migrant worker

post-family group living situation

everyone just taking a station, doing their own tough thing:
it's how i'd always envisioned a post-family group living situation.
adults, having moved from home, create a nest on a low branch
of the prison-industrial complex, establish a knowing unit leverage:

knitting searching and learning to growing into a cognizant vendible,
you can rule this whole vein of living and make yrselves indispensable
by plowing, polishing small then wise-ass investing, prpetually winning:
intrpersonal relations don't have time to get in the way of all the fondling.

by Ken
"I'm afraid it's over, Diane."

Empathic Death Trance

Must have been 36 hours now a tabby cast this depressive jinx on a whole house, me, the dogs. I lay here unblinking with one hand up near my head poised in soft clenching just as, in the unmown grass near the hedge, did the cat. It's as if my bones'd been tentatively crunched like Kaintuck fritter in the teeth of a strong little bitch who wants to help her boyfriend put me down. He's at my neck. They've frozen to create a vacuum for my last breath or thump of chest tho I'm already blown out.

After at least a day of heavy brooding on the couches I say to Juniper sarcastically, "You the hunter, boy." Jumpy or abash to be urban, he stretches on his rug, catches sight of himself again in the glass fire door at the hearth and sits to stare, hyper self-aware, not just grinning, really trying to closed-mouth get his mind around the reflection. Don't know how you can stand to look at that, I add, aware of the projection. Then I turn to find a small praying mantis resting green in my bare leg whiskers.

Because I have PTSD from bad dating practices, witnessing a violent death and having to make manly judgements during and after can put me in a momentary tailspin, meaning a vortex of moments, visual playback, empathic shock, and unattractive tightened jaws, accentuated jowls I see now in the 7-ft mirror I had just installed in the master bathroom, which is prolly as big as someone's bedroom. I realize I don't know how I look talking to others because I don't ever watch myself speak.

I lift and drag it onto a black cloth wearing elbow-length, heavy-nap, dyed suede garden gloves, and I have never felt death so warm and fresh. LaLa and Juniper, strangers, had to be jabbed at with a push broom to relinquish their vigil and project. Cat had already taken hold of us and we were closer to mortality than we thought, or that's what we felt, when in reality, we are healthy and renewed. Or it's just the bloom of surviving that comes over you to help with the wounds, after a kill, even if you haven't any.

There are stages of waiting: for the end of dying, for the lack of living, for the weekly garbage truck that always came yesterday. The first overnight, cat spent growing stubbornly more still in a loose wrap on the garage floor, in a high-beamed room for two hoopties, with shelves and appliances. If I'd intervened more, it could've lived as mangled, expensive remains. The gentleman at the Ministry of Humane does not refuse to schedule a removal, but keeps repeating, "It'll be okay. Just set it in the barrel."

Donna

Evening Swim 4 Rodney King

Waves rocked me at the shoulder,
try an shake in some sense
as i wet, floundered on the steps.
Standing back allz IC is beauty, green, breeze.
The surface of the plaz'm
is a funny color, a single layer.
Keep on like this mean
I'm a tire, can't stop, only slow down
to keep me in ribs, this tub.
Have 2 look back N laff.

by Mike

bug on house

Race Against Time Against a Timeless Place

Maddening waiting, stallers, obstructors, judging
you don't encounter here, except the atmosphere,
air going under tires, flatiron rises, fan of still water.
It's a ghost race against time against a timeless place.

Futuristic Pueblo Revival

when i first moved in
i didn't even feel
a secure line
between the walls and the people's
right to tread on me
but as it sinks in,
the futuristic pueblo
revival style,
just the porch lights from the street,
lift you off the level
of a typical drone.
exoskeletal,
scorpions clatter
on the patio at night.
tourists may imagine
some cult of art deco
around a selfish native-
american alien.

by Mike

Arse as a Country

I wish some of my contacts would
give me feedback on my affect
when they weren't pissed off at me

when i get on to access, say a song
an laika beaver gnawing at a log
other users think I want to cut them

or do i take on an innocent role
so that even i can't tell it's a play
but at my core's a big-tootht arbovore?

Missy

Retrograde echo

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.

corona of failed sperm, II

"Desmoronamiento"

tengo un recordino
un cositino que
me da la risa cada
vez que me ocurre

pasando por la calle
vecindido casko viejo
tu me dijiste hey, it's
rilly decadent here, no?

But you called back the next day
y me dijiste hey, that's not what
decadent means. Es que mal lo di.
Tu/ yo tuvimos ni noción de pudrirse.

corona of failed sperm

tengo una cosita
es un recuerdo
of you vanishing under
water in a wild rapid
en nueve segundos
de aves charlando
you were gone from
everywhere that mattered
en ese sitio que te tomó
por el movimiento, no
se permite la vida

by Hoolie

pueblo revival

spending the night in my tomb-like pueblo revival, accessing content
it's a place where lesbians have been, flesh color in all-surrounding floor.
i stay when i can in the room i've allowed to gather cargo of records;
my bitches question any mother's son.

the stories of survival, horror, sacrifice are one long babble
they narrate the stagnancy of my one-woman battle
a chorus to the fight of my life wearing out an
office recliner and a bucket-seated death chamber...

for somebody who loves freedom as much as me,
have to say it's a bum trip to be a headliner
and you wonder if the people can come back strong
with the illing and just dealing and feeling it so long.


Rev. Chama Tilly, from
Letters to Hillbilly Jehovah

bully crush

life over you is a better view
than forest or either trees
someone to meet my knees
and occupy my sharpest tips
of bone most honorable dis-
respect i feel for you alone

Cloud Dam

Driving toward the coast, the great mountain shoulders that let between them a wind pass to the Outer Chanks, we've been seeing a barrier, white-washed stable door, crimson smudge curtain at sunset, between northern and southern High Gate, where bouts of weather can build up and ponder a spill into our open gravel bowl. One you could see from the Community College of Cement, there's been of late a brooding cloud dam at Crack Gap.

We've got two car shirts, one getting its tail beat to fringe hung sticking out top the driver's side as an ultraviolet ray cushion, for a hooptie these days wants you to sit n' roast in yr own cancer juice as it crab rolls face-up along in its morning-loving glaze. The other's for short-sleeve work days to wear like a smock if yr painting short crescent lines with yr knuckles, sad faces rocking left and right in a studio that could churn the whole globe with a gesture light as a mouse's joint.

Where in the Wrrrl?

Cap'm is AWOL. Last seen slipping into The Crack with Hillbilly Jehovah.

White liar

Lectric pole in a gale, base is wagging the land.
Walking on is half again beyond an eagle badge.
Nothing, writing letters, shiny coins can trip the session.

Empty, kissing awl

Empty, kissing awl, riding on a wagon in,
Your wheels are hewn square, cad, heel.

Beliefs are polluted with the lining of the head,
Every skull a holster boosting love and hate.

Your breath on share from others or in egress
Tastes of useful rubberiness or harbors a tax.

