au revoir dragon cracheur
poison divin de l'hypnose
fabricant de transe flamboyante
l'obéissance des zombies
impossible à domestiquer
en raison de la taille
sur le plan pratique
et pour lequel tu es destiné à errer
comme le coeur qui te remplit de sang
bat plus ouvertement que jamais
un jour tu pourrais de nouveau
poser une silhouette puissante
mais ils t'ont coupé la langue
mais vous apprendrez à exprimer votre
dénigrement d'une autre manière
par Santorabo
He was a greasy little aryan. During that first meeting at the goat ranch, I posed and framed in ways I thought would get his eyes to drop. Finally I realized he was more sophisticated than that. He used his peripheral sight, which had developed throughout his awakening years in a red state, to map every bend and notch of my visible surface and behaviors, to precisely gauge biological changes. We were alone in the bread shaped tube of a trailer home.
He rested back on the kitchen sink and looked around like a good worker still in task mode. I felt free to stare directly knowing he could see that too but respected feared men me too much to make a move to get to work on the project about which we were both entertaining growing visions.
He smelled like cooking and flannel. He was channeling desire into rage at the spitting llama he'd tried to shave that morning. He'd like to chop its head off. See it run around with just it's neck swaying about. I swatted the fly on my levi's with my hand and left it there.
We each had our end. Thinking about ways to get to the middle. The middle of his face was a goatee on a tan around a roomy mouth. Now he was talking about the island that breaks the surface of a bath, with the palm tree and grass. The center of the island. What had I missed.
When I looked up I could finally see his blue-gray stare right on me, waiting for a reaction. I just laughed and started unlacing my boots. Ya he says after all the goat piss and bullheads i bet you'd like a shower.
Naw, I'm good if you're good.
por Santorabo
dear god please help me find my way back
last time i didn't know where you at
keep me in a place that's proofed for pain
and then i wake in this room again
soon as i got here i understood
chaos is out there and in the blood
freedom needs a template to lay down
a flag or stake to drive in the ground
i built a log cabin of rhetoric
just like my forbearing eccentrics
they asked to be spared from predators
i must submit to my editors
i walked with lala into the black area where we knew the park was around 10
before my eyes adjusted and after we entered night's shadow i inhaled sharply
and deeply and as the oxygen hit i could see better and confirm by standing
still with my head back that ya, there's hardly any stars due to light pollution
but then i picked up lala's shit with a plastic grocery bag and started hoping
that my mom didn't ever feel as guilty about me as i sometimes do about lala
how i know it would be different if she was a child more love, complexity
but also that it's the love and not the mistakes, regrets that fuel your worth
now it can't help but occur to me how severely light pollution can infect
what might have been a lovely inky and terrifying plunge into the only
vaguely known or previously noticed in actual physicality rather than a
virtual prance down a rutted lane with the miracle of light all around us
Traducción por Joél Barbillademacho
I'll try not to say apostate, tho apostasy might pimp the ride.
Not saying goodbye to all prostates, just the one that's rotten inside.
The quest to change the world's been delegated to transgression;
The money shots were caught on tape for posterity or confession.
These fields were always fallow, yet always yielded more to find;
There's neither need to salt the earth nor leave it all behind.
by Tom
1.
the skin on his outer back across the ribs is so white, while the back of the neck is shiny, shiny coffee.
2.
the sexiest one with his ornery chest and beard hairs
lines of words on his forearm and the tats the
south-pacific islander/ celtic/ native american/ burning-man tribal symbol don't make sense
the saint's medal hung from the neck and jutting chin claim his earnestness
the snarl as if he stands just pre-coitus before you naked
the squared-off nose as if he had been born to shovel
high tight titties
the funeral chrysanthemums appear to be there for him not the dead
3.
but then they all have these chains
the little one, with little black socks and trainers, his jeans cut off
his abs a blueprint or map in soilure and creases
if you hold him close, any point of his body or being could be within reach
if you are much bigger, he could have strong feelings about you
if you are the same size, he may not like you or you will be brothers
i love sitting in a barber chair, like a king on a pyramid
there's a special vestment and i feel like my appeal is concentrated
4.
our experience with sodomy has been overwhelmingly positive
though it's much more fun when it's illegal
and would be better if you could top each other at the same time
i think it's impossible but keep trying to figure it out logistically
he's not porn or a doll that you're humping but
another human being working with you and against you wholistically
and if you're weaker than him that's hot and if you're stronger that's hot
you might try to guess what he's thinking but it doesn't matter
sodomy supersedes thought law reproductive excuses for fucking
fear of death wrath of god precedent history science cocksucking
for some it's got to be the logical choice when bombs are falling
by Jan
The HIV Bros are still suffering from internalized homophobia.
Jer: That was so smooth how we got to stay like we are forever. It's cruel for them to make us suffer indefinitely. Sorry, my tooth.
Ken: Ya when you spit blood on me, I hate your guts.
Jer: Fushoobishgunmuvfo!
Both: Hahahahahahaha.
Ken: We're on permanent disability. What do we do now.
Jer: I cut you! I kick you face!
