OUTLIER

JAN: 

Well they've got to realize that from the very first moment of our employment, they were setting us up as opponents. Not quote coworkers. 

JAN'S BOSS JAN:

Yes, we had to draw straws. For seniority. We were starting the same day. 

JAN:

We had to strategize. There weren't just two straws. There was a lidded grass basket. 

JAN'S BOSS JAN:

The tips of seven straws were sticking out at just the same length. 

 JAN:

They were made of balsa wood. Guess they got them at the HR supply along with the psych kits. 

JAN'S BOSS JAN:

The HR lady's palm was holding the basket, gently turning and lifting so that it seemed to hover in space. 

JAN:

I went for the shiv on a plate after volca rule. Take the closest one. 

JAN'S BOSS JAN:

Lost opportunity. You had first shot. I would have taken

JAN:

I know, the one closest to me in case the HR lady had rigged it that way. 

JAN'S BOSS JAN:

That's not to say I didn't strategize. I mean

JAN:

Right, you're the boss now. Seems to fit you. 

JAN'S BOSS JAN: 

Do you think that bossships are for the bossy? 

JAN: 

Ya. 

JAN'S BOSS JAN:

What is ambition: putting to best use your strongest gifts for the good of all or a coincidentally necessary expression of paranoia and contempt for humanity? That the nirvanic system needs quote leaders to tell the workers what to do and use pain and pleasure to bend them to Mthyuh's willhead.  

JAN: 

Or that each of them as well are ambitious and recognize other ambitious servants and honor them and serve honorably to honor the nirvanas and the will of Mthyuh. Yes, all of that. 

JAN'S BOSS JAN: 

That's good because sometimes I feel like an outlier, you know?

Pathetic is the baseline

pathetic is the baseline the center our common nonvariable

this coming from both myopic and telescopic points of view

and thus my admonishment to all to live between the two

between as well oblivion and obliviousness

while getting consuming recreating and building

your smallness hopelessness are for my eyes alone 

i will give you only strategically timed glimpses

if you ever find yourself overwhelmed with patheticness

know it's you and not me doing that to yourself

as the avatar of worthlessness i suck all of it

so what you're doing is ganking my stash of your shit

once i go into mthyuh you'll try and pray to give it back

but you'll realize it takes a long time for me to regenerate

and by then you'll have lost your pathetic mind 

it was your baseline and you didn't trust me with it

 

 

 

by Ilyn

Day of Eternal Chama Address n.d.

[frag.]

 

the humanity around me was stronger than my body will or cancer

it seemed like i was born dnr but i kept on waking

a hive or suspension of healing molecules buoyed 

my cells did what only one immune system could not

do by itself

these were friendly robots with drone-like intentions

a frightening singularity of focus that lidderly

cut and skewered and sewed in service to their

own profession

some might say if it weren't them they'd prolly assume

what's most healing is the stripping and cleaving and

what's left will live interred in debt to pay for

re-ignition

that a done submission of spirit and character

rare deferment to the throbbing support structure

trembles in turn at the business end of an 

org-tree mandate

but can they stop me before i commit again

to rampage on the place that brought me in

ghosts of my venom strangling the landscape

cries and sharp tears

by Ilyn

approach

 

tiresome dreams redundant dreams

not being stoned the night

sees us seeking stupid bliss

hallucinations are standing by

anxious insight finally produces

granite roads leading to villages

my own anti-trans bias against

my own painted fingernails

intense gastric identity response

it's just ahead in the dark and

self-powers a familiar slog

seems to be moving toward the town

 

 

 

by Jan

victor surge

 

confrontation

 

I think i may be coming down with something

 

bullshit sort of shook out

pillars standing nakit

floor kinda sunk down

felt i couldn't take it

teen wanna party down

twenny wanna drown

tirdy he could coast at

fordy all dat

fiffy come a reckning

sissy going down (sissy going down)

sennie is a beckning

a.d. please now

o-nonny nonny nonny

hey nonny nonny nonny

nonny nonny nonny

[repeat]

by Ilyn

Edifice of manliness

Jan and Peg are hanging upside down in a gentle cataract. Their dust and dung are coloring the water purple. They do not have to raise their voices because they are able to speak and understand with their minds only. 