The World's Agents

Now that it's 11:39, a frightened user checks the time.
Even doing nothing, you are a part of the community.

When the filter came down we gave up futility,
traded it in for fear and opportunity.

She'd like to remember, forget, but she can't think
while the world's agents swim toward past and by me.


Phyllis
"Fuck you, men of Canada!"

Gore Vidal Army

Is it dt's? Everyone looks like Gore Vidal.
Turns out it's an army of an era of dreamy
princes, scowling beauties who're naughty.

obambic tom

liar, concubine
shill clown of energy
black oilfield lush

black as the deepest
grounds, the hegemony
of your work boss

black of temperture
a kinder doctoring
of loins, a fudge


Bill Naughdon

Black mute

puppy show
tourettic impulse
black mute
thoracic cavity

dark morning
fire exhibit
kyoot ko-leckshun
weather denial

notion aperture
end's wedding
life as fuel
auto-miraculous

Some kind of foam

Sylvia sees a film of herself on the outside wall of the gym. Her colleagues are stopping in the causeways and pointing out look, there's Sylvia's corpse. Why is it standing and moving? Because it thinks it's still alive. Maybe it sees a projection of its past life on that facade.

Tom comes out of his office with his briefcase and a v-8, does a double take. And I was actually married to that zombie. Look at her now. He glances back at his metal door, pulling it flat. Who was it confused the word crack for dimple. Said there was a dimple in the fence.

She'd had dimples everywhere they'd put her back together, dimples in the skin between the limbs and torso like momo dough. What if everything had dimples, what a cute world it'd be? Tom starts the walk on out to his hooptie, one drowsy thigh prickly as a stuffed owl.

The word jail was blocked out giantly across the side of the county jail to give everyone fair warning and to offer no illusions as to whut yor approaching. If you had a warrant, for example, you may not be released until morning. That's where he'd gone to get her out.

Once the attacks were confirmed they'd arrested her for having been the first to report a flight-gifted reptile in an olive tree outside her office. Her coffee, fortunately, had been in a spill-proof mug. She first spoke with the chair of biology Tom, her partner.

She next spoke with her labor boss, the chain gang lawyer, and a team of crack psychiatrists. When you let me out of here with a stern admonishing, and it comes back for me, will their be a separate co-pay? she asked sarcastically. Those creatures have saw-like teeth was the rejoinder.

And if it comes for my lover, even if he doesn't believe? Is he covered? Do we wait in line at emergency? Suddenly the panel revolved like a bus destination eight ball. They were things in robes, monsters of erect and punished gravity, disappearing unansweringly into some kind of foam.

Mind as State

Memory and a human's fluids thinly planing on a concave surface, two refracting layers over what's not us but of our same dimension, at depths we are protected from by our limits, with emotions and lights.

We grant it's psychedelia, where mind is state: mind love/ mind rule/ mind the invasive host and replacement unto all horizons, a world of fright because of everything that sub-equates, unimagined, but waits.

Survival is my god

Survival is god
and god is survival
as long as i live
allowed in my body.
Yet if i say a prayer
to be in the bible
and still don't survive
then god is my rival.
While lonesome and odd
survival's my god.


Bill "Goldstein" Naughdon

cleaver riposte

The meat has clicked all across these sagey flats, stood warm with a mild itching in the hair filter.

Their tail spread, a full-body sweat, heavier-than-air broadcast, markers of which we get plentiful traces.

This fruit was conscious on the vine, the apple of our mouth, ignoble for the word prey, yet not a weed,

Answered back a sound only comprehensible as evolution's plan to rejoin a perp from beyond the plate.

humming to go with "mind has snot in it"

"Harmonize your own humming with this while you read the piece."

Mike

My Mind Has Snot in It

Vic and I both had shown up at late-night volca outta horniness, not piety. By the time they'd sung Admonishment to Work, we had each of us a hand on the denim of the other's strong knee.

There was no Marriage Plea, just a place to stay for a couple weeks that extended to a bud vase or gilded vintage gravy boat crashed inside the door sometimes when it went flat on me. 

I'm a dog if he couldn't have the whole loft disappointed and rearranged by the time I'd get home caked in salt from the pools the next day. I'd ask where'd you get the wood, Dave? Oh, Stella... he'd start to say:

"You know I'm in the stick trade, I cd vend a dozen lampshades, but I'd rather get you laid." I guess because of the movie lot furniture, the ink of a knight or rook he'd tried clawing out with his fingers, I stayed.

But my mind has snot in it; I remember trips to a childhood shack where his mother still lived without an upper palette, a tree that stretched across the whole garden hanging hollow doll heads, and his tooled skin wallet. 

Going back is ever a sad fable. The first time featured stainless cuffs and a hatchet, tho I found the lucky safe words, "yr bordering scary." The last starred my own dining table, but the same old dude's ass walking away.


By Mike
"I know yr out there."

The Unfired

When a judgment finally took my side,
and I was ordered back to work,
I walked into a wall fresh painted
where my door had been and almost fainted.
I overheard a colleague's words,
"Oh look, it thinks it's still alive."


by Donna

mentholyptus forest

Mother, if I went back, I think I wd be dead, and not in a good way. It's some dirtiness I picked up in the gritty city. It affects you because you've been under the protection of my lizard body. I want peace, I need peace. Peace. I'm a desperate personage. You may think because of our ministry we're safe from thugs. Even as top bitch, I am vulnerable because of you. We can take care of PharmSupply outta the offring plate, but who knows what a hard up flake with a pistol whip can do. Yes, I am serious. The preservation society, it's whut's off their radar I'm concerned about now. Even with Illyn in the street feeding intelligence it's a random bet we gonna see days to spend what we get. I have to go through with the change so's we can live in a cave all of us big enough to hold volca for three days. I have to become the K you got mixed up and had to born me with.

Chama's side of the conversation
Swank anonymous alpine hotel

Pot of Embers

That you went's left the ground a trembling. Or is it the pressure of everything not you that's building.
The narrowness of this alleyway has come to a V-tip. Do bricks and mortar want me trapt or gone?
In any case, I sit stunned, and not by beauty or sex. Can inability to fend off germs be their beacon?

Through the blossoming years my entire flower showed freely, outlines of priapus in midnight lycra blends.
Walking around thus, in any venue, not a witness complained. My innocence and backing by fashion won.
What we have that's shaking goes down in a manly twilight of language, a mutual contemptuous attraction.

Starting in the morning, a blazing hell will pass over all over again. The tumbling voracious mess, engraver.
What provides life is to look at is to going blind as to slow down is to put out lights. With a pot of embers,
We stay up catching up on everything that wasn't acted out wordlessly during the worrying daytime hours.

housetosis

We went to a foreign city and interacted with the beings there. Scat my dockers! A wooden barrel, shot through with rifle rounds as a hanging target, and the light that comes in: those lines make up what's underground of their hive: a demented honeycomb of tunnel shafts to explore. We popped up like gophers and entered through servants' doors. Then back into holes plowed in the 19th Century. Samovars for Everyone!

