Please don't do that, scar tissue

please don't do that, scar tissue

don't be the weed chokes his host

that's what free radicals are for

i want you to do the opposite of

arming up, favoring one side, 

drama queen, sky-falling chicken

it's ok to relax now, even to 

give in, stop resisting, live

knowing that you saved a life

by Braino

simulation v. reflection

God must have chosen me to be the one to see the beauty of reality:
seven vestal hurricanes, a golden pestilence and a billion hot and hun
-gry begging mouths awaiting in the halls of kingdom fracking come.

The way he makes a give and take is by hanging my tits out the win-
dow and walking by and saying you've a pornographic face, Dolores.
Whenever I'm doing cartwheels across this victory grass o him n his,

be certain to listen while I grunt out the hydrolic parts that drain energy.
Some say there exists a continual mechanism that can be discovered or
invented that would perpetuate the cycles of joy and ascendance, amen.

by Ken

Cooling center

I'll never forget what my very first Spanish teacher confided in me after many many sessions. I had signed up in hopes of intercourse with a busboy at the taberna in the basement of my workplace. You think I've got cheap furniture. She told me that all of hers was folding. Folding furniture. And she had a scar. That was visible during our meetings. But that wasn't all, not just the scar. There was... some facial... displacement. Not by birth. And muscle wasting.

I simultaneously translated the following from an instructional video tape during one of our lessons:

Once global warming sets in, I'll have to take my babies to a cooling center.

Then the señora wept into her dyed cotton crepe jacket.

Hunger's always a bran new idea

Kep dreaming of a patteren or a mark:
from when they drove me spanking from poverty?
Regardless of how I'd been, I would be holy.
The gowns and injections, the bars.
I had to learn to twirl like a goat on a pin.

There were circles, lines, and curved lines.
Faces aimed at me filled the biggest caves.
At least no one marches a goddess around by the elbow.
She pulls on ropes, reveals tureens of fragrant smoke.
Preservation Society pays her in cash from the plate.
There is public housing for these special creatures.

Wayne, I'm awake.


Chamatilly, to the rescue

Gaping laxity

Wayne and Jan's first year went by in Jan's Dad's four-clawed bed above the family-owned mortuary cosmetics forge:

"You saved me."
"I bought you."
"I hustled you."
"You made me."

Wayne and Jan had saved one another, but each still carried the shame of the lower chanks. Wayne's lowest impulse was to disrespect Jan because he bought her in an alley. Jan's lowest impulse was to disrespect Wayne because he grew up in that alley. In moments of doubt, absent parties were heavily considered:

"He bought you."
"I brought you to him."
"But you're mine."
"He owns us both."
"Let's have kids."

Jan wanted to adopt the ugly child who had been spying on them from under a truck. Wayne said ok if they could take her brother too, a baby covered in scars. Reptily explained that the tot in its wooden crib was really her uncle, who had been 27 only a few days earlier, before leaping from a cliff-side prayer station into Mthyuh's roiling gut.

"He's a re-baby."
"I can guide his nature."
"She could be beautiful as a topless aframerican in her 30's."
"There's something in yr daddy's lab we can use to cure those scales."

The expectant couple had to step back through the crack tho to find the chillen. There were hunnerds of years of folds and recriminations. Jan and Wayne were not afraid because the momentum of their luck in meeting had brought them safely to righteous lives and prolly forced the muscles of time into a gaping laxity.

Hotter Black Stud Thanever

Peg and Ted approach the Altar of Forgetting.

I dint think we'd meet like this chile. I brought you here for questioning.
Please make it stop.
I can hardly hear your squealing now, silly. Be real.
OK, I kepper at the Squiggles Motel off the innerchank.
It took this much pain to let me know.
If youda showed up in yr own hair, y'ought'n hafta bring the eaters.
Don't get folksie on me now, Mr. You talk perfek on the oracle.
It's reading chile.
I know it is.
When will you let me go.
When I unnerstan wai.
She was going through the change like you did. I was hyperempathic.
Connie got some bones in her back?
One got caught on a spring in the mattress.
Hee-yuh! The Pegyuh laughs and coughs yella mucous.
I loved her so much, Peg. I swear it was a differnt part of my Braino.
I'm sorry I had to fight deception with deception.
Will I recover from this?
You will be a hotter black stud thanever.
Thank you baby.
An you dint killer neither?
No, woma! You needa ass me that?

