They knew the wheel of life

they wanted to feed their babies with 

my grief like they knew the wheel of

life that their system was wise that

brutality makes way for innocence

by Missy

Somehow, I have to cry

if the id or whut?
could at least let
me a) cry b) read
c) exercise every
day I'd be healed


Ilyn
First Words
Gravel Emergence
(Oaxaca lime pit)

Blue fill

Blue fill creeps along the horizontal time thermometer,
crappy white diamond jiggles in place on pause.
If you leave it too long it'll give up and startle loose the voices.

I'd rather sit and suspend my evening in a fork-tong satellite
than take that same amount of minutes to read your paragraphs.
I like 'em slim, my teeth, lines, rat-a-tat visions.

Control wand seems to send both in and out-way signals,
emotions motor round a color wheel: Our Dad,
Hope to win, dogs, a thousand gut-wrung wages.


Hoolie

surprise vs. inevitability

REPTILY: It's great how you keep going and coming back to life, but it's not the same as reincarnation because it's all in one breath; I know because I am still your blood mistress, and you've only been gone a week, a month. You were just here. Hey, the pink carnation, literally, in your lapel has not finished drying. It's the original carne, horseman.

ILLYN: But uglier, a taking to task of symmetry. Once I tried to retrieve some dry cleaning I'd dropped off in a previous expression. Lou looked up at me and said he was sorry, not that I died but that I had to insult the community and its grief that way, over and over again. These arncho raiments, he said: Might as well stick with the wormeaten pinstripe on yr back. ...It stung.

REPTILY: N' I know how they say that a Craw dive is the only noble way to treat yrself out, that the Mthyuh is hungry and the patriotic gesture is to beg her to eat you first, but how much of a sacrifice, bro...? How much, when you know that it's just a matter of planets moving through space without you, while an uncomfortable recital, dreaded meet-and-greet might be avoided, before you are back in action with yr credit rating through the sea floor and one ear a little lower than the other?

ILLYN: Like a warrior must fight, a dyer must dye, a narcissist must write, I sacrifice my will to live a full single life. As my flesh is torn and burned away by soft-molten and sharp-cool gravel, I accept each day as either vital repair or road to terrble destiny in randomly uneven ration.

REPTILY: Like the fall-and-recover dance aesthetic of early-80's Highchank.

ILLYN: No, not really like that. Unless your critical fulcrum is core theory. Right. Wherein the human body is reduced to a rag doll on a whip handle.

REPTILY: Hot.

ILLYN: Yes.

Swords for Olives

it's a perfick place for us:
where today is gone and tomorrow yet to become;
cheque the other mammals pacing.

locked in a dark ball, some teens'd
scream, grope, roll. All heroes see
night as best, either for rest or manufacture.

then when they grow old, hanging on
and that alone might seem the likely approach,
but no, it's a planetarium, a gyroscope.

Wayne
"I reelie, reelie just don't give a shit, Jan."

stink of morning

stink of morning, clanging buoy, chum and fly
white blind, biceps are visors as you rope, hoist
meat on fire, skin turning, stink of morning

crack of day, foul effusion, stink of morning
every shape throws black in your face
stink of morning, poison rays fan derision

stink of morning, bad july, salty tan
comes a time you can't outrun the line
rabid edge, hot aggression, stink of morning

Illyn

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.

Men's gene

We always believed in the true horrors uncovered of popular feminism, a product of a guilded horror age. While it was so easy to remember what had just happened, not really knowing what to say, it was also easy to remember sunshine and chintz, keeping movement frontal, forward and advanced. But when you see horror over there, you take a second start when you look anew around you. Humans aren't who we thought they were, or whom we made them out to be. Not least of all men. Disappointing. But most of all women: worth celebrating, mourning. But then you get a pendulum. Pig/ saint. Wench/ king. Magician/ witch. Biology itself has been a perpetrator, but all to men's credit as conscientious super-mammal. Created poorly for the modern world, he resorts to a hamster wheel. A hamster cranks out worlds of it's own dark little oblong worldz. In a flashbulb, all tyranny was rotten, harsh. Even eager embra co-dependers were seen as vortice-eyed followers of the missile-phallus. It was Men's gene. Fems had to prove that they had it too.

By Phyllis
Freelance Free-Weekly Filler Filer 4U

sleepy scream

Compared to Donna's pretty prison, Peg's incarceration over at PharmSupply had been much more futuristic and steely unyielding 'cause of both the interior architectural elements of the space and the officious register of her jailers. They were at work, bottom-lit, ghoulish, suited up; the rooms and interfaces boldly angled out of indestructible polyfab. The optimistic, gothic high-ceilingedness suggested a society of builders that would see their curving hallways with concave base molding tunnel through a millennium.

