Palm Tree / Dandelion

The ones bleed with the wind; the
others keep their trajectories
attached. In a full moon,
you have to look down the hill
to see that silhouettes of palm heads
are live and shaking, spotlit
as if caught rioting. A week-long
sound of rushing rapids,
nothing flies away anymore
but the spew of taco manufacturing
and the dust cast off of the rocks'
rolling, shriveling cactus, vegetable
and now mineral dust.
But the little bitch walks right up
and tells you she knows her name.
And you remember the moment you
fell in love, when you are clearly mine.


Donna
"For LaLa"

mod freak to freaky mod

I am sure that this potato would have been quite perfectly fit for a pig.
Oh no, it was a beauty, really, with only the one spot, so I took it out.
In a future, please to make sure the spot out of which you take the spot is also taken out.

similar status to a conquered people's

The neighbor's garage was burning down
and it sent up a fat smoke ring. When I
looked up above me, the center was the
sun. The smoke eye would follow me
throughout the county, across the southern
border, edges of the dunes and Chocolate
Mountains; the hazing red would cause me
acne, crack and decay close relationships,
beaches turned to black sludge, and the
footprints led everywhere you could go
there in the bowl and back again and again.


Illyn

Iridescent bird strains not to lose ground

went out to brush the dog,
decided to let his hair fly
unto a neighbor's downwind
yard. But a tornado formed
which pasted it on me as if
I'd been tarred. Then I saw a
bird flying in place at first but
when it darted, it directed
my stare into the thirsty sun.


Donna
"On Retreat"

You Can Lick My Apron

Illyn had ptsd so bad that his ptsd gave ptsd to his dogs. Then they started, and he started after them, to do a hurt walk. A hurt walk is when you are hurt but you are trying to walk normally, like right after you've tripped on a crack or walked into a pole trying to read a number on the other side of the street.

Except that LaLa and M'Lady weren't physically hurt, just scared of yelling and relative mayhem. He in turn stepped painfully barefoot through the debris field he left when he'd set off the sustained disassemblage of the past forever. The three looked out on each morning now as thorn-footed refugees.

Who was it resolved the conundrum of personal responsibility vs. divine plan or choice v. fate, Flying Nun? Answer is no one. You soar because you're on television, and vice versa. Doesn't mean yr invisible to the critical eye, even if it hasn't the capacity to translate its conclusion into a comprehensible howl.


by Phyllis

Anxious + Strong

We were wondering about the inspiration of some of the artists and also the effect that doing art all the time can have on the consciousness, and we thought about an artist for whom colors jump out, call out like little whores to him: this is who i am! can't you represent me. And then in a future time that's litterly slick, surfaces have become so shiny, either absorbent or refracting fluorescence, and they've become so good at hiding the machinery of the system, the technological infrastructure, that you only see what there is to see on a screen; it's not the actual colors of things in their immediate light spread eagle on a time tray as we now have. In that harsh and alternately shadowy futuristic ambient with human forms in minimalistic linear clothing such as Bill Blass or Donna Karan, the creator realizes that he must treasure all the bad paintings that survive from the past.

He's tough from advancements in understanding of the tissues, yet nervous existentially, and even more so now that the concept of time had been abandoned. His trial-period partner asks him, "How many steps toward death are we having been taking while we try and figure out if we know one another the way we believe we might should want to?" Following, she states, "Anxious + strong is a sexy but dangerous situation. You could stand up too fast and bump yr head and father any number of children all in the same motion just because you think somebody touched yr balls from behind."


Phyllis (embedded)

Flames of Soil

Am I pagan? Because I walk under bells I've hung around the house just at the right level so my hairdo brushes their clappers and makes them tinkle?

Is it prayer when I do nothing to avoid an action that will set off a sound that reminds me about praying? Why not, if the words would always be the same?

Is it civilized, unhealthy in some way to pay tribute to a number of deities? And what if not knowing their names has the effect of clearing out a space?