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

Scald Lines

Reasonable Person

I sometimes call upon the powers of the universe for no reason. But six nights in a row we smelled smoke curling in the blow hole. Six times we felt our bodies screeming NO. But we are still whole. Connie

Affective Filter

While the Chama is in training, I do reconnaissance with flakes. To bring down the affective filter, we build caldron platforms, watch the aurorealis in the twilight, passing giant bongs of shish. All the while I can take the temperature of the chillun while tickling them, whispering passages from Northrup Frye into their pointy ears. Some days She'll ply me for coordinates. After feed school, I'll be using her guide data to find the colonies. I give; the Chama takes. We'll help each other. Phyllis

Wind Quake

A cloud changed into dragon shapes and we must have been experiencing some high winds because the whole chank system quaked, and the shadows seemed to turn down, swooping into invisibility. This is the current that rules our skies and protects the Homeland. When hailstones the size of medicine balls start splashing the soup, they make scald lines. Flakes are making bets on target-shaped diagrams and debris field calculations. We expect a big attack soon. Mike

Canned Corned Beef and Cream Corn Casserole

Chama and Ilyn hid out in the dark cabin. After a while they started asking each other what time it was and then after a while longer they stopped answering. Chama explained later, "We felt that what happened had certainly been important, but we were nevertheless left dumbfounded. Then we began to chafe at the practice of assigning significance to events that were painful and therefore disturbing but really no more than blips of chance on a wheel. The filter wasn't working and a few of the flakes had already been carried away. We could hear commotion, heavy things dropping on pavement. The safest thesis statement? 'You just never know.' But also the most unsatisfactory. Then we decided we just had to break down and create meaning, like the opposite of breadcrumbs, tossing out floating disks on which to step across the Crack. Meaning was in our heads. That was what we were born and trained for: this was our moment to shine a light, as if, and leave nothing in our wake because there was nothing to leave. Everyone in fact paid us for that. Ilyn hurried and thought up some songs. I scarified and painted my chin. We found a canned corned beef and cream corn casserole in the freezer."

Yard Fulla Bullhedz

This yard held promise, yet
it's fulla bullhedz an stink c-
-abbage. Dogs trot announc
-ing their pleas, half hoping
not to feel the extra glee of
pierced paw pad n' extrusi-
on. One of them has dug a d
-eep meditation lodge near
the barbecue for her needz
on nights where everything
itches.

Hostile environment
-s breed pain alone; not ev-
en able to feed on fire-feeling-
fire combativity, a desert ca
n non-chalantly spit venom
in every direction, not even
hoping to hit a hi-pt. target
or formidable co-tormentor directly.
Alkaline passions blend back in
to their backgrounds more easily than
pollen in pus or even eels in a floating
salad. Many living, feeling sentient entities which appear
to be inhabitable environments on the surface and maybe
even maintain their status as land in some logs and directories
will and can smoke you out, stink you, burn you with special
tannins reserved for outrecular incursions which are felt, appre
ciated, and then expertly doused with too much sun plus a poi
son that react with strip-nekt beings left out in the direct rays.

Note left by one of the neighbors or previous tenant.

Monster Poinsettia

In this forest we give fear, alms to the Begging Rajah, who straddles a red-eyed dog named Shab. M' lord, your palms once carried, gave Vajras as gifts, cupped milk curd and batteries. Once, riding home to the Moist Pinkish Cave From a tour of generosities, which were your Fetish, you came upon a poinsettia as high as The Fordamal Chank, at Chukka. Its star-shape Mouths bobbed in thickets of plaited wondry; It's hunger smelt rough and good and buttry; But as your fingers slid thru the crinkled folds In bliss, there was a neuro-chemical stab, Your eyes rolled, and the Monster Poinsettia's Incisors chopped your hands off at the wrists.

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.

Queen's Ass

Had three docs look adit. One was this Tattooed Urologist called Don out on Red Light Highway. Claimed to be an operator. Said my prostate was too small. I gave him The Slip, Dad's Toilet Kit Gaping behind the Front Seat.

Second was a Happy Orphan fraid he'd find an Archetypal Angry Parent if he asked me to Drop Trow. His contribution was Advisement to Do Nothing, but that only Makes Time Stop; A Man Has to Act.

I listen to the little voices inside me for when I really Want to Cream: My Dead Posse.
They said check out the Queen in the Filling Station. They moaned her name into their hats.

Low Star

Low star, pull your pants up
Low star, slippry and dense
Low star, walk the rooftops
Low star, impervious.

Because Kevin Reynolds experienced the miserable smoking child cardiologist as a deity, he overcompensated its malice with allowances, which were tithes. The meat divinity could slip along the gums of the spa mouth, a critical tongue clucking a roller-coasting ticker tape of praise and affront, while Kevin stood locked and branked in one spot twixt therapeutic jets and offered up a stance which looked relaxed (on a commercial for a 900 number or a mustang ranch).

