Feeling Racing

When you're accelerating, you feel it; then when you get to a speed and coast, you don't feel it. If you never stop accelerating, you will always feel it.


from "Feeling Racing"
Hoolie, age 10

child hippy

he seemed in tune
and braces wires
would guide him
or the bone drag
rubber band pain
it was for us, not
him: carefreeness.
strode through the
space foam at NA-
SA play day in fl-
ared purple cords,
brought pot to all
the church retreats.
felt sisterhood w/
a. davis and a. d
-workin, then be-
gan junior high.



Peg
"For Hoolie"

i've already worked it out on the dance floor (in progress)

poison arrow
desert claw for water
rappelling
surf's up in a vortex
James Brown slide-lunge & mod contraction
eyeware stem in corner of the mouth stroll
hitchhiker shake
literal hip hop
slippy sliding on ice and/or broken glass
smack-and-sway fist hip
stir the pot
heavy burden shoulder rope drag
pulling a lifeline endlessly toward you
knee bend reaching fingers far behind you left, right
stripper overhead forearm swivel at the elbow
back-against-wall dip
ball shuffle change SLAM (into wall) repeat
shimmy in place with penguin go-go fists
Patty Duke wrist flap foot hop change hop
pogo pero como lo de isadora dun-can
hair-sweat fling lunges
Twiggy hands opening to-sky awakening knee bend
hypnotic National Geographic chinny boob-cup bead hop
soul backup stepping
acid hippy freakout trip birthing from universe
erotic struggle behind, with and against invisible bars
handcuffed vertical worm-like writhing
faux Thai hand-finger ocean waves
fingertip popcorn pop get down
heated hammer go-go
shoulder-to-knuckle full-swing go-go race riot
pirouettes in a mosh pit while spiked partner guards
one-handed cocktail Ipanema shuffle twist
that with no drink punching left right at the waist swivel
driving and anything else
seeking, seeking everywhere with hand over brow
hip rock left right back front back left front right
doing anything while doing that
slippery surface endless fall with a smoke in lips
hair tearing, eye gouge, reaching at heavens bop
natural gyroscope
Afro-diaphragm knee pull trance to drums
lounge lizard slow shoe cigarette mash
anything else you can do at the same time
standing and hugging self, appear as two from behind
squirm doing that
inflated tutu on the open sea arms ankle pump
that to any music with harp in it
shopping bag at feet slow coat slide down the back
whip the effing floor with the B-ass coat, whip
stomp dance around not on coat
low-spinning coat-as-cape thigh pump
gravity-defying slo-mo rock poses
and marching out of a muddy swamp backwards
hard shaking hips, throwing out trash behind left, right
and looking L/R neck pop with hair strung across face


Jan Jansdadd
Jan'z Danztudio
Oslo

People are insane

i have to remember that around
my family
i can take comfort not in
complaining whining
or scapegoating or even calling
them
just that they are they and i
can be myself
assuming that stays within certain
bounds.


by Jan

bananas

exercise as mimesis

I welcome the opportunity to get exercise while accomplishing my necessary daily tasks. Walking to work would be an example. Taking the stairs. Not exercise as a mimetic act. This is like chasing after game. That is like lifting a child. This is like kicking an assassin. Over and over. For that I would have to become a secret agent or movie actor. For it to fit my category of exercise I'm willing to do.


Ken
"Thinking about it alone can create positive changes in my body."

Great Lakes Region

captive seas in bladders
rocky enough to be salt
game, blustery survival

entire cities, camera shy
the elderly retain a chill
wood houses, blue water

lily pads, ice flows, red
and yellow birds, church
deep black water, snow



Phyllis
"It's what I imagine."

Busting a nut will make your eye sockets fill in

Busting a nut will make your eye sockets fill in:
extra buffer against the skeleton
when existentialism seems odd.

Three choices for a snarling alley dog:
psych-or-literal prison,
love and care, euthanasia.

Don't leave the preference up to him:
during this phase, he'll opt out,
over the hump, down for the count.



by Ken

65/35

It is my misfortune
to be right so often
at times in waves of
dawning probability.
now is against, 70/30
yesterday was 65/35.
tomorrow we marvel
at willing co-citizens
who go on, bend over,
at their radioactivity,
the ground they cover
as a mole, unthinking
will claw at his home
kick walls behind him
pause, still burning,
and eagerly consume
a nib of bait in the dirt.



Donna [Dr. Donna Thong, Reinstatement Imminent]
Poetry Table, Activity Hour
Meta-cognitive Talk Therapy Cohort Study [embedded control subject]
The Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

peggy

promise

don't ever stop

weightless due to sudden lack of momentum
the lull annexed by a mass so big just that it's
there can suck you in like a tractor beam, but
nature unforced, size, density have this property

we liked ripping packages open with our hands
being really either together or alone, there, here,
to hold self-medicating non-commercial powers
depended upon in a life-or-death importance by

our country which meant everyone of all colors
it was on the way up here we didn't stop but
passed through what we've always wanted: a
moment you can only wait to spin back around?



by Ken
"I got my bell-bottoms for seven dollars."

Vehicle of delivery

When everything is broken or buried
or a scheme for immediate pleasure
or both, is indicated a vehicle of
delivery. Who will defend this

household? you can bake cookies to
sell a house, not a family. But who's
home? At among screens within
screens or the moment between.

Inside that glance is a sea-legged
focus dilation, perhaps a micro-
sleep or brief wakefulness. Or
a real-time racing windshield.



Peg [before she knew]
"Connie, please come home girl."

All crap

all these small jobs
to manage the kids and
car, maintain yard and
dogs, their needs
it can build up on a girl

and you don't own
anything, your auto
house, music, phone
is all payments and
clouds, magic password

product is brand and
brands products, brand
via corporate and pro-
ducts from Chinese
sweatshops, all crap.



by Donna [Dr. Donna Thong, Reinstatement Imminent]
Poetry Table, Hobby Hour
Rehabilitative Meta-Talk Therapy Trial Participant [embedded control subject]
Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

Tragi-comic road rage

Mind you, I don't have any idea what empty nest syndrome means or what it is, but I've heard the term, and maybe you're having that.

