RE-CAP: It's not sustainable girl

fourteen months oughta be a monument to something baby
you cant juss say you gonna go and quit on me now womachal
y'got two kids and it seems like yor gonna hava nervous breakdown
corporations callin ona telephone tryna makeyuh pay yo dues nau
cantcha stick witme tellwe figure ifwe gonna go brakeda banko fo-cloes

misery
and growing old
withoutchu woma i cd layme downan close my eyes dontchu see-e?
youma co-D penna docta-lady fo-ah cobra vak-scene.

Sixty-Nine Cents an Hour

My first real corporate gig since shilling boner at private pool parties for the Chicago mob landed me right in the peaking tip of the dot-com boom. This time I got to be the old shuggie with the time-done-alive cred if nothing else. The mean street in between had been a beautiful government sliding down a rainbow of duty and patrimony, but I was ready for all the opportunity and glamor of a whurl-wide pyramid schemata. Even though you know already my only retirement income said and done now is from leasing out these tracts.

My new boss was half the size I had been at his age and twice as green. With a twitch. Always seemed to be sweating it out, this guy Pete Steeves-- what if they fire me, well it's curtains for me and the wife and kid, that's whut, and forget about the options. Just lettem get you drunk and goofy after work, dick-flip yr earlobe now and then, fetch a few things, learn the acronyms. VC is no longer Viet Cong.

But Pete also had another thing i didn't know he had, what they called hunger back then. It's also when they started leveraging the word leverage's leverage all over the place, almost like they were leveraging it. Just like when pundits and academics started saying the word "piece" all the time. Like, "And then the other... oh, i don't know...PIECE of this is, i think..." (they had to pause before the word piece as if they had just then thought of using it in that particular kind of brilliant figurative play). Around that time or a little before they also decided that the "UH" sound is too like a troglodyte. So everything has to be "AH" instead, as if a light bulb is going off over your caricature. AHnbelievable. Then the final golpe with the engine-like, throaty cackle talk, wicked-witch-of-the-west schtick to sound hip, ironic and also sassy!

Stumbling along a quaintly sooted, deeply rutted urban lane only meant for drunk young guys in ties leaving downtown bars at night, a street like the hormonally ergonomic curved charnel chutes for beef, Pete mistily confided that he trusted me in a special way. He expressed that as, "I feel like I can tell you anything." Next thing I knew I had responded to an urgent-toned invitation to his country home for a meal.

The Steeves' house was so old you could not even change a diaper in it due to its landmark status. It looked like "Shakespeare" condos, but lower, maybe where the ponies were groomed by jockeys. The double-dutch doored entrance with the capital X's on each under-wing opened wide to reveal an eerily medievally scene for riding the information revolution. The wife-- was it a bonnet? No, one of those prep girl tortoiseshell tiara deals--perched on a short stool across from the daughter, who was actually in a bonnet, being a baby, in a Georgian wicker, no, a varnished Confederate willow-switch ship bed, squeaking slowly. Was it a tyke rocking itself to some primordial Esperanto hymn in a flammable cradle edging our land's hearth, or another shriveled and catatonic relative?

As in a roadside "Mystery Spot," I could not stand up completely straight at any point, angle or coordinate in the structure. Pete and Nancy had developed stoops, though they could have geometrically fit erect in a technical sense, maybe just not psychologically quite like duck's backs around the time-travel/ anachronistic lifestyle piece. Pete, intuiting that I wouldn't stay on for whatever was boiling in the cauldron at the end of a hag's long spoon, immediately presented me with a gift. It was warm from being in his hand, and it stayed that way even after leaning-to in the cool vinyl toll-coin tray of my GM tank for the hour it took to get back home to Highchank.

