HOCK

PAST: forgiveness

PRESENT: gratitude

FUTURE: faith

Because I could arguably be included on a list of poor decisions taken by my mother, any others that she may have made in regards to my upbringing can't escape that light.
I can see my problems relative to the misery of others.
I suppose I'll find a job and several months down the road will not have to place the $2000 full-grain natural cowhide living room sofa I've just purchased in hock.


Jan Jansdaad
"A childless divorcee can more easily navigate the boundary lands of a new economy." 

Robots

I Live with Dogs

I live with dogs and persons with disdain for emotion

The dogs are honestly selfish and honestly affectionate

You get dirty lying with someone faking you as their dream

A stab is a stab if your own mother stabs or doesn't stab

I live with a mother who's suspicious and wily and simple

My bitch gives me kissies and throws out her warm arms

Dogs live with people who surrogate their relationships;

Robots are genetically conditioned to satisfy, yet still vex.

Hoolie

Two-and-a Quarter Tons of Crap

alprazolam, bambalam and three others
band-aided middle finger
his eyes seemed to rock lightly in their sockets when he bent over

he hauled two-and-a quarter tons of crap across the desert
and then the plains in wicker baskets
but this was a new place with different sorts of rot

she started immediately in on building a shrine
determined to act as if the gods were on their side
without a job they'll be begging in a year's time

Cornered animals

HOOLIE: This might be the afterlife, or the pre-life or the during life, but I'm not going to live in a fantasy world. I live in the real world, and in the real world, you are an old lady and I am a middle-aged man. Hope I'll be seeing you there because I want to be with you in the real world, and I won't insult you or your intelligence by pretending it's a place where everyone is young and everything is grand.

PEG: I'm not trying to live in a fantasy world. I'm just naturally protecting myself from the general onslaught of time and others' perception of time on my dignity.

HOOLIE: You used to be like Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, and now you're like Jessica Lange in Coven.

PEG: Oh, that's the real world to you.

HOOLIE: No, that's a world of hyperbole, beauty fame and skill, of parable.

PEG: Do we have to live in a parable together?

HOOLIE: God no Mom I hope not.

PEG: You just live in a respectful world and I'll live in the world I'm going to live in. We'll meet up on the other side.

HOOLIE: Like I say. Real world.

PEG: Like I say. Respect me.

Mirror on a Stick

"Mysterious Cabinet"

There is a very tall shelving unit
Inside the shallow door pit
Of a mysterious cabinet
Deep in the chaotic thicket
Of my newly-pitched tent.
But I fear for how stuck I'll get
By shoving my head in it
So I think I'll find a shiny object
And affix it to a stick.
Will I have been the first
While idly hanging up a jacket
In the gloom of a high closet
A stack of money to project?
Has every dreamer as of yet
Truly learned to hedge a bet
And every soul of curious bent
To seize first what before them's set?


Tom

Last night in california

Last night in California I drempt what I don't remember
Spinning lowly in the northern hemisphere
Deadly bees crept up across the border

We fed on the burgeoning scavengers
Of a single fecund season, about 15 years,
And then as if a single will had found His way revolvent from ours

It's a state of going the opposite direction
Beating it's own record of being western
Once again the earth may turn me under but I won't be taken.

Passive as a wrench and 2000 miles passed beneathe my seat
We're in a land we'd run away from, succeeded beyond, not quit
Still the night's as quiet as it's ever been, damned ghosts are mute.


Ilyn
"Short for Illinois"

pain mine

even the superstitions packed away
no bells ring at my passing
what are the songs they unwound

i half want to leave half of me behind
go on alone and under burdened
but one's one's own ghost appendage

a whole geography is purged
by lessons never learned or abandoned
though no girls are left crying

and forever this vein of trembling glee
will bring stabs of shame n' indignity
a deep and fertile mine for pain


Reptily

Survival instinct

Terror spills down and then out and creates a foot.
This is a structure upon which you can hop away.

If you're passing near Chicago or Joliet, I can tag.
Let's buck up and borrow a refrain from yesterday.

What song can narrate barreling across the plains.
What chord could be devised to make you stay.

When you're stir crazy dead at the wheel and nod
I'll be sure to slap you hard in the face if that's okay.


