My World is Shit

Now that I am in the Final
Stages, change seems dumb.
Some say there's been an
encroachment of a parallel
universe, but I fully doubt it.
It's just the ground churning
under us, belching new souls.
My world is shit because I'm old.

Once I had a game, an angle, an exit;
I was up for an ambit, didn't need to score.
Now every lit-crit babe with a publishing credit
Thinks I'm a door to the afterlife.
I can only leave maps and things;
I don't really bring much to the way I live
except my body and a knife.
My world is shit because I murdered Connie.

Missy

Collar of Skulls

When I close my eyes I can see pricks of light in the pattern of the tiny bud cluster on your ficus. They dim in and out and the tip wags like the shamrock marquee on an old border casino. Death gives you a mask of hurt knowing and the joy of helplessness. I see your face in the thick leaves I sink among to steal a smoke. I feel the backs of your knees and neck and bump the hip string of a loin cloth on my heroic groin carrying you inert out of Aztec Town. Ever since you planted a collar of skulls on my breast, ever since crimson footprints first crossed the wake of the blessed, I been able to get up on my knees, and the rest just pulled itself together. I never knew all the carnage was what my own eyes bled while stomping past the innocent. Monster, our arms rattle round the plexus, so many palms turned up with final gifts, a mill, beacon eating wind. Only your power can make me stop destiny and give in.

Kev's Biggest Wanter

Explication

Promise
this song, an avatar

Here in a trophied stone house,
the game cottage, game heads on walls

where palace charnel begins
meat meant for kings is first sacrificed and carved here, enabling their generations

its wet and glittering course,
see silver trays piled with fresh moist legs and chops bobbing up a path to the castle, into royal mouths, in royal peristalsis

I offer my fingertips,
this is where I choose to make a commitment, to reach out to the infinite (future)

blind and pendent ministers
active faith in our love, suspended in darkness

of last-moment innocence.
as yet but terminally unrequited

There in pierced forgiving skins
stacks of tiger hides on which you recline, their beauty has absorbed the violence of penetration

blood charges your perfecture
you on the other hand are throbbing with present life in a space that you experience from the inside out and I from the outside in

and can whisper a promise
blood, an excited pulse, rushes in your ears

while hours press beyond my lips.
that's how you'll remember me, how I'll speak to you, in that sound


Tom

Promise [the MP3]

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."

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

Time on a Stump

The meatgrinder of life had Kev speaking in star patterns and twisting himself up into every single asshole and grilled. Always hot yet or because hurting, Kev's tears were rain for doves. Everywhere Kev turned, there were democratic users of love.

Kidnapped by a buyer/hoarder trick, he stared for a while at the top of a shopping-bag chank: a slice-o-wood clock with its plasticine bark rested on a cardboard ox. Time moved batteried and therefore temporarily unfettered there, on its stump. Bhut whut was to become of us coincidentally, in our later years, sufferers of severe drying?

Kev's Biggest Wanter

Rattlesnake of a Timex

I looked out at Juniper's shadows of ears on the sand,
a Peace symbol. While other dogs might freak out, or
want to always stay in, he found a place he had sniffed
well, a shallow but wholesome place, where he could r
-est in his own skins until summer came. Juniper, a st
-eady berry, you unfold to me each day yor surprises.

Dr. Thong

Your Comfort

You're Just a Symbol

I really think about you too much
and it is not fair, not fair to you to
remain a symbol, the symbol of o-
ur love. Fral I know, yuv changed.

Sumthing that those days will not.
Do. But you? You're just a symbol,
a reminder, a cliche. How can I be
updated on your present lifestyle?

Therz another who may've becum
a symbol of us two; am I he for u?
For I am ready to maintain that ri
-gid pose, your comfort in old age.

Wayne

Promise

Here in a trophied stone house,
where palace charnel begins
its wet and glittering course,
I offer my fingertips,
blind and pendent ministers

of last-moment innocence.
There in pierced forgiving skins
blood charges your perfecture
and can whisper a promise
while hours press beyond my lips.

Tom

Lesbian Stem

Oldentimey couples often chance to sit and chat over checkers at one of the Preservation Society chessboard cubicles chained to Sin-Gaberra Chank. Today Chet and Charlie can't decide which carnival or what ride was the most chilling back in the century before Chang K. Chang was even a mention on the Chama's lips.

Was it Hysteria? Tiny Gun Toter? Envious?

If I had to choose, ventures Charlie, in a pinch? It's Devil's Clit. Devil's? challenges Chet. Charlie: You betcha. Chet: Clit? Charlie: Yep. Ok, just checkin, Chuck. Charlie: Yeah, I know whatchur thinkin: 'The Devil's Clit never choked a man's speech like the coaster over at Chank Dhubbabera.' But it was the cheddar curls, not the attraction. When the commissary cooked 'em crunchy, they cheered you good.

Then they made us colonize Chang K. Chang and opened up the longest ridemall in the wurl. On the Vagina Root, you could have some hairs pulled or catch a load of someone's spittle on your chest; coming off the Lesbian Stem, everyone would be dizzy and hurl no matter what. Yeah, Vagina Root, Lesbian Stem and the curio store, Prosthetics Whore, were all perfect for a second or third date as well as kitty-corner from the bar.