Once as she was taking in a breath between screams, Peg heard a guardian yawning. More splendid a range of emotions could not have dropped from Mthyuh's craw just then. Peg was grateful as if to a nightingale through her cell bars, but also miffed. Was the hard young mercenary jaded, bored. Did his employer weigh that sound down on him with labor, true as her gasps in chains? Did he intentionally hurl a sucking insult.

Then they went back to turning the big wheel of the rack. The basic mechanics had not been altered for centuries, though this was a modernist rethinking. Someone obliged by pulling her hair back so hard as to lift her head, and she could see the level of industrial streamlining possible in cast iron, the high-gloss cleanability of an aquamarine Dyemenkote dip.

Phyllis, embedded

Batch desire

Like when I sunk with the dropping floor on the Circumference Poke at the ridemall, tain only weight that can make you fall but maybe yr composition, auto-dread, and coming back up you could lose your shoes. When you see someone coming down the ramp in their socks afterward, it can all come burning back like lava. Everyone else rising around you in a circle, watching the faces turn from mild surprise at their ascendance to pity, hilarity. What it was now that I think was all the wrong desires, bundled, so that their only gravitational reference was the molten mess far beneathe the crust of Earth. While our heads are stuck by centrifugal force against a wall with a curve, there is always the way that chalk slides down the surface of a board, under the radar of physics.

Ilyn

Lysate

Donna poked at her tobacco bowl with an ankh pin.
So you walk in my sleep?
What? You mean you dream of me?
No, sometimes I open an eye and catch you streaking by on the tile floor in your socks, ninja. You yourself have reported certain nocturnal peregrinations that could only have occurred among my delta waves.
A white mustache of smoke gave her a veil as it rose. Hoolie listened to the flock of windmills cooing beyond sight.
Our bodies --and moments of shared tragedy-- are the thin yarn that in those two places binds us, allows us to roll sharply forward like a squared, spongy wheel.
On the contrary, I believe it is our love of those not present that keeps us in moon-like orbit, that wobbling, borrowed light of lost knowing.
Indeed, her name is tattooed on your wrist as well as my ankle.
Ink is the murkiness that follows. Connie was the miracle, invisible.
I can't see you at all now.
But there's been a Perseid every 15 minutes.
Someone's turned off the bathroom switch.
It's on a timer so's I can check the color of my piss.

Island of Stability

She rubbed the back of my neck while I slapped the bongos. I think it was the best jam I ever had. I found surfaces I had not yet discovered. I played them like an instrument.

The Filter was down, and anything could have happened, but that night she got back her hands: a lady of power and majesty, a real scum bag, perspiring harsh pollen. We were making music.

The Wall of Stress had disintegrated, and our love could flower. This is the way we forged an Island of Stability: her heavy ass and my diamond-like passion, in an open world's vortice.

Phyllis

bent anachronism

I know I can't shake my head too hard. There's been no moon for a couple of nights. Getting used to the high beam flipper in the new hooptie. Waking up in a pool of lipstick tubes at the bottom of the boat told me I'd been in a real bumper. I scratch across the desert pavement on my knees. Jumping cactus smoldering and weeds. Foliage, then fire. A feathered witch pokes at the holey cholla bone with a stick. AAA on the way. Jan, wait for me.

"Wayne, my main enchufe at TRW, protege. You will learn the tricks of trade in charms and powders."

So you are the Chama. They said you were a topless Afro-American in her thirties.

"We will shapeshift and read coals together."

That one says you're hot. Boom! I like you.

"Father."

No...

Ashes and sand blew into ripples around the Chama and took her shadow in the ridges of its trunk. Crickets chattered. Wayne could see the spines. Then he could pull a rabbit out of a hat. Then he could manage his family. Then he could finish his work. Then he accepted two soft-centered suckers from the tow-truck driver. They drove over horned toads, out of the land painting, off MPS grounds. The road was not so black.

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."

We must Hide our Joy

There were survivor barbecues while some of the neighbors walked in thirsty death circles. There'd been no news in weeks that anyone could get. That funny couple the chick with the spindly head and the albino, they showed up around then. She was telling him what to do but also worshiped him with fruits and song. He had a red afro.


Tri-Tip Toaster Oven Cookout

bottle of chili sauce
1 lb meat chunks
Worcestershire 1T
many bay leaves, whole
child's fist full of cloves
head of garlic: teeth are cut free but unpeeled
extra-thick foil

at least 1 hr @ 300
better yet, crok-pot it with a whole pork roast and more of everything, 4hrs high
squish the garlic teeth onto the roll before the meat
do not use the bay leaves out of one of those xmas laurel wreathes
mush the roast into the sauce with a potato masher whatever right there in the crock leaving a variety of chunk sizes for slopping into fresh bread. Makes you want zin on ice.