JAN: I was lidderly punching myself in the head with my uh... claw knuckles, caused an avalanche that wiped out a populated chank. Trying to think of where i stashed my cloakawax. It can feel like one is lost in life when it's just their bobbles they can't find. 

PEG: What is it like not being lost in life, Jan? 

JAN: Ah so perhaps--I mean, I get it, I can't answer that question--maybe misplacing health and beauty products is just a reminder of being lost in general, and therefore it's even more annoying. 

PEG: But you have goals, a plan of some kind, or you think you should have those. 

JAN: Uh both; i mean wherever you get your values, as imperfect as they may be, what else are you going to go on? My drive to contribute to society to make something of myself if not a beautiful family then a mark, a good mark, an edifice even. 

PEG: That thought carries the obscenity of manliness, no? 

JAN: Are you saying that learning to live without linear time is the same as dephallocentralization? That the concept of work as building toward the future and goals themselves are outdated masculinist tropes? 

PEG: I'm saying that our environment provides for us. We don't have to worry about our next paycheck. When we are thirsty, we drink from a rivulet of melting snow. There's nothing more to do than turn our heads. When we are hungry, a fleke is right there, on a cliff hike or a chain gang. Our purpose is only to be and to enjoy. Forever. 

Trans. by Phyliss (embedded)

Tribal dance for wedding

At a late in life wedding there was a tribal dance

performed by the bride and her brother

the guests expected them but not the other

Their feathered sleeves scraped the all-purpose flooring

The track was more than six minutes long

They each took more months than that to recover

Their bodies were blurring into the wallpaper

Even there indoors their hair sweat dried in wind

At several points he tried to stop her

She seemed to be expressing a life of incomprehensibility

And he a cattle rancher's drive to drive and drive

Lesser ceremonialists may have left it to stationary 

headbanging but this was a once in a lifetime

reckoning with sense itself its corrosive limits 

its lack in every answer

and dancing through that crack

no one joined them on the floor when it was over

Reptily-ily

My favorite surgeon

this surgeon was into plastics and he

sewed me up in tiny careful knots

that one almost bursting in anger

seemed to be so afraid of the nodule

he dared not insult it til the final moment

another claimed no students were involved

but he was one day a kid with a drafting table

and the next an umbilical slasher 

my favorite and i conspired to decline altogether

and send him off instead to the cayman islands

 

Ilyn

Bonfires are moot

It's brave of you to be in touch as I dissemble disassociate dissolve

It's clear it's not just morbid curiosity that makes you stay involved

Perhaps you learned before i did to not expect tomorrow

This sorrow born of understanding time and vanity sloth vice

You got the best three times on steps: formal wear throwing rice

They got pieces of our minds a lot of meat and plenty deep

We've got our pain to mine shallows to drown in words to keep

I got to explore occupy the boundaries thrilling roads to take

And now, as I stand in the rain on terminal monday, a scene to make

I see how fucking fucked this fucking world has fucking fucked me

I see the shit the shitty shit this shit of shit has shitting shat me

And i can take a breath and feel the float of my floating being floating

And if it's the end the ending means the end of trying to see ahead

To what the hell hell would have been that i'd have done instead

by Ilyn

Grandiose nightwalker

through this brick there is knocking about from the empty

house next door between the normal echoes from the highway

all movement now seems obscene who would choose these

hours to mess around in their yard or bike perhaps a ghoul 

not a sprite they sparkle best in twilit bowers of urbanity and 

archeological digs not in the living pulsing emptiness of full

refracted light this moon even has a satellite a star that looks

itself like a moon against the misty queen soaking in tulle 

only a few days ago it was really winter and i rather liked

having gloves on wrong hands the unexpected pulling on

unsuspecting patches of skin hardly noticed a flag beating

in the dark beneath a neighbor's porch shingles or the house

fallen silent that always has barking dogs and the prints of

their paws still there on glass in the street lamp's limited 

aura there's the assumption that a community is at rest or

simmering behind doors with lamps with motion detectors

the trick about going out to see what's happening when 

no one else is there is that you then become what's 

happening and because nothing is supposed to be

happening you become a species of trespasser attention

grabber ghost cat burglar stealer of visions and movements

not meant to be seen and also meant to be not seen but

also seen often enough that there aren't many questions

or witnesses to see to it you don't see what you're seeing

 

