Tabaquismo

Now yr a stranger with a bold affect; then you wr showing surface vein color, not structure. You've recently had a haircut. What's changed, have you shaved yr beard?

Nope. Juss takin care o' myself.

Yor swaggering folksiness is convincing. And even more for someone from the high chanks.

Oh you think you know me.

That was the idea of the day-long interview.

That was a job candidate in career apparel.

Who are you, Tom?

Sylvia is my wife. I smoke all day. I must be Gawda Fahr.

Is it like being in flames then, your marriage?

Not for me.

She stays around for lack of imagination?

Because we run a pyramid scheme, Wayne. Duh. Me, you, Sylvia. We got the shivaccount for the greater lower chanks. She'll be making shivrep soon. Why do you think she stays.

And you?

I'm going on No-Shiv next week, Wayne. We lost our shivstar to open release. Hardly no one wants the shiv unless they could have a degree instead.

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

Worship Section

It says here that on Cabaret Night the Chama was serving cocktails to a crowd of tourists in a Carol Channing wig and wacky makeup. When she looked into one of em's eyes and saw a hatchet murder. Now she's coming out as having seen her own ghost through psychic time travel. Sports N' Sex Crimes Bugle is expanding with a section for worshipers. Tom?

Tom stepped out of the bathroom like a robot, glowing in purple light. He seemed to have a bumping soundtrack. Sylvia stood and let the paper sag and watched him stroke the spines on the back of his neck.

Dogreeve

Chemical Prayer

I can still think even though most of my muscles are under remote control. This reminds me of an office job I had while I could still cover my spines. Repetetive movement. I could staple six reports at a time. My finger muscles got strong playing canasta with Sylvia and Tom. If they could see me now. Soaring over a canyon. Bringing home lost ducks. Men. To my nest. To PharmSupply.

It started as an offering, because I believed in my culture's nirvanic system. Here, look what I've found. I am a cat with a bird, but no. A bird with a cat. Then the Mthyuh Preservation Society ruled to let the corporations infiltrate the Shiv, and then... It doesn't matter if you are a lesbian when... they are force working and resting you, cramping your style.

My African-American news anchor husband and mulatto kids: waiting in some hiya-percha. I am employed, enslaved, an appliance plugged in. Retrieving robot falcon. I try to be gentle, but they have fitted me with metal. Plucking an individual from a park or deserted place, there is almost no sound. One must clap one's beak around those who insist on retreating indoors.

All I want is to get my puppies to safety. You implanted your motivator chip right near that instinct. Sometimes they dangle from my toenails and mouth both as I sightsee my worn track. One day I'll find my kids and have an operation. I'll go back to them and explain how tied up I've been. You told me I could retire in a temple and invite all my friends.

Peg

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]

Hooded Meatball Face

Christian Giggles

She had Peggy the way she was because the birth occurred in a Crack. Water broke on a reddish brown golf course where giggling Christian children knelt bare-kneed in the dewy Spring mash with their parents and their clubs in a prayer circle. But there was a temple. It seemed a shrine to a hooded, faceless meatball head. The goofy children were giving Sylvia a bad labor, even as she recognized their clothing from a missionary barrel back at Shivchurch. Her guide, Rajkumar, had been a Living Child Goddess, and then become a caddy, then a midwife. The caddy-midwife and Tom made a human rickshaw for Syl and her unborn and carried them into the dark opening of the shrine. All its surfaces were thick with a paste made from human spittle and sacred blossoms of the Tagetes erecta. The ridges were the giant stone elephant trunk whose waviness was deep as hilliness under trees. Peg spilled forth onto these mossy undulations. Something like disco music began to play. Her special features, the spines, scales, woofers and tweeters were like mother of pearl then.

I translate this knowledge from the daughter of Rajkumar, now a domestic I've named "Miss Sprint." It is said as well that the birth occurred in a direct trajectory between the game house of conception and Peak Fordamall Chank.

That temple was a crack as sure as the sidewalk next to the bookstore at Sylvia and Tom's community college is a crack; they know and they sticky progeny are subject to fluctuation. I know. The Pegyuh's brother was my form-shifting, all-night lover.

Dr. Donna "Donna" Thong

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

Pothos

Gravity Station

I, conversely, felt nails through my insoles.
Maybe pothos shoots trying to get in.
Life to a woman requires a fine screen.
Only songs make a magnet of the floor.
Was your question no more than repartee?

Look, you, stud, spaceman, spelunker of holes.
We can make a bed with thousands of chicks.
Sign up the throngs in your gism as pets.
When can I make room for your steady love?
Children have rattles, and so do your lungs.

