to see. I see I've been to pharmsupply-- I've got a live bag of hopinaskippina. I'm headed home, for whomever I find there. But what about my daughter-- will she take my place? I just wish we could be all together and safe with descent health insurance. 

Then there is a prick near the dew claw. Lloyd? You're drawing my blood. 

Not at all, Mrs. Jansdaad. I'm just cuddling here next to you while you nap. 

Jan? 

I know, Mom. He's from pharmsupply just like daddy said. 

Now wait just a minute, ladies. 

You're only here to steal our genes and spy.

Oh I'd say it's been quite a lot more than that. I can take you back. Get you reformatted. You'll be an in-between type, like La Chama. Small enough to fit in human structures. Strong enough to

To power one of your slave K's with my brain, as your slave. 

It's not like that anymore. We're finding new ways to

To use our natural bodily processes for the greater appetite. Our suffering is inconsequential. 

Ok, you know what, you guys? I am getting really sick and tired of walking around with a completely open heart to each of you as persons, and you know I kind of feel like that Begging Rajah, with so much, so much to give, and... no hands. You just scheme to cover up or push your strong identities. What about my purpose? Who am I?

Both Mrs. Jansdaad and Lloyd avert their eyes and tighten their lips. One concept they can agree on is the adorability of Jan and her paroxysms of sincerity.

Mrs. Jansdaad and La Chama Speak Using the Mind Only

Well. Here we are. 

Yes. Honestly I don't know what to do.

Thank you for your honesty. It's that this doesn't happen. I've never met sticky progeny. How did you get through The Crack. 

I didn't do anything. Maybe Braino was tracking me. 

That's likely due to how we share some Braino, sister. 

I met Peg. 

And now me. It's herstoric. 

What is the meaning of my life?

You'll have plenty of time to figure it out if you play your cards right. 

I like sitting and writing poetry at my kitchen table. 

Well, you're a monster now. 

The Crack is home to a billion holes

They say The Crack is home to a billion holes. Pilgrims, daredevils, and lost hikers alike will never be able to predict when and where they will come out. 

The Community College of Cement's entire Chang K. Chang Chank campus is dark except for a few pools of security lighting-- and the strong yellow bug lamp which illuminates the Crack Door Event area. Jan's mom Jan Jansdaad's steaming underwing fat flap is all that's keeping Jan and Lloyd from falling hundreds of feet into the parking lot below. 

Jan lands as close as she can to the bug light, which is there for the air conditioning unit attached to the bookstore next to temporary mobile classrooms B-D. Most campus employees, students and visitors walk around the air conditioning unit instead of trying to duck under it, which could cause them to end up in sudden Crack-related peristaltic shock (SCRPS), and besides now being invisible, their associates quickly begin to forget they ever existed. In this respect, SCRPS can affect an entire community from one instance only.

Lloyd is trying to keep up with Jan and her mom. As the odd group rushes across the moonlit baseball fields, plumes of white chalk dust spray from below Mrs. Jansdaad's three-clawed feet. And then they have crossed a short span of black top, and then they have reached The Crack. 

They might sound a little like disco when they're running, but when they stop there's nothing but funk, says Lloyd.

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

Preen gland technician

They brought me inside the control room of my own mother's puppet corpse. I could look down over the switches and buttons and through the glass down five stories and watch her feet drag and thud, drag and thud across the empty Sears parking lot, which was just the tip of the iceberg. 

Once we had triggered The Crack, it was a watery world of carelessness; a sort of sleep paralysis of the shock reflex set in while we were fed through a peristalsis of the dimensional organ. 

She was/ was not my mother. This was the flesh of the great beautiful young K who could toss me 100 meters into the sky with her beaque and catch me easily in her seal craw, where lightly blood-dappled pelts were stacked and crumpled into a very stinky but gossamer safety net. The woman they extracted from her inner ear during a shiv molting also is/ isn't La Pegyuh. She seems to carry all her memories, fears, quick tongue. Her body, as well, is now tortured day and night with Remote Tissue Decisioning in order to coordinate with image mirroring protocols and functions. They say she was a random preen gland technician who took a wrong turn somehow. 

by Reptily

Now Entering The Crack

one day coming soon will be a

portal to another world, the 

difference between past and

future, a crack in believing

we'll find out who's entitled

to get in, who has to sit on a

bench in the lobby, which

relationships count as significant

we shall sit before an interpreter

of evidence in perfect robes

but mostly there will be doubt

what will happen to the kids

other dimensions are ours to

learn, not theirs, not the natives

but this time that means no one

only wondering, a beastly rent

 

 

by LaChama

 

Reptily

"I can transverse The Crack."

