The Dirty Gory

Connie was so assured of her body that while many of her peers treated theirs as something so precious as to be given like a pink angora sweater: only once, or only in the dark, or hated theirs so much as to let it go only once, or only in the dark, she could feel Pain of Rivening but only along with the knowledge of regeneration and ever-presence. Indeed a joe felt drained and used after paying for a session, and so her clientele was culled.

"I don't claim to be Eryho. I have some implants that make my bones grow. It's a special sponsorship situation from PharmCo. Only one man could keep his lid on, and that was Ted. I bet he wonders wai I'm dead. T'was Wayne that did the dirty gory; he thot that Ted wd break th' story."

Liberty chank

Neighbor A: loose cats

• feeding is the main thing in our lives.

Neighbor B: pen dogs

• I knew we were different because Peg would take us for dinner at the AM/PM at 1:00 am and when teachers asked would I do that in my own livingroom, the answer was always yes.

Neighbor C: wasp nest

• a fixed income means you prioritrize; luxuries gained always outlive debts n' obligations

Neighbor B: leaky pipe

• it's the landlady's joint, but a beacon for trouble

Neighbor A: no W.A.S.T.E.

• I don't need no stinking waiver. Until I was in my 30's, I procreated mechanically. When I first learned about cross-sexual reproduction, I didn't see the connection with desire. Was a tam wen a woman didn't know the cause of her labor. Now that I am Ruler Queen, only the protection of my children and conservation of my lands matter, plus romantic gratification. Neither Neighbor B nor Neighbor C can provide any of that.

Neighbor C: stucco gaps

• Happy hour food, garage sales, 30%-off last day and bulk meat; a rice cooker. This is how we mate.

Neighbor C: barbeque

• Our chillun are gone, and we live in Liberty chank, the cheapest of all the chanks, so we are happy camping out on this land with no leaks or rain. It is similar to waiting for rescue on the surface of the moon, not really mattering.

Neighbor B: mud puddles

• Everywhere we step there are trials, plagues, pest. I seem to be the happy voodoo doll, banshee flapping.

Neighbor A: mosquitos

• creatures come to me, but never to kill. their pulling from every direction keeps me erect and surprise moving to their wim. if i keep drinking nectar in, my pores, wicking, can fight this gravity.

War Trench

I feel good in this bed.
I want to pay for it, pay the charges.
I owe it to Sears, feeling this good;
I want to pay them everything I owe.
I want to pay my debt.

I itch all night and can only dream about my ego.
The shiv is keeping me afloat on a nightmare lagoon.
Otherwise I think I'd thrash around until I could find Ted.

I seek you in my imagination, which is different than the future.
I seek you in the dampened sheets, the stink of your razor bump meds.
From a cliff you keep falling this way, into cotton and feathers.

All night in this room is what we have,
but the sun is coming up soon, love.
It's time to take a stand and give.

(your) Donna

My Spread

I'm not in a space-step program. I work hard; I am highly functional, as you've seen-- I am highly functional in defending myself, outcomes aside, hardworking in my own defense, just as I was highly functional before I began to have to defend myself-- and then I was hardworking my functions for the good of the flight school.

When you give me all theez rulz and regulations, train me to strive and try, then wipe everything aside with an arbitrary decision, I get double vision, I get religion but it's upside down right then. It's a dog and pony ride, but my ass growing wide on your office chair means I participated. My spread is your bread, baby.

Cuz I chose this grinder to wind me down, I guess I have to spin in it, find the swing in it, and do my thing. Drown. As in a blender. From all that I remember, it'll be like my hometown, the one I scrammed from when my shoulder bones started poking holes in roof sections. They were tender. Now my life itself is deregulated.

Missy

Interview with a Captain of Industry

"Looking for yr fren David?"

"Yes, I know it's last call, but..."

"Who's got a call butt?"

"Have you seen him?"

"Per my advice, he'll be arriving shortly in Gary, Indiana."

"Far."

"I'd say."

"Well, I've got five dollars. Can I buy you a White Russian?"

"I'll take that drink and offer you a job."

"What's yr name?"

"I hear yor a mediocre ho."

"It's what some say."

"But yr better than that."

"Don't you love Kaluhua?"

"Some glamour, but more regular."

"It's in Gary, yr operation?"

"It affected my amygdala, actually."