 

 

Don Sidon 

(Trans. por Dawntay)

I only want to waste this day

 

jarring when the screen goes blank

mind is awake but the body is numb

same if you like to party or paint

might look dumb when it's said and done

 

might feel great when yr at yr peak

creed might translate to the joy of life

wait another 20 years before you speak 

never live long enough to get it right

i only want to waste this day

on vanity and distractions

waste it into infinity

there's no tomorrow and that works for me

though it doesn't cure the anxiety

get to hang onto my piety

nose is open to society

Reptily-ily

O Winter, Fruit of Betrayal

another half moon with a hard edge

there's just enough light to get around 

there's a precious circle in there but you

still need the lamp to find shit in leaves

soon full will feel like almost too much

a self-parody getting pretty old

we project our nature on that thing

it's deader than you or me but there it is

you are a tiny horse tonight whereas once

it was clickety-clickety clickety-clickety now

it's a click and a clack a click and a clack clack

you stop and stand to act as weather redactor

For my Lala,

by Jan

VACATOR

We set it all up together but then you vacated without moving

d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd 

woe-ooo-why

Instead you didn't answer or acknowledge the dogs' or my howls

d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd 

woe-oh-ooo-we-ooo

I shouted your name stomping room to room in the big house

d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd  

we-oh-whyy

I agree it was crazy because no one was really there

d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd 

oh way-ooo ay-yay

You are one of the putrid moments of silence in french cinema

d'd'd'd 

ay-yay-oh

How the back aches from the lack of lines

d'd'd

woe-ee-oh

I keep the memories of unspoken love

d'd

ooo-ohhh

And a mask of your face

d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd 

ay, ay, ay, ay

d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd d'd'd'd 

ay, ay, ay, ay

[repeat]

Lil' Modat

 

 

 

 

Heap of tulle

 

literally an emergency is just what comes up

but you're more inclined to peak over the edge

the more anxious you get aware you become

it's a gambler's disease a disassociation 

everyday drama depends on what could happen

to stop the world from turning look in the other direction

after a stage length of chaines turns even if you spot

focus on a stationary chandelier balcony velvet seat 

in frozen time and space you must still breathe

which has less effect on aging than the alternative

your mind is temporarily stunned by spinning

you can consume and blow out the stillness

 

without taking the challenge in hand you'll end up

walking in circles like a dehydrated desert refugee

then crumpled swan like in a heap of tulle

the centrifugal force will have taken on a life of its own

Dr. Donna Thong

Hard scrabble

 

JAN: What should we do should we make it so the genders are a grab bag that one can assign oneself in any combination, or are we saying these were assigned divinely, not by choice, that it's the Body that came out wrong. Or not that at all. How shall we know. What can I ask that doesn't put me at a disadvantage. It's supposed to make me vulnerable. That's so I can understand. I who don't understand. The understanding stands in the soul of the haver of the identity. We know from years of being referred to as it/ that that it seems maybe to us petty demanding the gender after you are already distinguished clearly from other classes of ambulatory sentients like the grasshopper. 

PEG: It sounds like you've been thinking deeply. Why? 

JAN: ...

PEG: I was listening. I agree you're vulnerable, but not because of the new gender directives. They are only asking that you be sensitive and thoughtful. If you're already that, you'll have to do shiv all day. 

JAN: They're asking for more than that. To get a W.A.S.T.E. I have to say that I've earned nothing if everyone didn't have the opportunity. That obviously counts out all K blood because as enormous soaring reptiles there are gigs necessarily exclusive to us only. 

PEG: What's really lame is the whole premise that we're included now since we're not going to kill hunt or eat so what have we really gotten in return.

JAN & PEG TOGETHER: Friends' Service Hangers! 

JAN: I feel a lot fresher in general. I focus on the day to day. There's some good kibble and fruit snacks. 