Pete's gift is made of a hard, dark wood that holds energy beyond its own life better than most other previously living tissue. It is so much more valuable as a dead absorber of however the sun can stir dust into sparks and finally fish-lizard-rat-ape-calculator. Pete's gift you might call a totem he picked up from some port where they give a tourist a dark kernel of place and a little more, which can taint. You might call Pete's gift a fertility symbol with just the suggestions of parts carved roughly and all from one piece, but that was also the whole point. Along with how it can't stand up even though it's obviously a man. The soles of his feet are badly cut, really more like hacked at by a god making sixty-nine cents an hour.


by Donna
for Metacognitive Talk Therapy Apologist, Autumn Double Issue

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?"

Bunch of feathers

We plucked that folksy rich and poor line back and forth like a gi-tar chord, and the sound of all twelve strings
making a choice between high or low jangled the soul because we didn't know how we'd ring up the next meal.

It jangled the heart when we couldn't figure out how to get the BBQ grill in the trunk, and the real crystal pinot
glasses we gave away, the giant kind that miss october might be cradling somewhere bountiful, rocking hope.

It seemed like our sleek system for working the land and managing a certain chic was falling down around our
stetsons and turquoise as a bunch of feathers connected by rawhide to a roach clip tumbled onto the curbside.

Peg 



Chalk Chank

den mthyuh

they call you a gas guzzlr,
they say yor out, an
awl thye syuddn
yr ina mthyaphukin orbit

yu caynt yet getchr mayl thayr,
all yr stuff is in boxes, and...
an yr hair looks mentally
ill from n-x-s of home cuts

all you can hold onto is a den
of freaked out animals and the
shame of prescription shampoo;
where is the world spinning to?

Bad Paper for Tires

whizzing past Stink Lake on the Bladder Dip
gas baby got restless and bucked at the wheel
you just wait devil pup your turn to burp, flail

mama's got a shimmy needs reducing for free
tho its counter-intuitive, go heavy on the petal
as if to say it's hip to coast in on silent fumes

handbrake of sticky vinyl, stripes that we paid
ahead based on our regional weather patterns
back then, not caring who'd snag us by radar.

debt to bygone eroticism

warts grew over precise chakra points
lily pads on forks of refrigerated depth
ony lectric cd srvive in so cold a tissue

somehow it was pickled saved spiced
even empathy cd B posponed so long
for the energy to come out that strong

and they didn't throw rice or engage in
song, initiation, horny harvest ritual, pie
, because it was only an individual with

a singl eye which no one could disobey
because jumping up and down on him
would only incite the furiousnss n bloat.

bth kinds a peppers, just fr gd measure
BLACK AND WHITE TOGETHER!
Thru your senses, I feel myself a giant.

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

a relaxed paradigm of glass placement

The point is to keep the same kinds together so you know how many you have of everything, and beyond that, the exact positioning of glassware can fluctuate and flow. It gets grouped in the random order with which it is retrieved from the dishwasher and set according to space availability, clan and whimsy.

With this new rinse agent you really relax and feel proud of your barware as if lifting it from its packing tissues for the very first time. Putting it up has been replaced with a perpetual safari for the suitable place, always ready for painting a baby's room blue or pink.

You can't say even harsher chemicals haven't been involved in the soothsaying. This entire machine needed a rutting out with Lime-A-Way. Now it can fulfill its open purposes while working less hard, and with less hard water residue. Minerals may begin to regather.

Jan
"Call me Klink."

My Horz

I was just thinking how I'm resenting, maybe unfairly, all of my bitches lately. At first I say I'm turning over a new labia: never again will I hang my time out to dry on some lowlife hohoo ain't even turning tricks. Who think she can survive on my jism as a fix. Not so. Cuz that's too rich a treat for dependent mthyuhz cayn even work beyond her lips fer a snack o' some food stamp points fr the lil' baybeez. This is an economy fr double income, high rolling self starterz who can share meat as well as preen, luv. You got to have something equal to give if you gettin the biggest dickhead you ever seen, luv. Adoration don't make the queen, dove. She gotsta have a trade outside a shade an speckin pay in diemunz, mthyuh, cuz my preservation, above all the othyuh, is whut I spen my day lovin, not yo ass-jaded ball inspectrz with meterz on they taints an credit scorz like teen-mom newlywedz...