Jan

"I, too, have crept through it multiple times with my family."

Disco nausea

time seems to be standing still

not sure how i'm sposed to feel

i'm smoking to help stand back

but i keep ending up in The Crack

my hatred for you is all i need to keep going

any time that i think of your face it keeps flowing

you reeled me in like a sweet candy striper

taken in by the expressionless mask of a viper

 

it started with just us the two

then another while i was at work

then while at home with the flu

it was easy to guess who you pork

 

 

 

 

by Donna

Episode at the Drive-Thru

They sensed how urgent the shake was
Two of the world's most beautiful women
Dressed in tight grimy plastic

It was the wrong moment before morning
Just as they were crossing in the vault
To exchange their cash-and-coin trays

A fried potato slowly flattens, rides up
on a tire and into a shadow below
the fender and down the front again

It doesn't matter; I didn't mean to scare you
coming in with the gate half down demanding
an answer while you hide behind the fryers

So many greasy laps around a gas station
with an instant food parlor attached to its side
squealing engine on the cement drive

It'll be okay if I get my order
It won't take me long to get back home
The rest of the night can go on



LA CHAMA

No-Go on the Mo-Ho

I never thought I'd want a pre-1977 house with axles and deflated wheels instead of posts and beams
so desperately
And then be so relieved when the plan stalled as if I'd never really wanted no mo-ho at all.

My engine of change switched on just long enough to open up a crack in the down chute
of my soul
And then, when I knew I'd never turn it over, backfire energy torqued me on after other dreams



by Hoolie

A place where you come down easy

they never had to explain it until someone turned it off from the office
it was a place where vips could come down easy, live to tell about it

they say the closest thing to the sensation of impending death
and then a nauseating buttressing, result of machinery

where you contemplate the luck of your ancestry, or would if you were
the Chama, the work of society, science, mystery, the Crack.



Phyliss (embedded)
from "Before My Own Drop"

You can awaken safety issues

You can awaken safety issues
which had been dormant (not imaginary);
that's not the same as looking for them

Feeling unsafe is the same as being unsafe
from the environment, self, others; fear
alone could trigger accidents of nervousness

We volunteered not to strap on bombs but
walk out into the minefields so that you'd
know someone at risk because we knew

someone dead who'd gone in before us or
someone'd come in after them, but dead still;
trekkers into either world endanger one world


by Ilyn

More Donna and Peg in Prison

PEG: Wow, wait... I just passed through the Crack.

DONNA: ...did too, just now! Is that what you said?

PEG: What, we both passed...

DONNA: Oh shit are you kidding me we...

PEG: Hold it Donna, if you can, we must be..

DONNA: Let's...

PEG: Donna?

DONNA: Peg?

PEG: Wait... it's stopping...

DONNA: ...stopping. Peg?

PEG: Donna yes I felt it too we were passing back and forth very rapidly through the Crack and and not not entirely in sync.

DONNA: Wow, Peg-- how do we even know now... are we... can, could we communicate still if we were on different sides now?

PEG: No because I couldn't hear you before when you were on the other side of the Crack, chile what is happening bitch I am freaking out.

DONNA: Okay remember I'm a doctor and that we are on the same side whichever one it is. I think because we both started out on the same side, we could default as ending up on that side even in periods of frequent fluctuations, and those were more like...

PEG: More like a fibrillation...

DONNA: Yes.

Beyond the crack

Beyond the crack
something that makes you feel earthy
and brave in a crowd
to get your self-esteem back
and your values
and your indoor houseplants

Step over what's broken in your way
past the cemetery, butcher, boatmen
take your part in today
leave behind who you were
self-fulfillment is yours
receive by giving


La Chama
Third Solstice Tent Fundraiser (frag.) 

the Crack

grrl this feels like the crack in a damn samwich
where both of us wanna be the lower companion
you be damn, die be damn, dwurl doesn't care
between now and the years we grew up in
when we were young we were special and new
which only happen then
but our future's extraordinary rendition
are not being played out by actors in other bodies
what does it mean to live here among the rotting
in some ways the teens on the avenues
in some ways the teens on the avenues
are running the same set of vitals in an anachronistic bag
are getting a subjective other story
share with gone survivors conquests, foils and rivals
what they hope for is when we'll be disambulatory
but the creature inside the thing is relative only
of the species and scraps of language n' reliquary
experiencing the seasons critically, seen from above,
no matter the originality, is hairy-top heads roving.