Then we thought our response should be thoughtful, of maybe even doing some pre-thinking. Our return to the countrymen could make or break our knees. To their point, we do have come back infected. We will has been a life changing. From our mouths bring a daisy: even at 109, if it's not windy, it's a burn day. No matter the measure of particulate already present in the breath layer. High production dogs dig soil into skies.


"Traditional work chant"
Chang K. Chang Chank Grain Bank Chain Gang
Dubbaberra 

Translation by Donna

Grain Bank, the Mp3

Lesbians Demand More Responsible Films

Chama Tilly's turning 40 and won't come down from the sea wall cave. In the middle of getting her preen gland expressed, the fully-organic K turned on her certified technician, flinging her more than 300 feet into the cloud cover over Cliff Suites. PharmSupply's medically licensed glandular biotics rep known only as "Phyllis" is passing a hard convalescence at Thong Clinic over in Chalk Chank.

"She was saying all day how much she needed me, how my skills were all that made her sane, and then whoop, flips out. Maybe I got too close. My rescuer was a level-2 protection boss in a flying-F suit."

We asked Phyl if her feelings had changed at all about having real K's or K blood/K love/K rule still flying, suffering when everyone would prefer to drive their own false K with closed legs or recycled K meat with privacy screens sewn on.

"No, because K's are not the only ones who suffer. None of us up in this chank or the crack that runs through it gets to live in an environment most suited to our "natural habitat" except of course for all humans. On the other hand, if humans and their actions are considered to be part of the natural habitat, then everyone and everything is entirely natural. If curing K’s would mean a major culling of the species for commercial gain, that's not okay. On the other hand, there is the odor, emissions, the sounds."

The K is a re-emergent life form that was named for the way it flies with its legs spread eagle. Barely living K's were hooked up to muscular positioning outfits and wireless saline IV's and flown remotely first secretly, then as a silent swell of cash transactions, and finally the unlucky target of public outcry. Flakes can't afford a K implant or the kenneling. But they deeply value the patrimony of K lore/ love/ blood/ rule.

We asked Phyl about all the hoo-ha on ground below the Chama’s lair: balcony to the world, sea salt and moss tacky. Though we understand now there was normally no more no less than pounding waves down there, with a narrow spread of rocks close as a penguin’s foot and only accessible at the pleasure of the moon, and where every low tide documentary reporters and free-speech zone die hards staggered under rubber ponchos in the mist.

“I asked them to give me a shot and bring me right back. Maybe I was the only one who could get her down. When I pulled up in the ambulance, somebody told me here, take this, and I did, thinking we were all a part of the same occupancy. Here’s a sign, they said, shout and walk around with it now. We were moving in a tight oval, no, an ellipse. I thought they meant it was a sign she wanted to be with me forever. But it said, “Lesbians Demand More Responsible Films.” Even when I put what the deal was together, I thought what better way to be where Tilly can see... that I’m totally willing to come out.


Chalk Chank [the Mp3]

Suede and lillies

Tonight I was waiting in the sitting room over at the W.A.S.T.E. office in Dubbaberra, and a sexy cougar, a little grizzled, slid onto the vinyl padded chair next to me. Her purse was flipping long leather show-cowboy fringe everywhere. She dug and dug for her citation with me staring in the periphery of her vision, maybe even closer in, maybe why she couldn't find it. The colors of her eye makeup looked glow-in-the-dark against her brown tan. I could smell suede and lillies. I said you smell nice. She said thank you. Maybe it's too much. I said no, it's nice. She said it's White Diamonds. I said ohhh... She said it's the one that elizabeth taylor designed. I started to say something, but then I just nodded-- in fact it was nodding similar to what elizabeth taylor did a couple of times in a mirror crack'd.

A Waiver and Acceptance of Social Toxicity Estimate is what the Preservation Society gives out to some of us who don't like to schmooze or are terrible at it, those of us who see pretty much everything as schmoozing where two or more persons are interacting. This is how we're protected by our government: doing for everyone what we can't do in smaller groups or individually, in this case forgive. So with the certificate we can work at certain kinds of government jobs where we can't be fired just for being unpleasant. We would have to physically assault someone, and then of course there's prison for that. A fellow entitlement holder came strolling by. “Hang in there you two. If it gets rough, just surf it out.” He busted a pantomime that quickly turned vulgar.

Then she starts in about shooting fully organic K's in the groin with her bb gun down in Fordamall way back when. Since that’s basically their only unarmored place, the only creature that flies with its legs spread eagle would start swooping in tightening circles with their legs close-pressed in pain and crash and die or get slaved out half alive to electronics houses. People in Fordamall couldn't tolerate White Diamond’s ways, her attitude or her tone, which rang sociopathic to real animal lovers.

I started thinking about Reptily and all she meant to me, even with my thigh bone embedded by her claw tip permanently, and as this hard woman's story got more down and out, I started thinking yeah, good, you deserved it, and you don't deserve forbearance. Someone should have put you away or taken you out before you had a chance to ruin those lives and their babes’. But that was a point for preservation of the state. We’re none of us deserving, yet we still have to consume, conserve and create wealth, keep pace. No one is worthy of a W.A.S.T.E., not even the most beloved; if they were, they wouldn’t need it, and if they got it, it wouldn’t be grace.

Pinned Down by a Man

Mike ranked a weight-class second of two in the Chalk County junior wrestler's league. Holding a blue ribbon meant you know how it feels to be slammed down on a mat and pinned by the ribs of another man, a young adult barely clad, dizzy with his own new gristle.

The moth, having known nothing til then but wild abandon, submits to druggish capture, is still alive as the contents of its thorax open for a relentless poking into the satiny cardboard backing. Some necessary stun hormone kicks in when the last resort is capitulation.

Blushing shame or exertion is here nor there in a situation where yor being observed by official recorders. The victorious moment that you shared has been photographed and keyboarded into the informational mist. But it's not return via archive for which Mike tenderly yearns.

To be there again with so much to learn, worlds bursting everywhere. To have everything to try, to pretend, to eat. To choose the loveliest of all the denigrations. You shall be roughed up by a buff teen virgin and breathed  upon, weighted down by his chest, and then must undress.

Potential redactor

Illyn sprouts up through gravel once again sharp and tender. He barely lives behind some boulders healing the shreds, tearing of salvation, reeves upon scars upon previous birthmarks tho he's all the same incarnation. He keeps having to be reborn at the age he left off at, but uglier.

Soon Illyn's scaled the fake adobe privacy wall of a spa resort and coaxed away a guest's evening clothes, left the gentleman puzzled and trembling in waves of nile linen. Soon Illyn's grinding gears, engaging wipers, igniting lamps of a wood-paneled wagon unstable of wheel up flashing commerce canyons, maybe blurry Monte Carlo, Florida or a roadside tourist trap outside Phoenix, Greece: goats balancing on pyramids for coins among garden torches.