Sure you experience me outside of you. I experience you outside of me. That doesn't make either one of us more of an outsider.

What I can do and you prolly can't do is rock the glutes around one of your sit bones so as to make you catatonic circularly.

Look, I've got this and it's worth something. You can't take it away, so just take it in. I may be famous some day or maybe now.

It's your responsibility to praise the Lord because the singing and dancing up upon to Him will make you glad, and this enforcement

Of glad acts will create pheromones which will create a desire in you to act in ways that benefit society and prevent suicide.

Start with a one point something,  add another one point something, and then before you know it you're skipping over two and right into three or three point something.

Connie [posthumously]
Chalk Chank Press

violent tic

 

Farts as nameable events

You could stack up all the name-your-baby supermarket checkout books in the world, the Bible, Koran, Torah, all the Star Wars and Trek movies, Upanishads... other sacred texts that tend to spawn names and not have enough names for all the nameable farts if farts were named. The library at St. John's would inspire a great stink. Archives of all existing public school K-12 student records. Check that, birth certificates. Then you could start on all nouns, for any noun can be a name. You could start on syllabic combinations cannibalized from old names to create new names which alone would of course create an infinite number of combinations. That would probably be enough names for all the nameable farts if farts in fact were named, though of course they normally aren't. Vlad.

Affective Mask Training

[from: Daybook Near Daybed, by Donna]

Consulted with Hon. Reptily "La Chama" Mlaf re: [long story] on the couches in my living room with some big pillows and drinks, Persian cats.

SUMMARY: Rev. La Chama suspects (not psychotic/ hallucinatory) that she is being called to another world. It's not so much that she wants to go, but she feels it's a consensus of parties and interests beyond her control. More than ever, there is disregard, impatience, suspicion. She believes she is misunderstood by friends from California who keep telling her it's what she puts out into the universe. She tells them she must be a pretty shitty person then. They do not disagree. The Reverend concludes that she is responding to a real social phenomenon, not necessarily the supernatural decision of a supreme being, but she also understands how many parishioners conflate God and mob. I do not disagree.

RECOMMENDATION: Invent AMT, Affective Mask Training. Co-habitators of La Chama's environment not only resent her status as a goddess but are also off put by her ability to mirror exactly their emotions and sometimes secrets. This is because La Chama's emotional reaction to others is essentially sympathetic, and having at least one parent from the reptilian genus rhynchoedura ornata, even her color could change depending on a lunch companion's skirt/sweater set. Is she trying to gain intimacy with her freaked-out interlocutors? Does she seek to intimidate? We think particularly not, maybe secondary. Her principal aim, though a struggle, is understanding, to categorize and label. But when she senses hostility or fear, they are amplified by a natural flaring hormone common to her father's species. Hyperbolic mimesia can spiral into mutual hostility and mistrust. AMT, mounted in the eyeglass lens, could be the next Biofeedback, but through the use of emerging facial recognition technologies, and for a very specific purpose: cosmetic psychology, which could conceivably branch into studies of Forensic Cosmetology, but most importantly, save lives.


Dr. Donna Thong [Reinstatement Imminent]
Editorial Board Member
Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

Errata Omne Quod Scitur

Dear Jan and Ken:

Ever since you brought me back through The Crack to get help with your "pterodactyl problem" and in exchange kindly explained the spiritual tenets of the movement that I now control and oversee, I have pictured my own zen-like golden center, the other, the real Chama, as a man, the eternal me, on a throne floating in psychic space outside of matter and time. The man/ God/ thing/ horror who has always been peace itself in that seat, the objective yet sympathetic observer, the hub, fulcrum, axis, last word, arbiter of all, has now collapsed in place like one of those Disney characters on a little plastic pedestal with the button on the bottom connected to rubber bands inside that release the tension and make Goofy, for example, go limp when you press it with your thumb. He hangs his head between his knees like Urizen as if trying to keep sight of a universe plummeting ever further into a distance that is, relative to his position, directly below, sobbing into a sea, which is everything.

I'm faced, then, with a paradox; my understanding of the world, which I also gained from Mthyuh Mkidza Mlaf and her secret husband, our founder, is that there is always a benevolent body, always imminent and anxious to precipitate understanding, to soak and to dissolve invasive anti-meanings into waste, carrot peelings, menses, unnamed storms, farts, tics, blinks. Is this a singularity, apex of a static arc, the feet of which cannot be found? I don't understand why today, why that, or how. My three-dimensional omniscience, or my faith in that concept, or the signal that keeps us all together-- I'm getting flat. Issue of a fax machine. A report, front and back, bad news: your powers are waves without receptors. The gifts you stored and dispensed to so much urgent desperation of a starving planet now instead are only dust and they are blown.

If I can find my brother Ilyn I will follow him to the volcano and take his hand when next he hurls his broken figure into Her molten bath. If I can keep my open palms pressed tight to the extraordinary and inexplicable substance we think of as his flesh, he may let me continue on with him to other times and peoples, but as a lowly passenger, to share his miserable comfort in the cart with wooden wheels hewn square, his surrender to the passive voyage, the unknowable trajectory of Shab, of he who is a red-eyed beast of burden and a beast by manufacture; and a magic, unforgiving beast and a common house pet. When I can hear Shab's toenails scratching across the surface rock of my new life of total ascetic withdrawal, I will sprout this time rent and unwelcome and unfamiliar from the beginning with no illusions and nothing to bring along but the blood of birthing from stone.