Dr. Donna Thong
"For Hoolie"

Re-Cap: Bermud-a-Go-Go

anonymous sex act that's been on tour for 15 years

time as a liar
time is a liar
how time lies
lies about time
telling someone a different time than it actually is
incorrect predictions involving time
lapses in time or memory
time as material
water/ time cliches
fallacious time quotes
fallacy of time
distortion of real-time time experience during fellatio
accounting of all the various speeds of time
prohibition of any fully developed and/or commercially or academically published "theory of time"
trying to prohibit thought and use of time fallacy in any given moment
challenge to apply the imposition of death on time metaphorically
while in our minds it is a functioning chunk of ligature
that if removed would make me stutterer, monk, catatonic, busier...
time as a style of faith that requires little practical effort
as opposed to religion, which with alternate ladders and planes mocks time's fabled tyranny
and resistant strains that soak up red or blue contrast dyes from the environment
myths, yet real, of time standing still
how that can happen only if all activity is on tilt
then you could say your unit of measure called time just got to zero.

May it, Let it

Head of Mudusa

May it grant you titled helm
may it ram through close resistance
may it serve you well backwards
Let it be a brooch of aristocracy
let it let it feed in dewy fields
let it see with single focus.


by Hoolie

mystical acquaintance

i still get afterimages of a prehistoric skull silhouette
when i suffer morbid ideation of regret.

now turning with my back to moonlight
there's an outline of a thing who stands upright.

everywhere rings thickly pierced me i'd hung coins
of sea shell or enemy tooth set. From parental loin

to the next lad, race, career return nativity scars
from what they call a different year, another war.


Ken
(ghosting for Reptily)

I don't understand what this is like

I don't understand what this experience is like
any more than I can understand an experience
that I've both never had and am not now having.

What I now appear to encounter I get like
what's going on with a composite character
in the fictionalized memoir of a total stranger.

I am having this experience
but I don't know anything more about it
than I do about any random or non-situation.

Or also it could be a moment that's so unfamiliar due to the press of time layers
whose sudden release creates a stupefying vacuum, bends,
bubbles as a spring that has never begun or ends.


"Just" Donna

High cave waiting

high cave waiting for movements of rescue animal over tree line
even now no closer to belief in the veracity or even fact of time

one who lies, one that injects an expectation and an interval of
movements, lack of movement, invisible creeping some believe

only the sinus of raining as if it takes 10 min to kill not 10 stones
patient rhythm of sweeping, training, tic-tocking the weaker 1's.


Peg
"my last scratch on this faux granite counter top"

A Paper Artemis

PHYLLIS: I wanna know what's going on here at People's Park.

ARTEMIS: That's why you've pitched a tent and are so dirty?

PHYLLIS: I'm here both to know and to be. You are of this place.

ARTEMIS: The most important insight I can offer is that you yourself are as much a part of it as anyone has been is or will ever be.

PHYLLIS: So interview myself.

ARTEMIS: No, because you must surely still have some bridges unsmashed with the publishing industry, I feel especially exhibitionistic when you're near, like I could tell you anything and you'd make the world understand.

PHYL: How about your own personal experience of a relationship to this land, its fruits.

ARTEMIS: You're funny.

PHYL: No, really.

ARTEMIS: I can't really answer that without laughing I mean you know, fruits. You don't see the irony or the pun I guess there because you would never call anyone a fruit-- in fact it's more likely that someone would call you a fruit, and you naturally are not struck with a dart of humor around fruit allusions I guess.

PHYL: I'm looking at you Artemis and though I'd have expected a character out of one of those eager post-order wasteland warlord fantasies you seem more just like the bare-titted frisbee guy's sometimes stocking-fetished girl companion from one of the nearby gourmet boeuf-bourgeois-owned hill homes.

ARTEMIS: Are you trying to buy pot from me?

PHYLLIS: Ok, but as long as you're not dissociating, who are you? I've got a pack of cutcorners in my purse.

ARTEMIS: I actually live about six blocks up the hill with my parents, and both of those naked ponytail loincloth guys tossing the platter are my sometimes boyfriends.

PHYLLIS: I have to tell you off the record one that's really hot, and two it troubles me as far as do you have the appropriate information that you need about pregnancy std's heartbreak.

ARTEMIS: Your heart's been broken so many times you are like completely addicted to the chemicals, the ritual, which is fortunate because you'd be getting it whether or not you needed it over and over and over again.

PHYL: Thank you, walking tarot card with legs. Keep that. I'm good.

Bus ticket to People's Park

They administered our 8 ounces of Sunny Delight and returned us to the stone penitentiary maze complex.
Now it was time for free persons to decide our further if any fate.
There was a week's tv vigil in our individual suites to sit and dwell.
The cops and guards and therefore we all used old hookers' lingo to describe the suspensions of normal rule.
A cellmate might try and subject you to a 747; everybody knows to simply turn the other way.
But there the mixability cam will be parsing out your facial expressive points.
If you can be a survivor you can be grateful as Christ.
Normal ones don't get in a fatal bind because they have so many openings to escape.
One if you call it fatal you are hyperbolic result of two spoiled by superior political system.
Dignity means you don't register what happens to your body or future.