Ken: Let's take our shirts off and go to the beach and watch people see our sores.
Jer: We don't have sores anymore Ken.
Ken: We could start up a bitch fight with rat-tail combs and bleed in the surf.
Jer: I have a lot of fatigue though.
Ken: The only woman i can keep down is Glucerna.
Jer: That's funny cause yor a fag.
Ken: If you cut me do i not scream?
Jer: WHERE'S THE FUCKING WHEELCHAIR?!? I actually said that.
Ken: That's because PharmSupply's forcing you to age when you should really be either cured or aborted.
Umami Bhomb
until we tried to struggle free
we couldn't name our native state
the charnel house they made
the charnel house they made to show
how we were living out the fate
for which we'd bought and paid
for which we'd paid in mindlessness
and taken steps to palliate
and then from there to fade
and then from there to fade so much
to lack the mark of a livid wait
from which one could be saved
by Peg
O moon, what kind of goddess.
Hours of yarning, mindfulness.
Windowed rooms take on powers
But a rabbit too is transfixed
this is what it would look like
if you could see the other nights
some men going un-included
blind to an inner circle's appetites
moments of free running fear
a gentle unknowing morning
by Tom
Vajra, spin! gently through the entrails
spear the cancer like a golden pin!
the motion of the hollow spire rings
each bar a chord and a prayer!
Vajra, there! kill before it bleeds
fling it towards a thousand cleaning stars
repair your entrance once you have retired
send me off to sleep through every door
wake me and you'll see my face no more!
by Ilyn
you can't buck the system but i can't help but notice the formality east of the mississippi
having been gone a long time it seems parochial and authority-aggrandizing
but as i say you can observe but you're not going to pitch a complaint in the cradle of civilization
but if you do you're going to come out looking like a freak in your jeep and your meadow hoppers
today we saw a long skinny fox like a cross between a cat and a chihuahua
it bounded to the middle of a fresh-mown field and rolled in the grass and scratched its ticks
it was in no hurry at all about getting to the tree line and didn't seem to mind as long as we kept our distance
it probably helped that we were the only other pairs of eyes in the park grounds
unless the giant owl we'd seen swoop through there the day before was peering from one of the oaks
it's a shame the animals finally get to come out in the sun and they're miserable with insects
they cycle through their generations ground up and given life again and again with similar results
except that kids these days seem to see themselves as the frayed end of a dna line
but i guess when we were young we also saw ourselves as a sort of final iteration
so you see what i mean the dump truck keeps on spinning out sludge that's so hard to crawl out of
that you're never even sure if it's stupid to have kids in a crazy world you're unequipped for
but the population of the world keeps increasing because fucking is just part of nature
but you cross the river and you can say that sex is part of a duty-chain for god and country
and no fences between the houses is supposed to help you keep each other honest
is someone coming to your door for sex and is that sex going to contribute in any way to society
will it be followed by sacrificial and largely performative outlays of cash for merchandise
not for yourself of course but for the kids the growing family scrawling out a tribe line
every wild spirit gets sucked up into a chain gang called Spirit Chain Gang but
the wild spirit is only in the songs they sing to get the work done faster and more efficiently
and the ones that get away get eaten up by the parasites that once were culled by bats and rain
Zaul Eikensej
Everything that comes out of plants, it's all over me.
My skin is hot to respond to the natural chemicals.
My dog is panting sweating out the particles.
This building is a filter referee
I have the apparatus to be clean
but i prefer to move through space and time
letting the adherence be unclung from me.
Umami Bhomb
supermarket's got more but
a little shop can show its
whole movie in one frame
cep the ladder to the soup just
keeps on going up and
soon you've added decades of
food and waste but now you're
floating in a non-temporal zone with
invisible borders and
irrelative placement of content but
who really cares how it fit before
Umami Bhomb
that fever dream
was just like a love story
i had to work out
while scratching narcotics
dream that i'm awake
that love story
was more work than worth
narcolepsy
stillborn consciousness
story isn't justice
those narcotics
one day they'll run out
while i'm sleeping and
transgress a story
narcotic-temporal justice
these workplace transgressions
narco-crime unit
dream of unwanting
story archetype
shame a warm reminder
Hunnard Peshupts
through anecdotal evidence and sheer respect for truth
i now retire my cock from service to the gay community
and may it rest in peace unlike the seventies through the teens.
i now concede this moment and have nothing left to prove
beyond the fact that i have been your tool for 40 years.
by Hoolie
They say because i breathe fire i leave burning ruins, and that just feels like an attack on my identity.
Yeah, as a frickin loudmouth.
Life is short.
And there's so much to burn down.
Then why are we just sitting here?
BOTH: Hahahahahahaha.
But no, really they say you split the eardrums of babies in Dubbaberra Chank.
I did some high screeching. That was a great day, but I doubt they split.
So why do you bring it up?
They are gene shaming me. They
Waywaywayway who they?
Legit news outlets, da-preests, what's spilled along the vittle trails... And it's partly that i'm gender-fluctuating.
That sounds dirty and inappropriate.