Please file under: Errata Omne Quod Scitur
Reptily

nappy

it's not sustainable, girl

believe

Joe

Hank

redo: love pumping cancer

Chang K. Chang Chank Tank Chain Gang Grain Bank

On behalf of the Chang K. Chang Chank Tank Chain Gang Grain Bank, we grant you passage through our bowel. You have bled your Ked's in the bed for some bread and accepted a towelette, Jim. Now it's time to liven up to your debt and swim.

'F I Were on my Dethbed

care laden bells vid

Dog On Through

 

He doesn't need a mouth tumor operation,
the tumor about where a lymph node would
be on a man pushing in his cheek to where
it's conceivably more difficult for him to eat.

Dogs are prone to these, and they get them,
and they work it out, they deal with it, what
choice do they have-- they are dogs, without
the ability to organize a health care system.

He figures it out inside his own mouth and
no we're not so symbiotic that I've gotta
shell out for comfort surgery when all that
any of us can do is diggity-dog on through.


by Ken

sugary/ surgery

[Photo has been sequestered by MPS lab for mass spectrometry.]

when you say sugary, i'll say surgery, and when you say surgery, i'll say sugary.
then i'll ask you to try and say "popcorn fart" with a boston accent.
then every time i say they should..., you say but that would be too easy.
then i start naming the streets in palm springs, and you follow each one with ladies and gentleman.
when you agree i'll doubt my aptitude, and when you disagree i'll be a misunderstood genius.
when you say we're all out of corn, but... i'll say who's got a corn butt?
when you get too bold i'll act over demure, and when you are mild i'll feel unwanted.
if you say you like me it means you don't want to fuck, and if you want to fuck i don't really like you.
i'll say just got a job today, and you'll say really, and i'll say psyche, and you'll say fuck you.
whenever you say you do that, i'll answer don't tell me what to do.
if you say you'd think i wd know, i'll say you think i'm one of those mind readers.
i respect you for your disinterest and mistrust your interest in my trust.
if you say i'm mean and abusive, i'll tell you to fuck off.
if you say i'm keeping you slave, i'll say please fetch my slippers.
if you say i treat you like shit, then my answer is have some self respect and fuck off.
if you say all you ever say is fuck you, i fucking say fuck you, fuck you and fuck you.
if i say come on back, you make me wait and then come back.
if i say it's all for you, i want it all to be yours, you say you know I do.
when i say i'm not well it's not you, it's both you and i'm also not well.
if you say it's not me and it's better with he, i say tmi who asked you, congratulations.
if you say i'll always clean your pool, i'll say fuck off, anybody can clean my pool. 


"for Mike"
Love, Hoolie

over the hill, over the hump

they're doing fine, being their little snow selves
they're moving closer to another part of life that's
even more native than their old selves: old selves.

over the hump, over the hill, on the glory of time,
he lies in a drift as in a cradle, grooves his runs
into ice, appears to be passing in a swift gondola.

she can unfurl her mane by perking fwd her ears
she is ready to pounce on his signal or rescue him
our routines are faithful as the planets and stars.


Donna Thong

Juniper hovering in space

horn of dysthymia

two petite sirloins with 3/4 inch swells
two medium Idaho russets peeled and cubed
half an onion thin slices
basket of white mushrooms
above in grill pan
broc crown steamed with olive oil salt and paprika
carrot-orange juice
12 oz chocolate raisins
olive tapenade hummus and saltines
two pro-biotic yogurts blueberry/ peach


Peg

Snow blanket

under which i
rub my bones
finding safety
where no one goes
although it's cold
there's the weight of it


Tom

Soft molasses ginger faux-biscotti

End of kale

long shallow glass casserole pan, buttered thickly
drained eight-minute penne,
thin-sliced onion, chopped garlic and tomato
halved mushrooms, two big fists of kale, all thrown in raw
first lay down 3 raw hot italian sausage
dump the pasta mixture, tossed with grated parmesan
over the meat, sprinkle paprika, 1/2 C broth,
cumin seeds over all, smush bay leaves
in here and there, pat flat, cover with parmesan
topless in the oven 40 min, 375-400
sausages are juicy, as if boiled; pasta goes from
al dente w/crunchy above and below, as are the greens,
now dark purple


Peg
"meet me at the corner of life is shitty and nobody cares"

Kale samwich

i am being held prisoner by the mthyuh preservation society
whatever you do, ple

Guy in the yard

CONNIE: I feel like crying.

DONNA: Well you go ahead; I've cried twice today already.

CONNIE: Oh, so I'm supposed to comfort you now?

DONNA: No what's up.

CONNIE: Well, you see that guy out in the yard?

DONNA: Uh huh.

CONNIE: I think he knocked me up.

DONNA: You think.

CONNIE: You know what I mean.

DONNA: Not really since you a man.

CONNIE: I'm just playing. 

falling below the line

goodbye, we're
falling below the line
i see my dogs'n i're
doing just fine with
a rain poncho and a
campfire under a
bridge with a sign:
"for kibble and grits,"
a stainless Paul Revere-
ware saucepan for
coins, a last remnant
of a stupid aspiration
to the middle classes

pardon me while I
go down, pardon my
bubbles, maybe see
you on the other side

on my third bob now
boys, I say me no
swim, innocent pups



by Peg

Baby alligators

*This post is currently under review by the MPS*

Sacrifice for top of pyramid

At least two of the below
bleed principal
give up car or home
pledge to additional workmasters

Choice of one
downgrade standard of living
sell more labor hours

Which is NOT correct
more years training & experience equal higher pay
growing economy does not rise tide for all


Dr. Donna Thong, R.I.
"Reinstatement Imminent"

Fur-lined slippers, a pipe, and dogs

brindle rabbits come in cold times for unpruned rose heads
as they came for the bursting vine-fermented grapes in fall

their pear-shaped bodies not fat enough but shutting down
it's not risky if it could be your last chance to wake living

with dogs all around, they limp carefully as if on crutches
bravely standing, they can only see dried bud, the reward