Reptily

Deeper Bays

Dreams keep on unperturbed
Dreams reach under and go around
Dreams behave like water seeking space.

When life is taking place in the midst of a novel
It's a simulacrum of dreaming
Whereas you travel in two dramas at once.

Drama is a check digit, analogous link scout;
Drama runs parallel with a road;
Drama washes onto the stage from deeper bays.


Peg
"Trying my hand at criticism."

Jan's Chant

You remind me of my father before he had me, and I remember your father before he had you: him, whom you remind me of and I'll remember you to if I see him again.

My father before he had me reminds me of me myself before he was gone, and your father before he had you reminds me of you after both of our dads were long gone.

You were spinning out just like and from your mother, who reminds me of my mom, whose big brother spun out and was gone into a world like the one you're in now.

Our mothers are like spirit sisters more than ever that they stand on either side of the line of alive; they remind me of you and your mom standing shoulder to shoulder.


Jan Jansdaad
"On holiday in Dubhabera Chank"

hernia of the craw

Once ire's fruits've made it too wide an opening, the thyroid cartilage gets sucked into the anomaly and a poor sod's diagnosed with hernia of the craw.

Left dream-splayed and vulnerable, a sitting duck for the picaresque, he rocks in a corner with his wrists pressed together starting over and over, "i feel...".

Space itself has to drain from the body when an impression's been made too strong and wrongly and efforts launched to recover normally've gone on too long.

Before you can chew your way to freedom a mother figure is forcefully feeding you live and squirming fodder for the chest burning that's also used for reflection.


Peg
"I too was Missy."

Dry and Loud

Looking up from a sulk at the ground

We put "dry" first in "dry and loud"
Because seating comfort should come before sound.

If the sound is good but the feel is wet
The experience unfolds as one you'll regret;
You haven't known humiliation yet.

But wind that's dry, with trumpet full
Calls foul the cries of "Imbecile!"
And proves you've been responsible.


Ken
"Scatology is not the same as scat."

[donna on ken notes]

[donna on ken notes]

he has different moods but why
is what's not easy to justify
he's not a single mother
substitute teacher, police officer
and it's tricky to decipher
a code when one's so earnest
so basically with what you're left's
a literal interpretation, direct translation
and some hyperbole, dark or sunny
which leaves a consistent note of exasperation
that seems to appear outta thin aspiration
and it isn't clear if it's period, just there.


Dr. Donna Thong
"I'm alla bout your relationships."

Inability to titrate

My inability to titrate creates an irritableness surfing on tubular rage.
They prolly did that in the 70's and 80's; it's just not cool these days.
There's no excuse from a blunt-edge mood target perscription, Dad.
Things I will stomp on: all the objects I need most throughout the pad:
electronic equipment, barware; bread, sling tokens, a hardback book
you have to come at with a slide, expecting to travel, break the spine.
I took my time working out love on a number of men, nothing missed.
I can rest on a loud, dry train better than a bed in the heat of August.

Ken
"Parsing through my feelings."

At Least Tonight I Have Hope

I'm not going around calling things like multiple leaf blowers for 140 minutes this morning heinous
I been in the business long enough to know the difference of a cataclysm opposed to annoying
N' even though no precedent's been set here for a cocky night leaning toward a second following
It's a positive something I've got with me now and it's measurably kicking: at least tonight I have hope.

I may get in a freeway high-traffic windshield fluid fight with spraying at velocities of 80-100 mph
Might even bail if it gets too real, call it in to the CHP as road rage though the other guy was laughing
Even though mine's the vehicle on the warning sign, going to pass on the right, into a semi's wide-turn flank
Tonight I'm stealing a breath, however undeserved, and entering a period of unjustifiable smirking.

Perhaps instead I've figured out a way to have the future double paved, as the life line on my left hand
Whether it's cuffs coming up from the other end of the wrist, a crossing-over experience, or much worse
A full moon takes up just as much room in the sky as the fully waned, and as fully I, whole, repose.


Ken
"Applied for a job down at the pie factory."

