tonight a crust forms around me, a
fluttering, gummy placenta
the muscles are locked from
pleasure.
last night i was trying to drive a
car on a building ledge
i was steering pretty well
until.
they say never go to sleep afraid
or stay awake either
the body will win you over
the hell.
by Jan
Why, Lord Bentbridge? Why have you come at such a late hour. Come now sir, come right in. You're getting wet.
Lord Bentbridge, with a tip of his hat and apologetic smile, steps across the threshold, adding in so doing a beleaguered flourish of his half-cape. Jansdaad my friend. My presence here is as puzzling to me as it is to you.
I hope it's bad I mean I hope it's not bad news.
Fear not, only my wife out late again, and I thought why not pop over to Jan's place for some of that excellent sherry, which I suspect he might be enjoying already on his own!
Come Lord, lean on the mantle with me and raise a glass. [They walk over to the mantle, where there are glasses and sherry.]
I say puzzling because
Yes, why do you say puzzling?
Well, let's not be dour. Cheers to you!
Cheers!
Suddenly, the door opens.
Jan? I'm home with... who's here?
Nobody.
Well you've got your arm up on that mantle like an orator, as if you're entertaining.
Ha!
[Putting away groceries, yelling from the kitchen.] Say have you heard from Jan?
Jan our daughter?
Who else? Your father is dead darling.
You know how many Jans it could be.
Well have you heard from her? Pharmsupply won't pay out for shingles.
You mean Hopinaskipina? That's the most annoying commercial.
She's been hanging around with that sadistic lawyer. You should call.
Do you mean Lloyd? Lloyd Bentley.
Yes, he's an esquire.
Jan liked watching a little tv in the afternoon, or rather she didn't like it, but she was hypnotized by it when her husband Jan had it on, which was most of the time, because it soothed his nerves. She kept it on mute when he wasn't in the room, but then he'd start to notice there was something off, and he'd come back and take the mute off, and that would inevitably be when they were having commercials. The commercials were even more transfixing because of their special audio qualities, which had been outlawed for a while, and then they just seemed to creep back in. The volume and frequency alterations were probably still illegal, but someone was lying about it. Then it would take years of legislation or court processes to get them to stop doing it again even though it never stopped being illegal, and it never stopped being wrong. Only lying had stopped being wrong. The acceptance of and mass participation in lying and religion was the most brilliant social phenomenon of the moment.
Jan would be out in the hooptie to pick up a prescription, and she'd try to read or imagine the faces of the other drivers. The ones in the nicer cars seemed to be gloating. They'd have a wry smile. The guys in the elevated trucks and campers were smiling too, but it was a mean smile. Minorities in crappy cars often seemed pissed off or trying really hard, squinting, to get around. They would be getting tailgated by a guy in a jacked-up 450 with a mean smile. Jan imagined how she looked to other drivers. I look like a freak. I look like a birth defective person with a caved-in head and a flabby, skinny white neck who is trying to cover it all up with a big fluffy beret, a cowl sweater, and giant over-the-glasses sunglasses. I give them all a target to look down on, except the minorities, who don't seem to be paying attention.
The pharmpro is grotesquely obese. His eyes are enormous behind thick glasses. Do you know if Pharmsupply covers the Hopinaskipina vaccine. Let him check. Not. Ok. Rather, it isn't okay, but is it this poor man's fault? Wouldn't shingles itself be much more costly? Not if you die. Right. Shit I am speaking aloud. It's just a thought experiment, doctor, says Jan. I mean pharmpro. I know you don't run the health system. Jan remembers back to her days with the pharmpro boyfriend. I know what they do to get shiv for themselves and how they cover it up. This man has a generous smile. What does he make, 120? 150k? I want what he's having. Jan gives the pharmacist a little wink. That behavior and lots else is why, in her personal opinion, she can only be regarded as total freak material.
