White Smoke

I unnerstan you have a prolm with the hate on my face. But maybe it's a reflective moon of the huge sun of radiant hate I get every day in this place. That's right-- not radiant heat, but radiant hate. So if I'm hating a cat, it's just me hating whatever grocer butcher father accountint. 10 haters on one is much diffrint. It can burn fer years an pass along the generations. N that's why I'm in jail. Because one cell is cheaper than 10 to the state. Otherwise, it'll be all you morfurs of the innerneh. In this way, I'm a saint.

Reptily

Broken and Lame

There was a very small, cave-like discotheque in the basement of some chic shops down on Oak. Ducking from the coat check through a tunnel to the dance floor was the main salient feature of an evening alone there, apart from whomever might tend to reappear by coincidental rendezvous at the door to the men's or cigarette machine. A guy named Chuck once sat at the back bar for hours smoking and drinking Kirs before I sat across from him another hour staring as he smoked and drank. Finally, as closing drew near, I moved over and took the next vinyl cushion. I suggested we choose an additional wallflower and head back to Chuck's swingin' pad. We cabbed the three of us uptown a ways to a tax office with boudoirs and took the vacant one. Chuck's accountant flatmate spent all non-working hours in her "womb room" socked out on Darvocets or Tylenol 4's. The other guy felt excluded as he had predicted he would and left early on. At one point I inserted several ice cubes into Chuck's anus and gave them time to melt before going home.

He had me back for Chicken Andaluz which we forevermore joked was "On the Loose." He had been a man long enough to accumulate vases and dust on books. I would meet him at his job in a massive, stony district near the stockyards where he stood aproned and stirred sauces in a precious, signless late-dinner spot and smoked and sipped Kirs in the alley with the bleachy steam from the washing up dumped over cold, rotten grease on asphalt rising all around him. There were places to hang out for hours when he got off work where the level of debauchery seemed so deep as to be safely out of reach for hitting bottom. We could stand there smoking and drinking Kir and just be part of the painting until it was too exhausting and go back to the tax office and spend the rest of the night fucking in sometimes acrobatic positions where ears might be in a vice of two stockinged feet or the pelvis rolled like a fish in the gullet of a snake by my herculean thighs.

Then he moved to his last place, where every surface was covered with newspapers from 1978 for 10 years. For relief on the rent he'd promised to strip every turn-of-the-century wooden rail, board, knob, sill and restore it to a pristine state. It was a decade of heat guns and chemical glop and flecks and twist-rolled peels on floors but only one door and its frame got done. Chuck had progressed to an industrial kitchen at the employee lunchroom of a major downtown bank but had to stay in the park reading and smoking during warmer days or the tearooms at Ward's in the winter due to complaints he might "taint the food" from his famous carousing, and the union helped him stay on the payroll 13 months out of sight that way. I often wondered if I was to blame for leading him on and disappearing and reappearing and leading him further to the point he splintered apart, until he was broken down and lame.

Reptily

Rappolt-Kapeluck

Lockdown

We had a fight where I distinctly heard myself shouting why don't you get a goddamn job.
I listened to him zip a bag and slip out through the sliding glass door to the pool gate.
Then he stomped into the desert in the middle of the night and didn't return.
I thought I saw him on the shoulder of the highway out to the train station by the windmills.
Whoever it was nearly got us killed as I drove south and north people honking, didn't even
turn his head. But lately deep in the evenings I've been wondering maybe he never left at all.


Donna
"I miss you Mike"

Baked pasta

pj

there's a space missing

once mere emptiness
now an aggressive vacuum
there's a space missing where
I should be being needed.
if of one of us must be gotten
rid, then the other too's devalued.

Started calling for his dog

The next moment he was sitting up and calling
for his long-gone galgo, noble dodi al fayed.
The other animals heard it even among the
notes of hypnotic song, tiny blue lights flickring.

He was sharing a fabric or film that held
suspended the present on a grid independent
of dimension. Juniper, craven, the survivor,
who won't lie in the bed of his predecessor,

thinks of him now. "We still share the fact of
our mutual presence, configured just here,
more than we can ever prove that time is real."
Two dogs and a man sit on a plane tilted from life.

Does the mind need a pill?

Does the mind need a pill?
Or is it the brain that's having trouble hearing.
Some chemical arrangement is not being handled.

You might ask if it is I or a circumstance brings
trouble down as if from a door top's bucket.
Isn't God everything?

Are we falling backwards?
From where does the will come, the feeling?
Upon doing nothing, what direction do we float in?

Vidmar

Seen 2/13

Dark, husky male in tight clothing dragging a full-size wooden cross north along California Hwy 86 at dusk.
Wobbling in the gravel, ground end impaled with plastic training wheels the color and circumference of eggs.