Tudhu

Block out as many sources of light as possible to get one super-intense light source.
Cough until all impurities are removed from the lungs.
Read enough photo captions to equal a multi-volume treatise on sloth.
Love everyone, even people you don't know, so much that you die at one with humanity.
Keep remembering a song until everyone else is singing it.
Have a system in your kitchen that bakes fresh pies like a factory.
Spend a whole day doing a task over so many times you'll never have to repeat it.
Practice talking dirty at home alone until it becomes second nature when a sex partner is present.
Find a place where cliffs and sea, sky and recline of sand overlap to reveal a perfect square.

by Donna

I Saw a Glowing Dog Lounging

X: I saw a glowing dog lounging by the pool at nearly ten pm.
O: Were you seeing things, hallucinations, voodoo, optical illusions?
X: It was a matter of dimensions, like several transparencies overlapping.
The ecstatic pet was in the house trancing on trying not to listen to the television.
Out near the water there was a patch of moonlight on the cement, someone's lost moment of election by heaven.
In between the dog and the light was a film of glass and behind that another.
O: And this was meaningful for you how--? Do you think your bitch is a medium or saint?
X: M'Lady is so far beyond reproach already that calling her saint is not a compliment.
What it meant to me was how we try to imagine other dimensions, just as a metaphor.


Peg
"From an old tape I found. Who are they?"

Urge to Beg God

She stands up stringy hair, staring horror-eyed, as if into a void, without taking air, n'then it subsides.
She must apologize to all victims of fallout everywhere because she blew, and blew so much.
But now she must stay alive and never go back to jail, not kindergarten, nor the place they kept her after the abduction from the parking lot at Sears.
The only safety there was never having to go back and never being able in any case to return.
Sprinklers kept wat'ring the strong desert plants that only knew to grab and thrive when they can but did it all the time and soon were banging up against the house with the wind in an entitled fashion.
The urge was to cower and dread even though she was the god that was supposed to let the beggars in.


Phyl
"Peg's really opening up."

Life of Peg

If some professional-primitive magical realist hack painter sloshed together or spent all night smoking pot and fine-lining it all in ball-point pen or traced with a stubby stolen public library pencil in front of an overhead projector image jazzed up by a team of so-called parapsychologists, right onto the stretched skin, the result would be Peg, topless, looking back as if at a history-changing conflagration while visible ghosts of the beloved buzz all around her head, advising or just projecting reminders into this waking plasma that they existed and of what they meant.


Phyl
"por parte mia"

i hate...

i hate having work things in my personal box and personal things having my work box,
or i hate it when there's personal works in my things box or personal-things work in my personal work boxes.
i hate it when there's work-box things in my personal thing box,
or boxes in my things or when things are not in their boxes.
i also hate doing thing-box work when i could be spending personal time boxing my personal-things work.
But mostly i hate working on things personal while things from the working thing boxes at work work at hating my person.


Connie [R.I.P.]
"All I get is pretty."

God Beggars

God beggars are gods that beg God for food,
and they starve feeling bellies full of good news.

God beggars beg until their nuts are blue, eager
to dream a century of virgins saying what to do.

Virgins beg a god t' make their sufring history'n,
that "this" once again have ambiguous meaning.

She felt th' begging as a wordless urge, but din't
make of it a saying, can't be judged for wanting.


by Phyllis

I'll Make the End of Life Really Beautiful for You

I'll be there in confident open blouses and pearls over tank tops. We'll be gliding through wooden-paneled hotel lobbies with the bouquets in giant vases. I can be titty all up in your face but I know that dying isn't only about that. Maybe you want to imagine naked slick slavery helping your way crib to kingdom, the backs of naked slaves maybe with fringes, gold satin cord. Stop and screen this: I am whispering Wall Woman's Blade of Grass in yr ear with yr eyes closed and you're seeing the grass. All of it.

"White Chocolate"

Algorithms of an Executrix

Her cataclysmic world's a rocking canoe: while you just can hold on, every moment is an upgrade. This is when sometimes people they start to sprout alternate personalities that can better handle the stress and strain of any given situation/ problem.

For example White Chocolate is a chick who's been hurt but still has a social craving and a sexy, hurt sexuality about her, very much into stockings. Sometimes guys guess she's a dyke, and girls think she'd make a handsome man. She started out practicing quick comebacks, for about 20 years, like it's cuz I'm sweet, but then she settled into folks thinking she was a freak even without knowing her name. Even fewer could have guessed it was Peg in lip gloss.

Another apparition sits with his legs tightly crossed and a can held at face level. Seems to have had one of the fingers on that hand removed for a better tipple. He can remember events of many years ago, but none of yesterday's. "Alan" has the permanent look of a monsoon native trying weepily in exotic tongue to explain the disaster to first responders and direct their efforts toward where they'd be most fucking needed.