The riots at the Mthyuh Preservation Society were on the radio. I should have been there. Had I known, were I more well connected. Of course I know we can't live without the Filter of Loathing. But it's all we have to unfocus on. It's a symbol of our systemic bastardization from society, whatever that is now. They could use a few good old fashioned fleke oaths to start getting their stewardship straight. But most are bought off by Pharmsupply blah blah. It would be fun just to get out. Next time the filter is down I will try and get in with radicals. Maybe even Jan would come along. Who am I kidding. How would I make him stonecakes in the hooptie. They are his life. Baby we've got to get to Highchank and stand up for the original shiv. They have stonecakes. Might work.
Then the chant, with another not infrequent para-informational MPS interruption came on. The chant is accompanied by a distillation of all the free world's favorite music remastered to praise La Chama. Apply brake now. Stop in the moment. All future days are at the state's discretion. I am entitled to the following poisons and schedules. It was annoying how they read the schedules like circus barkers, in thrilling growls and whispers.
Dr. Donna Thong and Peg whispered through the ancient stone glory hole of at least 9" in depth. It must once have been a Cuban prison.
DR. THONG: I'm remembering Mike and the abdominal surgery I performed on him when I had my patio studio.
PEG: That's after you were a Fanny-Girl temp out in Dead Beet Chank.
DR. THONG: You know friends do continue to self-realize when you're not around.
PEG: But you've always had emotions for Mike. Two swimmers in one pool or another.
DR. THONG: He told me his intestines smelled like latex for months afterward.
PEG: He sat up on the table fresh like a baby, glass bottles tinkling against the IV stand.
DR. THONG: You remember the story like a song.
PEG: The one that got away. But what of the others?
LAMENT OF THE OTHERS
by DONNA
it seemed as if they entered willingly
following their noses to my kitchen
i thought most necromancy to be weak
but the bottom of the pie was crispy
followed by stepping out of doors to neck
that first incision leading to the next
we woke among discarded vials of heparin
ecstatic still in the wane of hydrocodone
ready to renew our grunted oaths
until the next opportunistic infection.
They brought me inside the control room of my own mother's puppet corpse. I could look down over the switches and buttons and through the glass down five stories and watch her feet drag and thud, drag and thud across the empty Sears parking lot, which was just the tip of the iceberg.
Once we had triggered The Crack, it was a watery world of carelessness; a sort of sleep paralysis of the shock reflex set in while we were fed through a peristalsis of the dimensional organ.
She was/ was not my mother. This was the flesh of the great beautiful young K who could toss me 100 meters into the sky with her beaque and catch me easily in her seal craw, where lightly blood-dappled pelts were stacked and crumpled into a very stinky but gossamer safety net. The woman they extracted from her inner ear during a shiv molting also is/ isn't La Pegyuh. She seems to carry all her memories, fears, quick tongue. Her body, as well, is now tortured day and night with Remote Tissue Decisioning in order to coordinate with image mirroring protocols and functions. They say she was a random preen gland technician who took a wrong turn somehow.
by Reptily
The stage is dark at the center and it's one of those setups where the players are seated or standing around the inside of the three walls waiting to take their turns. Giant leaves made of plastic bags get caught up in the breeze of a fan and bound noisily across the upstage out of doors like plastic bags.
"But then I'm telling you we love to have her and she's so talented but she does her writhing ritual really in breaking of character and does it right in the middle of the stage when others should be starting their lines and action."
"Jan, I can sympathize, but she's over 21. I can't control her even with the shiv. She has the fins of an embryo, but she'll never develop any further or take on the exclusive markings of any particular species. She feels like shiv's the only way she can find freedom as she will never sprout wings or a full claw matrix, so the ancient hooting and dancing are her expression of a foiled archetypal and organic need."
"Don't get me started on the topic of Institute for the Talk Therapy Apologist Movement mumbo-jumbo, Donna. We all knew from the start the risks we were taking by having Reptily here full time. I mean, not just a goat you can tether to a tree. And it's really no problem. Just no more community theater, k?"
