Chunk of Horny Rock

IN 15 minutes I shall swallow the shiv and wake up seven hours later in full wing, full toothed. My nail rigs are still soft as bowling balls, but that's to carry me in fear far enough to hide and sharpen, grow and take me just as long to return. Therl be warnings. I'll be famished. Two unauthorized kills set me back a growth cycle, and I will carry the nubs in my skeleton for life. That means nothing now. With flake donors, I can go on to lay dynasties and just be, permanently, like a chunk of horny rock in silent orbit. I'm a fixture in Mthyuh's plan. Quasars, plague, all kinda cataclysms you name it. My job is to witness, monitor how life progresses, ebbs. In between I nap and fart.

But tomorrow I must pass the final test. Am I really formed. It's a hairline between liability, casualty and launching me half assed. A K's buttocks grow and balance in flight, not squashed cruelly into a wood desk. With an ink well no less. That was how I tatooed our life, your blood on the inside of my cheek flap when my halla talons were fresh. I know now I can't stop and smell the mercy after whut I've learned about the mission. I am built for particular understanding. Because I am not destroyed, my purpose is truth and trumps rightie/ wrongie. I feed and take and create culture.

Missy

Callous in an Odd Place

Donna's hut, carport and pool create a Tiki-style octagon behind the chain link fence. She can often be seen in knee-to-toe bells and a halter adjusting deck lounges. The parcel is mortgaged at more than three times its worth; one would expect it to sprout exhaust plumes and fly. True enough, a layer of hot lava sufficiently shallow to be covered in the mineral rights sometimes causes mudpots and steam vesicles to appear in the yard.

Donna lives in shame of her sun damaged forearms and ankles. The scar is a shimmry curt'n. The desert pulls at your blood through the skin. Someone has snipped your life stalk and placed you in a drying bin. But why the callous on the back of her thumb?

She was into fresh-juiced carrots until it turned brick-orange. Why should the most puzzling parts of the physique present so saliently dyed? Donna'd been at P-Supply U during the tenure of a psychoanalytic dean crossed with Jungian department heads. She wondered how she was somehow callous in an odd place. One would expect a life to form armament where friction is most frequent. Donna loves her girlz, has shared a kidney with the poor, and of another race. Of reverence to higher beings, one does not chafe from that which can't exist.

Could my linguistics background add something to the mix that would reveal, through language, a fallacy in the metaphorical approach? Not. Memory trumpets: "Phyllis, to tell you the truth, I think something may have bitten me there." Donna crammed a smoke in her mouth and stood to fold the chair. An incision had left the faint white jet-like streak on her lower back.

Phyllis
Re: Donna

Wild Savior

You were lucky it was a seven.
Yeah, you were too.
Seven saved us.
Yes, it did.
Pfist.
What, Fool.
Do you know the story of the Wild Savior?
Yeah, the Seven.
How did it get to be that number?
It's just an old game.
No. There were seven that stepped through The Crack. Only one could be a savior. The rest would do menial labor.
Seven what.
Seven mountain rebirths.
Some of them were bitches.
Yes.
Someone told me they came up from the soil.
After jumping into Kareer Kesh.
I didn't hear that.
You know how flakes take to covet their land.
Hell yeah I was born and will die here, I
Calm down. You don't even know the story.
What sto- hell ya I know the story. Seven went up; it was a pilgrimage.
Moms dropped them off in town.
Dads were working in the mines.
Sisters and brothers praying for them at big assemblies.
Wind blew the roof off.
K's took some of the chillun.
They prayed for a wild savior.
When all the numbers were down except one.
What numbers.
The damn ten numbers. In the law.
In the Law that Saved the Chillun?
There's no such law.
In the Law of Climbing the Mountain?
And that law says
It says you stop ten times and praise Mthyuh and beg.
Beg who.
Beg Mthyuh to
To eat you last. Beg her to eat you last.
That's true. And which station didn't fly away.
Station.
Which of the ten on the way up to Kesh where they pray?
Musta been seven. People get blown all the time in there.
Exactly.
Whut?
I think I met him the other day.

We Will Live in Wanting

We Will Live in Wanting

Until these winds die, we will live in their wanting.
We just continue to resist some far-off vacuum
While air alone, in its fairy likeness, can only follow.

A void rules our yards and makes us feel shelter.
It's a release from pressure makes hearts rush on;
The determined surf, in all its roaring, is sucked back.

There is a hole in space that keeps things moving,
Even within these walls as we listen to the locomotives
Night trumpeting their liberation from nature.

Phyllis

Empathic Implant Report

Empathic Implant Report: Birth Boot
Mod#GAYSHINER89.1-6.10 Glass n’ Foolz Gold Filament
WD40

Sun about 80% of the way down, straight ahead. Visor employed. Two men about 20 years apart stand close enough to touch in a V facing me. They both have long goatees: one is grey, and the other is red.