Syl

gravity station

it presented deep, but there was no pull.
a random, unvertiginous marker.
in lieu of a beacon, hoary barbed wire.
vandalists had no imagination.
you paused and asked me, “What kind of babies?”

a farmer’s wife walked towards us in the dust.
a tiny goat hung pressed behind her arm.
liver and tripe rocked in my cavities.
our knees bumped along with the potted road.
the highest peak in the world was a dot.

Tom

Homesick for Sorrow

Peggy, daughter, godlike
horror; I miss dangling
from yor claws

Don't you have even one arm
on reserve for yor father?
you can hold onto so many

chakras, tendons, memories.
at yor birth as an adult already
we stifled our vomit be-

cause you were ourz, woma,
shocking yolk-sucking
bird of technology:

your talons carried me,
so were a part of me, my
migration into yarns,

lies, wintry buff salad of
fur and cries, wild and
concern with pre-history,

peggy... peggy... peggy...

Love, Dad

My Husband is a Rickshaw Driver

Krais I think me air bladder's full, Syl.
Well just don't take to the skies, my love. And walk behind me.
Nothing like a brisk and life-risking stroll t'the hotel after Thanksgiving with the savages.
Do you refer to the motorcycle dodging?
And the blackout and the open pits and filth piles.
Happy Turkey Day, Tom. If yor lucky yule get eaten too.
Did you catch the framed photo of the dumpy colonists and dead tigers?
Hideous. One lain atop another. Lifeless as rugs.
And what about the way they announced our consumption from the minibar to all the other guests in the lobby.
You are ashamed?
There's such as thing as discretion.
In drinking or in collecting drink's wage?
Bastards will gouge you with their handlebars to avoid a stone.
Or maim a dog.
But we've come so they may see, remember.
Or for fear there's nothing for us anywhere.
Yor maudlin as a milk-begging cripple.
Yes, everywhere cows roam free, and yet...
Here we are.

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

After No-Shiv

Peg just home from Pharmsupply Focus Group would squat and pee if you even touched her collar. We finally got it and threw it out. She seemed liberated. Our reign would be one of logic. At first a butter-soft Gucci leash gently looped behind the neck did the trick in that she limpingly obeyed as in mock Stations of the Cross. It was Pathetic.

Now all Syl needs is to loll the thing against her thigh and Peggy knows what it means. To bed. To your den. In a cave.

She'll be back to fully verbal soon, and on to childbearing. We feel she wants to whisk the ones she's got off to a cliff nest and wish them well. She must be stopped.

Hystadelic Rejoinder

Sylvia: I don't want to put away dishes with you while you're in your underwear.

Tom (turning toward her in grey boxer-briefs with a sauce pan in one hand and a rat's tail shivknife sharpener in the other): I want to open up some opportunities for you. To talk about what you saw. I know I was all wrapped up in my time experiment, and nothing registered. Not time. Not even horror.

Sylvia: Time lies, you know. It's a liar. Put on some baggy pants and we'll talk.

While waiting, Sylvia stands absentmindedly pressing what seems like her taint against the back of a faux-Rococo dining room chair. It boasts a darkly varnished hardwood patina, and it's downright cocky about its Shorn Crushed Red borganna brusquely shielding all the parts on which one might normally leave prints. Bare-flesh contact with wood, tile, lead causes Sylvia to auto-hypnotize and occasionally seizure. Even through knits, that kind of pressure triggers a not unpleasant hystadelic rejoinder.

Since that first week when Tom began trying to explain his "announcement" about his "Pax on Us" goddess coming to save the middle chanks, it had been over. Now crime was their bond. Tom's agreement with Collie was so strong, the power of his surrender so profound, that they could only dance with the beckoning animal that kept them stepping on. Tom singlemindedly distribute shivplate, stone compasses, Hopinaskipina for his corporment sponsors until his ears bled for lack of Filter of Loathing. Everything was dephallocentri-size now.

Tom: I'm back.

Sylvia (opening her eyes): Oh.

Tom: Are you calm? Why don't you sit on that for a moment.

Sylvia (lowering slowly, bracing herself on the borgana armpads): It was a bird.... It was obscene. You never believed me; no one did, and I lost my job. Now our whole county can't leave, and our essential compositions have shifted dramatically from gaseous to chemical.

[FLASHBACK: Going over the conversation in his mind, Tom recalls a strobe light of important snippets, a bucket of chicken, Patron shots. He squints, and spits. All he can see is her lips talking. What he hears makes him want to make her stop.]

"...one wing, but like a cape. You could say pleathery. White veins...

"...I thought I saw it again last week, but high up. It looked like a letter K. Going backwards. Flying with its legs spread eagle.

"Are you listening, Tom?"

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.