LaChama
cracked microwave oven
atomic bomb tests
industrial farming
office smoking
hepatitis
deviated septum
demon possession
mistakes
house fire
house fire
house fire
I was dozing off at the command center just six o'clock from the electric rice maker on the dining room table. But Braino was upstairs in bed dreaming because that's its point of reference for sleep or fond memories of dreaming there or just because it can. But when it started thinking about not having put the rice away, like in a baggie in the fridge, it started coming down the stairs and was going at the rice maker from that descending angle, more like four o'clock, when I woke up. Sometimes you wake up and have double vision for a moment, and that's what it was like.
my friend tells his near-death experience as a joke
when i tell mine, i'll some point get the urge to cry
what is it awe, no, self-pity, well... no, fear. i cry with fear
then what was it, seen not remembered remembered but
not seen... that spooked no it's not spook fear. it's wide-
eyed terror at a blurry event that at the time was not
scary. there was an organization that required its mem-
bers, at a given point, to say, "...and that's when i started
working myself up." suspicious at first about the cultural
tokens sprinkled throughout event call it, i realize that
even though the mind collects its available symbolism,
that doesn't mean you're not actually dying. delayed
horror. at a non-scary moment or hour. judgement now
kicking in as Braino congratulates herself and begins
creating her own survival story: look at what could
have happened if not for my heroic and timely action?
i don't care. Braino is the real savior in the story either
way. Doing for herself what God could have and might
have done without her willing self-starterality. Of course
the God side would say of course God directed Braino
to do it, but ok, i see the divided gratitude energy betw.
what? not deities-- apples and oranges. Braino is really
just a glorified human organ, not even. she's just a function
of an operation of an organ, but she is the most beautiful
and one who would make any lesser god than God jealous
probably use a peeler on their thigh gouge an eye, attempt
retribution etc. God-Braino is completely different. it's
like God-bird flying to a tree branch, harmony. then there's
the question does Braino get drunk or stoned if i do. well
not sure cuz one of those things i don't do, but... can Braino
be addicted to any physical substance or even i guess love,
etc.? of course as in i love you with all my being which
would include Braino. don't over or underestimate i guess.
Does Braino get tired. i say no. she wakes up even more
in sleep, no. she is not so urgently needed as in waking
hours when anything could happen. only one tiny part
of her is the conscience and another is urine regulation,
so... obviously we're not talking about the normal, sub-
awake mind here. in fact "we" are not talking about
anything; this is actually more of an inquiry of B. her-
self, which is probably as ridiculous as a seance or
one of those amazing tv preacher self-answering prayers.
God is not the only sphinx in the universe. i get it that
you shouldn't get it muddy what, which god, huh? but as
described above, it's more like sphinx God smiling down
on sphinx bird flying to a branch. why do we bother?
how nice they have this peace. so Braino says, peace
my ass. even tho i am mute, i can't take that. i am the
workhorse of the entire operation, bitch! i never sleep
you know i never sleep. it falls on me to figure out
the flack and you make me do it totally wasted as shit
on ok i won't say it. that's about the best i can do as to
a workup or a portrait channeling or who knows direct
quote from her royal highness. she sounds real to me.
But there was the question of wait.. all that sounded
as if Braino is being held as what a hostage? by me?
i think the original question ok, i feel what they call a
tiny voice saying hey sleep on it but if that is Braino
that means she a lie cuz she needs sleep-- or cares
what about me shia lebouf i've totally left out christ is
that what he portrays in our cultural toolbox? The
character of Braino, the intermediary, the divine
flesh, but again, Braino is only divine in a camp sense.
i really don't think there's a conflict though because
you know if you pray and it's a christian prayer, you
pray to christ anyway-- Braino is not really for praying
to; i wouldn't want to flatter her quite that much.
which brings up the issue of proper address in prayer:
i believe it is necessary to address a prayer: even tho
i know where it's going, Braino in a compassionate
(?) manner or just as a normal function might feel she
has to take on whatever i am praying for; in some ways
i am her boss, but i don't want to... is this one area
where Braino can get confused while mostly knowing
more than i could possibly know at any given moment.