Then it would be time to do the laundry, feed M'Lady. M'LADY Peg'd shout as if a cry for help at a lower creature could yield much but hiding in bushes. She's trying to express all the fear and exasperation of a braking middle life in an empty nest strewn with needles. Just her own raw self, without K-mones, couldn't be more inept at operating its shielding or filtering systems much less the measured algorithms of an executrix.

Phyllis

On Peg's backstory

Peg and the kids made house of a large working fridge in the middle of the desert. They could peek out, run back and forth from the car without singeing their faces.

When there were clouds it would be time to scout curling lines in every direction; it was like a ranger's post. They could burn garbage at night in steel barrels with holes poked by some unimaginable force.

Paper goods going made a multi-eyed jack-o-lantern, sparks blowing out his top. Phosphorescent scorpions, exoskeletons, clattered backwards from the light.

Inside, they welcome their own smells to remind them they're alive. Yet they feel kept only fresh, and how celery skin will start to slough and ice on the inner curves.

While Ted was out reporting the news in his salt-n-pepper beard, there was overall fear. When the dog held his breath to prick motion outside, a general MUTE was applied.


Phyllis
"Thinking about Peg's backstory."

The Future is Just a Cushion

The future is just a cushion between now and you know what.
The future is a cheap cushion with a hard, uncomfortable button right in the middle.
That cushion's button, squared and wooden, is the wheels on Ilyn's cart.
Ilyn's barely moved an inch in 20 years, except for straight down into crust.
A chesterfield sofa is an illusion of softness the way its buttons pull the surface in.
Illusions of depth are often mistaken as illusions of time.
Time does not exist. Time is a lie. The lie of time is just enabling your blindness.
You are blind because your face is buried in a cushion.

Peg

Identification Shell Slough

Missy, coughing blood bubbles, skew-winged and grotesque, pends between her stucco front porch railing and a massive iron drug store scale, still teething on a rubber diving vest. 

MISSY: In this my third iteration involved in these habitats i invoke, even before the fangs set and i can lift myself steadily from this misery on fully formed arms of flight, the names of my pre-carriers, for at any moment I know I shall lose their recollections.

SOME VILLAGERS: Don't tell us! Don't say the names, for we cannot hear!

MISSY: The names are Chama Tilly and Reptily.

SOME VILLAGERS: Great. That's just great. Now we'll have to go back into the records and produce some recompense for any act of disrespect tordall and any persons with those names.

MISSY: I would certainly hope so.

VILLAGER WITH CHIN LIKE A MIRROR HANDLE: How can we cope with having viewed your hideous molting, or...

MISSY [literally bending over backwards]: To take those backwards, I'd opt for meta-cognitive talk therapists and the term is "identification shell slough."

First-flesh venture

i am a genetic line
where vertebrae grew along it
and a nerve bubble formed
the faceless prototype head.

my parents were so unworldly
that i wanted to mount every trend
and i metamorphosed from within
so no special effects were needed.

when you learn you're descended from a pantheon
of first-flesh venture
you can roll out your tanking chakras
and they sparkle like dimes in a rug.


Chama Tilly

Once her hairdo missed the bell clapper, she had to say her own prayer.

Mthyuh it's a test
of how bad it is
that I insult my own beliefs
to moan your name.

Donna

Spam n' Eggs on a Plate, Stat!

Hey Mr. Big Tiny, y'gotta tiny big prolm?
Why doncha getchr big'n tiny off th' street?
Hey, Mr. Big; hey, Tiny Big. Where's yr
Tiny Missy, Tiny? Tiny Big, y'lostyr little
Missy Tiny Little Big. Yr gonna hafter sit-
chur big n' tiny body down fr spam n eggs!

Cause Me to Seizure

Metaphors Within Shmetaphors
Two of the four seasons
A menacing shorter man
sympathy for another
intensity of today's sun
i remember what i used to remember
don't know what i'm doing here
cause me to seizure

Ilyn

8 More Lipsticks

stay you die/ leave you die

Unrequited Suitor

random, but constant

shame for change

Day of non-participation

Had a Little Grip In

Drag on The System

Big Ol' Quinoa Party


PharmSupply

Phyllis on Jan Jansdaad

I recently had some down gal time with Jan Jansdaad, the daughter of Jan Jansdaad, Jan's dad. What's it like to be invisible? Is education overrated by the uneducated? How does she mean when she say "take it like a flow"?

PHYL: Jan you're one of my favorite co-bloggists because, I donno, you're less assuming and I guess self-defacing in a way.