He's going to try it this time around as an effeminate storefront preacher by the name of Lawrence Avenue. By now his jaws activate a birdish cartilage elbow way above the temple either side the head when they speak, so flakes will remember this Illyn as pelican with celtic afro and turtleneck shirt, who Got named him Lawrence Avenue because it made the pavement he got born and saved and ran away on. All that before he went and stayed and preached and was that street.

Soon he is trucking out the Upchank elevated station with the vent flaps in the sport jacket bouncing as if on a pair of hams, but has to stop cold. Blasting toward him, a swelling vision: brown-beard-flying Eiremann in some kind of poncho and like a cross-country passing spike, mightily-handled butcher's clave, in his fist. Illyn reaches deep to find his grim-handy response to each life threat, the dickish fact of his own invincibility. Still it's not surprising how the weapon bearer bounds on by, the fugitive of an even greater terror.

Rounding a corner, she is progressing down to just the classic bra, and very sweaty whipping off and out of a long-sleeve denim career issue of a meat factory and winding it about her boning hand. She is out to disarm a man she knows from the tank. As in spontaneous passion play for king or inquisitor, the pair decide to stop there in the middle of the lane, as if Lawrence Avenue was a stage, and as if there were a way that Lawrence Avenue, their potential redactor, should behave. He stands there like a big-adam's-apple cartoon freak. The brawler worker and her would've been attacker have to pause, concede that Lawrence Ave is weak. Not an action, but a stepping stone to Peace.

Hell study

"Questions for Rev. Chama Tilly"
Hell Study
Chang K. Chang Chank Grain Bank Chain Gang Think Tank for Meta-cognitive Talk Therapy Apologetics
Dr. Donna Thong, Facilitating Surgeoness


) Have you ever felt as though you were experiencing Hell on Earth in a "real," non-figurative sense?

)) If yes, please describe the emotions, physical sensations and any other experiential items as thoroughly as possible. Avoid too much self-editing. If you are completing this questionnaire simultaneous with a Hell-on-Earth experience, please express your observations/ exclamations in the present tense. If you are not presently experiencing but are able to conjure or invoke a Hell-on-Earth event at will for the purposes of this study, please do so now.

))) If you do not believe you have ever experienced Hell on Earth in a real sense and/or do not believe that Hell can or does exist in our present Earthly reality, please imagine it at this time: what the most plausible expression of Hell on Earth would be, in as much detail as your pain centers will allow, and remember we are a non-profit cause that only wants to make it stop.

)))) If you see an issue with the concept of a Hell-on-Earth "moment," "event" or "experience," and especially if that issue is your position that Earth and Hell are one-- either for you personally or as a world view-- please fill in your understanding of the exact schematics of a Hell-Earth symbiosis, simultaneity or paradox below. Please avoid extended autobiographical illustrations of nameable phenomena/ paradigmatics.

))))) Check here if you accept the hypothesis of a literal Hell on Earth but cannot empirically verify its existence. Please indicate whether you have checked this box as the result of a religious and/or morality-based self-evaluation juxtaposed with your knowledge of others you suspect as more likely to be/ end up in and/or deserving of Hell. Further indicate the specific conclusion occasioned by any exploratory moral introspection. Which personal Hell can you infer to be the most likely outcome based on your findings: never going to happen, have been through and moved on, will/ may/ may not only occur after all medically-defined life has concluded.

)))))) True/ False: "I am most often free of Hell and Hell-on-Earth experiences/ anxiety as the result of regular and deliberate righteous thought /action as prescribed/ illustrated by familiar moral constructions/ codecs."

)))))) True/ False: "I am most often free of Hell and Hell-on-Earth experiences/ anxiety as the result of regular and deliberate righteous thought /action as proscribed/ illustrated by subjective/ personal trial and error."

))))))) What would you want to know about this researcher's approach to Hell/Earth, and why would you want to know it? Do you believe that you as Chama could cure an outbreak of literal Hell were I myself to experience it in a very real way? Is it wrong for one woman to love another woman so much that she doesn't care about Hell at all?

Donna
"I am equipped to handle a number of medical procedures on the back patio of my home."

His raw, hotted-up body

If my workplace is my body, then every cell hurts. And if because my body is a temple of work, where they labor just to keep it standing, then I can hear the workers singing from the lobby. If I had a finger for every one of the pains of giving body to the birth of work, then the finger would always be the same and repeated on the other hand. If my liver was a filter for all the poison going down in my labor-related milieu, if the lungs stank of my environment, if the heart, if the desks and chairs?

If a company is holding me, tightly, and I work to pay and be his burden, how can he owe me back my body when he needed it to help the keeping of it enable self-feeding. Now already both I and the man whose build I'm in are third persons. At least flesh cogs become wiry in a long flat arc, despite the sudden-precipitous last few clock punches. Brain taffy would be perfect if brains were made of taffy but not brains, but in turn they're made of coffee.

When you say you're stingy with your time do you mean you don't like to give it away, or that you literally don't allow that it proceed. For it cannot unless a movement's in the way. Still,

You'd have to go on working till they ring the bell. Even if there is no time. Even if this were a big dumb set on a rented scaffold in the truth of stasis where they made us believe in a clear river of unborn moments. You skewer a random few instants of experience scamping across on winged feet, long whiskers, your protist seeds, may even have some prints made. The invisible time river is like water because in reality rivers are made of water, and time is crap. Time is how long you can convince a primate to do your bidding before his raw, hotted-up body takes over and says, "No way, machine. I'm having a nap."

Wayne, Sr.
"I understand workers."

Sixty-Nine Cents an Hour

My first real corporate gig since shilling boner at private pool parties for the Chicago mob landed me right in the peaking tip of the dot-com boom. This time I got to be the old shuggie with the time-done-alive cred if nothing else. The mean street in between had been a beautiful government sliding down a rainbow of duty and patrimony, but I was ready for all the opportunity and glamor of a whurl-wide pyramid schemata. Even though you know already my only retirement income said and done now is from leasing out these tracts.

My new boss was half the size I had been at his age and twice as green. With a twitch. Always seemed to be sweating it out, this guy Pete Steeves-- what if they fire me, well it's curtains for me and the wife and kid, that's whut, and forget about the options. Just lettem get you drunk and goofy after work, dick-flip yr earlobe now and then, fetch a few things, learn the acronyms. VC is no longer Viet Cong.

But Pete also had another thing i didn't know he had, what they called hunger back then. It's also when they started leveraging the word leverage's leverage all over the place, almost like they were leveraging it. Just like when pundits and academics started saying the word "piece" all the time. Like, "And then the other... oh, i don't know...PIECE of this is, i think..." (they had to pause before the word piece as if they had just then thought of using it in that particular kind of brilliant figurative play). Around that time or a little before they also decided that the "UH" sound is too like a troglodyte. So everything has to be "AH" instead, as if a light bulb is going off over your caricature. AHnbelievable. Then the final golpe with the engine-like, throaty cackle talk, wicked-witch-of-the-west schtick to sound hip, ironic and also sassy!