is this the one or one of many ways i have to take her
in hand, an ultimately defenseless and delicate creature,
feed and protect, etc. in turn she may protect me out of
thousands of possible examples maybe if there is
information that's "too much" for me to handle, like it
would give me a heart attack, or an actual memory of
a heart attack, etc. so she keeps it a secret. but then
she might get in a habit of doing that too often; may-
be she can detect the bad results of the bottleneck
without being self-aware enough to realize it's her own
neurosis causing it in the first place. Ha-ha that was a
joke. but fear. simply because i didn't feel at home, that
there were desperate decisions being made and there
was nothing i could do about it; whenever i tried to
answer my voice would wake me, but it was annoying
not a relief to be wakened. Braino may have been
the underlying annoying agent, just to jolt me back in
shape-- it would be just like that ok i won't say it.
by Ilyn
by LaChama
It was clear until my third or fourth call for repairs that the landlord and his girlfriend, who wants to be a wife, had agreed to always come over here together, never alone. But then they started getting a little cute, and then a little tiffy, about how he'd replaced perfectly good radiant heat for ducts, which he'd slammed in himself during his twenties, anxious to get the bar done with the Smoke-A-Lizer and the deck right there on the creek in time for the wedding, and then a prompt and open-ended fractalization of subsequent drinking + nature-related gatherings.
Then, (I guess) Mike showed up alone to
adjust the furnace. I said is (I don't know) Janine here, and he
turned to hide his face mumbling she didn't wanna come in. While Mike
went to check on some knuckle marks high up on the face of the
fridge, I slipped on some clogs and waded through the front grass to
their low-slung truck. That's where I saw the figure. Its silhouette
was undoubtedly feminine, all dressed in white, fuzzy-edged. It was
perfectly still, but the energy was tense as if it could manifest in
horror without warning. Getting closer to the passenger-side window,
I could now see that it was-- just... Janine, texting, in a terry
turban and robe. Why don't you come in and have some coffee, Janine,
I asked, stupid not to realize that she hadn't even made up her face.
I don't WANT to! it screeched, banshee-like.
In contrast to Mike, my ex-fiance had been fastidious about dampers and grumouts
measuring tightly up to their flush surfaces. He didn’t mind
poisoning house mice in the most painful way, for example, because
he’d already done his part to responsibly and reasonably keep them
out of our sphere; if they persisted, they had to be
overly-aggressive anomalies of their species and therefore ok for
destruction.
I think the landlord’s companion wants to be
his wife because she was so thorough about checking me out, did it
all herself, is very efficient, you know, though it is his place. The
first time he finally showed up alone, he squatted and duck-walked an
entire stainless-face dishwasher, still part way in the strapping and
box, mudroom to kitchen after having worked a 16-hour day or so, he
said. Then Mike muttered something about before his wife passed
away, and I figured that had to have been here, maybe upstairs. He
couldn't seem to get the math right, even to the decade, about when
and who and what. I sat quietly with the cable remote between my
knees, just a dog and a green leather hassock between us as he wiped
his brow with one of my dish towels.
That same shade of
bologna pink except for around the eyes, they seem like they've both
been liking their wine hours or countryside tavern rounds in their
present neighborhood, near my last address, over by Tom's, maybe
since she died, maybe "Tessa," of cancer, and he'd been
living on his own; but no, the hardworking girlfriend had referenced
having lived here by the creek as well... or was it just her air of
anticipatory ownership through management, man management, and the
exhilarating world of background checking other people's risks, the
way she found out about me, hungrily engaging my references.
I
think they must have agreed to always come here together, and never
alone, because it's too comically common of a scenario for the
landlord hubby to go and fix a pipe for Mrs. So-and-so, the divorcee
or young childless widow, or widow/ divorcee with a sympathetic
child, and what ensues. Maybe a shadow birth or a life insurance
scheme. They must surely at least have passed some kind of bottle
with their pants rolled up sitting by the water soon after Janine
Wannabe came into his life endeavoring to replace his inferred
melancholy with her palpable carnal and appetitive bounties, seeking
to address her fiduciary insecurities with his plumbing and
electrical business.