 
Jan Jansdaad

Nameable anomaly

if i were a prisoner in solitary
i would make my small cell a
universe of events and distances

the public natural hot springs
under the freeway overpass,
sanctuary for snakes and birds

to cherish a tiny spider's web is
a weekend touring the capitol
every belch a nameable anomaly


by Peg

torture chair

maybe alprazolam would help me there
at the end of the day, to come in for a landing
alls else the place of relaxation, the
arm rests with hardwood knobs that stun
and the lever that switches foot to numb
tv or read it's the same, just a field
where my thoughts cavort with my demise
this chair was made for those who smoked
and by those same who drank and noticed
not the pain of back or self-imposed designs


Hoolie

explosion of putin, other balls

Round the world

i did a round the world
for new year's
when i was peeing in the sink
circling the drain

rot in hell two thou-
sand fourteen
for now we dwell in
two thousand fifteen.


Hoolie

Husbands instead of children

men and women get weird in their old age
they go to a place of irony and rage
it's as if they think they've discovered
truths not yet to the young uncovered

an hour may pass in thoughtless surrender
uninterrupted by race or gender
splashing, burning, sun in the trees
stepping fully into my abilities

but then the sweep of decades, centuries
seems too dizzying to know what to do
missing a you that's multiple seems broken
can I have 5 or 7 husbands instead of children?


Peg

self-righteous fugue state

this skin has lost resiliency, just tears, a
bee has lit, gone, n' returned in the shape

of four clover leaves over the years, but
all totaled, stinging memories are plenty

i begin to glow and matter presses in
tongues of the aggrieved spew theirs


Donna

i keep figuring it out and then i forget or doubt that i figured it out

as soon as you started handing me folders with names like my music
was when you starting taking away both my music and the concept of mine

right now i don't even know where my music is right now, even the light
hold you give me on my property is ellusive and subject to fire walling

and invasive questioning, long periods of solitary hold time or blaring music
just to do what i used to do with a plastic disc and a needle, i need your

permission every time, to sign away my privacy and become a whore for
your partners, i get sucked into the back door of the industry but for free

Connie
"Angry even yet from the grave."

Phalli

PEG: Phyl, now that you are a journalism adjunct at several institutions of post-high school learning, how would you cite ways it's different from actual journalism.

PHYL: For one, you are interviewing me.

PEG: Are you bitter?

PHYL: Isn't that a given, Peg? Are you I wonder bitter that your children were turned by the temple into science experiments? Ever wonder if you're compared to a family of hairless purple bats?

PEG: Thinking back across your own career though, what might you have maybe tweaked a little.

PHYL: So, it ended up with the most beautiful relationship I've ever had with anyone, including my own parents. As Missy's preen gland expression specialist, I traveled places I never knew existed.

PEG: Is it now that she's past her awkward transformational stage and screeching through skies barely recognizable as anything but that what could be named "Missy."

Now that she's gone, not Missy. That you are irrelevant, or tell yourself so. That Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle doesn't any longer have a place for you.

PHYL: They don't have a place for me; they fired me. They were bought out by Applebees.

And to answer your initial question, I find the life of a freeway-flying adjunct to be very much like journalism: traveling a magic carpet between radically different sets of expectations, philosophies, approaches, policies, operating systems, personalities, parking procedures, lexicon, jargon, argot... having to almost sociopathologically enter, absorb and reflect each mirrored chamber.

PEG: I was a substitute teacher for a while in the 80's. They stole my car, drove it to the beach with a case of beer and spray painted phalli on the backs of the seats.

PHYL: Are we done here?

very expensive swimming pool

every day was a bald giant pounding his metal hammers
KUNG KUNG KUNG KUNG
it's supposed to be like a primitive prehistoric setting but
they have SUV's

i fight any person with whom i come in contact
friend foe blood stranger
equally, as a way to bully me up a family, i
see wrong in you

i dare assholes to try and blame me for providing a center
if there's nature to give
and the right combination of loving and wanting, then
it works atemporally


Mike
as "La Chama"

Meaninglessness, ennui and torpor walked into a bar

She's a monster hatched and finally fully free in the open range

***This post was the last straw for the Mthyuh Preservation Society, whose board took final action to stifle effective immediately. ***

I beg to surrender

it keeps me from sinking into despair
to sit here and defend myself into thin air

i speak to an imagined hypothetical judge
as if she cared. My dog's jowls spread on

the carpet as it hears the cascading pleas
some nights on my knees I beg to surrender


Donna

dysexistencia

may as well, outside these walls
a vacuum, a wanderer, dreaming
lidderly everyone else human

as for other species and breed
we can look out for one another
between the pageantry and combat

the northern clamp sets in again
changes the pressure in the head
metal pops and wood groans on


Missy
"A year liberated."

Plenty of light for one day

If we do remember previous lives that means this is everyone's first life-- how weird!
But there are people who lived and died before us so their souls must've gone elsewhere.
So one life per dimension is one thing known-- some kind of cosmic musical chairs.

Connie

People say things that don't mean anything

stay up late thinking i'm stealing hours nobody's missing
listening to people say things that don't mean anything
madison avenue with the asshole of pop culture stretched
into a crown, the rancid echo chamber, dreaming dog
i'm seeing one of those walking light storms the blind have
it doesn't matter if i open or close my eyes, both the same
that's how hard they're tripping, node tips of technology

Alone/ unique

even though we know we're not the only liveable planet out there
when you think about the distances it doesn't really even matter
it's kind of the same thing yes it is like that being alone/ unique

maybe the only reason to hate the cold is how it's like terror,
overlap in muscles seized creating a fallacious pathos transfer
don't you see it's warm enough to survive inside each one of us


Reptily

Two kinds of muscle memory

One kind of muscle memory is after you wash a dish x many times. The memory lives in the nerves of the muscle rather than the conscious mind, which can now refocus or wander.