"Mom'll wanna know where I've gone."

"It'll hep you get a loan on a hooptie."

"With a visor mirror?"

"I told you you wr jus right."

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?

Shame of Flying

shame of flying

as an assemblyman, i have access to routing data
for public oracle dispensers and in homes.

i can pump shiv straight from my fat belly
into receivers who are mostly human.

resources are unlimited tho it's all company owned
; my boss at PharmSupply sees improvement.

because i sort of sell my soul to Later,
i can wag my nose at crashes all around me.

my wife and I are sure the public is dying;
we tell everyone to keep buying.

Wayne

Down, Down

I learned all the lessons of cement
by falling down pitted, dusty steps.
It's a consolation, this knowledge.

My sexiness couldn't protect me,
nor did well-meaning tips change my mind.
I was a female doctor, dammit.

They stripped me of my Donna Karan;
now I scrummage like a thrift store rat
in a maze of snap diagnoses.

Come Down Mthyuh

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

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

Kev

Shiv Overdose

Family of Consumers

We live interdependently, buying style and smartly. Any moment of piggishness is copacetic in
the privacy of your home. We are a network of understanders, tapping heaven's color palette. If
you sign up for automatic transaction, you barely feel the entries and egress, and if you get the
rhythm, it starts to generate a flow, a chi-wave. You can look like the foto in the public oracle
dispenser if you stay up to date. We are all on the same page: a rubber slide that feels like
leather. It's a company with roots, entanglements, holes. We can produce chillun this way. We
can whistle them like smoke into another century, remembering. As we speak, my fingers are
writing checks. We know the weather in Orlando, Bensenville, Cliffe Suites. We can be there on
the morrow, while always in reach of the beam. A two-way street means we take our knocks in
the surf. The elite might be hypnotized by their space on the curve, no matter how far they've
turned. It's the bold hang from a big arm that will catapult our moon shots. It's the brave step we
don't take, for the wurl, which the generations wud want this way. Boys and their machinations
are under branding, butterflies, every gesture, expression, attempt: ours to claim. Every knee
jerk or shudder just creates more gism. We are a chain of strangers, enemies, happy to be sealed
from any one asshole's greed. Leadership means take our emotions and lay out the whole runway
so we can see our land. We will work for solids, make waste of air, enter a future every day. Our
aim is to clock in, collaborate, live, breed. Salt of the Sea and cream soda is the Mthyuh's fetish.

Donna
Sears Parking Lot

Salty

If I have cash and I'm willing to pay up now, would you let me offer them a bit less than your mass-mail quote..? No it was personalized, but by a computer printer, that's all. Say 18 percent of the new total including interest..? You could fax me the agreement, and if you'll accept a card tied to my bank account, we can settle this today. What is your percentage, sir..? Because you know if I claim 13, game's over for us both.

Donna leaned back against the tile kitchen counter top in her yellow gauze Charro pijama and farted. A salty peanut shell cracked between her teeth.

No, I'm not swimming in money that's exactly right. All I've got to eat is snack food. OK. Give me a minute to plug it in. I'm a doctor for chrisake. And dog food. Never thought it cost this much. I'm feeding you out of my bitches' mouths, mister.

Dr. Thong had been physician to super shiv-stars and wandering freaks. Now barely able to keep Juniper, La-La and M'Lady in kibble, she wondered if someone wouldn't once slip her a pro-bono, as she had done, on so, so many occasions. Was Kevin on some kind of Jesus trip? He had once, as a walk-in, asked her to put him down. Now he frequented a fiery healing pool.

O' Kev. You could touch my coin purse at least. We bonded on a pill-bottle bed, and that pumping beat. How could I know a lapse of shiv could trigger a random shiv test and set me up to lose my license all for a rotten night of hounding?

Sermon

in weariness
the Earth's nougat
cast up stronger
her lasso.

in this contest
only a taut heart
against her pistons
can save you.

while listening
as other creatures
die of what we call
bad timing,

in some folks' minds
poverty of movement
was their keeper
from friction.