Low star, a mud bottom
Low star, or a searchlight
Low star, banana trees
Low star, not high season.

Kevin looked like a statue in a grease fountain lamp, with stray dog hair, hanging on a chain. Stitching through conversation and anaesthesia, the skin-masked and sterile stethoscope imp had trapped him in a crib of adoration and scorn. The bars were taut suture wire, twisted like candy canes or stripers on poles, down which the serum ran in dizzying regular spiraling drips. A suffering physician took Kevin Reynolds's needful swell under advisement with the assumed entitlement of a faith healer rigging a magic trick or something you could plug into a cigarette lighter.

Low star, where are you now
Low star, surface drifter
Low star, moth ball in pop
Low star, gravid ardor.

When he awoke afloat in four-hundred-thread-count sheets, the message indicator on the telephone flashed like a red lighthouse beacon. There was pea seed in his hair, and the oracle was still ignited, drumming out that morning’s urgent crisis. There seemed to be no air, just a tobacco-y sealant which even caught the future and held it still. The Other Presence had left this disco-cabana world reemed and vacant as a church. Kevin Reynolds was once again a gentleman alone in society, but his manhood was broken in two.

Low star, you were fragile
Low star, melted cupcake
Low star, bloody s-curve
Low star, meanderer.

Maundy Friday

Won't even roll over when I shuffle into the room, but they on they knees bathing my feet when I stoop to weep. Go away, M'Lady; go away, Missy La-La. Gonna put you bitches to work one day. When I feel depress, you shake your tails like a single kaleidoscopic Goddess of Asses. I want to turn your force on my enemies. Stanky bitchcunt of infinity. Love weapon. Merciless forgiver. Virgin of recycling. Inundation. Burning saliva. Breath that cuts and scars in rosettes. Christ command me! How much time have I spent in bed? It's a Maundy Friday.

Word Hospital

Let's face it, Braino is bifurcated and like an ass in so many other ways, but it's the only organ that can speak, so it's able to tell me how its feeling unlike the others. And it does. I'm just telling you what it told me:

"I'm tired of being burned. After a time in here, I feel like life has been a scarification process that's not voluntary and leaves its mark over me where I have to sit cradled in bloody bone, which is as insulting, really, as Grab Bars on a Tub. Even though I know I prolly cun't survive in any other varn'mt, and that the source of my grievances comes with the territory, I want you to know that it's painfol; it's so painfol.

"Remember the farm. The immaculacy of her housekeeping juxtaposed with pigs. The bath radiated Lush Rose only Mildly Undermined by Shit. The towels were hard and plush. Always at two, something just murdered outdoors roasting indoors.

"Pretty dirty air balloon over our smokin' queen at the Motel 6.

"I could show you thousands of slides; why do you insist on spending time with others?

"FYI, I may be passing along statements that were originated by a second party and fashioned specifically to sound as though they were my own earnest and spontaneous utterances."

Ted, reporting from The Crack

"Weird things happen in The Crack. Perverted things."

K's Rule my Emotion Sickness

Reptily because she developed the incompatibility early on before her shivpowers were implanted against the K-Names her force shield would now remain up always, even though the K's were again taking blood with the local alliance.

"Even standing facing one o' them full on, I feel a nauseation. I have to turn away and pull feathers over me."

Prepping now for Volca, only a few months away, unsettled matters become a concern. But then what wud scarification rites be without a scar. She shuddered thinking of the letter and where it would be place.

Once in a Hole

Once in a hole the ancients used to pass drugs through to the next cavern, I heard the ritzy neighbor lady screaming, wife of a famous author, not really screaming but loudly, loudly speaking: "What a bunch of shit, honey. Well. That's... what a lot of shit, darling." I believe she was speaking to her daughter, who could not match her volume. It occurred to me how that kind of feedback could have been helpful to one in a place, at a time.

Swarm of Eaters

Chamatilly, a topless and comely African-American woman, 35, bowed from the waist and allowed the tip of her tongue to dab at the inscribed shivplate wafer sewn into the bottom hem of her skirt. When she stood up, all of her thoughts were gone.

She began to chant:

?u-bri' nitu' uhznao'? u-bri' nitu' uhznao'? u-bri' nitu' uhznao'?

She was practicing for Swarm of Eaters. Nearly her entire left side was covered with a dense forest of SOE scars. She had stepped up to the box, paid her tithe, and submitted to the ravenous creatures in the tiny, decoratively-shaped openings three hundred and eighty-eight times now, voluntarily.