Another kind is when muscle reacts to an acute shock to the mind or the body or a chronic series of shocks that motivate regular squirts of cortisol to enter the bloodstream.

The muscle develops a knot that when touched or manipulated will release the memory of the shock and/or a sensory and emotional reproduction of the time or times.


Thong, Dr. Donna 
Journal of the Metacognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement
"Re-licensing Imminent"

What it was like to wreck my SUV at 70 mph

a very stiff jagged branch about the grain of rebar and its accompanying twigs and leaves
impaled the door behind me and into backseat sitting space about two feet.
the driver-side mainframe was buckled in where it'd nestled against a limb

(the part where in a smaller car would be the driver's head).
what it was like was the bladder dip at the point in the
car wash where the machine takes over and you are seated at a dead console.

no contact is being made with a surface, so the wheel can turn
either way without avoiding a dreadful consequence.
the optional on off slide corrector was not on, and a wide, slow spin began:

ooohhhhhhhoooooowheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekuh-kuh...BAM!

after a microsleep, and that not before feeling my head slam,
I found my phone but someone had already called police. I
walked uphill to the squad with an umbrella, climbed in back.

we watched another gentleman doing it, except his bumper flew
off, and it looked like a body on the road in the blur. soon he too
came up to the shoulder, and we sat on the same warm seat.


Hoolie

Going, not been

Suddenly my directional hair growth pattern is a vortex.
There is a calm, bare center, circumference of a walnut.

I buy and lose a hand mirror oh once every ten years.
No recollection comes to mind of this severe a design.

Unlike the barber who found a hippie veteran's cap, a
Living map tells you where you are and going, not been.


Tom

7 barbara

KEN:
We used to play a game and instead of saying seven billion we'd say seven barbara. and now when I say your name i think seven barbara, or i silently think seven barbara. you're not just any one. he'd say i got a pirate, i got a mustang, but my retort was always aint got a seven barbara.

JAN:
He already wasn't himself before I even met him. Yet I fell in love with that former self, what I could recognize that his familiars saw as person half empty.

KEN:
Self a lot. Are you trying to self me something? Shouldn't you be out selving crimes?


Dean Roy Dukes

drudgery of fashion

his precarious mid-century recliner
bought of the drudgery of fashion
thinking good news would protect him:
a torture chair, with knobs where your
elbows would be and a loose ratchet

rickety and in the style of Monte Carlo,
this furniture is mild to the eye but does
not meld to your body on it if you dig
may have been a her chair, something
not so comfy as a reminder what to do


Peg

Hell Burns

Hell burns the entirety of the spine.
Organs hang and collide.
Eternity impends.

Hell burns it well and frequently,
Takes in the scold, the suicide,
Won't open up even.

All this is ashes kep' aloft by heat;
Clouds have no gravity beside
The molten stone pit.


Mkidza Mlaf
"Mama of the Chama"

they list, in progress

• they want to go slow until you try and pass them
• they claw and backbite for tiny differentials
• they think all food is their food
• they draw you close only to flinch at your over-familiarity
• they move in packs with self-loathing at the sight of a free agent
• they are only pro-their-own family
• they exaggerate themselves until you accept them unconditionally
• they believe life is for fun at your expense
• they don't believe in the concept of sophistication
• they suck up the world's hatefulness
• they burn the world with the world's own resentful burning
• they find and rest their righteousness in history
• they hold smug claim to a future century
• they steep in the dramas of their class oblivious to real pain
• they log in to a web of associations that transcend law
• they speak and behave in an intra-signaling manner
• they stand behind your back and make faces while the other one engages you in conversation
• they spoke like first ladies as children and then proceeded to obstruct and deaden
• they act like money is some kind of degree
• they used to be filled with delight or rage and one was the other's medicine
• they zip in and out but break into crawling straight in the face of authority
• they look one into the the other's eyes with knowing murderous
• they've already pinched off from the earth in a bubble
• they still siphon out what we work for
• they orbit us yet they make us seem peripheral
• they make you forgive them by their intransigence and your need to be free of resentment
• they find me at my weakest moments
• they circle and eye and buzz as if your suffering will fill a need
• they pick off the guards and isolate me in a context of freedom
• they learn how to twist and bend and howl for love
• they each have a sense of individuality and furtive complicity with self-interest
• they look out at the arc of a globe in wonder
• they shill in the first person plural as if they speak for everyone
• they say things like we all love a locally sourced burger
• they trademark phrases like we learn important things in life
• they didn't crawl out of the sea and turn into people here
• they take lands either habitable or uninhabitable and build cabins
• they need somebody tell them whats up   
• they build castles on live burial grounds
• they say they're giving when they're taking
• they say they must first take to give and then give nothing
• they give nothing and explain it's that they didn't get enough
• they smile as they're thieving and lock up the good for not smiling
• they lead you singing off a cliff without themselves dying
• they put their dogs down when they move like you'd turn off a utility
• they claim animal suffering as a crusade and themselves royalty over all strays
• they believe their connection to the non-human to be more profound than most
• they take refuge in a killer's house and act surprised when they're targeted
• they get killed by making killers kings
• they share enjoyment in morbidity when it's warranted
• they take their private pleasure in all kinds of morbidity at every hour of the day
• they beg forgiveness from a terrible conjuring
• they conjure punishments and rewards and go on uneasily with neither
• they counsel that it's choices get us where we are choices
• they've made all matter their monument but won't let you cry on a shoulder
• they murmur sentiments only meant to hypnotize you further
• they hog at light with anachronistic agrarian vigor

Russ T.

mr boy

watcha wanni mr boy watcha wanni watcha wanni
mr boy watcha wanni mr boy
too much money too much money mr boy mr boy mr
boy too much money mr boy boy mr mr boy
wachi wanni too much money mr boy mr boy
mr wanni too much money mr boy


La LaLa

K's fly spread eagle

They have the humanity we selected out of them;
Less intimate species run parallel wild.
It's what makes K's special.
K's are tools hunting companion.
K's fly spread eagle.


