Gedditfaidit

you try to get a little exercise
we put a liddle uh in the walk, babi
we no longa walk across town or up
and down and up the staircase of the
big city laif we chillin in suburbs in
the lakeside or fireside or rurl-militry
industrial chal, we got the firey crops
and jetting blue studs with their gleeming
sex appeal and rubber and steel, we got
greens and beets and subtle kill, beef,
cockatiel and swan, sparrows, cranes,
ptero-dactyls, reefer, guano, beans and
elevators, but only for grain, escalators
that feed poisons and metal to your brain
through every cavity we got the mill but it
aint for gaining strenth, if you get ill
you can try to catch yer breath waiting in
line with the wretched millions bleating to
break free from whut, mexico, bulgaria,
illinois and Pee, Wisconsin. we gotchur
brefass rolled up ina puffed up corn tor-
tilla ana cyanide wafer, movie stars in
hum vees an lemonade vests ducking into
the trailer half the day traina rest wal
da extras stay out na heat practicing they
no lines at all, practicing being: in lines,
not having: lines but just standing, extra-
like ina shadow of a trailer, not evena
trash-level environment by Mercan standers.

Flipping Bacon Naked

Meat turn three taiymes
d'mo likely da burnya bb.
mai verge day cn be prr-
deen tinse, th'out no hep
frm th'nvirenmnt. yo be-
ss ment wurds? only mk
me frgitcha waleye focus
own cookin brefuss chall.

Thanks to God There's Something Uncommissioned by My Dominion

Thank God There's Something Uncommissioned by My Dominion.
There are free lands to ore and sow, where I encourage you to go.
While not outcast, you see, your state is remote and unprotected.
I can then fairly and humbly reason that I too am beholden to Her.

Mike's Swimming Blog, Day 66: I am Keeping this House Alive

try locking your ankles together in the deep end;
see what you naturally do to survive. dancing yor
way out of a situation can save your life if it is sw-
imming. notice also that as you merman yor way
to safety, you swim like a fish, but flap yor arms
like a bony bird-reptile. preservation society helic-
opters could mistake you for a flying reptilian bird
entering our space from a watery third dimension.

Mkidza Mlahf

Mike had his back jammed up against a Cheap n' Simple hardytile wall. His GPS marked him as on grid and viable. He got on his walkie. "Theodore twenty," he murmured. "Theodore twenty, Ted over."

"Come in co-man," Ted drove stoically, understatedly, heartily home yet with such relief in his voice. "What's it like."

"I can tell you it's different. Funny. I feel a will, a desire. My nerves are racing. While I am aware of all that is bitter and cloying, I am circumsized from any direct impact."

"And the sexualsides?"

"I beg your pardon."

"Ok so then."

"I am not a native of this place. I can only co-exist through the most basic of commonalities: Shivweek, Chart a Planet, pet-door procreation."

"I wish you well. But you know... Your getting out. All of us will suffer less as a result-- not only you."

"If you reckon."

"I reckon your mommy was a stripper."

"Yeah. Her kids were her lahf. That's wah ah wuz bornd nekket."

Undergrounded

Tom dreamt that he stooped over and did a somersault in the air and kept tumbling upward until he was flying flat out over the clouds looking down at what one of us might see looking out the window of a modern airliner even though neither he nor anyone else had yet been in that spot and lived. He looked at the bumps and smears and veins and trails and hanging mists and cracks and wrinkles suspended in the complicated vapor scape and decided that, as a part of nature, as he, as well as his language were a part of nature that it, as much as anything else that he could speak or otherwise create, must have meaning.

If he strained his neck, much as if one of us, a taller one of us, would have to do to see out the window of a modern airliner all the way to the horizon, he could see the line between the cloud cover and the sky and this too spoke to him; it meant that there was indeed a line, a limit. He had been drinking a little bit that night and feeling still emotional, like someone slammed back into the world after they thought they were already dead, so a high sound came out from the back of his throat as he slept, like a teakettle, and burning water squirted from Pink Squishy pads in the corners of his eyes.

The concept was since he was a natural animal and the clouds that hung in the sky below him or the air that he breathed were also natural, just as natural was the language which grew out of him, that he spit and spewed, as Real as Phlegm, and it would be arrogant to think there was no meaning in any of it.