At this point they rolled themselves up onto their sharp elbows to look out across the meadow.
Zebras stood in their shadow, a vast jagged temple.
They are afraid of my glorious history, not just my beauty.
They are sick of your nasty-ass attitude.
It's called sass, and she's a legit spirit.
Is it a little blasphemous to invoke sass in an earnest moment.
Is it just as good to wrap your tongue around them and squeeze to make a fresh bone nest?
These are the rights of sentient airborne reptiles, but what are the responsibilities?
BOTH: Hahahahahahahaha!
Per Phyliss (embedded)
After seven hours, the surgeon had removed the laughing, multi-spoked cauliflower of a tumor from about 12 inches north of the balls.
But she awoke in recovery as Susan, full of vamp and sass:
Well, doctor. It looks like you're the man who saved my life.
She looked up at him leaning back with her bangs and with her legs as if he were the sun and she were in a bikini.
Well it's nice to meet you. And I only did my part on a team.
See how gallant?
Susan shot this at the nurse standing behind the surgeon. She meant: he's mine now.
Nurse smiles.
She meant: Bitch if you could see how your hair looks, you would not be channeling the spirit of Sass at all bitch.
Then Susan, herself a projection of Ted's own temporarily schizophrenic-hypomanic, gender-dysmorphic state, tried to become the man that she imagined the surgeon wanted her to be in order for sexual attraction to occur:
TED AS SUSAN AS AN IDEAL AVAILABLE GAY GUY NAMED JOSE-MARIA:
So are you a swank bachelor doc around town these days or home with a family.
DOC: My husband and I are raising our two daughters up in Allview Chanks.
As if smacked in the face, Ted returns:
That's wonderful. Thank you, doctor. I'll see you at the follow-up visit. Thank you so much.
Umami Bhomb
yall up on yo hippie scrip
always thought mao was a kitty littuh
sang holdie-hanz naykit when you trip
men's mean any bloody sistuh muthuh
ladies' cayn't say it cuz it disrespec
woma is da kinda lady dat my mama
dey nevah go out wit dey face a wreck
so sexy men are ending up with trauma
who nena whenan set you free
stepeen to da leyuf when iss me you needit
yall up on yo hippie scriup
you say I love ya like you really meanit
[loop]
by Jan
[To Jan]
It's always interesting negotiating meaning with you.
So you are saying that you have bpd?
I'd forgotten, maybe out of politeness, to ask you about it. Or a little out of not seeing a reason or a problem to solve. More information is better than less?
Here's a sample of my ignorance on the topic: I really don't see how pd's in general are much different than symbols of the zodiak, numerological principles, or multiple-choice industrial-psych tests for HR departments.
I once took a test that said I had all the disorders. What is my treatment? Maybe I should be locked up.
Some multipurpose drug. Of my choosing after months of chemical torture trying out different brands. Or none. What had brought all this on?
Other drugs. Life. People go to shrinks when we have discomfort of mind and/or behavior. Or cops, but that's not us let's face it, not yet. Some of us come home stigmatized and traumatized by the pharmacological drug-testing spree and resulting stresses on normal life which was already fragile which is why we came in to talk about our problems.
That's why I began the Institute for Talk-Therapy Apologists right down here in Chukka-Chank. Our Journal of the Institute for Talk Therapy Apologistics circulates into hundreds of libraries worldwide. We have a BS program that was first in the Lower Chanks to be approved for Common Mirror delivery while operating a motor hooptie.
Another thing I like about us, even though as you say no one can ever know you, I have to grab at some likeness, like a toddler trying to distinguish myself from the wall even? --what I like about us is our tendency to make unsolicited comments. No?
And for parsing out ideas/ sentences, sorting speech as one would if they were being critical in the everyday sense.
The results of all that are, indeed I guess those of a personality. If you see yourself and seek to know yourself better using the template of X set of symptoms in order to better predict and watch out for unwanted tendencies, how might that process apply to my thinking about you going forward or our correspondence? I am ok knowing or not knowing the answer to that question.
This is all my grasping, and it's for you darling.
To the volcano,
Donna
PS: Oh please just indulge me: fun game. Find at least five signs of personality disorder in the text above. I can do it: 1) #1 could be taken as sarcasm/ irony though it was not meant to be so. 2) #5 Takes a stance like all politicians are corrupt, so I won't vote, you know? An abdication of responsibility disorder. Doesn't have to be all or nothing. But I've read that's a bpd thing. 3) #6 Was it really "torture"? Is that like it was devastating that their grandmother died? Self-pity disorder. Or it was really torture. 4) Same with #7: traumatized-- really? Experiences are relative to other experiences in an average schmuck's life. That's how being yelled at on a patio at a cocktail party or a pig roast can be "traumatizing." Folks show up to Shiv Days fully armed and ready to do damage for.. less? More? No reason-- that's the point. Some signs of the zodiac might be more driven toward heinous crimes. One would always hope it's passion somehow but no, much creepier. Like ignorance. Should they widen the scope of topics children encounter in public schools from an early age? Let's talk. 5) #9 & 10 cross a line into aggression-- there's little doubt now that some suppressed interpersonal issue is percolating. Life is short. Let's not let it boil. And these are not to mention the potential pathology of any number of the other statements made here, including the non-statements and especially this very exercise of picking through it all. What is that about. Ok and have to say, #7: Hopeless Circle disorder. DDT
in these rooms that once were strewn with decoration
my spirit roams between the broken lavatories
a skeleton but now a template for the future
when you're alive you use the steps and open spaces
they encourage exercise as part of living
and now the freshest air is in those very places
those generations haunt me just as i haunt yours
presumably a gentleman could find the door
I commit to dying out this death with meaning
and since i never sleep nor tire for lack of pep
the actions i take now will count as double duty
and doubled once again with hindsight's added wisdom
There's a basement sure, but it's gutted. To the bricks, he says.