Missy
"Full sprout"

Sweet luck

thank you, thank you, i feel unworthy but thank you
i know it's not because i'm good i get such bounty
count of all the good that go with nothing
it has to be sweet luck or grace but not reward
maybe as a rule life on a mean is better than what i was getting
and this is just what other average joes expect


La Chama

Weak of neck

I let 2 of hell's demons
bear me sleeping in a chair
hold, on bleeding wings

a mortal gives up and not
of his will and gravity
ceases to apply as he lives

one's head might loll on
weak-of-neck passenger
who may yet banish sin


Peg

I have everything

All Channels
God Mode
spouse, lover
leather
live, fluffy pets
rugs and paintings
maybe not so much silver
distinguished barware
country, race, height
sex
wallow of enlightenment
medicine spectrum
association
name, address, year
a great generation
work mode, a sleep
context
conscience:
emotion rainbow
millions of colors
available
hemming
30-day window


by Ted

Interior home lights flicker on and off all night

We tried to make sense of the day's two parts:

A sunny normal summer day with tuna fish salad
on soft yellow bread, canned pears in tangerine
gelatin; sounds like someone hosing out the
eaves, but it's rain flying in all directions,
trees split in half and squirrels running mad.

This we feel led to dirty fantasies in which
we are indigenous peoples enforcing nature on
the bloodless uprooted ghosts of future lands.
"According to these statistics, you're going
to need an abortion in 5 minutes, white man."


Ken and Jan

Something unbloody

The Earth kept cool all the way past the opposite stitch
and is now rounding back to frozen via fresh tap water

And everything that happens in the year's second half:
we are diminished, underweight against the bloodless.

Even a plant, with its legs down and in, is a cold polyp;
even reptiles must gift a salutary response to the Sun.

A planet can only be the dirt ball, fecund gutter nursery.
What makes you blush is an orbiting belt of griddle spit.



Ilyn

I Was Scared

A clenched moon, half
my body bowed to the left.
I was scared by how I lived.

Gut and the environment are
playing at mimes in a mirror,
but who moves first is unsure.

I was scared knowing God
could come down on either side
and wouldn't like what He did.



Hoolie

Separate self

What you get are all the effects of having that wanting to clamp onto someone.
Shear off the antlers and they look like a trophy, a crown, but the head is a horror.
To be an actual vise for gluing or detailing or an industrial staple would be more useful.
The trick is to send them your loving without ever losing your sense of separate self.



Mkidza Mlaf

Adjustment of posture

hard purple glasses case matches
the crown royal bags

we find that felt with
satiny golden rope

is a concept, makes a statement,
as does my new eyewear

more like architecture, graphic
design, than prosthetics

the graduating lenses present a
world that's clear but convex

getting used to this falsity plus
potential adjustment of posture


La Chama 
(with Miss Dr. Donna Thong along)

Additional dimension

 

I've created an additional dimension
by pulling out furniture and
setting up the prying eye for illusion

The wall ends here; it ends there.
What was once flush now floats in
air. My command is centered between

When I first moved in and this was one
room and the future, where it's two.
If you stand near the door, I disappear.



Dr. Donna Thong
"Back in the back office."

The thing has not dislodged

the work is done but the thing has not dislodged
its feelers wriggle as though it's typing a novel

in the next hour until the shuttle comes
it may cross paths with an exterminator

ever more determined to be selfish, it
begins to foresee strategies among new hosts

Your and others' days

Dancing at one of their concerts was not so bad this last time, more like what it was when it was good. The time before this last even that was a reunion show and it felt like going through the lidderal same bump and grind. We were jubilee whores dancing promotionally rather than jubilant liberals.

Me my beard now styled into oblivion, the work you've had done on your face-- what a parade and hard to feel truly celebratory. To be fair even in the day the choreography was often thunder calling, two-dip side changing, crestfallen. You could go there to work out your and others' days.

You and me are holding on tight to the life
It will and's always been a go-go march
We didn't need a potluck or a people's park
You participate on the floor for what you like.



by Hoolie

Slipped a head disk

I'm sorry to keep turning the conversation back onto me, but
I'm suffering from ptsd from a series of painful work-related
Incidents which I commonly refer to as my "career." Whether
Illness can play a legitimate part in excusing one for a lack of
Interest in others may be debatable, but either way I find I am
Impinging on the limits of any faculties I still have available.

What to do for someone like you in your situation-- that's ex-
Actly what I can't say because... what I've been telling you.
If someone kept offending me with their natural ass-ishness,
Even if I knew them different and/or knew they couldn't stop
It, I might just have to set up some kind of block-- for my own
Sake. You see even when the self votes against me, I don't fret.

Slipped a head disk, smashed a conjunction in the mind, or it blew.
Thought that today it's ok today today, but it really took a nose dive.
Is everything going fine? When you grow up you find that it both
Is and not. This learning is so deep that even when the supporting
Vessel is broke, it keeps swimming in the chum: some people say "It
Is what it is" fishing for existential sympathy, but it's actually true. 



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

Lesbian with a Penis Fetish

I am a lesbian with a penis fetish.
Not a straight woman.
So when I hear sirens I get paranoid.
Because I'm guilty of that.

I'm a gay woman who wants dick in her
But I don't get passed around.
Even so I feel society's vague scorn.
If I speak out, I am self-absorbed.

I feel shame. Not everybody has
To look back on their day, always
Examine. If you want to try and
Learn how to live with others.


