journal of a house arrest, day 106

at least down at central lockup you had yr hell is other peoples;
a pretty prison soltera, even with dogs, may become agorapathic.
she sits in the sand with the bitches guarding, hoping, dozing.
her hair pushes through the squares of chain link fencing.
Donna, you are beautiful, but look at you:
a free tumbleweed with caramel tinge, mashed in a blockade.
whooda known you'd steadily become a morbid-ideating blob?

Phyllis, embedded

Phyllis in a cilice

Meanwhile, Dr. Thong has her toes spread between the railings of the brass bed in her cell. She is painting them with a q-tip from a bottle cap with a solution of urea and Pink Bismuth heated up atop the radiator.

Someone is with her: Phyllis, in a salt-and-pepper fall, natural mock cilice and denims on a folding chair. Her purple lipstick is inappropriate.

DONNA: She'd be very upset to know you were here.
PHYLLIS: But I'm a reporter. I get to be in on all the angles.
DONNA: Yeah, you put the bed in embedded.
PHYLLIS: Allz I did was sign up to express her preen gland. It took weeks to get clearance.
DONNA: As if you could step back through the Crack anyway. You can't mend two worlds with a few strands of horse-like hair.
PHYLLIS: Hmm. You noticed. [PAN FROM ONE TO THE OTHER OF HER BREASTS]
DONNA: Maybe she'll come to us. She could get me out of here.

[FLUORESCENT CEILING TUBE BUZZES AND FLICKERS]

PHYLLIS: You know Dr., time travel is a bunch of b'caca. But light beams come and go as they please. A deity can do that.
DONNA: Now you insult my sense of connectedness. Isn't it much more likely yr pal Wayne over at PharmSupply has been pumping up his experiment?
PHYLLIS: Are you saying you'd be down with RMP if it could bring back the Chama?
DONNA: I'm saying I'm a doctor and I know an evil phuck of a shrink when I smell one.
PHYLLIS: Illyn, her brother, does it the hard way. No one blames him for crawling out the Mthyuh's stinking rubble erry tam a generation almos fergets.
DONNA: You are sinking into superstition, and it's unbecoming of journalism.

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]

Chilling howls

We're in a ditch, bottom of a moat that curls part way round a moun'n and sucks wind in from the ocean. Relief filter graphics show how a storm's plasm turns from maroon to turquoise as it pushes across Mthyuh's peak. A pink thunderhead in a sheet reaches in from the shores and up through the pass just skirting the lower chanks and back again to rejoin its northerly impulse. It's raining noisily. Feral pups squat with their ears back on rocky hillsides and search for their mothers along washes in the lightning flashes.

Peg appears sopping wet in some kind of buffalo fur hotpants and bra. She scoops the wayward babies into the fossil of a pelican bill, but giant, and drags them off in their hope boat of bone by rope to a distant glowing cave.

Phyllis, Embedded
SSCB

siberian rent discount

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

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

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

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

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

Joy Laffter

Joy Laffter shows up at Ted's in big sunglasses with a box just as the sun's popping behind Chukka chank. Her blonde wig is human hair, a little frizzy. She stands there in nothing but a black pantsuit but for a khaki parka instead of the jacket. The vest gives it a tank-top affect. Ted answers the door, all negroid with maroon-rimmed eyes. Peggy was seeing so much red his blood seemed to swirl on the wrong side of the skin. Who are you? asks Ted, on his day off, after a couple of mad dogs. Joy Laffter, Peg responds. Her lips are pink-orange. And she steps on in.

So this is your dive. The back of her parka flutters cape like.

Ms. Laffter. I have an office. I'll give you an autograph outside.

I have something for you.

Ted takes the box.

Then all the eaters of the world swarm out. They cover his flesh except for his mouth. They have evolved to let a man scream during dinner because it makes him taste better.

Callous in an Odd Place

Donna's hut, carport and pool create a Tiki-style octagon behind the chain link fence. She can often be seen in knee-to-toe bells and a halter adjusting deck lounges. The parcel is mortgaged at more than three times its worth; one would expect it to sprout exhaust plumes and fly. True enough, a layer of hot lava sufficiently shallow to be covered in the mineral rights sometimes causes mudpots and steam vesicles to appear in the yard.