Stumbling along a quaintly sooted, deeply rutted urban lane only meant for drunk young guys in ties leaving downtown bars at night, a street like the hormonally ergonomic curved charnel chutes for beef, Pete mistily confided that he trusted me in a special way. He expressed that as, "I feel like I can tell you anything." Next thing I knew I had responded to an urgent-toned invitation to his country home for a meal.

The Steeves' house was so old you could not even change a diaper in it due to its landmark status. It looked like "Shakespeare" condos, but lower, maybe where the ponies were groomed by jockeys. The double-dutch doored entrance with the capital X's on each under-wing opened wide to reveal an eerily medievally scene for riding the information revolution. The wife-- was it a bonnet? No, one of those prep girl tortoiseshell tiara deals--perched on a short stool across from the daughter, who was actually in a bonnet, being a baby, in a Georgian wicker, no, a varnished Confederate willow-switch ship bed, squeaking slowly. Was it a tyke rocking itself to some primordial Esperanto hymn in a flammable cradle edging our land's hearth, or another shriveled and catatonic relative?

As in a roadside "Mystery Spot," I could not stand up completely straight at any point, angle or coordinate in the structure. Pete and Nancy had developed stoops, though they could have geometrically fit erect in a technical sense, maybe just not psychologically quite like duck's backs around the time-travel/ anachronistic lifestyle piece. Pete, intuiting that I wouldn't stay on for whatever was boiling in the cauldron at the end of a hag's long spoon, immediately presented me with a gift. It was warm from being in his hand, and it stayed that way even after leaning-to in the cool vinyl toll-coin tray of my GM tank for the hour it took to get back home to Highchank.

Pete's gift is made of a hard, dark wood that holds energy beyond its own life better than most other previously living tissue. It is so much more valuable as a dead absorber of however the sun can stir dust into sparks and finally fish-lizard-rat-ape-calculator. Pete's gift you might call a totem he picked up from some port where they give a tourist a dark kernel of place and a little more, which can taint. You might call Pete's gift a fertility symbol with just the suggestions of parts carved roughly and all from one piece, but that was also the whole point. Along with how it can't stand up even though it's obviously a man. The soles of his feet are badly cut, really more like hacked at by a god making sixty-nine cents an hour.


by Donna
for Metacognitive Talk Therapy Apologist, Autumn Double Issue

Ghost Ship

I sublet a place up the street from something called the Ebbtide Show Lounge, what looked like it had once been a last-chance suburban strip joint on the highway out, or walking from the stockyard train, a square cinderblock sugarcube with a single window pane, in the front door, where the bouncer could see you and bang the glass if you peeped, and then the beckoning green and yellow tubing of the sign, which really did still make you want to interrupt your motoring, may have culled some from their sleep. The name and the timing effects suggested you may be sucked out to sea in a sweet and brilliant reverse gush of sense. Now it was blight or an ethnic social club, hall of dance depending on if you asked the neighbor homeowners or the occupying tenants.

Neighbor Jazzy, who cared for a spittle-babbling mom in the quarter-million dollar cottage with mattresses in the window frames next door, owned a driven bullring terrier mix called Shab, who was hellbent on raging its way through the slats in the fence between the sideyards. Shira’s baby would be playing only inches away from most of a slathering groaning muzzle jamming through the holes it was gnawing. So Shira told Jazzy to repair those boards or she’d have out the animal truck. She didn’t feel bad at all about her tone, even as a recent college graduate because her daughter, Elyxir, was so much more important than an earnest, grubby single-man’s gut, though she had been trying to spare him til then by not showing stress when he ambushed her talking too much at the curb before she’d even had a chance to bar-lock her steering wheel.

On my second night in Shira’s bungalow, an alarming urgent illexical or trance-tongued screeching began ramping up out of the dark and then more of that along with the sound of Shab growling frenzied you could tell with something fighting in his mouth. It couldn’t have been Elyxir because Shira had taken her along up the coast to get a divorce from the daddy who should have been there running security as he’d promised when he decided to dig a family into the lower chanks. His baseball bat was left behind next the front door on a mop clamp, spanning the length of all the dead bolts and chain guards. The rent I gave her paid for the trip and part of an attorney, but I couldn’t feel good about that hearing the guttural, stinking banshees and their sinuous deafening spasms of death inflicting and stubborn resisting just below the window of the dining room where I’d converted the table for eight into a space-encounters-online central command console.

The next morning there was a raccoon the size of a baby calf rolled over on it’s side like it had eaten too much, but dead, on Jazzy’s porch, where it had been dragged judging from the chitlins drizzle up the steps. Jazzy came out and wanted to talk about it. How Shab had been mortal enemies with the coon for months, since it had started its rutting and slutting and garbage hoarding under the house, and how maybe Shab could finally now relax, and he was indeed lying out, not breathing hard in the hard dirt out front, but with his back to us, really more like sulking. Jazzy said the coon was full of cubs, which explained both her size and ferocity. He added that he had not yet decided what to do with the losing beast or her never-to-be born, which itself begged a bouquet of inquiry.

On the third night, I thought there was an x-mas parade or hollywood eminent domain incursion of dressing wagons, boom dollies, mess trailers, grip cranes and hideously obnoxious assistants’ assistants busy putting a brand name to the thuggy authenticity of the barrio. But then i could hear very clearly, “We have the building surrounded. Come out one at a time with your hands above your heads, or text my cell.” Though it sounded Industry-generic, you could tell the whole neighborhood was reverberating with the decibel level of real police on loudspeakers under helicopters, not studio lighting, even though the drama and oppression reign the same. The lawmen bellowed their side of a negotiation between land lines and social media devices to dedicate a contact with...  the lead go-go? ethnic socialite? on the inside of The Ebb. In about an hour the squads had skulked away, no one having appeared in spotlit surrender at the front door. That’s when I realized of course most any reasonable person would be inclined to take the more discreet exit out back of that place.

The other vestige of Elyxir’s estranged, hot young drinker dad was all the wedding portraits, which most people would keep in a large binder on a shelf, instead hung on every vertical, set into any dioramic dimensional of room after room, lovingly magnified, glassily framed and further adorned with dried natural plants including cat tails and spray-painted reeds and monkey pods, silk florals and bows in a variety of lace polymer and metallic fabric blends. I had to catch myself almost hourly spending too much time positing attributions of cousin, high-school bff, disgruntled gay uncle to the faces repeating across the surfaces in so much tuxedo and gown leitmotif.

I was out back smoking deeply and watering the lichen sprouts one afternoon after the first week of my residency when i discovered a flagship, ghost ship, of the commitment-day wreckage: a trellised arch, nearly faded from view against the back fence in the hoary return of spring, not meant for the adventitious hedgenettle running up its coarsely whitewashed staves, but for wire-boned stems of blossoms: permanent, inorganic and twisted in place to cling for a chance to drip wax petals on altar pilgrims, just as the generous licensing of mistletoe, whose berries’ storied charms drop the first puckered rings that open pools of generations.