What if every surface were a safety suction cup where the four-limbed would always have a four-point hold? Every molecule of oxygen an air bag?

Can flames of soil reach out to draw in all bad and selfishly settle back to enjoy monstrous containment? Is the world, cold suspended, bled of its evils?


By Donna

Strangeness of the Future

In tonight's episode, Donna and Reptily occupy adjoining cells at the Preservation Society HQ in Dubbabhera. They whisper at an ancient glory hole through the decomposing granite.

DONNA: "A moment ago I thought I heard an owl shriek in the airspace between the Twin Chanks but it was the echo of my own gut whistle-farting, internally."
REPTILY: "If you can throw your voice that far maybe you can get us the F outta here that far."
DONNA: "You the one knows howda fly."
REPTILY: "It's not an item you know, it's a function you do."
DONNA: "Do your wings of light feel more like extra arms or an active back pack?"
REPTILY: "I am a jellyfish or spanish-shawl nudibranch who moves along only as a secondary result of breathing in and out, at one with the proverbial seawater."
DONNA: "And you're a salty bitch."
REPTILY: "You need to stop coming on to me just to pique my bristles; if I try to tear down this wall, I'll only skin my Epicel, and that makes less with which to fondle you."
DONNA: "Sea Bitch, does it ever seem that you're walking in a future that for you it's not meant? Where everything's a skosh off?"
REPTILY: "Like the light now, anemic egg yolk, music that impersonates a past, and the shriveled clueless recent gawking generation?"
DONNA: "Thasright, darling."
REPTILY: "All the time. And that's what I live for. Because I'm changing too."
DONNA: "Changing or disappearing. I mean it could be either. I donno, sometimes I... Tilly?"

Sausage on Salmon

Ayre Fromme Diaz

White Farty Weekend

need not wonder now
tears driven into snow
who what was to blame
it's all the same today
tonight we fitful sleep
cradled chaste in sheets
unstained of false light


by Mike

The Wurl Made Me Creepy

Real People Playing Themselves in a Copy of Their World on a Movie Reel

Big people help little people get up and take their places
By pretending to be themselves instead of famous faces
A prison drama played out on a stage at a prison
Is realistic in every way but the lack of strong acting skills.

These are speeches that wdv normally been hushed or whined
in a way that's far more unattractive than a hero giving a line.
The homegrowns radiate from the sole professional actor;
It's his best hour and their forgiveness from society or reward.

It makes you wonder if yr playing yr own character all wrong.
Maybe finding out that in yor case bad acting is worse than lying.
Thought i was et cetera so real, simultaneously suspecting all along
that i am confirmably bad while redeemable in retrospect portraying.


by Mike

the Crack

grrl this feels like the crack in a damn samwich
where both of us wanna be the lower companion
you be damn, die be damn, dwurl doesn't care
between now and the years we grew up in
when we were young we were special and new
which only happen then
but our future's extraordinary rendition
are not being played out by actors in other bodies
what does it mean to live here among the rotting
in some ways the teens on the avenues
in some ways the teens on the avenues
are running the same set of vitals in an anachronistic bag
are getting a subjective other story
share with gone survivors conquests, foils and rivals
what they hope for is when we'll be disambulatory
but the creature inside the thing is relative only
of the species and scraps of language n' reliquary
experiencing the seasons critically, seen from above,
no matter the originality, is hairy-top heads roving.

Next generation

all the men i've destroyed
are ghosts now except alive--
they could come back at any time.

i may feel cobwebs at my heels
watch out who's in eyeline
start at the slightest thrill.

but most of all im free to
draw outlines around my heritage
move to the next generation.

Reptily

Destructress

I put my hand on the white bitch's head and brushed her hair back with a meaningful near-teary smile. She looked startled and then resentful like, "You can't help me. So keep your pity as well."

Have I destroyed another life? Indirectly, by divorcing its deadbeat dad?

Where is the safety net for non-traditional families? Society asks, gives nothing.

And then my pelvis fell asleep.


Mkidza Mlafv

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