Ilyn, Brother. Sermon, frag. 11-14

Drop-In Center

In this village, there's still a camera shop.
But the money stopped with a red dream
And chop, chop. We put a drop-in center
For the third gender made whores of, but
They mothers started showing up. My son,
You told me you went for bleach, shaves.
Sheaths. This is where the rice thrasher's
Dogs and chillun play Carom with poker
Chips. The neighbors came round with
Sticks and chrysanthemum paste. There
were fights, but now when we see goat heads
In the street, we can say, here, I brought
Some money. Internationals need batteries.
No more swatting; you must say hi to me.

I am Hoolie

easy home

Sylvia

• a wild forest of desire under her housedress

Tom

• usually amenable
• sorrow of captivity
• hyper-empathic
• "We have to wade through a stink water river of suffering humanity, crippled dogs and burning tires just to buy a damn nail clippers."

Sylvia

• "Don't forget it's for the church, dear."

That night

• she whispers praise the lord as they fuck

Morning in the Terai

• Big red sun on a 3rd-gendered temple
• Tom and Sylvia in silouette
• suitcases full of eyeglasses for the clinic

Swooping Beast

My partner in the hard-plastic cask where we were buried alive in cellophane sheaths and cables and I took an airborne beat to contemplate what's now a rural legend: how the Chama was sucked through a grapefruit-sized hole in the pressurized cabin when the stainless steel flap suddenly gasped open at the bottom of the commode. In an instant one is there, and then not.

She was a goddess and could sprout again in a dirt lot. He was a prototype for Asian-American goobers. He kept hocking snot into napkins and stuffing them between our seats. He was scanning a spreadsheet and operating three electronic devices while tongue-rolling a toothpick in a baseball cap. He slept hard with his knees bent "indian style" and upon waking had already cleared the virals he'd been farming.

Monday vanishes over Da Nang. It's not ended because it never happened. Throngs phase through their generations as Archie characters in fresh skins. Freckles appear from nowhere into their rightful industrial age of error. In Spain, they called it edad de pavo. Big-headed, pencil-necked beasts. They are miserable and potent and giddy with loose beaks.

Chamatilly birthed as the earth turned her up: back, shoulders, arms, scales, and having been scattered to the winds, desirous of integral flight. It's everyone's problem when a queen takes a spill. Now she swoop in bald headed with piercings and claws and craving easy hot nutrition in tiny disposable dishes.

Thai Business Lounge, BKK

You Havin a Party, We Havin a Party

Measure your success in drops of happiness, and the drug addicts win.
Plumb sorrow, and regret.
But if we all can connect over stylized flowers,
Stencils of the same design in different colors,
Commodities will be cheap for everyone.

You havin a party, we havin a party.
Spread yor fancy plumes-- nirvana costs the same everywhere.
Here's our lucky day: don't have to worry at all a good
35-80 hours a week. It's a hypnotic supply chain.

Bring me yor backs, yol. You should be doing good, not begging.
If all I see is asses, I am Lord. You are selves frontal forward,
Trusting me. That's how we have fun signifying one another.

Sand Trap

The neighbor sometimes mows his
dirt while a pit viper dogs its barrier,
wife standing by with a needle.

Isn't she regal in the torn screen
chatting on a land line? Aren't pretty
hands wasted swatting at dire straits?

We thot we'd at lease have some
body art to show for our aches as
opposed to a paucity of bike parts.

Door Prize: It Hits you on the Ass

Corporation: OK well I'm the great big corporation. Think I can do what I want? Well no. I'm just a hallucination: you are me. The individual. Without your support, I'm nothing. Never heard of a Thousand Holes that are Tight? It's everyone pulling together to co-sign my Right to Plow.

Individual: Ooo lookie me I'ma little diddly noo-body who can't even pee without buying a contraption from some kinda capitalist. You'll arrest me if I just let it flow. You say I'm gay if I don't have a mug with your pig logo.

Hoolie drinks a lot of wheat juice and tries to explain getting fired to what's left of the disciples.

Art Fair Rapist

In my fifties, bare aesthetics will turn to hungry assault.
I'll have less self-control, in proportion to attractiveness.
At a salad bar just the other day, a German tourist near
-ly brot me to my knees on the plastic runway protectin
-g the rug. I was on my first beer, but I could have slain
his frau and drug him home by the hair with a second m-
ug. I vow to haunt art walks, retrospectives, book fairs a-
nd lame conventioneers who are paid to stroll their carne
between miracles of the marketplace and crudités variés.

Promo Script:
Dr. Thong's 10-Minute Day, with No Workout