Low-chank truckers

I caught my husband wondering if the low-chank truckers can form gangs and crack down on his traffic shenanigans vigilante style. Wayne himself has always had his cell ready to betray working drivers to their centrals or whatever number's painted on the laterals or rear (Big World/ Reefer Division/ How About My Steering). They on the other hand would be more likely to take matters into their own band of diesel brothers. Today they'd tried the turning blinker trick. One jumps in front of you with his left signal on, the other bumping up behind but suddenly passes on the right while you're still in confusion. No way to retaliate except stopping before him at the next light and sit at the green even after he blasts the thundering tanker horn across yr dorsal. I say honey eat yr chop and thank the chama yor a high-level shiv-consulting marketeer.

Jan
"My husband is Wayne"

Homes of choice

Homeless youth albergue takes in homeless youth
Marches them in parades to get donations
Youth become professional homeless
, never find a home.
Turn 18, get a place of their own.
So what we need is not the albergues, but
alternate homes of choice for youth and beyond.

Dr. Donna Thong
Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

paralyzed from the dick up

poynie-head dog hits his noggin
on a log knot whennie stanz up.
hey boy, y' litterly hitcher bumpy
dog head on yr head bump on a
wood hump on a knotty dead log.

i'm sorry i kissed you

gun condonence
dunkin' donuts
truckload of farmboy
sitting close together
mornings were cold
static parade
i'm sorry i kissed you
bone dispenser


Connie

Other energies

I dreamt a solid facsimile
of closed-lidded blackness,
a photograph of texture, 2D

when i woke the dark
was a skosh more swirly,
bloody coal bubbles broke

blinked as a slide projector,
gorged with overexposure,
reviews greys maroons navies

each angle of black a deprivation
where other energies can express,
or it's the optic nerve misfiring

Blue fill

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

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

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


Hoolie

If i have to ask, then no.

Whoresbaths-on-Honeymoon

many swag of lace dripped,
fingers grew across silk-
blurred thigh. we'd skipped

the rite as well as the reception,
most of the precautions,
our future in a blip.

you can slide in on a dragging train
or read this book about sliding on in,
or you can shut up and disrobe.


Dr. Thong
"Hi, Mike!"

swamp celt

my lumber is a boon to drying fruit.
here i'll wrong and wrong until
one day we'll swim with the krill.

there we will set sheath to hilt.
there face sour rhyme with ritual.
there the heady wind, hoary lake.

never came fail but nor did safe
in or between each age and hour
danger consolidated its claims

Chamatilly

He died with his eyes open

He died as he lived, with his eyes open.
He lived as if he'd die hoping
That he'd done a little more open-eyed living.

He died as he did, with his lips praying.
His mouth stopped what it was saying,
That he'd given for an answer all his giving.

He left open-lidded, with his mind seeing.
He saw what's for only the dead or the leaving,
But he blinked and missed out on the meaning.


by Ken

If it feels like a mental illness...

you've got a problem being logical,
or you can't scan the logic how its
laid out, and you can only speculate.

you can communicate it, but are you
just an explainer, a blah-blah to nowhere?
spend a tearless day, no inappropriate laughter?

if it feels like you want to be out all
night in the wind, and that's something
you've seen on television that's sick, is it?

Get your nose checked, or your feet for no good reason.
Multiple times swear in an hour while feeling anger.
Wishing it were another in every season.


Dr. Donna Thong
"Please have a professional take a look at that holiday 4U."

palm springs trick room

decor is prim with terror: legs and columns,
thin at the bottoms, holding their breath.

lines form only to dis- and reappear
with interruptions of fluffiness, a mirror.

surface film shows accumulation of time;
lack of clutter lets breathe the memories.


by Mike

ugly chill

you choose diamonds because they're the hardest
and they reflect everything to the point of fire, but

no alternate turning planet, in your gut, not even acid,
can stain high noon for wholly bad and insane actions

a dog can neck pivot scan for molecular waves, but
the only answer is that it's new, we've broken a record

but even mushrooms can grow in this second rate
code red horror blizzard while everything changes


Jan & Connie

pain skull

i felt something come over me
looked and saw it floating in front of me
a sinister pain skull back lit with red

wake howling from a night of not dreaming
many have tried seeing clearly with their
spirits draining into pillows behind them

The Real Pig

Do you see this wound here on my thumb
it looks ok more or less maybe even a paper cut
but what you didn't catch was the CHUNK mis-
sing outta that thing yesterday like I thought I'd maybe
needa STITCH or sunthing it was gouged so bad,
and uh, and here i am sitting in my cute plaid jacket and
you hear me tell my bitch she'd prolly like 2 strolls a day
and how that's never happened, an it prolly never will
and watch her, sunthing REAL I can help, turn and CRY.