Soon after we bought the property my wife and I were a little drunk and decided to check out the basement with candles. We saw the ghost of a youth and a phantom locker.
And there was the shovel. The working end was raw wood but machine sanded, tapered to the hand.
The youth is pulling up his pants, a joint hanging from his lips, when a very tiny journalist, a friend of the family on furlough, also a ghost, enters the scene. She says she was looking for the locker. All her stuff's in there. Instead of looking down at the locker, the boy's eyes dart up to the handle end of the shovel. He thinks it looks like someone dipped it in a lake.
And being a journalist, the other ghost follows the boy's unexpected glance up to the tip of the long wooden handle of the shovel, widened slightly for about nine inches at the end, and makes her own conclusions. She then adjusts her concentration towards creating a privacy bubble with her tiny body (although she wore a large military jacket) around and over her army locker while she rustles through it, obviously planning to leave it there in the gutted basement permanently, making that entire gutted room into her own cheap urban pied-a-terre.
We didn't know what to say. To the ghosts. Could they see us? To each other. It wasn't threatening, but we'd never seen anything like it.
Jan, I think that was when we started healing. You know?
You're right, it wasn't traumatizing or re-traumatizing at all. More of an affirmation. A cartoon!
To me though it was also disturbing, sad.
I don't know. It depends on what mood I'm in. It can make me hot sometimes.
Nope, we've never had sex down there but we know that we could.
claimed she'd love to make me a bernaise
to compensate for the original burnt fish
sure thing, so first time i call back
restaurant closed but she answers the phone
second time she says she's not mary
by now i'm asking does she have bpd
she eventually confides that yes, it is she
just being worried that i was a salesman
although the restaurant is currently open
and got me to apologize
for my beautiful voice and convincing manner
well will you at least take my card
for a piece of pie and a tip for the driver
oh no, instead i'd have to come down there
i stood in the restaurant's vestibule
watching diners eat normally
no sign of anyone who could have been mary
i get to my ottoman and my remote
and the bernaise is at least a day old
trapped in a plastic condiment cup
the fish is upside down and swollen
but somehow it's all been sanctified,
the hard-earned spoils of a free-market system
Vicky Dekalb
I defend myself as
foolheartedly as possible
for as a team I am but one
it's not like I can say
shine it, someone understands
alas that someone is still me
i'm in jeopardy
every time I must assert myself
it may sound like a lady's plea
but I'm as male white meat as they come
a whale and a seahorse might meet
but in my case never two in one
(two things I am not I am two things)
[from this tangle, vapor slowly rises]
in what we call the orchestrations of a sociopath,
each stuck participant
does errands in a separate maze
and the passages are everchanging
there's only One who can see all
and it isn't God
who receives our frantic offerings
by Jan
they wanted to examine
queer lives lived loudly
recklessly selfishly
where fear is not abandoned
life comes naturally
in irony and erroneous
roads of tripping over
forward like a breaker
or cowering, ancient
stones grazing a lover
pleasure of solemn
dis-officiality, witness
duly wasted goodness
unterminality of each other
hyper-presence of dogs
dues unpaying and crazy
expending arrows meant
to bend to this universe
font of redundancy
stone won't roll smaller
or kill big here today
tomorrow's history, a
vanity, not a release of
more stomping foragers
onto a world unlearning
only to reappear there
by alternate delivery
Jan Jansdaad
After consistently electing states of oblivion over problem solving and positive forward movement throughout a lifetime, the subject asserts that he must not succumb to terminal illness because there's too much to live for.
The kind of exaggeration that reflects emotion attached to the subject more than the subject itself.
Assigning blame for lost items to supernatural phenomena.
Decision not to acknowledge intense physical pain during a chatty personal conversation.
Nope, come to think of it, there was a time before that. Ok, let's just say insane for more than a few moments, a sustained insane event. More than say 24 or 48 hours. Anyway, this was one of the times.
There was an adult bookstore in Silverlake called Circus of Books. First off, L.A. is insane. Everything that happens outside of a building or a car is tawdry, violence, drama, the ugly spectacle of life. Except at the beach, where it's all the ugly spectacle of life, inside and out.