Donna lives in shame of her sun damaged forearms and ankles. The scar is a shimmry curt'n. The desert pulls at your blood through the skin. Someone has snipped your life stalk and placed you in a drying bin. But why the callous on the back of her thumb?

She was into fresh-juiced carrots until it turned brick-orange. Why should the most puzzling parts of the physique present so saliently dyed? Donna'd been at P-Supply U during the tenure of a psychoanalytic dean crossed with Jungian department heads. She wondered how she was somehow callous in an odd place. One would expect a life to form armament where friction is most frequent. Donna loves her girlz, has shared a kidney with the poor, and of another race. Of reverence to higher beings, one does not chafe from that which can't exist.

Could my linguistics background add something to the mix that would reveal, through language, a fallacy in the metaphorical approach? Not. Memory trumpets: "Phyllis, to tell you the truth, I think something may have bitten me there." Donna crammed a smoke in her mouth and stood to fold the chair. An incision had left the faint white jet-like streak on her lower back.

Phyllis
Re: Donna

Pins n' Buttons

Tom wears a home-sewn vest over every plaid shirt every day. It's covered in commemorative pins and slogan buttons. Even as he lectures, its beige suede rocks against his arteries. His half-naked students find it obscene, but a heart on his chest puts them at ease during drills and bloodletting. K chicks will often leave purple stains on their seats.

Missy is out on suspension for off-limits vittle. Every re-creature must be protected extra much because they are most likely to be eaten with the smallest pang of conscience. Because they come back, because they must, it seems a venal abuse.

Tho flakes are other matter; academy classmates even graver. Flakes are food for bloodsac only; the grrl in the next seat is your sister in pain. Had Connie stepped in The Crack? Were her tertiary characteristics driving her onto the waiting list for shiv clinic and guided skeletal bursting? Had Connie in fact been a casual associate of Reptily among the rotting alfalfa bales of the Low Chanks long before the filter and the MPS? We measured time in WD then. But it lied.

Imagine all the singing night birds before wide feeding. Now there is only one, and he mocks. Fecundity only breeds more episodes: thumping, wailing, spines. Flakes disappear like soap. Soon only those who rule the skies will have a strip of land. They are proud and unsentimental or grieving. They have paid with burning; they have paid in change. They are tired of thieving, of treating. Now we are their petri dish. Death is a privileged doctor.

Phyllis
Lit-Crit Contractor, Embedded
for Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle

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.

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?

Idling Caprices

Now that the swimming pool had been drained for good, Mike took up with new ways and associates. One amante at the Preservation Society, another down at Shiv Council. A scientist, an accountant, a bum. Let bloom a goatee and a black, open-shirted look. Got into trouble with rents and men all the way to Cliffe Suites. Until he showed up here one morning.

"I'm looking for Julio."

"Do you mean Hoolie?"

"Told me he lived out back in the shed."

"We don't live here at all. We..."

"Julio." He was looking over my shoulder at I guessed Hoolie.

"Mike." Hoolie says behind me. I step out of the way and they say,

"Just because there's no water, don't mean you can't dive."

"We squirmed like eels in another atmosphere."

"Even while lawn salad bobbed on top."

"But now it's a neck breaker."

"NO. We've got lungs now. Ears."

"We've got the Filter down and K's rampaging."

"Yeah. I let 'em out. One of my pranks. Come dark-rule the chanks with me."

"NO. Come with us. We're deities."

"NO. My life is free."

"NO. You are a slave to shiv and idling caprices..."

As the sun set, the two worked out their issues. Silhouettes in pink on the listing log cabin porch. I, a woman, could not intervene. I wasn't even sure if Mike had the right guy. Hoolie isn't Mexican.

Chama-tilly

Spin, Vajra, Spin

Maybe it's my hairdo that makes your bun fall to the side when you think of me, mom. For she is I that laid your egg, not you a Peg, and members of my retinue must twist the dhammilla so low and tight.