The thing is that this guy I dated,
Zhann, is so swish on the phone, and he prolly still resents me for
moving in with I guess I'm calling him "Tom" out in
Brickhouse-Horseley's Craigs. Zhann apparently told my landlord's
girlfriend/ fact checker/ whatever the protracted story of our
perhaps having met on an app and I maybe prematurely being recruited
as designated driver to his niece's Magnificent Mile dance-floor
wedding and reception in the city. The anticipatory and
self-envisioned Wife of Mike prolly put one and one together and
said get smart, bitch. I don't care how butch he is; I'm not leaving
my Mike alone with that fag. If anyone's getting to know the new
tenant, it's going to be me-- because it could be fun. Or maybe a
three-way. Drinks. Anyway not until after the spring (?) wedding
unless there are already little rugrats bouncing about.
But
then as the toilet/ furnace/ disposal-broken weeks clunked along (me
a wreck fallen fresh from a dream life in a fairy-tale property)
footstep-like creaks would follow my own going up and down the slick
and narrow, high-gloss painted hard pine stairs to the bedrooms on
the second floor, really not much more than a hot, musty attic, and
cold spots and fragrant and rank spots would appear and dissolve
unexpectedly in random angles and passages. One night I thought the
washer-dryer closet doors would explode open when the European water
heater turned itself on, blasting gas far more powerfully than
normal, and the dogs startled awake to the urgent, mad attempts of
the auto-pilot at igniting. I briefly imagined myself staggering from
the smoldering ruins of Thornfield Hall in a flouncy, soiled
blouse.
Raccoons started chattering and many other noise making
activities that were less comfortingly identifiable. These invisible
yet intensely present beasts occupied an alternate universe of drama,
hilarity, and domestic corporal brutality right there in the same
spatial cross hairs as my aging pets, tarnished silver, punch bowl
boxed in tissue paper. The dogs drew crazy designs with their noses
across carpets and into walls. The more needed repairing, the more I
saw Mike, and the more he seemed reluctantly obsessed with hanging
out, never at ease, always active in a pretense of punishing,
grunting physical labor.
The fighting grew more intense, a
real bag of cats. There was plenty of room under there in that choice
crawlspace next to the water, where they could wash their hands before
eating, presumably. Presumably after a conversation with the
in-the-running wife Janine, Mike told me to go ahead and arrange the
wild animal removal myself. I didn't go with the hot-daddy social
media star whose wife had created a huge photo-and-video album of him
bending over backwards, all kinds of ways, to get cute baby skunks
out of chimneys. They charged $20 more per animal than another outfit
called Animal Removal Service. ARS sent a guy clearly attempting to
hide, with posture and garmentation, the textual contents of a tattoo
beneath his ear. He pointed out that it's mating season, so two males
in one winter hole is just asking for fireworks no matter how
roomy.
I remembered entertaining the viewpoint of a determined
and tiny-brained but essentially innocent animus undergoing a process
of systematic extermination, even as it dutifully offers concessions
and phones an army of sophomoric relationship interventionists, not
at all conscious that its fate was sealed the moment it had entered
the premises. I'd helped Tom pick out our sprawling, ivy-wrapped
Edwardian deep in the summer while a total density of green was still
sealing away the panorama of protected natural wetlands
professionally curated to assure historical accuracy and provide
stunning contrast to a former Tallest Building in the World, which
rose from the clouds framed by goldenrod and tree-like daisy stems
more than 25 miles to the east.
Before he'd told me that
she died, I had my back to him washing my hands in the sink and
explained I was just going to have lunch but that I'd just pulled a
whole human head's worth of hair out of the bathtub drain, so I
didn't expect to get hungry again any time soon. He sheepishly
apologized, and I turned to look at his ruddy, close-cropped scalp
and said I understood it wasn't his hair. Then we stopped talking,
which allowed a menacing spirit to claim for a moment the unnaturally
maroon, multi-legged glop in the bottom of the bathroom wastebasket;
one might have briefly pictured a forest-green and rust pants suit
over a smart argyle v-neck and many thin gold chains, a newly hennaed
bushiness under a floppy wool cap, and snowflakes, bumpy lipstick and
mascara, out by the mailbox, reaching in all the way to the cuff of
her long beige driving gloves for some envelopes like the ones that
still come for her, maybe Ramona.