Circus of Books was supposed to be a great place to meet guys, and I was lonesome as hell for a man. You had to go through like these saloon doors. You'd hear them creak, and you get a blast of hot shame sure as the AC effect stepping into a supermarket out in Temecula or Palm Springs. You're supposed to stand there and look at feminine buzzers or paperbacks until there is some verbal but probably just non-verbal cues happening between you and the dream guy. You know how sex works. Even your breathing speaks volumes.
There was a guy, and we did all the steps and somehow knew to just buy some gum and then meet on the sidewalk. Well, all the real estate out there was strewn with really drunk down-and-out sex-worker dudes, so we ended up just going directly to exotic maybe persian-y and cocky hot firm gentleman's hooptie to hang out. We'd both driven there of course, so I had to follow him after we decided to go to his place, and I remember thinking as I was coming up to a bluff above his subdivision and looking out at the endless mud-colored waves of rows of honeycombed townhomes that "I will probably never find my way out of here."
I wasn't crazy yet--that fear was reasonable--except probably I was crazy before even driving on down to the Circus. The insanity was just having a smoke in the back of my head and centering himself. But wow, what a man I'd found. We wilded out on his bed--I guess it was a studio--and then I attempted to pry into his personal life.
He was hesitant or feigned hesitancy and finally almost like I deserved it for being nosy, he says "I'm a hit man." That was like the first funny he'd made during the whole relationship, so I laughed pretty hard. But then his face turned to an open snarl. "I have a weapon, and I kill people. All over the Americas. South America, Central America, Mexico. I have a uniform. Do you want to see my uniform?" He went to the closet and pulled out a legit camo uniform, and not in a nelly way at all. With the other hand, he produces a military rifle with a sight attached.
My eye lingers on the ceiling fan's twirling reflection in the cantilevered scope mount's rainbowy glass.
Then we had sex a second time, which I never did even at that randy age. Then the panic started setting in. All I remember is driving away and looking in the rearview mirror at the honey-colored townhomes and knowing that I would never be able to identify the guy or which of those places he lived in if I ever had to call the FBI or whatever.
Then I called the FBI--from a payphone outside the General Hospital building, which is a hospital. I confessed to an agent--I confirmed that he was an agent--everything that had happened, and we both spoke in our deepest voices. This call ultimately went nowhere, but it seemed like I had at least completed some important action.
When I got home, I felt vulnerable. I was renting a tiny 1920's cottage up in the hills above Angeles Temple and hidden behind a 1930's six-flat and under Victorian bottlebrush trees which camouflaged the roof with furry red strands. Yet I could feel a target on my back. He had shown me the black rifle, the uniform, the telescopic lens. His car his apartment were completely anonymous in color; he himself could have been mistaken for nearly any non-white designation. I didn't even know his name. Perhaps Mario. So many Marios.
As night fell, garish shadows rose across the 50's B-movie posters in my livingroom. I dared not turn on the lights. I climbed into bed and listened for a long time. There was some rustling, and then a snap. I carefully pulled back the sheet and stepped into the livingroom and stood invisibly still, in my briefs, holding a breath. It was completely quiet now. So I had to be extra careful taking a few more steps backwards and over to situate myself behind my overstuffed chair in the corner. There, I ducked down and waited.
It felt great. Safe. I started to feel very sleepy. I was surprisingly generous in my lack of judgement towards how I was behaving. I gathered the courage to snap out of it and walk a little bit more confidently back to bed. When I woke up, pinkish sun permeated the same rooms that had been a scene of terror.
EPILOGUE:
For the next couple of days, I was alert and mature. I drove back and forth to work with the warm wind in my hair, accompanied by a new and easy peacefulness. There was the sense that I'd done something for my country, that perhaps I'd even earned my place in paradise.
I was relaxing on the phone in my little dayroom on a futon chaise and found myself telling a friend about a letter I had received from the famous author Tom Clancy. It was a response to a note I had sent him on which I had drawn a large purple swastika in response to one of his many public antigay comments during those days.
My grandfather, who'd been on the board of regents of a university, was once accused of nazism in a letter that included a swastika. It hurt his feelings deeply, so I wanted to try it on Tom. Clancy's reply was something like,
That's not a swastika. You drew it backwards. It's a blah-blah cross representing the blah-blah band of warriors in butt-fuck blah-blah white-people land from Century blah-blah. And all those Nazis were gay.
It was not signed, and there was no return address, but I wanted to save it anyway. I tucked it into one of the letter holes in my great aunt's desk. No one would believe that he'd written me a letter. That was the idea, I guess. He may have thought he was safe sending it so anonymously although my name and address were written by hand. It might still be valuable someday. Maybe so valuable that Clancy himself would get paranoid and want it back. Those paramilitary guys are crazy.
I was telling my friend ya, I have the letter right here. I stretched the phone cord to make it over to my desk, and there was no letter in the hole. It wasn't anywhere. The letter from Tom Clancy was gone. There had been no guests or cleaning personnel in my home. Only one night when I thought that I was being stalked by a hitman because I knew too much, was so sure that he was lurking outside my windows, but then got tired and drifted off to sleep.
It dawned on me that i'm a part of everybody's fantasy but my own.
In one world, the female sex had to wear special shoes.