Mechanical creatures and slime can rest in my weightless curls with room for your life and forty more. I love you that much to communicate my post-feminist claims so you may rest in my jatamandala while I shriek in carnal crime and despair.

My terrible living makes me pigeon, street girl to stars, but to compare, you are just a tiny ovum saved by chance on my vajra tip. You suffer sharply. But I am there. When you hear the cloying screech of a suparna, you feel me.

Your Peggy, Our Pegyuh

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.

K Coming

Peg heard herself remark as she woke up on her fancy hovering cushions:

"That's the first time a living bone creature in my hand ever proposed marriage."

Crisp sky blue sheets were her universe. Without the kids, life was a cockpit.

Raiding villages in her flying F-suit brought flakes to their knees.

Her turds boiled in outdoor mess cauldrons fetched a hefty consolation for the burns.

Forever was 13 Years

This morning I couldn't sleep because flies kept stinging my cancer scabs with their maggot splooge.

Our own planet's outer persona was being popped open and violated by too much light.

Static Adventure

I leave the sands on the floor of my home

so you can swish through in your sandals, or

bare footed in the granules, pick at stones.

I have the shades rolled, carpets up, brother

because the winds then can have a handle

to drag us on the dunes as they wander.

For we virile khans of unfastened stakes,

time can’t end murdered by jealous princes.

This ark is a mill which grinds its own wake.

Amygdala Jones

Was that her under the avalanche of gratuitous accessories and empties at the sidewalk cafe?
Did she never become that buck-tooth, saddle-shod shooter from whom we all long to flee?
Was her rearing not overdetermined by scripture, her apocalyptic destiny given us to slay?
With safety in righteousness, patrimonial soil, swarm this story for your spleen, worker bee!

She shall be known for whatever it is you call a curse which is a name: Malediction?
Since she is technically a goddess, leadership nomenclature splatters out of her everywhere:
"I hold out both my hands, like giving anal polyps: fingerless but ready, fertile, present.
"Imminent, I hold you in my balls, which are fists. My arms, living tubes, can be dicks to you.

Sighing, Peg took off her ridiculously large and fake sunglasses frames, palm rolling a sweaty 7/7 across her forehead for clarity. Listen to that clinking. Sears is going to be here any minute. Shd I try and cram in a nap and say I'm just groggy from dreamin? Or might I go ahead and ride this current/wave of Violade like a Mayfair lady in a white sateen and foxtail cape?

Partial Ch. 4 and notes.
Sin-Gaberra Ms., shard 4c.
Ass-assination of Amygdala Jones: Princess or Goddess, It's the Same

Sucking Beacon

Donut cloud, crown of thorns, and your lateral, unsurvivable blast: we must all learn, but be far away from. The charm of your beacon is a ring of pulling wanting. Our own livers, our sensing organs, viscerally seek to sate your warning glory.

Disappointing former anomalies, pivotal galactic trendsetters, turn out to be really no more than wood chippers. Matter doesn't "disappear" inside them. Their density is not "infinite." Law of physics: something always has to give. Look what's blowing out their axes.

We astronomers, in bed with our telescoping mirror cones and eye needles; we livers in other realms, of freedom, of caprice and lifestyle mistakes, of blight off season. They put us in prison in spite of our feathered hats. We recant our previous believin'.

Only the bars prevent our final charge on gravity. Suck me, wide one. Beauty is your annihilation of all other meaning. To true is to leave terminating dusts on a vinyl stack of atmospheres, to be creatures who will eat through song for an invite to a place where space bends.

From: "Ode to Black Hole 7"
Reptily, Graduation Day Speech
Hunger Gardens, Low Chanks

Lady McBirth

Hot neighbors' sons with shorn hair empty onto
the street and crawl up the block at night, spray paint
the garage. Reptily mom call police. Neigh-
bors complain, "Therz alwayz trubble over thayr."

She knew it was not at the law that they jeered,
but rather marked her as sodomy doer.
And their votes were against sodomy, not her.

She thought of the way shit stink stays in your skin
and wondered whether that was yet another
shame for mothers.