A trailer with silver stripes frames them in back. A campfire oranges up the nic-stain faces. Subject A waves. “Hey Micah howya doin!” it says. It gives too loud and too fast even at 50 yards, its movements cartoonish. Pfist is projecting a man who is giving himself to you and fighting you. He acts as tho he would perform fellatio and shoot you for having let him do it.

Flakes can be found easy in trailers. Rolling up to the big one, made clean with stucco, there were the bitches. La La’s eye fur is bruising in mocking tear blobs. She sports a fresh jaw bone from the carcass of an escaped embra kid. M’Lady comes fullallopping up to the truck and scratches the trim with her gnarly black foot pads. Amygdala has some degenerative hip going on and smiles her painful greeting with fangs.

Sometimes her eyes glow red, as if she’s in a spoiled foto. She nods her head toward wherever there’s trouble, never taking them off you. Her front legs are permanently mangled into a hug. I, too, have a disease of giving.

Mike and Jan came out to help lug groceries and my cameras, tripods. Pfist runs up pulling out a gun. I’m caught with sun in my eyes for a moment-- too many glinting metal objects. Jan and Pfist take me down to the vegetable garden and set up an empty 2-liter PowerShiv bottle. "Shiv" is any worldly comfort that simulates death.

Jan’s clothes are apparently meant only to constrict her hottest parts. There is not much warmth or protection. She feels this intimately when she shares her eyes with you. She is always scrubbed clean and ready for sex. She passes out $100 bills coming back from the casino. She and her kids once lived with Wayne, or Jack. There she is posing with the tiny Colt Automatic 25.

I get my training with a beer and fire off the only copper pellet in the clip. La La & M’Lady’d followed us down and laid there patiently in the rows. I’m standing like a cap’m on a ship or ready for a big-star bow while jazz dancing. Ball went high on the kick, made an explosion in the sand, and the girlz jump a good 10 feet. From there my moral standards were set for the weekend.

The next step was to run shiv for the whole mountain. It was the only thing Mike was out of except butter, mayonnaise, vinegar, salad dressing or any other balm or salve for things that raise themselves from the ground. Me and Pfist take to the truck for the local PharmSupply.

There’s a flake in the road who rents out his Caterpillar and a day’s work. He’s walking three giant mastiffs in the dust, one of them in an empty saddle. Hey, Joe! You don’t remember me, but we dug a hole for a whole lot of cattle. And a dog. And a cabron. Which went in first. It must have been 20 feet down. Perfick on his knees, a bowing pony clown. And then a Dalmatian. With the bullet stigmata. I had to fling it by the ankles. It ended in the predatory pose gravity'd chosen: teeth dead across the back of the old goat’s neck; legs struck, spread so hard as to pop the nails. We used to call it Death Farm 3000. Say—you were the one in the cockpit that time, on yr backloader!

No, I don’t remember you.

The Flake in the Road squinted into the extended cab. Nope. Who are you? I could hear Phyllis, my editor, cackling in the auditory node. On the way back Joe was walking in the same direction but about 100 yards behind where he’d been.

The liquor store guy reached for his alarm when Pfist came in and they both started laughing. Pfist starts to rant: I hate you! Everything’s free today! I want that, that, and that! while I get the libations. And one of those, please. At a discount! Pfist chimes in, then quiets down. Yeah, guy knows me. I beat up a flake in here. He was, he was touching chillun. He’s doing time now.

Get the phuck out of my store, liquor-guy stage yells. Yeah phuck you brother. I’ll see ya now. Pfist smiles like Clark Gable. Pfist is OK! the guy says. Are we all done here, I ask him.

Back refreshing remnants of our earlier cloud, we rumbled out of town again and toward the stucco trailer. Cactus whiz past so close they could give Pfist a ruddy shave while he sounds off in the open winda. Yeah, he was coming in, and me and some friends were coming in, and he says here come the snitches. I say good cum goes to things who wait. Then I was all saying shit and he was all saying shit even more, and then we just let free like when yr drinking and you get to the point where you know it doesn’t make sense, and you just feel this hate, and you just don’t care? Well we were both getting to that point and he hit me and I hit him and knocked him on the floor, and then I beat him up until he got knocked out. He was all blood and drool. And I said, “I’m a felon; I’m on probation, and I can’t even vote. I got some meth, and a gun. I’m goinda jail. I’m goinda jail.” Pfist said this in an exaggercized way that would make you think he was ready to suck your dick or mad and ready to really wail into and murder you or both. The question was when. I felt excited and sad then.

Should I pull my briefs looser in my jeans or mourn my own offing. Back at the ranch we poured the shiv into the rest of the morning coffee and broke up a box of hard brown sugar into stones perfect for casting in with some ice. Skole!! Pfist shined with his mug of beer and played a game of stealing mine at the point of toasting. We were clicking just fine as he let me claim a joke about Johnny Walker and answered Right on Micah, friends for life, or if not, phuck you!! Phuck ya’ hard and in the head!! His glass had raised to cover one eye and wink at me through it.