Ilyn

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

Scat Xmas: A Fart Journal

Psych-Low-Pedia say: "Errybuddy cut priusnear 35 farts a day."
So they are named:

1) I am wickit, yet a boon to you.
2) Another exorcism.
3) Drumroll of slumber.
4) Starting to sound like conscious intervention.
5) Wrong: it's as savage as it is archetypally knocked out, unbeautiful.
6) "Phhphffbbt."
7) Is it? A shy question?
8) Crossed over into fracking.
9) Is this corprate or goverment laxity?
10) Pray it was a one-time event, unrecorded.
11) Electronic woodpecker.
12) Grounded.
13) Butt-intense.
14) Weak and bilious.
15) Not at the table, but moving along the salsa bar.
16) One microwaved jetliner entree: $700USD.
17) Chicken.
18) Painful, unsatisfactory.
19) Red wine or internal bleeding?
20) The basically-digested earnestness of babyhood.
21) Cradle robber.
22) Jolly rude.
23) Hold it...just...try and...omg.
24) Does it count?
25) Heal thy moralistic burst.
26) And your mother.
27) World's most generous.
28) Santa Ana
29) Where does it begin or end?
30) Pushed out.
31) Her stalker.
32) A number of hounds.
33) Rilly dog like.
34) Afterthought.
35) Uplifting.

By Donna

Greatest good

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPu59h8OrL4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta-F4NAVURs

Hoolie, 16, bursts out in tears while visiting his best friend's family at the Waymore D'Nuttn Homes, Southchank. It's a 19-floor aviary of blacks, with views of 16 more. They rode the potty elevator with a tough 9-yr-old Mom in Pink Tube Top. Everything strong, everything dented: steel door, bricks, dense turf. What if bees banged their tin cups on comb wire. What if no one can't leave anyone alone because he appears to share some blood. Because there are no shops tho, what you have is more valued by neighbors.

"Where I laughed and played is a hole in yor eyes."
"No, there must be love around I'm sure."

Then the boys ducked into the mother's perfumey wardrobe hollow behind a changing table and fellated each other. It was a taste of the greatest good ever, or else they'd never have gotten together.

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.

Physician's Licensure Hold Lounge

Now Donna cannot even go back to her hut on the desert floor. Some say having left the garden hose on too long made a leak to the aquifer, and that's how the collapse occurred. Sunlight and her stucco home broke through the decomposing granite crust and free fell a few hundred feet before splashing down hard. One ironic mention about it all getting sucked in, her cards and pictures, pets, food, art collection, driveway with cement prints, mailbox is that at the same time, she was remote viewing a documentary entitled Chank Atlantis. She'd shown up to sit in for the state that day. They had her on a tuffet of clay, some would say, because of the law tablets that were played to negotiate her stay in the Physician's Licensure Hold Lounge. From her folding chair in the rehabilitative media chamber she had marveled at the power of the sea cutting down on hubris, especially the condescending sass of the middle class university-style intellectual with their endless self-congratulatory slumming forays and phat-assed group licking pageants. 

What saved her life was the rubber room is the first obvious but wrongest conclusion you could come up with. If life had been normal it would've been Nature there to call hero: Nature, who held Her shit until most righteous folk would be off at work before giving into the breach. The depressing fact was that nothing much else but Donna's life was saved of Donna's life. Was this where she'd be into perpetuity, a detention event venue for enemies of the meta-cognitive talk therapy apologist movement? Sure, she was safe, her life anyway, but the focus created by these environs always had to be the patients: were they secure from alternatives to medication as well as compliant with the prohibitization of medicative alternates? The rationale of the health vendor societies everywhere was cost, that they be recipients of all cost, that it be monitored, and that there was an accountability of payment, sustainability of need, and payment that could be pursued and multiplied and punished even while continuing to provide a river of product opts.