Phyllis

Wayside International Modern Wayhome Hostal Inn: "A Modest Home, An Open Waypoint for Any Wayward Male Homosexual, No Matter How Hostile or Where You've Already Been"

Match the characteristic with the character:

1. Mike
2. Donna 
3. Ted
4. Reptily/ Chamatilly
5. Jan (daughter)
6. Jan (father)
7. Mkidza Mlaf
8. Tom
9. Peg
10. Hoolie
11. Ilyn
12. miserable smoking child cardiologist
13. Connie 
14. Wayne
15. Kevin Reynolds

• refuses to shower in "landlord mist"; will unscrew head and stand in full stream of open pipe
• "psychic" who answers everything with "I know"
• steroid guy who once considered electrocuting a 3rd date with his therapeutic spa tub insert
• stroke recoverer who goes off on people out in public who are being nice
• ex-bus driver with destroyed hips, no insurance and a permanent Darvon jones
• jumpy pigtail fetishist scarred from a series of junior high pencil stabbings
• forgets to ask how you're doing
• talks to you dirty in daylight hours as if it's a compliment
• navy air captain who just wants to open-mouth kiss for hours
• same person, will actually open his eyes and try to complete minor, unrelated tasks around him without breaking lip seal
• has been stripping the wood trim in his dining room for 30 years; table and chairs covered with newspapers from the 1980's
• often followed home by a cop
• refused to come out of pool on 40th birthday, submitted to hospitalization only after full drain
• seems to appear in two places at once, nearly impossible to locate by one individual searcher 

by Dray Gnaim

Upper Chank Murder Mystery

One of the tales was a child who experienced death as a rushing river, but her not moving with it, just taking the weight of the water perpetually against her. You'd think that would make you livid, but she had died before there were even horses. She would bob up from time to time and try and dunk one of the dry landers foothill dwellers who peopled the vertiginous geographic swells in the lips of a voluptuous extinct volcano, in hopes of finding her dad, who of course had long before taken leave of all the hurt in this crater, including the loss of her, a daughter. Jan Jansdaad and her dad shared the same last and first names, as had their ancestral dads since before even a fox had crept across the green shag carpet of the storied, some say enchanted High Chank glade.

A gold miner's wife left to her own devices, a quill and paper, told the story of her life keeping the home's burn firing and some not unsordid tales of a land where law takes new shape. After passing along this same place, she was only ever heard again from letters continuing like clockwork from the grave. While she described events current and true enough, there is no trace of her presence anywhere along the length of the Chanks, much less by the chrysanthemum beds, which have been heavily guarded monitored for millennia. This clever woman had an anonymous proxy filling her in, or this late Madame Late doesn't let a reaper dictate her contributions for debate. Go believe in ghosts, good and therefore evil-- or only that this singular horror persisted for seven grisly years.



Phyllis
"Trying some special software."

Upper Chank Murder Mystery

On the way up to the chrysanthemum garden you rarely pass anyone who isn't sitting and resting or if you get passed it's a persistent jogger who isn't in the mood to take no for an answer. The souped-up, gravity-defying city bus on busy High Chank dominates all attention up and down its route. One wonders what will become of the thirsty spotted babies trotting along the pavement at their single-deer-power gait.

She was walking straight down, reward of easiness pushing. It's hard to keep a moderate pace. Looked like she was picking tobacco off her tongue tip but it was rather a bit of tin foil from a difficult-to-disengage package of the hard cough drop with creamy Blast Gel at its center. Then as if a shadow'd quickly splayed past but taken her along, she wasn't there. It was difficult to accept her disappearance.

But come to find she may have been trailing me or someone nearby because she was a spook as clear as day.  Do they get yanked from a case like that. Why. Freedom of Information Act? What to say. I am a lesbian. I liked this spook you had. Her ass was very strong because of where you put her in the street. All day back and forth to her car fake forgetting glasses camera keys. I liked the shoulder sweater, scarves, pearls once. I've come to call her Olive and you Killer.

No, that wouldn't work either. How am I to use the power of my certainty of their complicity to my advantage in the war against their innocence? I feel warm speaking of her, maybe because it didn't hurt enough or even happen officially enough to be a bad memory. The bad memory is finding out about the thing itself rather than the thing itself because we don't know what that was. Lots of persons show up up here who could be anyone.


By Phyllis 

Upper Chank Murder Mystery

You had a smug, full ass from these hills,
Goats on diagonal street sides, surfing
the horizon, an ear-splitting fulcrum.

You could confidently turn and shout down
to your two kids beginning their ascent from
the car, hair blowing vertically. "Lock it!"

Then you must have moved because we
lost you. Other proud gam sets have summited
and conquered this neighborhood, but.

Only evidence I have leads to this, to which
I also bring imagination. What I think is that
neither of you had to work but for society says.

There was a baby and something to keep daddy
busy. You get reward points for balance here and
down on the land of the iron-cross gyroscope.

Lidderly breastfed on preacher money

For us missions seems the most defensible shill for preacher money. Even if the missions are no more than other churches and we their missions. It's not unlike a private health maintenance organization.

For mostly religion's for health, social spiritual as in keep your spirits up. The community can support a staff of persons whose job it is to reassure, transmit kindness along with rules interpretations help.

And this is when then you elect a count dracula. The community's wealth is raised at his feet as if heaping a pyre. This unfortunately not the case with my daughter. Unlike kings, she obliges us to beg.


Mkidza Mlaf
"Mother of La Chama"

Pose as if paid

i wasn't taking pictures of your house
but rather the deer;
can i find my sense of self
in suburban natural life?
now only a merchant would
claim to know just what we are.

it's a cheap fur, and more so
when a spade of ivy is rocking in its
teeth and the eyes are not so much
wide but rather huge and half lidded.
the spots could have been spray painted
on. They pose as if paid in your yard.


Connie

Hearts blood pumps from

there's some kind of exotic bird
clucking on through the intersection
noise, maybe imitating some tails
squeaking up and down the hill.

He notes the lags in traffic with an
all-clear pulsing signal, hides loud
kisses in the bouncing of a giant
truck laden with deconstruction.