But as a stud, how can i understand my own space
so that i can begin to move through it with both dignity and
self-realization? These are dim flashbacks of youth mania.
I can see that some of my neighbors have spent time in
a place where they wear their caps high on their heads
and the name of that place is this place except
forty years ago. And i know because i too was there
and i'm so happy that we've mostly been replaced
Those ancients then had the good sense to move away
and because there's a college now it's more like
a coastal state populated with strangers who tolerate
except for the neighborhoods that are full of natives
and they hate, fight and give their lives for real estate
It's come to my attention that having washed up once
again on these landlocked crags i've swiped up the
fragrance and taste of a man who got away and was
unaccountable before dragging back to preen and gloat
among paintings, rugs and strange, non-war-begotten
scars, puzzling visitors, mail, hours, gait, asymetry
of values, when or when not to laugh, unengageability
i judge them on these and so many other oddities
or rather studiously note the details and mix them in
with mine until it's a snow chamber of unique flakes
Use mathematics to erase my virtue and my gains
and to count the missing tiles in the game
where stories played out before no one better than
dispassionate monitors, clerks and first responders
blinking at the will to carry on from universe to universe.
by Jan
modal parlance repercusses
to temporal presence
eminence to occupance
to immanence to rubble
yet i posit that deliberated
objectification is more probably
emolumental than confabulated
projectiles of catastrophe
right after ladies' school she went raging through
the landscape
a trembling paper lampshade pressed with flowers
war really stimulates my war goddess
my deep goodness that's feeling sour
fine drop your hemp trousers
someone's got to occupy the borderlands
keep them strong and be the first to
cry out, or try and blend in secret witness
i mean kill, as many of the enemy as possible.
to think of that is suddenly a thrill?
No it's the fire for freedom she moves me.
by Reptily
Aunt Jan has died.
She had spent around 20 years with her vulva nearly on fire.
According to cousin Jan, there were repeated radiation sessions
and other horrors which she has detailed for us over time.
For even longer, there was a woman who was not her partner.
For even longer, there has been a woman who had never been her partner.
We don't know if they were together in the final moment.
Cousin Jan says aunt Jan was in excruciating pain, even while in hospice.
She also says it's a mistake to think that Man is good.
But she was talking about a totalitarian then.
Today I had to watch another very triggering HR video about what else harassment.
You couldn't jump to the test. You were forced to answer humiliating questions.
Some people like getting flirted with, but no people like being treated like a perp.
I spewed my filthiest most biased language at the screen as the little situations played out.
But sometimes I'm not in pain.
I'm in a female-dominated workplace where the mantra is just be flexible ok but what
the fuck is my job and how do i bill the hours? Who is my direct-report? I swear
I will not sexually harass goddamn anyone.
I can only return to aunt Jan's pink bare vulva.
How would she feel about a mandatory fucking sex-harassment vid?
In her condition.
Where no man had ever been.
Do hospices require it?
Where was her lover Jan? Would they let her in?
Like it's on fire. All the time. Even at church.
Wait who's good who's not good it's triggering me.
They say your employer will really appreciate your report.
I know that for a fact to be untrue.
It's all rigged my employer paid for this video and they are paying me to
watch it again and again for the purpose of their own legal protection, and
that's it.
They don't appreciate anything.
My employer's not even a person.
Your god kills innocent people, or you're lying about him.
That should be the lesson.
by Jan
i includes all that i am including
aspects you surely cannot think of
when you look up my output or feed
cork, at the ports of local cacophony,
appears to take up words when i
try and
speak
words
you, for me, includes all that you
are excluding prospects for knowing
you better which may preclude our
ever getting together the way we
should i mean assuming what's hidden is
way
more
good
those who are not we are they, grammatically,
and it's cozy being exclusive that way
unless it, to you, means claustrophobia
and they equals the only ones who can free ya
i the parasitic twin enjoying too much of us
you and them, they
and me, I and
you, not we
[loop]
Jan Jansdaad
Keep repeating: Now my ceiling for
crisis is very high. Now my life is a
cathedral for mental stress-outs and
physical breakdowns a place where they can
stretch and breath because the ceiling is so high that it creates a
micro-atmosphere, small only in comparison to our planet itself;
rain clouds may even form there, within the cupola, in August.
Now my ceiling for crisis is very high.
each contender for the moniker will be scrutinized
drolly, with a sneer. or otherwise trod on, in
everyday shoes.
Now my ceiling for crisis is high.
approach much more authentically wry
contenders will be scrutinized
while i stretch, while i breathe, while i
sleep and sit and walk and stand and cry,
but always briefly, not asking why
Now my cathedral for crisis is
filled to the brim with adjectives
with a devastated point
that doesn't even reach the picture line
even the shadow on the clock has broken
off; it colluded with rumors of crazy luck.