JAN JANSDAAD: Thanks Phyllis. I used to think that you asked questions because you just wanted to get a grip on the right switches to totally turn someone off when you go bored. That you insinuate into people's lives and become meaningful to them only so that you can then later, for your own amusement value only, come up with the deepest possible way to hurt their feelings. The idea that psychological violence is better because it's legal, otherwise you would be a real murderer.

PHYL: Oh! But all that changed when...

JAN JANSDAAD: Right, since I found out you're embedded by the Sports N' Sex Crimes Bugle. It's cool-- in fact I feel comfortable being exhibitionistic with you now.

PHYL: So Jan, who are some of your favorite authors directors thinkers.

JAN JANSDAAD: You know I never have been one to maintain a lot of names in my accessible memory sectors. And even though uh Wayne and I are growing old in our empty nest, I've always not bothered with --and couldn't have anyway because I'm not capable-- human names. Baseball players, presidents, writers, directors bands poets. I just tend to take it like a flow, enjoy some music or a book, but not feeling obligated in any way to care who or what was the creator.

PHYL: So for you it's not old age or lack of education but rather brain capacity, strong sense of personal style and religious belief. Basicly any kinda nomenclature is Satan's nature; there is only one godhead. Now. "Take it like a flow"?

JAN JANSDAAD: That means be in the moment, Phyl.

PHYL: Why do you think it is that people don't notice you?

JAN JANSDAAD: We've taken steps over the generations that leave shadows like veils, and what in some places would be actual veils. Our behavior acts as an invisible burka. Leering shock envy dishonor my body, which resonates disrespect back hundreds of mutations. Moreover, modesty itself is a shield.

PHYL: Do the poor resent us.

JAN JANSDAAD: The dignified of any class can harbor no resentment toward another.

PHYL: Well spoken, but...

JAN JANSDAAD: Who's got a well spoken butt?

PHYL AND JAN: HAHAHAHAHA!

PHYL: Ok but really [smile]. Who is your God?

JAN JANSDAAD: You should know; I'm sure you tryda make a deal and beg him all the time.


by Phyllis

2nd Burnoff

Bad genetics

Every single facial expression
my face is capable of making proves
inappropriate for any situation.

But how often does the environment twist itself
hard enough to wring you into hovering orbit?
Enough to make it seem like an interminable hell.

And wouldn't it be better if, like the mail,
you could say i don't accept this,
i won't accept this-- it's the wrong address.

when you let your body take charge and speak for you,
it'll take its electrical cues from the mind,
so you're back where you started, with bad genetics.

Genetic shadows

When it's late and extra quiet, when the seasonal owners have gone on beyond to the next temperate happening, we see something like the flicker of candlelight, a sample of many a typical evening take a hundred years, or skipping continents. But here it's from inside the ancestral mind, where your instinct uses nuances of weak electric color to project target practice for its most visceral calibrations.

Only one curly bulb can make of a peaceful den a psycho-dramatic playhouse or frozen backdrop for dreamless, open-eyed sleep. A real estate photo might make these furnishings seem cheap, as if someone had opened wide the theater doors in the middle of a noon matinee, and it's all exposed and sordid and ruined, the giant protective stone lid removed from the top of a maze of clowns.

Genetic shadows twitch like atrophic limbs, facial spasms. An intensity of the left eye; the other's from the head of another guy. This personic blend can only see one life and its offset double, never truly two views; when they say a horror lasts forever, they mean across millennia, and it throws switches along its own strand. What I've always known, even since before I was a man, is nature and Her cruelties.


Donna
"I confess."

Prayer Gong

i can almost taste lake michigan on my lips
and breathe the rot of autumn at close grip

when i say god and gaze upon a place
in the curtain hanging black across His face

the fabric falls away and my eye goes distant
to a floating island in an upper quadrant

looking way beyond because it's been so long
since the call to prayer for me's been gonged.


Donna
"Mthyuh...I'm so grateful..."

dieoff up ahead

Never mind the swollen sea of young behind;
What concerns instead's the dieoff up ahead.

Our exercise of awesome individualist power,
god's voice one with making the right choices,

is good now if it will be or ever has been good
tho I reckon it's hard t' see thru a circle of fire.


Peg
"Really thinking. Kundalini thinking."

Entry Portal Craw Circumference Dimensions

As a virgin parson's son is out about his day, and just as he is ready to grant his first true blossom to a ruddy shop girl, he is seduced, literally hoisted by the roof of his mouth with a pair of thumbs made into hooks, by a scarred, hairy older man in a suit open at the neck, a handsome bearded but sadistic aristocrat.