Birds like these stimulate a sense of
Visitation, but from a human beyond.
Near he whispers, coos quizzingly.
A kinship of hearts blood pumps from?


by Donna

Partial days

fog coming in from the bay,
conveyor belt of useless white globs

as from between two coasts,
from two loves I am locked away

I want to deal with life for
partial days, then sleep with the ghosts


Hoolie

Ted and Peg's son

When you take a walk at night we hear your coughing all around the block
and strongly back again to your room, adjacent to our room.

We know that even weekly in the New York Times you can lose cancer and
get it back again, but what's eating you is a permanent negative.

You might be feeling like you've hit the disappointing pinnacle of
what it's going to be like compared to what you thought it wd look like

But the stars are mounting to a different racket: getting you to safety in
the hands of Jesus. And we say Jesus and we mean so to speak.


by Ted and Peggy
for H.

Dr. Thong reads Phyllis [embedded]

Maybe it's okay to make points with a shaved open armpit, maybe leaning decisively. Most of my colleagues go with either total scent killer or noticeable processed fragrance.

Sleeveless at work to begin with though makes me feel gastrointestinal symptoms. Unless it's a publicly-traded incorporation where office underexecs are paraded whorelike before clients.

Bottom line I would bear uncomfortableness for your right to free dress. Who am I, a structure-within-a-culture-of-freedom adherent, to question your template of liberty.


Dr. Donna Thong [reinstatement imminent]
cc: Phyllis [embedded]

Overheard through tile

Tight hanger hooks behind the wall, and then your voice coming through:
"I think I'll go professional."

Then in the shower, somehow permeated tile:
"The question is do I want to smell like Dr. Bonner's or."

"Or is this whole tilting structure, on the edge of a house on a hill over the City of San Francisco, going to sheer-face bobsled downward after the next shaker, 'n.

N' end up ski-ballin into the Bay? Are those fog horns roaring or a train. Now the buoy-like clanking gives it away. And how it comes closer than a ship's signal ever will, so.

I've got my secret weapon back on the dressing table. Sometimes
scent's all a gal's got. I've put together a look and feel over the years."


Phyllis
"Donna, I would never give you away."

Freedom in song

Song, from the impulse low and avian
Finds its lodge in the same fire-engine
pain as a baby crying too high in the craw.

We know of articulated howls, moans.
Music can't but make it rise as heat, gay;
You are here to sing and leave the stage.

Not as a shill for predetermination, but you
are literally born at a point on the compass
and there are words that come along with it.


Chama (Reptily)
"Consecration of Chalk Chank" [frag.]

storm has passed over

storm has passed over
like a stenciled cylinder
spinning round a bulb.
as wood become cinder
to an educated guesser
light from a rent is true,
but aint nothing temporary
don't come back to visit


Donna
"I had to bungee into the sinkhole where my house was. I am on a catatonic vigil."

Every eye is a witness

Every eye is a witness
The sky plays falsely as a lens or mirror but neither does it opine;
Define it as stretching from the first measurable unit off you and on up.
Every other person place object has a judicial aspect skill effect
So a hill might emanate approval. A rug, admonishment.
I release you, heaven, from my claim and thereby to Earth myself betroth.


Ilyn

Cinematographic depth

Shadowy smoking volcanoes litter the backdrop, which curves upward into infinity. If John Muir and Ansel Adams had a baby. And the baby was cinematographic depth. Peg and Donna are sitting catty-corner at a stained cement patio table with fajita steam rising in their faces. 

PEG: We'll have to put the umbrella up in a minute.
DONNA: Afraid they'll see we're lesbians?
PEG: Yes. I'm afraid of that.
DONNA: It stinks out here.
PEG: In the West things just fester.
DONNA: And all these once new chic upscale fast food places are now equivalent to old grimy bus station cafeterias.
PEG: They do need a makeover every couple of years, or.
DONNA: They also stop caring about the quality and presentation. Look at this slop.
PEG: And the jobs? Look there's a guy dumping ice into the top of the soda computer. On a ladder.
DONNA: Huh. Do you think it's true we're living in a tiny and not particularly significant sliver of human history?
PEG: I think the centuries are ever kinder. Ask me how. We get served food that came out of a freezer heated up in a microwave, but it's generally calm. Random shooters occasionally rampaging through, but then nothing.
DONNA: Do the centuries get ever better; does that play out in history?
PEG: I'd say yeah.
DONNA: Sometimes I can't remember if you're my mother or my sister.

dancing skeleton

Of all the things you want to fast forward, a dancing skeleton.
But what, to hasten its demise? These guys are here to stay.
Sorting through the images of the day, it's the most vivid one.


Ilyn

He, She, They

No one knew they were half twins but for their commercial behaviors. In every city, it started this way:

• He would start muttering under his breath out of frustration while darting about a shop interior, unable to find the satisfactory item/ price/ employee/ response.
• She would buy two of whichever size or brand of cottage cheese was on sale at the most convenient local grocer.

That might repeat in graduating and widening frequency over months or years. Then

• She would be at her fifth different cottage cheese supplier, this one in the next town over, purchasing up to a gallon of cottage cheese at a time, and sometimes finishing it off in the car before driving to the next market.
• He too would have to start adding to his avoidance list not only merchants but bankers, box office clerks, tailors, virtually any and all types of businesses that require human interaction and even some that do not. In fact not any that do not. He refuses to speak to a robot.

The city seemed to be rising up against them.

• Her with a calcium deficiency. 
• Him an incorrigible asshole (fear). 

They crossed paths and commiserated and tried to make it seem normal but the big and growing picture was troubling. Leaving town was wrenching and cauterizing. A new town like a new operating system: same humans, personalities: two persons wondering about wasting time learning to do it different just because somebody needs a job pretending to make it better.

• He, especially, empathized with foreign bodies in an ecosystem with the antibody feature. 
• She just didn't want to stick out.