PEG: Tell me in a thousand years. How content you are. They think we're vampires just because of our lifespan is long and theirs is short. Because you're a seroconversion, you're not all K, and you're new anyway. I don't want to bring you down. K's fly spread eagle. 

Peg and Jan have been lying back sunning their tummies with their elbow spikes holding them up with their dorsal flaps unfurled in the wind. It's an ancient river bed. Their spines have broken through the outer crust of sediment and leave canyons of shadow and dust behind when they each roll to the right pull up their left spike and slam it in again way up pointing toward the cliff face. It looks like they're about to ski, or fly, but instead they leap at the rock horizon with their toe claws and scoop the air behind them and scrabble craning their necks up the cliff to their hangout. The rock has been hollowed out and boulders pile up at the base, which is also where they drop the extra bones. 

JAN: Is it because you're a lesbian you try to discourage me? I have joy thinking of my husband and wish we will be together? You want me there under your dark cloak? 

PEG: Haha bitch shut the fuck up. 

PEG & JAN: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

JAN: They is some mens around here an my nose is open.

PEG: There is no mens. Just more gender question marks either being ported by pharmsupply or coming in wild like you through The Crack. Now go back and read the directive. This is your life now. Jan is far too small to have a meaningful relationship with you anymore. That's all in the past. He's tiny; you're big. Doing this is not about that. You have to represent the boundary-lands. 

JAN: No I get it it's not even about like I'm here with you or you with me or we're here together. It's more about this rock shelf and some snacks and the open air and the mist and what we mean and what we can do but don't do. 

PEG: But also what we did do history and what we do do because of our air skills and gravitational importance and in terms of fertilization to all the chank communities.  

PEG & JAN: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

per Phyllis (embedded)

Sports N' Sex Crimes Bugle

LX1 (frag.)

instead of taking on a whole new imaginative god-world

they simply refused to learn much about the science-world

and from that mystery their fantasies hung

they were pendant on truths too fiery for questions

their humility grew from an easy acceptance of unknowability

even the experts kept jumping all the way ahead

to the volcano's edge of knowing

and within those boundaries sought to keep proving nothing

 

La Chamatilly

Zaul Eikense (trans.)

Omne Quod Scitur

LX1 (frag.)

i don't rise

we couldn't tell why it was bright out

basic blindness was the scheduled moon

it was a reflective light but of what

lala keeps track of which route/ night

we headed left below the shiny cloud cover

these days she's prone to weave and digress

the sounds have changed with the freeze

what makes it through the brick is a moaning

now and then a snap, the mini pipes of tinnitus 

by Jan

don't touch and don't look

 

X:

you have a dazed face narrowing your attention to the peripheries

as a fish looking ahead and behind might be the effort part

it doesn't matter where i stand because you are my object, not the opposite

i would torture you with language if i were much better at it

you are made humble by not having anything better to do

Y:

even i am your this or that sounds to me to be too self-referential

so i'll be silent to also avoid objectifying you with the word you

this is half a hollow ringing sphere also with a ring in its nose

there we go we is presumptuous but it he she all ok by me it him

i am attendant by accepting attention as one would rain

 

 

 

by 

Reptily-ily

trans. by 

Menen Jenral

a shopper forcus

tonight we're going out into the field, darling. far out. 

i won't see you again til the pictures come back

we'll point the lens where the world would be

had it not been and gone so quick

perhaps it still exists between the clicks

even our faces might rematerialize

thanks for the kisses but i fear i'm your salt lick

hollowed out on one side and more sensitive there

where the wind passes through i glimmer

my elbows operate as if by riding straps

with your shit i can still pluck the unfrozen grass

my knuckles are warm and let me tie the knot

but a massive arctic front is imminent

i'll stand in the kitchen window to watch you squat

by Jan

Tonight's dog walk

 

flashback three days it was a

half moon with a blade on the flat side

then came the self-imposed blur

an off angle of mismatched crescents

suggests a circle but

now it's joined up with other forces

also in their glory if for an evening

Toris, the horoscope lady in her fort

her tense prophecies about the weather

the lottery is now our widest belief tent

into the dark is where we went

passersby were spooked and silent 

we could only hear them in the grass

when they were already up upon us

pedaled fast because it's become dry

i produce a plastic bag from Pharmsupply

and pick up lala's shit

by Jan

Tonight's dog walk

you can always plan for a fall but when it happens

the ass goes to ground fairly quickly

you live in more than one dimension and

you've got to be aware of the one you're seeing

 

upside-down world where the signs are all menacing

right-side up world where the signs lead to an exit

if not you'll mindlessly play along and fuck up

or get tripped up in the signs and become despondent

but none of that will keep your balls off the pavement

overall if you can still feel them you're fine

by Jan

"Chilly, still. Lala just stands and seems to forget her purpose. To evacuate her bowels, she has to strain against me on the lead."