The cruel and charming duke turns out and sets to chain the bewildered parson's family's only son for seven months in butt plugs and scrotal weights. He forced that the boy, wearing more than seventy tiny rubber-on-metal clips beneath a kimono, say goodbye to a friend who lay expiring in a mechanical bed.

Preacher's kid eschews the magnetic grip of the lusting mastermind and his duplex in a canyon highrise by scaling back to earth along the slippery yokes of the anonymous and undocumented classes, training in return their progeny on what to say to be redeemed in the context of the host society.

When he wakes up in a cooking pot with a cassava root and a pound of celery, broth to the chin, he stands and gathers his fortune slowly wrought from proctoring and chalk, returns triumphant to the scene of his pubescent initiation frights and is immediately tricked by a familiar voice behind a cape.

You've taken seven years to be away, and now another seven alone with me you'll stay attached to a radiator pipe in a pretty prison full of playful castrati maids. Your still warm nest egg isn't all you've signed away on what you thought was a petition to lift restrictions on entry portal craw circumference dimensions.


Odrin and Ayre Fromme-Diaz

Gift to speak truths in anger

you call me crooked
dick clown wanderer
broker of heart and rules

my argument is that
i love you just as much
as I ever have

there's no truer fortune
my better eye could find
than the sinew of a trail


Tilly

Spin, Vajra

winning and losing connote will
zen master refuses to take step
goes down on a burning temple
aggressives link selves to a god
and feel good about the victory
the bending willow slaps a boot
without even achieving titillation
the vajra, a vessel or pin, coun-
ter ambulates against our plane.


Ken and Jan
"We belong to each other."

cataclysm

and ground splitting,
loss of limb strength
signs thrown at you,
jarring, a vajra spins
past is disintegrating
wraith in a spotlight,
fireballs behind you,
dank rent in the sky
convulsions of sinus
begging, intervening

waking chi blackout
out-of-vehicle drive,

hello? I'm travelling:
it's a lucid career of
then to nowhere; he
who troubles not be
troubled not by any-
body, so I go toiling.

Paranoid of Nature

It was a role play or exploring letting swim a fractile of human makeup that most share. Maybe because of the music then we lent ourselves cheap to its timing (or just by being in a generation can you claim any hand in coloring the nature of its arts?).

Human makeup is darker than the skin. Or so said the mind who invented original sin or simply spoke for every person having flinched from nature for fear its dangers represent a judgement kindred to the horror a mind beholds at its less civilized head.

The mind includes nature, but atoms cannot include other atoms unless where there's a mind, which must then be agreed to be para-atom, para-material, magic and its imagination. Mind cannot exist without surroundings. If it did, it would be a horror.

If what's around us was a mind it would be a mind without surroundings since what surrounds what surrounds us is a vacuum. Tension created by sucking is what teases on life. But your fear about nature is that it just might be a mind and not that it could disappear into a void. 

If all else went away forever we could finally heave a sigh and symbols could no longer torture us with accusations as if we ourselves had decided to be born so dreadfully bad. Not even a stick man can exist when there are no lines. Nomenclature is meanwhile my only defense.


Baal

Pups

Pups watch through trees for the fence-walking kitties, but the trees are all wavy from light off the pond.
Pups think that kitties are mystical creatures that come from a world that is shimmering fronds.


Donna
"I surrender."

I Blew My Pleasure Center

My cheeks felt tight for about three years, and my gums were receding prematurely. In the mirror, my face kept changing. I thought my bite was sinking inward. I wondered what force could make the bone structure of a skull move and bubble. Nocturnal bruxism? An uneven ridge swole up surrounding my mouth like an older smoker whore, but it wasn't unattractive. Only if I pinch-lifted my lips-- and who does that?-- would anyone spy what was really developing. Even I didn't guess until the little ruffled moons started poking their fingers through. These have got to be someone else's damn teeth.


Missy

Good luck thieving

i drowned a wasp
left him in the net
turn back around
an a piece of fluff
flies at my face an
i flinch so garishly.
but all the evening
under half a moon
good luck thieving.


R.

cathartic diagnosis

They say a walking problem is a mind problem
as if your mind could have trouble walking, or if
you could even think and walk at the same time.

They assume that everything physical about you
must be normal and in so doing make your mind
para-physical. It's not matter that exists in space.

They see you wobble and think of drunkenness as
mind impairment not physical disabling. The mind
wanna own everything so it calls everything mind.

I name what your problem is so I can own it while
still not having it myself. Whether or not I own you
as well is inconsequential as to cathartic diagnosis.