Pandora was just a gaping humid cave with a fog machine, but everyone went in there to pee and avoid the perverts in the Ladies' Room. For some of their ideas, we blamed Perpetratoress, which always had the longest line, and once inside, things just went wild with lists of suggestions on what to do without getting arrested. The only way to exit the Perp tricked you onto the street as if the whole churning circus had suddenly become disgusted and attested, "Yor toxic!"

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

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.

They can Go Back to Hurt you

An agent of anything steps into your life and shows time for what it is: a lie.
Let's take the bullet holes along the side of Ken's sedan.

Pick any vertical line to indicate "now" (Her). Let's say the long crease of the driver's door.

Punctures to the right and left are future and past, for a lack of better tautology.
Inside each dark opening, poorly-captured moments flicker.

On the left, they are ripples of attention. Starlene's prism black lights the steps in hot retrospect:

• Oh what a pommeling he gave that love. He was brown nosing fate.
• Showers ruined the yard sale. Now we know why he sought that.

On the right, they are ripples of motion. Starlene's gravity stones past the splash, dropping wet:

• Must have been some undercurrent make him call his mom the next day: eddy pull?
• In less than a year they've got him surrounded at the Club Martinique-- surprised?

World of Mornings

Sure, there was hope, but you woke up
tired.
Fire bear come flying over horizon.
Insects, reptiles click, split.
Now tell me is or is not,
considering nutrition, a dried apricot
as good as its flesh-fulfilled cousin?
Because everything they wrote
can now only be found in the bone
chalk of those scratched letters,
crystal, canvasses, silver, china.

Wiccan Dipsplit

apparently the blind find me goodlookin;
the unsighted obviously think aighm hot.

just when so many naked people are against me,
aigh need people naked against me, and thayr not.

with a witch's fingers on my scalp,
i can travel to new ages as a scab;

before demagnetizing the last few nodes,
i enjoy a robot's timed sense of moving on.

Hoolie, from Birth of the Mthyuh Preservation Society: When K's Gave up Living and Volunteered for Manned Flight.

Hooptie to Tomorrow

I combed the chanks, all of them, to get housing for me and the bitches. It was the end of the longest Off Season ever, and a lot of what was closed down was going to stay that way. I guess I saw about _ spaces and met about the same number of men.

Phil Barleycorn drove me out to a hive where your fwd view and rear shield look the same. Phil was white and pink with the earnest humor of a man who'd been telling challenging jokes to chillun for all time. Never laid a meal in his own way. He also seemed to be sniffing for lint in my mind as he bragged about sending three zygotes to Pig 'n Tongue U. The rental structure had provided final launching pad for an original pioneer famly whose ultimate jump was remote lordship of these spoils.

"You may have seen it, the death march lot for K's right there at the end of the field, but the wind Never Blows this way," counseled Phil, farting. "They started this hole way back when the chanks were still flush and sweating. Then their heartland became a museum for ugly, militaristic protocols. Everyone who came here wanted badly to be a cog. So they called it God. It's where I'm still living."

Next stop, last rest stop before High Chanks and extremer pointz. RIP!
"Hoolie Roll: Hooptie to Tomorrow"

Thought Wash

Shall I sit outside and smoke by the last hour of sun
Or on the information highway in a cathoid-ray tube?

I prefer to forsake insects, mildew, sorrow
for a measured poisoning by light and booze.

These cancers attack from the outside,
Little Dr. Kevorkians teasing your hide.

These scabs you can't remove but at yor peril.
Death hardens and plugs itself for a while.

Fabrica de Pases

El tiempo: padre mentiroso, padre de gases, tirando tus peditos en pleno rostro, cada segundo toma otro pelo, medida vergonzoso, timo de tela, estafa de nada, de engano, tio; putada, lio, hueco vacio, espiritu, capricio, munecas, idolillo; parasito. plasta. fuera. le paso. me mosceas.

Early to Mourn

Way after the violent gnashing of hard drives in public oracle dispensers had become a given, even a homey reassurance, sucking on a shivstick, Peg could often be heard to bleat, "Well I don't want to live forever, growing a two-thumbed ombligo. I'd rather keep the process movin, movin."

It was comments like these from the deities that began to lead certain ad-hoc temporal realizers to believe that the entire concept of time itself was a hoax and a fraud developed during early civilization to compensate for setbacks in the arms race. Each side was complicit because the scam functioned to shield corpornents, goverations, philosophers from skeptics, artists, cretins to whom they could easily attribute skepticism, artsiness, hypothyroidosis.

In primitive terms, shivsticks are a time machine. More moving happens, more activity in your cavity. Yet not so much as to create a tragic instant bygone. Your consciousness itself progresses to a level of acceptance it may take others decades to achieve in a "time" paradigm. They, in turn, learn early to mourn.

Odd Day

took dump at courthouse
and left

pool had checkered grid waves
like a denture cleaner

true identity of a co-worker
dawned on me

saw self at center of relief map
and sighed

asked for guac when I wan-
ted bleu

pictured you as really
gone, Tom

eyed my own back fat

dogs got early bones

felt a ghost pain that
couldn't be

Love, Syl

Odd Day [the Mp3]