I was slicing potatoes on the back of a cheese grater
and even while I worried I was getting too close,
flesh jammed down on its own disaster, and ever
after, have been wondering if some HUMAN simmered
in a 350 oven for an hour and a half and served it-
self to others in the various incarnations and reheatings.
It was a diamond cut with fat and skin on just the
one flat end, so no way to tell from the HAM in the GRATIN.
But who is the REAL pig who won't let his charges WALK?

Is Saliva Meat?

We call them rockers in this environment, where no one else is catatonic. Some see the many-legged harbingers of decomposition, others blind to any over-self. You might be tripping this wild natural filigree that's really an afterimage from the wallpaper in the men's or the back of a phonics workbook. Purple and red. There could be as many exclusive trademarks as flippers on a snowflake and still be the same psychedelic cutout rorschach family tree. Shadows split two ways here. Light, too, available in any direction. You wonder if it makes you a carnivore just swilling your own spit.

where we're sitting now
is so far into posterity
that it's a dizzying needle tip

as i dangle, unending state
wonder if it stops, when
, how am i connected

a flash cube might take away
all your time dependency
or a strobe light

last of the front-line genetic minorities
at a vertiginous future zenith
victimizing the right


Jan Jansdaad 
"Jan Jansdaad is Jan's dad Jan's dead daughter."

Plank @ swordpoint

Ken kneels before the Chama in her elaborate cardboard temple:

To avoid muttering to myself I guess it's better to have a focus. I have not stepped behind this black curtain for you know how long. Chama, in her gothic eyebrow pencil, expresses contempt by not changing her expression at all. It's just that life is terrifying, life seems dangerous right now. I'm afraid, well actually I'm afraid of you. It's been you all along. Chama, not even breathing much, shrewdly conveys a curtain of black with swirls of dark brown and maroon. A mixed bitch yips. "Ken... Ken..." Ken realizes he is whispering his own name, as a prompt, to God. Her unchanging screensaver now appears to be projecting empathy, but toward a target standing just behind him and maybe to his left.


Raga Darbari Rudra Veena

moon-corona-stars

Even the innocuous and virtually unknown text formerly in this space was spirited away by the Mthyuh Preservation Society. PIGS OFF!

Chama as Moonflower

Retrograde echo: Monster Poinsettia

In this forest we give fear, alms to the Begging
Rajah, who straddles a red-eyed dog named
Shab. M' lord, your palms once carried, gave
Vajras as gifts, cupped milk curd and batteries.
Once, riding home to the Moist Pinkish Cave
From a tour of generosities, which were your
Fetish, you came upon a poinsettia as high as
The Fordamal Chank, at Chukka. Its star-shape
Mouths bobbed in thickets of plaited wondry;
It's hunger smelt rough and good and buttry;
But as your fingers slid thru the crinkled folds
In bliss, there was a neuro-chemical stab,
Your eyes rolled, and the Monster Poinsettia's
Incisors chopped your hands off at the wrists.

can't feel pleasure

can't tell this lush diamond pave from the glory or pain of blood and treasure
don't see eye to eye with peacock feathers, shade or nudity, healing waters
shant feel pleasure, won't embrace the never happens part of our tomorrow

mangaboyhagcapm

pie and wooden box

50-year-old Dildo

Sometimes when cherished guests have been to stay
and I'm lounging in around-the-house apparel
it feels as if they never went away

bird twisted like a fish into an 8
wild dog's high call
two-dimensional representation
balls of the hillside coyote

kill the night? or leave it to night mongers
irresponsible domestic predators
are not allowed to perimeter guard or roam
after dark or when we're not home.

Donna

List for John in The Fifth

we thought we'd invented 69
he was white and i was black
one of us hated, the other loved
we were in bed

i good, he so bad
him cunning me linguistics
Each of us say over and out
bleach and trade underwear

as in passing fire buckets, tandem
to achieve a common goal: heroism
but turned in opposite directions
stomped along streets out of step

late and later to finish eating/ exit car
once i read while he wrote a letter
fair is everything not real
fortune arrives if you look away

i stretched, he hung from a bar
rosebud, green pine cone
dozens of eggs spinning
his knees wrapped in my elbows


Reptily

Last rabid dog in England

you can only hear
how water rubs air
stones click together

trust a moonless wood
to take your sloughing  
ruin in its brook

crickets' constant ring
feeds between the ears
sanding smooth the nerve

breath of tar and loam
this evening sinking
below the earth's turn

anywhere or to anyone

I don't belong anywhere or to anyone
My life has been a zig-zag up these
invisible stairs, cartwheels on air.

To me most of all it's clear we're alone
each in a maze with the tunnels sized
down to our own labyrinth choices.

When you toy with your hair, it's like
what God says: do not trace roots to me,
for I've always been a self-unto unity.