That's a Fine Boutique...

Years later, Peg has opened an understated dress and fingertip vibrator shop in Upper-West Seersucker Chank. Ted stumbles in on account of a bad map. He can only see her butt as she re-stocks some Pinky Nuke, swinging expertly on a rope ladder. He exits immediately back through the heavy, treaded mudflaps and with a hatpin noiselessly scratches this grievance on the sandstone mouth of the establishment's windward entrance.

...but you think it's time that sweeps us? No, because stasis mocks time and still creates its own results. You think time always liffs the upper hand and therefore exists. Just because you always lose does not mean the victor is abstract. That might even be psychosis: not able mentally to embrace any oppressor as solid. In time's case, it's a setup: a supposedly moving target that's too profound to be understood. Booshia. How do they tell your speed from a traffic helicopter, for example? Paint lines and watch you move across them.

You been scratchin' lats in my path baby? Are you a woma with not much to do but see me spin my wheels in distress? Am I a hooptie tryna tess the curve on a invisible rail chall? You don't think I'm for real? Youda onee one who ever raised a fiss. To me, time is met you knew you lost you crazy kulat-wearin' ruttin' like a hound, afro-grabbin' slag-mammy.

I love you,
T

Trukk Stoppe Ho

Truck-stop Ho:
Truck-stop Ho:
Truck-stop Ho:

Yor aways mad when I leave you or upset when I didn't need you
Little Rembrandt of a paisley weasel, you are a slime right where a
man seeks some lube, chall. When I rent you, I feel all I get is a m-
-all! o' wheezing crine, Tiny. Anchored in whatch-u-whan! (a meal).
Truck stop ho. Truck stop ho. Truck stop ho.

If we can both just agree that you with me, lady, Mother of Evening,
you can leave aside your pleading, rise up and serve me, Muthuh W
-heel. You roll the dough, but someone rounded off the dice, Lucile;
Muthuh Wheel, give yor nights off such a feel, like the bride o' krais,
Muthuh Wheel, Truck-Stop Ho, Muthuh Wheel.

Here in this rain-po puddle, a man can meet a thousand jet-setting
sangle, from all seven corners o' the building; but then what is he h
-olding but his own butt in a butcher-shop case. When in Boulder, h-
ook up with the look-up king of older trade names: The Roller. He a
-ck laik he on TV bowling when he rilly in the gutter.

Trukk Stoppe Ho:
Trukk Stoppe Ho:
Trukk Stoppe Ho.

Trukk Stoppe Ho [the MP3]

When is he coming back?

I used to ask where is he, does he beckon.
But now I know that gone is just a wash.
Now I want to know but cannot reckon
If Ilyn's coming back, or is he lost?

One sighting happens ery WD,
but never all up in a bed with me.
No chance because he's uglier than shit
the danger of a shoe that doesn't fit.

My Ilyn sends his pow'r of gravity
to meet the Goddess of Infinity
who reaps his tenderness as an hors d'oeuvres,
and vomits his remains into an urn.

The urn is dumped each Friday on some rocks;
Then, as from an undertaker's table,
And soon he is quite able, Ilyn walks,
Hideously marred by private journeys

Through intimate Halls of Our Intender.
Where there is scalp, red hair grows back. Where a
Crime left sin, a hymen fills in. You say
Wheel of Life; I say Vortex of Gender.

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.

Connie Soda

No one remembers me, I am a sister.
Sometimes they call me Commie Splices.
Bearded Lady, Zygote Birther, Goddess of Propriety,
Muff of Fur, Topless Coal Walker, Native-American Squaw,
Mucky Muck, Two Decades of Feminism: Dual Tank Treads;
Food Covetor, Wisdom Mist, Virgin, A Sentence Said [A.S.S.].

• I could have made my way up. There have been investigations.
• I got left aside, maybe the story strangled me in its turns.
• I have a weight as a One Crossed Over, but even the boatman trumps.
• I have no control over the situation beyond the sweater I was wearing.
• Ted found me dead weight or weightless on a very good mattress.
• My first husband was a scoundrel like all Southern men.

Father bleated on preaching of coin-slot plotters and drones,
They impeached him in the middle of a Period that was Misunderstood.
Show respect for the drifting cadres, growing, of Robed Men sifting in
from the forests and deserts and Fallowed Lands.
If you see a One called Ilyn, with a Red Afro, tell'im I'm his chillun.
Somewhere along the road, I could be Born Again like an albino I know.