Al Upinnahb Iznis

a new poverty layer

out with the genteel poverty that's neat;
in with the ground-in extra layer returning
intimate effects into earth at your feet.

one layer of wallpaper or applique bordering
one fiberglass headboard as the base for an
entire climbing wall of fluffy Borgana faunae

thin crust of sprays and exhausts and their
harvest of dusts and micro-excrement;
now slide, rub passing by, and carpet stomp.

from bong water of the Jedi to Febreze,
oily, salted kernels, pebbles, party sprinkles;
coarse smears making of shag a rank flat top.

cap 5's a measurable gaseous zone;
above that we experience mists still falling
and then roundabouts the hearts and arms.

the center may follow the throat to be able
to vacuum over again its own essence;
the throat is the eroded gate that plays out.


Donna
"Yes, I'm up."

Meat Horn

I remember the blood and turquoise-color rubber and my mother.
Stainless steel trays and instruments, from beneath a paper bonnet, druggily beholding me.
There were electric storms that felt like my hair growing, emergency sucking.
Sounds interrupted, noise was interruption, we were attention bait on an interventionist planet.

Now clots of our lives, appearing behind mirrors, in drains, snag on the present, must be yanked.
Her shimmer fills doors a couple times a year then disabsolves into telephonic vibration.
When I extend my thumb at the end of an arm to pull her braid I'm blocked from contextual access.
Except for hearing waves lap school-blue tiles, how she squeaks free of her swimming cap.

When I hold myself the way she hugged herself in self-knit sweaters on a slug-lined morning
The same elbow tips come to touch the mitts with similar tentativeness.
I am a genetic trail that's grown the habit of spouting vertebrae along it.
We have so many stomachs that it doesn't matter where the break is, or change of mind.


Hoolie
"For Peg"

I am a genetic line

Slack gaping knots of vines of rubber coated vines of metal wire roping, dipping over and under, across each other in their glacial play. I am a genetic glacier.

The tree, a spear that disintegrates attempting to exit the atmosphere, all the while shedding dna and re-materializing in competing shards. I am a stack of totem.

If the heart was the only rhythm we could hear, and we liked getting bounced around in a leather bag, the drums came out and we bobbed, singing "I...I."


Illyn

Wherever He Lays a Cat is his Home

from their breath each could tell that the other was scared
they lay bare in their bed with the light from outside
it was right what they'd done but they didn't know why

There were roads that would never be lit by the moon
so deep or so smart as to always be gay
to wither or not one knew night from the day

But some sinewy vines that swung out of control
re-trajected by chance with the same random goon
and in blindness of living got tangled in two.

Tilt of Mast

there is a lost-ness
but also a seeking;
a tilt of mast could
be caused by sink-
ing but also rowing;
mor'n half a planet
covered in puddles
flat as tables, a fly
meanders cursively
over, seeing his self
from most angles 'n
not sincerely caring,
for it's all an old sto
-ry now, reflecting.


Ayre and Odrin Fromme-Diaz

Why = Where

If what you desire is for me not to exist, that's not ok. 
That's the fist with which she grips reality. Where
Were the OK police? They'll come swooping in. Why

There's a whole thing happening that includes your sleep and what happened you thought you forgot, and added to that what you think life is, your assumptions about why events occur, how material changes hands, and the dark presence of the stars and planets teasing growth while life counter-intuitively resists and yes, choices.

When you try to hurt me, it almost seems like I can't
Trust you. Peg's girlhood is full of blank spots like
These. Now she is a fierce and lonesome retired woman.

Tendrils of wealth can curl in anywhere at any age. Some license you got on weekends suddenly pays off. Teacher of that course filing for bankruptcy. It seems like a directive hand because she can't see the invisible swirling currents, just her little paddles. She squishes forward with the bated breath of a blindfolded bottom.


Phyll's Log

These Things've been Kicked Around

These things've been kicked around
these things've been tard n hung
things we are a used to be
regretful for what's to come.

First thing is a prison round
out yr window a golden town
one day they cough up the key
(that's) when you chose to run from me.

These things've been kicked around
these things've been tard n hung
things we are a used to be
regretful for what's to come.

Another one is a paper cup
you take a drink and you've used it up
Now Raylene she is history
but when she ran, the cut was clean.

These things've been kicked around
these things've been tard n hung
things we are a used to be
regretful for what's to come.

Finely my dog passed from me
Bad breath and vasectomy
Not once did he ever run
I kep'm chained t'the Mercury.


Donna
2 Mike: "Should we really?"

These Things: the Mp3