Found out someone in the Q-for-Questioning Room of space-encounters-online lived up the street and that he might want to greet real time, real place. Was he renting a service entrance to the swank cliff-stilter on the hill, or was it all his raven's-view nest from which he’d clipped superfluous wings for comfort in a cockpit-like enclosure? Didn’t matter, cuz it wasn’t a date. More all like: “Here have at this, and omg yeah, and oh you too huh?” Not art-- handicraft, but with lips, and water glasses working in, feet on pillow, head hanging from side of bed, rolling over into candle wax. Tensing, resting, repeat. Me: Why are there wine bottles everywhere? Phillipe: I’m a pilot, and those are the complementaries the ladies sneak for me in their security-exempt wheelie packs because they love me when I’m riding shotgun. I go everywhere. It’s exotic, a life with spa homes in every port; I just furnish a room of an elegant pad, say on Mount Everest, Burj Khalifa, anywhere Liz Taylor might have liked to be. I take my friends with me. I know the owners of the Federal Reserve.

I nearly wept at Phillipe’s story of boarding schools and being present for the invention of the NASDAQ, only to be car jacked, head-bricked and dumped on a lawn in the middle of the day behind the health food temple on the way home from a trippy Lanzarote-Vale-Diamond Head run. His subconscious heap was nearly stepped over by a woman who’d just finished praising to her cashier the benefits of multiple bowel movements in an afternoon. They had to reconstruct his cranium, but he'd kept his glamorous job because the most he could remember was how to fly a Jumbo. I asked if we could drink some of the wine, and he said no. Each vintage he’d previously assigned as re-gifting to various diplomats, crazy millionaire Japanese girl coolat designers.

Yet I still recounted and desired to share my own burden of being away from home in a place I’m not known and alas, on a decimal birthday. So would he please accompany me on a jaunty circuit about town, a giddy breeze through the many fabulous establishments he must have known so well. He joked about swinging through the Ebbtide on the way uptown to the absinthe parlors and martini salons and patios with stroller parking and micro-ales. For me the tube-lit strip cube and its blank marquee sent the undertow of imagination that night, though the both of us, having been honest, could have wagered that a back door departure from the Show Lounge would set a dark and stormy sail.

all the time i wanned to be yr big brother an you enned up being my big brother

all the time i wanned to be yr big brother an you enned up being my big brother,
all of the times the jig was up and we needed each other but we didnt know how
to do it to each other, brother, the natural pleasure another brother can give another.

now we're face to face, a waste of a race, you know some might say if they saw us like this,
tho no way we would kiss, at least not on the lips, if you can dig my meaning, my brother.
i try to imitate the way you move your hips when yor on yr way to cop a jay my dear bro.

An if you need an afro pik, of stainless steel, to be peeking out of yr fro so thick,
to put the fear of shame in my blight, i can respect th' motis operand-I baby brother.
I could never be yr lover but i wish that you could be my dick at night, my studly other.



"for my Illyn"
La Chama

 all the time.mp3

damnatio memoriae

ANNUS NON GRATUS:

I didn't ask that you be born into my world.
But for the lively spit and frying pan of the latest
spin, we'd have dropped you in the oubliette.
Now you are the lesser sin on a trek of forgetting.

Chevied unto your breast, I looked behind in fear,
hounds and torches phasing thru at the time door.
They carry fetters and impeachment writs and
would hunt, condemn across the generations.

To our grower

Without flagellation, you seem to want to sing wry about the microtubules that never got through.

Too bad that the flaw means the culling of only a few. And the gravity of the day when you share them.

Everyone, meaning I, knows that the final result of surviving your method is a gateway rising lighter than our atmosphere.



from Mike's personal prayer blog

Big tureen of incense

A few moments ago they held our last smoldering expression in this town; now the ashes are heavy dirty, a prolm for waste removal bureaucrats.

A smell like something that was once good. This suitcase, a gift from someone now long dead. We hate moving in a caravan enough to give shit up.

We hate blanking out and never waking up enough to relinquish every item made of atoms that we owned, every flake of gold turned up or down.

All the messages a man can send, each particle of tint or lead. The only knowing is locked in metacarpal clouds, bruises that shine the light off silver.



The Chama and her mom

bankowned houseparty

Broker went or gave the keys for the house across the street to his son or associate as a holiday bone. Shadows from the fire pit were hula-ing well above the 40-something ficus hedge. Donna says she feels that life is trying to squeeze her out, not the road narrowing. Families that still float don't even have to curb their dogs and might even kick yours on its leash while they eat. Problem comes when a primate or pug doesn't recognize a distant relative, only sees red and Dr. Thong. 

Loud bankers and sons or associates, some shrill women. Then did they start passing out or learn to drive themselves home on backlanes. Now the trickling blaze becomes less a vigil or moon and gives way to someone who's got our main energy source behind a bathroom door as her nitelight. The great eyelid over the valley begins to unstuck, but sickly. Donna keeps pounding out "The Doctor's Prayer" even though she's just a flake on a test how bongoing can address anxiety.

O Mthyuh I shake beads of your monolithic face, chips of stone, not even teardrop shaped, in a cokecan rattle, army pail. So well i get the need to bring the sheep along a path to rest in nothing that will fail, i won't ask you now the way because your meaning is too deep for minor aches. But could you put me back to sleep? I've gone ahead and healed in by for of your name and acknowledge that the whole reason for a doctor's prayer is humility in the face of abandonment by higher beings.

Mike
"Am I a fag hag's hag fag?"

Drink or pussy

my bitches tried
and found me
inconsolable.

the fact is I
am a sincere person
who only wants

to help the needy.
I cannot find
self-esteem in any-

thing else, not
even drink or

pussy. I am a
disturbing
freak of nature.

mordon holy star 

if i were on my dethbedd 

Bunch of feathers

We plucked that folksy rich and poor line back and forth like a gi-tar chord, and the sound of all twelve strings
making a choice between high or low jangled the soul because we didn't know how we'd ring up the next meal.

It jangled the heart when we couldn't figure out how to get the BBQ grill in the trunk, and the real crystal pinot
glasses we gave away, the giant kind that miss october might be cradling somewhere bountiful, rocking hope.

It seemed like our sleek system for working the land and managing a certain chic was falling down around our
stetsons and turquoise as a bunch of feathers connected by rawhide to a roach clip tumbled onto the curbside.

Peg 



Chalk Chank

ICE CLAW

ICE CLAW was spotted having replaced the sun like a crystal bear jumping up and over the tooth-full mountain peaks that keep our valley in a hoary shadow...

ICE CLAW seems to have ripped open the stone floor of our habitat.

ICE CLAW cannot be trailed anywhere because he's so giant that he's always pretty much right there.

ICE CLAW's hand is often stuck at the center of lurid posters.

ICE CLAW is not a way to get ice but rather one of ice who gets.

Phyllis, embedded (coming up for air)
"Dial your emergency number now."