Tonight's dog walk

 

a half moon hung among the branches

and behind the trees stained velvet sky

sent the children home but also sirens

they came in droves learning the approach

modified for pairs of teenage jackals

the tiniest possible skeletons and wizards

we could monitor the door throughout our wanderings

along the path that winds between the trees

but no one tripped the light above the steps

rabbit and seal parents confessed their plan

to consume the bounty of their charges' words

bypassing both threat and vulnerability

by Jan

Distillment of the Urge to Worship Illinois

Ilyn sits best he can in a lotus position as Reptily gently picks blood clots off his scalp and back and replaces them with a rub of mineral oil and bright yellow sulfur dust. Water drips from a shaggy black fungus lining the walls of the cave.

ILYN: My life force flickers like a spook bulb.

REPTILY: You have the miraculous but unfortunate curse of carnation redundancy. You keep being born again, but uglier. 

ILYN: But what I can see is all beauty. 

REPTILY: Then you are selfish to boot. Never mind our horror when we gaze upon you. 

ILYN: I've proven my willingness over and over to disappear forever. 

REPTILY: By now you know it's only a ritual. It could never be the same as that first surrender. 

ILYN: Until I jumped into Mthyuh's roiling gut, I was burning from the inside out. 

REPTILY: Why is it. Why do others want to stay and can't but you can't go and stay away.

ILYN: Why do others want to stay and can't but I can't go and stay away? 

REPTILY: Yes. 

ILYN: My cross to bear is the mystery of my cross to bear. Flekes come to me because I am the most extreme expression of their own befuddlement. Like they'd watch a kid beating a doll against a fence. Ya, I am that doll, and I am that child. 

REPTILY: Ya I am that fence and you whitewash me. I mean I say you are full of shite. You are holy, another mystery. You'd cash your own mother into indentured servitude to heresists. Oh wait. 

ILYN: Ya look who's talking. At least you kept her in the family. 

REPTILY: She could do worse than collect shiny coins at volca and command shiv service on her own servants all week. It was her idea. She herself is practically a deity now. All life is contingent and symbiotic. Except for yours, Illinois. 

ILYN: Look at us. A pair of broken records. Have you ever noticed that my full name looks like a "no" peeking out from behind bars? 

REPTILY: With an s on the end. 

ILYN: Ya that's silent. You know what it means. Freedom. No to not freedom.

per Phyllis (embedded)

Seasonal-disorientative gravitational sensitivity

first lala started wandering in circles and 

pulling me along in her orbit and then i

felt so wobbly and we were both getting

magnetized by that tree that you and

i together couldn't get our arms around

but its power seemed to wane once we

stumbled closer stopped watched the 

beige sides of its fallen leaves return

ambient light but as if from beneath

so that there were mini search beams

reaching back as i bent over to pick

up the poo, and when i added my 

torch we nearly swooned again the 

ground tilted and we had to ride it

bent kneed the rest of the way lala 

was straining on the lead but not 

ahead, sideways as if to mark her 

value to be free but also bound or 

to bring me along to her agenda

striped with shadows in these lanes 

confounding cats for pumpkins for cats

while at home she will lie by my feet 

by Donna

As five boys overtake us on the sidewalk

i'd been farllowing their ruings fer halfa mall

when lala stop they caught up walkeen tall

lookeen straight ahead sep for eyes all starry

who turn arounan winkan say he sorry

because the harvest is coming up 

shadows are jabbing into daily life

a afternoon walk with my pup

turn into a tree with a knife

it's the planet's sickning turn tort

flame on the horizon you caynt

walk backwere fass enough or

evolve or spind or learn 

sure your clan presents a novel difficulty

but it's otherwise unrewarding

who wouldn't take easy bake up the street

or a pendant night on el capitan  

my path has not led to gender psychedelia

but i've come very close now to what 

amounts to a high-tech diaper fragment

and i can tell you sometimes: it's clumpy

Lillian "Lil" Modat

trama-induced attention deficit

i'm just saying words because i can't let you touch me

you know how you might mutter nonsensical somethings

on a train car under the roar resting on a man's shoulder

 