Now whatever time it is that's where this
temple can be found, temple of sass and
regret and malice, all-sinners ground.
by Peg
intermittent humming of hard drive resembles
distant ship in fog, but
clanking buoy's peal
replaced by
cadence of Her breathing
silence brings too many
default noisemaking issue
squeaky-high tones chords
sounds of ear
listening to itself
sounds that speaking apparatus
having been damaged abused
afflict surrounding tissue
pressure on canals chinks
astigmatisms of perception
or it was born fused on one side
upper and lower yapper
no option to rest disengage
on any day after
congenital skull cracker
by Tom
Shab's mouth is splayed, consuming the environment as they go
Like the former rider of Shab, Ilyn's hands are missing.
His spine is scrambled, his stomach distended, face swollen, ears like a bat.
please don't do that, scar tissue
don't be the weed chokes his host
that's what free radicals are for
i want you to do the opposite of
arming up, favoring one side,
drama queen, sky-falling chicken
it's ok to relax now, even to
give in, stop resisting, live
knowing that you saved a life
by Braino
you can see from hand mixing hamburger
that even dead flesh wants to stay together
throughout their existential disaster and
beyond, cattle wanting at a cellular
level, same as drinking from the same
pond, to bevel individuality,
to fill the tank with commonality,
a temple of identicality that tempers
diasporic fears of wasting anger
at exploitation murder and dispersion
when everybody has a different version
of neutrality, destruction and creation
the ties that bind the stories of a nation
by Peg
like to share with a world of strangers
all of us floating, untethered by space or time
perhaps just that i hope your
landing place is kind if there is one
or that any endlessness refreshes itself regularly
when just floating one hopes to be in a
company of well wishers if not wishes
coming true in a constant strumming
we must realize and gird our instruments
seek out the good luck and opportunity
already waiting in our personal associations
you have so much you have to sort through what you don't want
possibilities are stacked in spilling-over boxes
each moment an opportunity to move forward
trapped in a mind a body that doesn't want can't won't do
sealed in brick and snowed in at the dead end of a
street in a tiny imitation of urban settlement dishevelment
you need legs even to get the laundry accomplished
how to break out of the disuse overuse injury cycle
mix your targets among the physical virtual geographic
a hungry mind that prefers to eat sleep
a jaded palate that doubts and postpones
a vehicle loathe to cross emotional landmarks
by Donna
now she's an anchor on the leash
while i jog in place
low brown cloud layer but bright
long pees with the shoulder hunch
boys look at us
through the grainy snow mist
by Donna
telling about a time when i was a
man fully loaded
is really sideways disrespect for the
kind of stud i am now
one stem into reminiscing could also
draw a stream of horror at the
hungry animal its disregard
for self-regard estate planning
this life wasn't yet a paradigm only
anti-paradigmatic yet
organized enough to fool a boy into
thinking he had time
my boot tracks in the snow are like
the bodies each a new step into the
cold delight of warm palm islands
we were an intimate crew
i have my colossal straddle over those
old-timey train towns and worn goat
paths in the gardens of other capitals
lonesome memories
now i am tripping off to glory
on the heels of my dad and mother and
so many countrymen
so that the past may keep being fed
by Ilyn
once your personality begins to blossom
you become more annoying
although you may see your
religion in all that you survey
that doesn't mean that
religion must be affixed to everything
what is a handout
a handout must include public
education, welfare, corporate
subsidies christmas and birthday gifts
litter to those who would
eat it
or honor honor that comes with no
religious affiliation or
indoctrination except for the belief
that government can run parallel and
not entwined with religion
though the law may have
come from religion religion
is not the law
and the more you sing His praise
the more this becomes a scowly
silent car
with passengers who'd just as soon
plug their ears with silence
mood agents conscious managers
want the poor to be less so
not that learning and learning to believe are the same
not that they birth and suffer more
which is a religious notion
put forth and then abandoned by
religion religion when it was
all we had or when it was the
government government that was
the stick to the holy carrot
either of which can be fashioned with a
phallus but is it
godless is it godless if it's
not religious
or what if it got started by
religion religion supposedly
inspired by God a god who
is inerrant which must mean he
chooses the winners winners
glorious for better or worse but
glory glory
for better in the long run
for example would God choose an
idea that's religious over a
good idea that's inspired
by religion and what man who's not a
savage
is not inspired by at least one
religion and would not conduct himself
with a preinstalled moral compass instead of a
do-it-yourself one
or at least by his lower impulses which he's
going to know are the opposite of his
religion-inspired conscience
but there's a conscience without religion
way back way out there or maybe
closer than i'd like to think
a conscience born of stove touching
lingering physical pain
ecstatic sensory experience
recognizing flesh wounds pleasure
and extrapolating that to emotions like
loss bewilderment hilarity
a conscience that is and becomes a
god by fashioning a god out of
conscience conscience that wants to use
the knowledge that led to conscience
as a templative more than contemplative
religion religion that frees and constricts
and annoys others and
steps on the rake of its purpose and
spirals into meta-perversions and
degrades conscriptively by way of
murderers rapists
deprives minorities by ommission
grifters slavers exploiters
all the same sins sins that predate religion
religion so lonely so powerful destructive
gods that grant freedom only by dying
and quite probably not even then
apart from the especially remarkable moments their days kept unrolling easily and within the scope of relative safety
they moved on from one another's disasters grew to accept or tune out any resulting disfigurements
there was some pressure from the many many feet that still could be yet to drop
but this was a familiar and traditional pressure against which generations had developed mechanisms
their story was to live under new pressures develop new mechanisms or
survive to tell of their sufferings
for example those ones who'd fallen through The Crack
learned to live in their bodies but in our reality
but they had to come together in a circle
and talk about their putative worlds
they turned out to be places where suffering had a different definition but one that they could hardly remember
i'll try not to rhyme eye and sky, but
here's the situation: there are vibrations
there are lightning flickers but also high
wind cloud smears malfunctioning
xmas bulbs against houses and a double
ocular migraine. depending on which
way i look, various fields are pulsing
another creepy but not physically un-
pleasant day in a strand of sometimes
horrifying serendipities weatherwise
which lifts you neckways off of the
plain hard sand of quotidian worries
that you'd normally be depending on
natural phenomena to free you from
by Jan
to the poor or persons in the past i suppose
i live the luxury of a most debauched king
while to my peers i seem a pitiable thing
the afflicted find fault in my astonishing
complaints; the threadbare really seem
to care about the level of my waste
prejudice, from the right and from the
left, from every gender camp and
disinformation factory, theme, caste
you don't know if you'll live throughout the night
and you're watching a rom-com? you can deduce
that all prospects are tongue in non-literal cheek
or that your level of acceptance is very high
or that it's depression giving up disassociating
and probably not production values, star power
a sudden insistence on minding the moment?