Deal Maker

sometimes yr wrinkles take on a heavy
dropping pressure against the skeleton.

you need to fling an eyebrow scrotum
backward just to see whuts up ahead.

or in a convertible, scarvs on yr chins,
some flaps of manz largest organ coul

-d fly off cracking loose as in shingles.
Giant tissue boxes and chili canz that

used to be marketed to the Y (MCA)
chromosome alone? Nau gone away.

Gels gazm coldly

all wound up together:
salary, bills, sweater.
tomorrow will be a
vital, go-getter, cap-
throwin kinda red letter
down at the polar station,
each of us a spinning oven,
starch packing away the
dark, and symbols hang as
if houses need earrings.
once real bells jiggled pies
on stone sills with noble
iron peals; now decentral-
ized gels gazm coldly to
signify true material clashes.

Vikki Jerusalem 
"The Mediterranean bumps my cervix."

midi

gay disco bouncer

Even this innocuous posting was targeted for removal by the Mthyuh Preservation Society. FUERA, CERDOS!

We bring you this instead: Juniper responds to a fake-fur xmas stocking and having to wear it. [click image]

last full moon before xmas

darling, you have me leaning over on my elbow and shoulder
musing into an evening of psychedelic projecting
about whether to keep our hope a smoulder, or make it
die in spectacle of effect all during one big affair.

spiky pines barely darker than the night to the West
come out in relief when there's a shining saint to shine
this wild hypocritical mayhem festival, cannibalism
good thing the right drugs have trickled down to the kids.

peanut butter margarine criss-crosses

less cholesterol, more trans-fat; your low income family will be highly compliant

meatloaf with cous cous and sliced green olives served with boiled potatoes (not shown)

 2lb 85/15, 1/4 C ea chili sauce and merlot, long dash balsamic vin, celery and cumin seeds, 1 chopped yellow onion, 2 eggs, 3/4 C dry cous-cous, 1/2 C crushed wheat chex, black and white pepper (TOGETHER!). Tomato paste frosting with laurel hieroglyphics, sprinkled parm. 2 dientes gordos de ajo picaditos. aceite de aceituna, aceitunas.

Vikki Madrid

Albino cannonball

Reptily and Peg are walking their dogs downtown on a crimson sun day.

A light rail tour craft and bio-powered "U-Perp It," perpetual machine that runs on a series of human lives, collide. 

REPTILY: valium woulda helped that crash.
PEG: I said hey babe, do you have any valium.
REPTILY: I say hey, sugar. 10 or 20 milligrams wd do.
PEG: do do-do do-do do do-do do.
BOTH GIRLS: Ha ha ha ha ha!
PEG: No, really do you have any?

Reptily draws a leash up through her glove, and for a brief moment a fat little white bitch is hanging and choking over the plaza stones. Then just as quick it's safe and sound against her breastplate, if a tittle out of breath. 

REPTILY: You know I can get into talking to myself like a waitress at Cliff Suites when I finish a 1.5 liter plastic jug of no-label scotch-- "Good job!" or "Wow! I guess you didn't like it, huh?" But I would never-- ever-- carry around a valium jones or have a valium jones monkey on my back if I was gonna be any day the vestal virgin of all the chanklands who is supposed to be the most serene of all the glandular mutations we've seen since the filter came down. And I am. My mama and me are going to rule the sacristy with some protective gloves on. Now if you in the public, I suggest you get up to the temple and watch my slave brother Ilyn go head first into Mthyuh with his red afro burning. They call him the albino cannonball. Believe me, he's had a bad day... he'll be there. Now go. Go. Go on.

Peg swivels luxuriously, a catbird walking her greyhound.

PEG: OK, baybee.

Peg and her prize run stud, Bill Naughdon, slide in ridiculously elegant gate toward the jutting figure of the Mthyuh against a throbbing coronary 6-o-clock summer sky, a peak that makes all the skyscrapers rising up on either side of a woman and her dog look like palm trees on an island with a view of mount fuji or burj khalifa from where diana ross might've seen it.  

REPTILY: OK, it's way better than OK. It's my house, baby. A candy cottage. While we fatten you up behine barz, you can eat the roof and flooring.

Watch 'Even Light Can't Escape' Discovered Black Holes on PBS. See more from PBS NEWSHOUR.

RE-DO: Ceremonial Parka, 1-19-09

Flying F-Suit

Awda prees made her a ceremonial parka called a Flying F-Suit. It mocked the fin-like webbed spines rising from the crown of the K cocks and their awkward, remote-control ability to clear ground despite they priusnear chal weight. The winter version of the garment cast a squirrel-like shadow when she'd pass over the rooftops and center stones in the hives or up against the superchanks and their cave holes at sunset. It was a beloved sight, but sometimes worshipers didn't know if it was the Chama or one of her security mannequins. Every year, a dummy is shot down by flakes or caught in one of Mthyuh's middle fingers of flame.

palm springs trick room II

den mthyuh

they call you a gas guzzlr,
they say yor out, an
awl thye syuddn
yr ina mthyaphukin orbit

yu caynt yet getchr mayl thayr,
all yr stuff is in boxes, and...
an yr hair looks mentally
ill from n-x-s of home cuts

all you can hold onto is a den
of freaked out animals and the
shame of prescription shampoo;
where is the world spinning to?

Bad Paper for Tires

whizzing past Stink Lake on the Bladder Dip
gas baby got restless and bucked at the wheel
you just wait devil pup your turn to burp, flail

mama's got a shimmy needs reducing for free
tho its counter-intuitive, go heavy on the petal
as if to say it's hip to coast in on silent fumes

handbrake of sticky vinyl, stripes that we paid
ahead based on our regional weather patterns
back then, not caring who'd snag us by radar.

debt to bygone eroticism

warts grew over precise chakra points
lily pads on forks of refrigerated depth
ony lectric cd srvive in so cold a tissue

somehow it was pickled saved spiced
even empathy cd B posponed so long
for the energy to come out that strong

and they didn't throw rice or engage in
song, initiation, horny harvest ritual, pie
, because it was only an individual with

a singl eye which no one could disobey
because jumping up and down on him
would only incite the furiousnss n bloat.

bth kinds a peppers, just fr gd measure
BLACK AND WHITE TOGETHER!
Thru your senses, I feel myself a giant.

creature o. habit

in winter there are the vat dyed suede house mocs,
the wide-slatted leatherette deck thongs still warm.

if you take up the rugs you mt as well chnge house
so where you put dn proverbial hat is always fresh.

but thn yr left with living tissue as the only constant,
an dwen it starts answering back you want 2 slap it.

Donna

my needs

without the filter of loathing, there is no insulation;
tons of sentient matter teem in erry precinct, cell.
we can only wonder what 2 do about these units.

how yuv turned out makes of me something swel.
if i engaged you erry morning 2 farm perspiration,
i wouldn't care about my duty to let others down.

yet i'm a system, dependent on a few brittle cogs;
the belt of skulz born of foam from my backswing
bobs in a solid tide of need in2wich we've all cum.