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]

Someone has to Occupy the Boundaries

We're not here to fight the other side, but rather
to stretch the leash of Our Own as taut as can be.
Someone has to occupy the farthest bound'ry
in the paradox of interdependency.

But they are turning us out, Syl, unencumbered--
Free to wander like meaning seeking a structure.
We could make a human chain to hem in others
like a padded room where they ricochet in fun.

Nothing's holding us back now that the kids are gone.
We take to a panting tourist road, The Driven.
Forward and Backward are twins in our time mirror.
How'd we win a life beyond our own destruction?

Re-Cap'm

• Reptily student of Tom, drop out to be a thug.
• Sylvia Tom wife who teach hystry.
• Sylvia spot a prehysteric raptor in a tree on campus.
• Reptily stumble into a dimensional crack near the bookstore.
• Tom and Sylvia need someone to clean up their baby's shit.
• They get Reptily cumovah after school.
• Reptily sing funny songs change the baby inside out.
• Reptily husband beat her knock her down.
• Baby Peggy roll naked in nanny blood.
• Peggy have Hoolie an Connie wit Ted.
  
• Ted a black man wit blue-eye so stud they make him a newcastr.
• Awso Ted sighburn have some whyte.
  
• Peggy beg him call her he whyte bitch, which cd keep the graft togethr.
• Ted say his woma mus respek hersef.
  
• Peggy leave Ted anda kids to lead a laifa wanton sexy raw abandon.
• Soon she a goddess an fuel her own religion back by Pharmsupply.
• The shiv make a reaction to Reptily blood so she can Know All.
• 'Cep where are the chilluns.
  
• Tom a local distribution rep, corrup, pathetic.
• Reptily kids, two son, stay home with they brutal father, a snake charmer by trade.
• Reptily get to be a holy milk maid for been the nanny of the Pegyuh.
• She start a scam with her moms to whip up th'whorshippers an pass a plate.
• They can't retire now, they slave of the temple in pertectif torcher.
• A volcano nearby, result of The Crack, take on flesh-like characeristics.
• Likewise, Pegyuh and Hoolie's blood examine by geologiss.
• Reptily (now name Chamatilly in her holy extrak) exhibit the hideous, scaly psoriasis monstruosus that cause her to resemble, when a shadow fall just so, a flying lizard.
• Connie did be normal, but now she dead. They think it was Ted, become a unabash pimp in hope of retrieve his true luf an finee make a home.
• Boaf Ted an Hoolie rilly hot.

Laf'n Heyl

Peggy roo da lanz
Chama roo da ska.
Peggy got da man
Chama kep d'chal.
Chilun wuna mom
Mama wuna man
Manee tayka bryd
Brydgo offwit Tom.
Tom wurkata skoo
Skoo a doe da heyl
Heyl is fulla birdz'n
Birdz hep telda tayl.

Naughty Somalians

When the hooded one arrives on his apple cart, steps down with a naked scythe?
When sudden death occurs there is a strong initial shock, and then healing begins. A major illness will extend the period of strong exposure and be more likely to create permanent collateral damage. Beyond length of exposure, intensity can fluctuate and climb, stressing out a worshiper's innermost marrow.

Are there any interactions or serious side effects?
Illnesses that provoke secondary expressions of violence, scatology or other dementia deepen the horror, widen the suck of the spinning drain of death. When multiple careers of morbidity overlap, especially in a close social network, death can stomp up and down, a sticking period key, a repeating decimal of dead.

Why do they keep them so long, and wouldn't it be more merciful to kill them immediately?
Well, the fact is that if push came to shove and we'd have to admit it, we kinda like having them around for as long as we can. It's like sitting on yr balls. We grow accustomed to their valiant little defiances; their quirky pronouncements and curses; their cute, spirited jabs from the sidelines. We know how under-it-all dependent they really are on our goodwill, and that makes us fuzzy.

What is your view on the abolition of Blood Sac?
It seems to keep people calm, especially the young mothers for some reason. Nobody needs to say a word, as long as we know it's happening and we can go to see for ourselves whenever we want. In fact, I hear they've been poorly attended of late. Sure, the opposition pretty much gave up after they couldn't get a retraction on the Sac they did on that what was her oh Chang K. Chang. That was because she was such a beloved living maiden that for her to "only milk Mthyuh in hell always" indicated selfishness on the part of the Preservation Society and maybe even envy slippin out some of the high preistesses while we know that's just potty. It's a controversy of the past, certainly. Today's worshiper is just bored with it. It may eventually be won by the inane above humane, as they say. It's all about cultural stewardship for me, and that's what I've shown you crossing over. I say get in my boat and I'll take you there and now here we are. Now there's someone can bring you on to the next big bend.

Tom
CEO, Pharmsupply
A Year to Another Year