a pain strip that overlaps takes on is informed by
the stack of strips below it, a translucent
suspension of anecdotes, quips, romans a clef,
bulleted lists, self-pranks legends memoir
and these legs can take you from sofa to desk
and a desk can take and make havoc with an arm
and an arm is all it takes to stop an action or
refuse the sorts of service lacking which could
mean the end of a long but very young evening
it's that you're tired and afeared of a rapacious
environment which can be slowed cannot be
slowed by inaction but can be snubbed as one
would snub an earnest lover with no worldly
blame apart from the ancient code she arrived
with, no more agency than gravity and water
decaying cedar lodge in eastern prussia
clump snow dropping from high branches
crystal blue sky
trying not to boil it down into an unfair
and ugly blob or not even trying just
not doing that you know?
presents from four-score christmases
choke the closets and litter the plank floors
they're real planks that they'd cut from the
surrounding woods and made floors of them.
they were watching a season of Star Trek in
which the flow of the plot kept getting
stopped dead when each character had to
turn to the other and affirm their goodness
there's also a lake and silently dipping mallard
groupings, legit choppiness or gently rolling
in the moon, natural waters that are filtered
and stocked, ballooned over; still nature was
winning here, fungus by mouse by respect
by time no not by time. in the same
measure of time there can be renovation.
by age no not by age each age is just a
fashion. there is only movement, only
action, else there would be preservation.
by Reptily
they say never go into a situation angry or you'll lose
but if your spirit is angry all you'll do is suppress your
anger and not be unangry
that's how breaking the rules becomes a spiritual
pursuit especially if you have to pay off your
transgressions
and if not are you humbled by
rue?
the day after a full moon i felt and discarded emotions
rocked the bottom of the steering wheel
snuck nicotine vapes near a hospital's elevator banks
found the only saturday medical supply outlet
marveled at aisles of crisp alarming packages
how family characters rise to an emergency
in direct proportion to the value of the afflicted
or sink in unison if there's even only
one who can't hold her shit
by Donna
in one full-moon day:
ran out of my vape pen
with an hour and a half to go before the
tow truck
who said i couldn't ride with him because
he'd brought his girlfriend
the stepfather says:
pull it up right from the middle
give me a snuggie
and the woman with the broken hip says:
home healthcare workers
what for?
and the jury says:
let him go
and half the people realize
all we need is lies
dog pees on rug
there was a four-foot tube going from my nostril to my small intestine, and i pulled it out, twice, once while vomiting.
i figured out how to work some of the blinking, sucking, beeping machinery, and when i'd had enough, i switched it off.
i took the loudly ticking clock down from its high place on the wall and removed its battery.
i signed a waiver of liability so that i could be allowed to sit up in bed.
i told them i wanted ativan, and a full milligram, not a child's dose.
i allowed a young male nurse to wrap me with a vinyl leash and walk me up and down the corridor.
i became conscious well into a narrative with a daisy miller-like subplot.
there in trinidad and tobago, i gave her one more chance to choose between the hipster boyfriend and the security of her father.
i drifted in the streets after they made their choice and moved inland, toward the volcano.
i evaded pickpockets and thugs in a dark terrain of campfires, our shadows splaying against the outer city walls.
i got a ride in a jeep full of local teenagers speaking tagalog.
i cooked a pork shoulder in an aluminum pan at an outdoor community kitchen.
i slept in a flophouse full of mattresses in wall alcoves and flashlights and men.
i met the girl who was going to solve the problem of the tracking wires embedded in everyone's eyeglasses or canes.
i was desperate to find an overall solution, but i could only wander from situation to situation.
by Donna
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