Wayne 

Virusy Hanz

Vikki, can you get me a tomato?
No dahling, ahm too busy dicking arown.
Well you no i cantouch thingz since i got this damned microcosm.
But of curse you can. It's just yr own internalized can't monster wrecking the town.
But Betsy, it's a sudden onslot of a vex you can't begin to fathom.
Together we cn savage any attempts to drown r worse selves.
(this is baby jesus talking) drop yr weapons bitches. come clean.

then as always, a corporate interruption: "Y'no? Merka's faysin some tough challenges right now."

Hanz, no matter whut, we're not afraid of you.
Is that some kind of dig?
Well if it means yor virusy than yes.

Vikki Berlin

It didn't figure

wen we signed r domestic partner papers in the
taco bell attached to the arco thayv boarded up,
an I tipped the chaplain 50 bucks right outa my
wallet, not even in an envelope with a card, we
none of us cd've known that it'd end in disaster.

man show'd up in an open shirt an zipper jacket,
ona break frm workng at the local private prison
like nothing was wrong at all with corporate agre
-ements that married fasfood n' gas plus beer (or
that plus the lottery as 2 rich a gamble not a fear).

some men will linger like terraced smoke plateaus
in your life's venetian blinded rooms and hate you.
when you see them move, it lets you no they need
you, can't feed you, might leave you, may go down
with your ship. His name was Hoolie, as in "Chip."

by Mike

sloth ambulance

sloth ambulance
sweet chariot of the law
am i dead?

why carry me so far
boat of rushes
bowl of sand

rocking tumbler
mountain lion
i hope that you've been fed.

Vikki Dublin

gated punk retirement rock community

he ground his teeth so
much that his skull split

hard banshee dances
dervish rotations

tight urbane stepping
in a crowded square

bad driving tic (bad tic driving)

i can feel i didn't sleep last night
i can feel i was driving through
a toxic d'storm all day

i can feel my neck
ready for a brace
i've got a violent tic

now there are crickets
and a dog yap in porchlight
across the fence

erybody say
just relax is whut
you cn do nau

badrivingtic.mp3

a relaxed paradigm of glass placement

The point is to keep the same kinds together so you know how many you have of everything, and beyond that, the exact positioning of glassware can fluctuate and flow. It gets grouped in the random order with which it is retrieved from the dishwasher and set according to space availability, clan and whimsy.

With this new rinse agent you really relax and feel proud of your barware as if lifting it from its packing tissues for the very first time. Putting it up has been replaced with a perpetual safari for the suitable place, always ready for painting a baby's room blue or pink.

You can't say even harsher chemicals haven't been involved in the soothsaying. This entire machine needed a rutting out with Lime-A-Way. Now it can fulfill its open purposes while working less hard, and with less hard water residue. Minerals may begin to regather.

Jan
"Call me Klink."

ikea

Drop what you're wearing

Because of my pseudonym on a sex site, a whole family called me John.

They called me John calling from the kitchen. They called me John when all the wives and girlfriends were kissing their lovers at the table, but my compudate and me were just sitting in place, even though he had voted Republican and earned the right to make out with the rest of them, they called me John in their minds wishing I would just put out so they could go on with their lipid mixing, noble attempts to found a race.

In time they called me John when I whipped around a corner past them, calling out the windows of their F-150's, slowing down, thinking I could hear them, that I would respond as anyone would to a name. They feared that "John" guy in the small town when I called to complain about the utility, corner shop, hay broker. Everyone seemed to be connected by clan and known by a monicker of Christendom. Why didn't I recognize mine?

On a camping trip all the kids ran past in their boots and down calling out John come and play war.

During cocktails but before wine when we'd go and disappear into compudate's boudoir, he didn't know what to call me, and we didn't care. It was prolly just the two of us there in the entire county with that kind of romantic flair, but no one was counting. What we would wear would be dropping.

by Sylvia

the hag and the sheriff

thing in the ivy

...and because it was crawling up a wall, not a lot of vegetative girth to explore. Still, in these months, you can't quite see all the way through-- whut's a sprinkler head, a totem of bamboo. Her face, green with black highlights, seemed a shade between imagination, voodoo, amphibia, a forced dusk. He could have been a tiny human, tortoisine, a kitty, cobra, otter, fake that the pups were poking and fussing at. I only saw a composite projection of whut Braino was able to slap up based on profiling.

by Sylvia
"Why, Tom?"

Perishable human chip, bottom petal, shrink, dust

Wayne finally decides to be quiet about what's ailing him for fear of being robbed in weakness. Where before the loud complaining mostly served to warn how coming close could be a risk. In that much pain, while strong, he could have snapped a man's wrist merely expressing emphatic politeness about not wanting anything but an ear. It eventually gets bad enough to where you have to be invisible to anyone who might think you've already taken up enough of the available resources. While nourishment can be renewed illimitlessly, yor whut's not sustainable.

Shaker Motel

Just by busting a set of moves from each of the past three decades, we
Were able to reproduce crotch flora thot no longer to egziss in the wall.

Yor date on a night like this might mistake you for a culinary clown if U
Start with a romantic fish tureen up in the Vista de Arcos apt. complex.

But 3 pumpin hitchhikers and a roun-da-whirl jacket shiff cd shayk him;
Baybee juss letchur freak of another natchur come on & sign the registr.

"Hi, I'm Jan?"

Please apply

Please apply to be my only black friend;
Please apply to replace the number of
brothers i found lost along the war trail.

Please apply to be my body's lover.
Apply yr thick black, black black skin.
Come to me as soul that wants another.

Because you seem to be able to believe
almos anybody who could raise the boo
shit lever, i pitch on my knees my cover.

Donna (I'm your)
 

My Horz

I was just thinking how I'm resenting, maybe unfairly, all of my bitches lately. At first I say I'm turning over a new labia: never again will I hang my time out to dry on some lowlife hohoo ain't even turning tricks. Who think she can survive on my jism as a fix. Not so. Cuz that's too rich a treat for dependent mthyuhz cayn even work beyond her lips fer a snack o' some food stamp points fr the lil' baybeez. This is an economy fr double income, high rolling self starterz who can share meat as well as preen, luv. You got to have something equal to give if you gettin the biggest dickhead you ever seen, luv. Adoration don't make the queen, dove. She gotsta have a trade outside a shade an speckin pay in diemunz, mthyuh, cuz my preservation, above all the othyuh, is whut I spen my day lovin, not yo ass-jaded ball inspectrz with meterz on they taints an credit scorz like teen-mom newlywedz...

Ilyn

Officer of the state

I think I'm just doing my duty. If I had a family, it might be different; I'd just want to keep them safe; go ahead and compromise my privacy, trespass a little, okay, cuz if I started complaining about my "rights," I could be taken away and my kids left half parentless. I am just responding to the mechanism that was implanted in me when I myself was a child about standing up for the constitution because that's what makes you not a greasy foreigner, and what else do you have really, especially without having spawned another generation of weasly, selfish little eels.

Tom
"After all, in my capacity as technical college instructor, I am an officer of the state."

fyre 5

fyre 4

fyre 3

fyre 2

fyre 1