Phyllis, SSCB

Jan and Her Dad, Jan Janzdaad

Daad,

Here are some of the questions I've been promising. When you say things like "I don't know how to be a daad," it makes me want to slap you very hard on the face. You think your existence is optional even while you live. Or is it mine that could clinch the diff? If I die before you it will add and not subtract from what you are. Now I'm telling you: grow up. You must answer me as best you can and not be silent out of pride of being proven wrong one day and marked as such in someone's registry.

1) What is our intelligence relative to others?
2) What are the primal and seconal reasons for our current economic standing?
3) Are we less or more worthy the more or less we fight for our stature?
4) Who did you trust and now who brings you sorrow.
5) How can you help me carry honor in our name?
6) Who did you love, and who loves you.
7) How am I weak and strong; please don't make me vomit your diplomacy.
8) Now clearly describe your standards for satisfaction with me; if all you can say is "to be happy," you shall be stricken hard in the face until it's forthcoming your honesty.

Night time find me dangled in volcano mouth by crane bill; moneylenders at the edges hanging ten, perched with lawyers, dressed health providers. I can't be civilized enough to pay even my krill, but then I recall the swarms at Denver Airport in brand new leisure apparel, total value not more than 50 peck per rack. If by lifestyle you mean down with sport and a fleece fetish, the free wing of horniness in a brine of marriage, the smell of beer suds and baby oil, a family who dance to TV commercials and nest in a church's love steeple, how important do you think life is?

9) Can I use your formulas to become rich without endangering mankind.
10) Where are the code books and lab support rolodexies?
11) Are we predisposed to resist more radiation in less time?
12) How are man's real expectations linked, if at all, to a Moral Compass?

I Sit and Drink before a Screen

Rock rolling, in packs, against effigies, has been preserved.
Some flakes even stream in hoopties to communal slurp holes,
risk getting picked off by the sensation grid or spoiling a life.
Gods of atroposis can bareback their amygdalas and view.

Once you buy the razor wires for yr pinfold, the bolts and screws
close automotively, as at sunset for grain bank doors.
Yr consciousness and shiny coins are disbursed in the heavens.
All the moisture you can carry is your hydroelectric insurance.

Donna
"For Illyn"

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"

the human meat bazaars

Reptily loves telling stories of her childhood in the human meat bazaars. One endearing slave's Johnson was so large he would be ordered routinely to hold it still. It held metaphornical value as a coat rack, a radiator, a spritzer bottle. By way of salutation, you'd jive, "Just don't move, daddy!" in place of [his name] or ciao. For fear of insurrection or other friction, it was gathered to be the phrase Wayne wd encounter most often. Just as cruel were the simultaneous demands for hot verbalization. Two central desires, to act and be wordless, were denied him during moments of nature's most strenuous command. This was Wayne's work and Wayne's sacrifice. Bereft of options either for civil disobedience or employment, he wd oblige the temple-step tithe monitors to collect their coins by shameful finger from deep inside his snakeskin lucre sash.

Reptily was watching with blackened eye, from bed of filthy rag, beneath a corn hooptie when Wayne finally met his ticket to the middle chanks, a kidnapped preachers' kid from Fordamall. Jan's bare-shouldered, curly-shod traffickers were scraping her encumbrance along a pinched and moldring callejón, high on a mirrored pillow. Her veil branks was fine as wisps of smoke out the nostrils; wrought-iron finch seemed to dash for liberty from the fancy, cage-like dental installation; her head was razored to crushed velvet pile. He bought her where she sat. Without hesitation, for a five-teated cull nanny and a few ribald shouts, Wayne set Jan free. Jan took Wayne home. Jan's dad bought Wayne. Now Wayne just moans. Jan can now see. Wayne is on top. Jan says, "Don't stop..."