When Tom woke up, it turned out he actually was on a plane. He sighed and saw his breath on the glass of the little oval window. He realized that some of his previous breaths might even be contained in the broken-up Chunks of Orange and brown clouds he was flying over now. There were veins of snow on the Brown Dirt that covered the planet west of the Chanks. The White Veins seemed to follow the water runoff. He could probably see millions of trees from that vantage point. When snow became general, water running was marked with the absence of snow. He had not yet seen an animal, but as far as he could see there was only terrain with trees and rocks and snow, and then no rocks, which seemed like a place where animals would want to go.

Warm Green Monolith

Tom was walking down a wide empty Dhubbabera windy boulevard, his pants flapping. It was disorienting not to have to go anywhere in particular except what one had planned out for oneself, and that type was the most breakable of oaths.

So his thoughts took over. Only when he forced himself to admire the towering desert chank, blurred with a haze of spring olive verdance, did he feel that he existed as himself in that place, and in any case, that was not a pleasant thing. His mind operated as a spring this way, snapping back almost audibly after an intensive moment of pessimistic concentration before the sharply pending withdrawal. A whip. You wouldn't always want to be the object of that studied, cringing fronting off with reality.

So when a young German widow, furtive, herself disoriented, chilled by the wind in the shadow of the warm green mountain, blurted out, "Are you familiar here?" he saw the look of fright on her face and didn't want to be the cause of something like that, so he deliberately brightened up his mood, from within, allowing her innocence and vulnerability to spur on a sympathetic view of life, a view of life's delicateness, which ended up showing in his face and reassuring her.

It's back that way, he pointed. See the golden building? She'd asked him for the casino.

Then his walk continued and he did not snap immediately back into internal patter. He was crossing the shadow line on the sidewalk. Wind seemed to buffet him from all directions. There was brightness and bright color, magenta blue pink green yellow blossoms and their fragrance. As water sprang into his eyes stingingly, he imagined all of the dead who loved him standing in chorus and encouragement. But also in envy.

He felt responsible to use all of his senses, just for their sake, for a few moments longer.

I Feel You Mthyuh

Ted has returned to the laboratory of Dr. Donna Thong, who has become his regular interlocutor.

"You know I stopped being afraid of wild dogs when I was in France. Aix en Provence. They would come after you circling, instinctively, not even looking at one another, only at you. Perhaps because it was not a conscious strategy, but rather an externalized brain operation of some deeply-tucked, pea-shaped descendant of the jellyfish that has forever been able to interface directly with the outer world without having to go through the conscience, the thus-organic and seamless nature of their movements had a lulling quality that seemed to hypnotize both hunter and prey, dragging them into an even wider and remoter scheme, neither with nor against their wills."

"...Ted, isn't it? Uh huh. Wasn't that a comma splice?"

"One night I was really scared when we took a walk on this country road? We were camping out on this guy's farmland? And these dogs started running toward us. They looked like big, black and white Dobermans."

"Oh," said Donna. "Did they start circling you? Did you throw a rock?"

"How did you know? That's what happened. That's all you have to do..."

"Is throw is rock, yes, I know-- that used to happen to me and my friends a lot when we'd cousin up all summer and hang out behind the bottling plant in Greensborough. It was green there."

"Yes, of course it was. And that is my point-- there were probably plenty of rocks. Yes. Well you see, when I was out near Olde Mthyuh this week after work just clearing my head? There were no rocks at all. Just very fine sand. These were coyotes; they're small, but there were more of their voices than I had ever imagined to hear from a canine species at one time, even in a recording. It was way more than if you go to a kennel, for example. It was a flurry of cries much closer to the squalling of the migratory bird nurseries in the very next section of the marsh."

"Mr. Azir, you are giving me goosebumps now! I think of my little nursry babies before they grew old."

"When I was back in the car I could still hardly dare to draw breath. Without rocks, I was completely without a plan or a defense should they attack. I was traumatized, and nothing even happened."

"It will, darlin." Dr. Thong's voice and smile created a curiously and chillingly reassuring tone of response.