Ken

Fruit Bowl

actors seem false

On the information highway,
my husband doesn’t know how to drive
“with the flow of traffic.”

always the asso flying past
or freaking out, boxed into a hive
swarming slowly past him

when it gets like a wet racetrack
living longer’s not a top concern
but panic turns to calm

I asked him once, Jim, I asked him
Have you ever caused someone to skid.
Yes but with shame, he said.


Jan
"My Husband is Wayne"

Another Amsterdam or Another Venice?

As the butt of everything,
do you dyke in or build up
when churning natures call?
As the mons warms, his
eyes they skitter and sweep,
want to feel her everywhere;
Is she in the palm of an outsider?


Baal

De Zonia

Dosia N. Conner

Community Butt

I was a tall, skinny hustler with rings of abs and ribs
holding up a light armor pecs and deltoid silhouette.
I appeared around the same time hippies turned to drink.
My face looks like I got punched in the face, which I did.
Then I pulled a love handle.

Mike was a physical therapist who came into my life when
dawn was darkening the focus of every day,
and when I couldn't catch a ride in the city canyons from
one to another 3rd floor reflector curtain hotel,
he helped me pogo to the next level.

You grasp at stuff when it's too late, literally smoke;
as community butt, you have to set it aflame.
Fast lane living is about always looking out frontally
and maybe registering peripherally a bum hitching,
later as afterimage or sunspot, and then a funnel.


Love,
Hoolie

what an idiot

this weekend can't mean anything,
and not for lack of trying;
we're in a story's long stretch now.

this dread torques countenance
through your ancestors, correspondents;
the world's an idiot to your purpose here.

Static Parade

cott'ny balloons resting,
blobs splattered into frozen
place by a blowtube

billowed as if popped,
their shadows tattoos,
spread on a membrane

wanting humility

Sunflower heads, popping their stashes,
want to bend away and face the ground.

The earth itself likes to turn in its grave.
Diers of thirst circling are well drill bits.

In fire, grains of years curl remorsefully,
and only glowing caps of dust can relax.

gimme the dee effin money

gimme the dee effin money,
an eagle with wings that are a map:
these are the things that seem a
good idea to me.

a spaceship secured by
gravity and chains
where they chop down trees,
jubilant dirge of victory.

sorrowful tomahawk,
legs of ginger
stomping through tall grass,
tuneful recorders, fingers.

Hoolie
"desesperado"

Terror v. Horror v. Anxiety v. Fear v. Panic v. Paranoia v. Puzzlement v. Exasperation v. Dread

Headlights made me squat and lie down on my back like a cat burglar. Those and other slick gangster moves made me wonder who am I?

I'd stand before the oracle dispenser and a great personality, an exaggeration, appeared to bubble into the frame, a swelling from my skull.

Was it self-regard made me lose a way to muscle outta here? I wake up exhausted from a night of paramilit'ry operations: for bread.

Reptily

Prop

the painting looks like a prop,
or it is a prop, or
the boy is a prop,
or he looks like a prop, or
the painter saw him or used
him as a prop, or
the painting was a prop for a large
and pretentious receiving hall or
middle-class cascade of staircase, or
set as a prop in a film or on tape.

it could also have been an ad,
or a mockup for an ad, maybe a
generic boy for any number of ads, with
no copy, or a painting of an ad for
anything, a bill board could have pro-
vided to the painter a free model of 1 the human figure,
2 how you can produce commercial art, and
3, that if you are a boy, this look would be OK.
this painting could have been the result of a grandmother and
some ads she'd seen and wanted that look for this boy.

moths b and c

garlic phallus

am i strong willed? is that why i'm doomed?
as fish schools part and switch back,
the shading i cast, as fool, seems to dissipate.
half-buried chains wave to give anchor but i drift.

my staff are a bunch of dicks posing in lab coats
, and even they can't find a way to get after me.
some friends might fuss or threaten, chumming on
jetsam of the callow marrow of a man's trajectory.

Donna

something empty we share

The emptiness between us is something empty that we share.
Your head blocking the light behind you makes our faces dark.

Let's not

Let's not
take this any further
or end it either

wild poinsettias bobbing in circles is their race up the mountaintop
and while we're someone who'd never say no to a splash of color
we're stuck with the translucency of skin as a crude odometer


Ken

self-regard

i see fresh irises, ski slopes,
pancakes, cross hatching,
a jutting larynx ridge.

there is an eyed, faceless being
inside a face with no eyes.
spasms, years pin back a jeering.

clusters of melanin
are moving back
and blending in,

for youth is in a reversal.
dyed payback is all ahead;
winter is nearing an end.


by Missy

information in search of a vehicle

violence as social media

admonishment

wasted bird of paradise
edging sideways through life
straight is the final arrow's flight
even if you do things right

harsh are the rains and tides
jarring are the co-confined's
needling the pines
wicked the minds