its the equivalent of a purr though i should know better

or a cocked-up night caller imitating dump trucks

songbirds must sing their garbage regardless

i think a dog wants to converse but there's no 

water in the dish and that's how much language

can fill up or satisfy your absent vacuum

blathering on a stool makes me an easy mark

because the words are just a placeholder for your agency

i give you all of these raw and unperturbed by care

all the sentences i have expressed have brought me

trauma-induced attention deficit disorder from their failure

as abjectly worthless as money or religious fervor

as open and sincerely as to share pips from a grove

i grant this empty meaninglessness for you to throw away

as soon as you can see me pull up in the drive

"For you, Peg."

by Phyliss (embedded)

Tonight's dog walk

take nighttime dog walks only in a waxing moon or if you see party lights

you can both track the stages with optimism 

avoid the panic of shadows dissolving in oil

projecting feelings that hope disappears

how likely is it to look up and see one ring glowing open in the cloud pavé

and arch your back and spin your face to find that 

you stand at the center and yes the dark has singled you out

while in fact you're stealing time from the night that you'll have to pay back

what were the words we left below that 3/4 satellite

why do those i do collect arrive at home

disjointed and unintelligible, snow back from a mountain,

a muttering pool behind a firewall of mist

By Jan Jansdaad

Highchank Jr. High

Homecoming Week Hangar Fair

Poetry Stall, Bench 12

No more-cum-forever

No more-cum-forever

all i could produce

after getting the news

was shot through with blood

i earned but didn't save

no white cotton briefs

-cum-air to breathe

not a drop for your beard

no signed letter marks

nor for sofa pillows

check your bucket seats

for the dusts of time

my-cum-yours

and this always was

every iteration

even the invisible ones

counting off elations

i still subscribe

at least in my 

heart-cum-mind

by Jan

 

RE-CAP'M18: He sweated it

 

Always ask yourself: how is this moment auspicious
Then remember who sweated all of it for you
See when he dropped it shook loose some shit and
Made him less valuable as bud (blood was 33%)
But more for humanskind to gather from lily pads
And cough up for Volca in the form of a shiny coin



from "Good Graciousness: Ilyn's Perspiration as Nourishment"
Children's Myth of Mthyuh

Better psych care

At some level they all knew they were bad and that the only good would be to wipe each other out and to enjoy doing it. 

There was also thanks to the shiv an intense respect for the individual spirit in each putrid violent body, sprites who were challenged to but could not become angels and were unavoidably and irredeemably sucked into the gravity of their hollow pelves, long fingers, and tiny manus.

"List of lists, I've lost my license." Jan spoke with her mind only, but it was real language. 

Peg: "You funny."

"I mean I really los... oh, damn."

"Ya they make them so thin they can get lost in a clump of pycnofibes on your ass."

Both: "Hahahahahaha!"

Jan: You know, Peg: I could just swoop around with you forever. 

Peg: That's what this is, this moment.

Their wings were on slow beat two, three times. There were no peaked or valleyed panoramas, just some yellow mist and greenish floor which both stretched out and curved down as if over a globe through all the angles they could see out of. 

My dorsoventral flap is really chafed. 

I like the vet-mix salve down at Friends' Urgency Hangar. It's practically a spa. 

Ya, I need to get my W.A.S.T.E. stamped soon anyway. I'll get the lavender. I know which one you mean. 

The day they started giving out Waiver and Acceptance of Social Toxicity Estimates to K's was the day they say we got our freedom. 

Better psych care anyway. 

I say volca to that. 

K's fly spread eagle.

 

Trans. by Phyliss (embedded)

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