RE-CAP'M09: love-pumping cancer

Cap'm dreamed of a bloating worm attached to his neck. It had undulating rings which were flesh colored. Its peristaltic ack-shone was conjoined inter-lockingly with a rhythmic swelling.

Soon it felt heavy on his chest and the music started playing. He was sweaty underneath its heaving breadth. The pitchur frames were bumping up against the paint, which was bubbling.

Someone, must've been Him, reached down to feel denim at the groin. Suddenly everything made sense and he was able to identify with his attacker. It was a... love-pumping cancer...

"Cap'm! Cap'm? Wake uhp! There's been an event!"

Au revoir dragon cracheur

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 

Greasy little aryan

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

Depends on my ass

When civilization's crass, who'll step in to up the kitty? 

A man spends a life with the world's elite on the same planet

What can he give? What is the answer? Depends on my ass.

Everybody's riding on it, the skills I bring. I feel the responsibility,

What can I say do now with the weight of this knowledge a

big load of memories across two centuries, the first step into the

Future depends on my ass. Now I can't look around the room 

and say oh yeah, well of course he has a prostate, he has a prostate,

and yeah he probably uses it all the time, I can be that way but

Depends on my ass is not going to change, at least hopefully 

not more than once a day. Depends in each new day. Depends

on how it goes, and whether or not I'll have dick to say about it.

 

Ayre Fromme Diaz

Peebagger

 

They asked to be spared from predators

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

by Donna

Institute for the Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

Chukka Chank Center 

Community Week Poetry Festival, Table 7

Miracle of Light

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

 

Final 3 Weeks of the Prostate

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

Be happy about recycling your empty glucerna boxes

Hot Ukrainian Grave Diggers

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

ILL-advised: Return of the HIV Bros

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

We're convecting our own investiduction

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

Squib load

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

Spin, Vajra!

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

Spirit Chain Gang

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

Adherence

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

Disorientation due to distance

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

dream/love story/work/narcotics

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

Statement

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

Bone nest

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)

Dysmorphia

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

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

From DDT

[To Jan]

1. It's always interesting negotiating meaning with you. 

2. So you are saying that you have bpd?

3. 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? 

4. 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. 

5. I once took a test that said I had all the disorders. What is my treatment? Maybe I should be locked up.

6. Some multipurpose drug. Of my choosing after months of chemical torture trying out different brands. Or none. What had brought all this on? 

7. 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. 

8. 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. 

9. 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? 

10. And for parsing out ideas/ sentences, sorting speech as one would if they were being critical in the everyday sense. 

11. 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.

12. 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

Mostly, it's my gut that's unrested

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

by Jan

"It's Uncle Jan, kids."

Gritty, dark

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. 

Witness statement (frag.)

Mr./Mrs. Jan Jansdaad

Warmpth

 lady named mary in catholic country

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

Not God

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

More stomping foragers

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

Is It a Lie Type 1

 

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.

Is It a Lie Type 3

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.

 

Disturbances above Chang K. Chang Chank

 

The First Time I Think I Was Insane

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.

Use mathematics to erase my virtue

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

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

 

by Tom

"I pillaged Umgungundlovu and made friends with Oda Nobunaga playing Civ V online!"

Foothills of Karir-Kesh

right after ladies' school she went raging through
the landscape
a trembling paper lampshade pressed with flowers

and came upon a wizened gentleman wearing just

bells

lolling involuntarily across the boards of an oxcart

a wintry spell was giving in to blasts of clover and

farts

he and the hideous dog lurched forward in the turf

she stood looking after them and even in the setting

sun

it seemed they'd never drop below the sharp horizon

[traditional]

Temple of Sass

 

brief testament

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

Completion certificate

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

there's no we here

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

All-sinners ground

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

 

Career apparel

 

 

Ilyn on Shab/ Shab Under Ilyn

Congenital skull cracker

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

Ilyn on Shab Near St. Dick

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.

2:22 2/2/22

 

Please don't do that, scar tissue

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

Body capacitance

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

Cruel facts of longevity

just sitting here, thinking about what i'd

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

Dr. Donna Thong

"Recredentialing imminent."

Today's dog walk

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

Today's dog walk

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

Tripping

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

 

Template

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

 

 

by Ilyn

"Short by Illinois standards."

I could have been lidderly all the way into the next hexagon by now

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

Periodical Insight

Vol IX.7.78

Today's dog walk

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

Duddle-dee duh/ duddle DEE-dah

when i can't think

to the music 

better to sink 

what do you say?

then we can be

in the same groove

bobbing away

in the venue

letting it take

up all the room

then we can feel

at our leisure

when i can't see

to the future

better to be

in the future

then we can find

what there is here

and we will know

what to leave here

and we can think

to the music 

better to sink

what do you say?

[loop]

 

 

 

by Peg

Bothsidesism

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

 

 

by Jan Jansdaad 

(Jan's dad)

Snub

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

 

by Reptily

345

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

Unangry

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

Dog pees on rug

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

wound porn

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

Repast

watching her dance plays

all their muscle keys

her inner commands

can freeze them in place

but she can't reach me

the pitch of my jib

bends off her song

and won't let me on

my breathing, long and

unobstructedly

tacks the vanished spell

only when she's gone

only when alone

can i read her lips

free from the bleeping

moment's disorder

wings sweep on the floor

panic and truth merge

is this not my drug

or not me at all

 

on stolen spirits

please the vacant skull

take time and hurl it

with your polished shoe

 

realization

is after it's through

what's not caught is true

so what have you done? 

by Reptily

Skeleton parade

i can feel the life 

coming back in

and it's terrifying

as a skeleton

while before my 

past wrongs paraded

before my eyes

now more are on the way

i don't set time

but i did invent it

so to steal it

from the chill of night

 

but the warm of day

is tending light

must i still pay

for not living right?

 

 

 

by Reptily

Smoke crazy

She keeps going out to smoke this

in to smoke that

like breathing except the opposite

she smoke crazy smoke crazy

She went to college and all that

end up like this

in mutually exclusive states

we trial dating while mating

Half the day she's in pain from 

electrolysis

she gets that but not how her 

soul might fit, soul might fit

Lady in the main, second is a

man for this, a man 

much more than any other gender

that's one for you, one

 

she smoke crazy

we trial dating

oh she a lady

and he a man

[repeat]

by Donna