Ramona Plantagenet -or- Current Occupant
I knew Mike and maybe his
girlfriend or whatever he calls her, maybe "Janine," had
been renting my new place out for at least a decade, so the flotsam
and jetsam of all those bodies would be boarding-house anonymous to
any forensic detective determined enough to search the pipes and
corners and attic and creek bed and crawlspaces. Neither one of us
though, I fear, Mike nor me, can help but identify the creaking, the
ambiance of living but un-housed consciousness, the parallelism, an
unfinished wish, the unsettledness, the strong odors, as anyone but
young Tessa, the reigning past occupant in terms of prolonged crying
out, of injustice (I suppose from cancer). This doesn't have to be
spoken.
Even as smooth local gay boys, seasoned by their
middle-class bullies, ring the bell and wait blowing vapor from their
nostrils, their patient eyes bordering on expectation and then
acceptance of either tenderness or relentless cruelty, talk up cable
packages or gym fundraisers and shiver with desire for warmth-- yet
nail their scrupulous feet to the welcome mat without asking to come
in even during inhumane arctic vortices-- there, once again, helping
himself across the threshold and stomping snow from his boots onto
the floor he'd sanded, returning, as the result of his intemperate
youth and careless workmanship, is Mike: repairing, rethinking,
replacing, refluxing as if that nail had come loose every day for a
thousand years before, but that he must keep on pounding until the
nails are everywhere, holding every fly, sound, appliance in
location. Yet the holes (means of entry) multiply.
I sip
coffee or jab my fingers into the kitchen window flower boxes when I
find he's here thinking of her and being with me and feeling how I
feel for him and want to be her not now but back then. I sip and
wonder if either one of us wants to be who we are at the time, in the
year we are in; the calendar seems to squeak along like a room where
a nearby fire's sucked out the air and there's sirens and neighbors
in blankets with their breath showing, and then pretty, sunny days,
then volcanoes; then it's time again to change out the furnace
filter. I long for company now living alone again so soon after
believing the mansion in the woods and its cruel master would be a
final resting place, trying not to think about my inevitably
over-confident replacement. I wake up not knowing where I am --but all throughout the day, and not from sleep. All I know is that I
belong, and Mike belongs together with an-others who are not
physically or temporally here and therefore not available for normal
carrying on. This is what we have instead.
When i was sane i had crazy red jesus hair
how it made me look like a flaming canon ball going off the edges of LaMthyuh
how i crawl back up through the rubble of endless punishment
but now my tourette's so bad and they won't give me clonidine cuz it sounds so
druggie, and the other PA says i gotta go back on the opiates so as to come down
easy, so i went for some nicotine patches and they only had 2 and 4 when what
i need to even begin controlling the tic, which will result in a cervical injury, is a
12 to 16. So i got the 4 gum but it works for like 30 seconds and even my speech is
still contorted from the facial ticking, so i went back and bought a pack of lighters
and some american spirit. now, as i had prophesized, i have the tic and a nico-monkey
on my back to boot. and eating desserts like crazy. every process of my life is disrupted.
When i went to the emergency room i was still on regular medicare so the hospital chain
i ended up at had to take me tho they prefer to keep out riffraff. Then by the time i was
out with my four tramadols and a bunch of proton inhibitors i got dropped from regular
medicare and dumped into a hispanic-themed plan with the exotic doctors. I'm thinking countercultural though might be the way to go if i'm thinking there's gonna be a bias against my medicinal cannabis use at all the white hospitals with the five xtian stations to go out on and no msnbc.
by Illyn
It hurt so much
but it wasn't spose to be
then it hurt me even more
cuz i wouldn't let him free.
i locked him deep inside
i locked him deep inside
i shut him in my car
and laid it on the gas
i tucked him in my bed
all up around his ass
i locked him deep inside
i locked him deep inside
i put him on the porch
like an alley cat
i kept him in some woods
where he could take a breath
i locked him deep inside
i locked him deep inside
i locked him deep inside
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