OK here’s the deal I say. If I die, and it’s of natural causes, you can phuck me in the head. You can phuck my cerebrum. You can phuck me anywhere cuz I don’t care. But if you kill me, no. You can phuck my stinking corpse in the ass but that’s as far as it goes. Hell I can phuck you in the nose for all I care; you can’t do anything about it, says Pfist, who’s pulled in; You’re dead. I’ll come back to haunt you, I keep on. I have friends. They know how my head’s supposed to look. Where the holes are. I’m sure they do; I’m sure they do, wavers Pfist. Man, that’s sick!! You one sick Mthyuh phucker.

Meanwall Jan is done marinating pork steaks. Ooo. What are you guys talking about? That’s sick. Sick Mthyuh phuckers. Jan, you look beautiful, I say hoping to piss off Pfist. She looks at him. Thanks. Pfist gives me a thumbs up with the top row of his teeth pressing on the bottom lip. Taking a piss, I find a bar of baby soap.

Ya’ll have littluns yr not tellin’ about? Nah. Just my baby. The girlz caught her mousing in the bedroom the other night and now she ain’t right. They got her in their teeth. And shook, chimes in Mike, staring at the beets in the salad spinner.

Mike, yor a scientist; why don’t we all go down and have a look? You can tell us, on a scale from one to ten, how grave it is. Pfist wants a wager. I’ve got 8 and 9, him one through 6. Seven is the Wild Savior. 10 is dig a hole, Chihuahua meets its maker.

So after dinner we all tramp on through the stickers to the silver trailer under no moon, just torches. You can see the fabric of stars and boobs and thongs and hear Pfist and me working through the conditions. There is no payment unless my numbers prevail. We call a vet. No responsibility is required in the unlucky event that the scientist pours his tube in the direction of your fate. Mthyuh will be in charge then. But we don’t know yet.

There is a tiny, dobie-like bitch trembling in a pool of yellow light on a 99-cent astro-turf Welcome mat as a space-age altar to the sofa on the mauled and hoary w2w carpet. Get out or pipe down; we can’t hear anything, warns Mike. Yeah you guys, says Jan sitting, looking up and hugging her own naked brown openings. We can’t hear a thing. Get out.

A casino girl and a scientist through an oval plexiglass window. Pfist and I smelt glowing acorn smoke and an accordion RV hose dumping slowly under some oak. Mike'd got his training with a swimming scholarship and a grant from the Preservation Society. He was stroking the pooch and listening hard for a job or sounds of protest when he pressed for trauma and/or seeping. Ouch! Pfist barked at the sill. Bitches get all the attention. The night was still.

Micah
with Phyllis, Embedded

Communities White

This post has been squashed mercilessly by the Mthyuh Preservation Society.

Stories, Stories

One night the Chama was in so much pain she totally blew this guy's empathic circuit. He was a kiwi-level groomer and blood guide working on her gum shunt. Is to say trippy to say psychosis-inducing? No. He litter-ly popped a fools' gold and glass tube implant. Micah I think his name was. Now he calls himself Ted. He's like someone who stepped in the The Crack but he didn't.

Oh and the proclivities he is letting show. He even shacked up with the cart man for a weekend, Mthyuh's vomit we call him. They made a pact never to care or introspect, that it was 48 hrs of flesh-only intimacy. Then bff takes Kareer-Kesh anew and the next trek in, never heard of our colega cuz he's been born again.

Now Ted's set up camp in the bottom of Mike's pool like Edie Sedgewick eating daisies. He'll only allow his catty side to come out. If you press him, he just shows teeth. There are always cameras around-- his gourd was popped by a monarca bitch, what'd you think. If there's a record there's a story, simple as that.

Sue Me

So sue me; I refuse to change my pattern.
Sue my lungs and loins-- go ahead.
Sue my hours and times and foods.
Sue my scotch and rude fonkytown wayz.
Sue my bones and how they grow.
Sue my slaves.
Sue my metaphorical twitch.
Sue me all day, and sue my tics.
Sue me in droves and sue me.

Missy, after counsel

Born Again, But Uglier

So nice to hear rock n' roll in the Lower Chanks. Someone must be amping up for an exit. A flake mohm and her baby cower in a niche. Does a hole you scratch with your fangers count as a panic room? Someone is bleeding on the strings of a real guitar. Communities open up to picaroz and needles as long as they can watch the whole project launch soon and far.

I'm here as a Missionary of Doom, but it's a good thang. We promote something like healthy recreation. As the Hereafter Looms, why not stock up on favors to the Butt Unappealing?

Illyn
"Born again-- but uglier."

Stunted Mess

I watch them toss my fangernails in the chipper. I'm left with these shiny studs, searching to express myself. This is what happens when you get held back a grade. I drool in my desk nest, barely able to stroke keys; my head is spastic, elongated. They have to grant me open release or deal with the stunted mess.

Day after day my neuroskeletal budding triples their urgency, conservatism, likeliness of failure.

Even the teacher helps to heave my meat scoops into the dumpster. "These suckers are like cement Jai-Alai paddles," is his comment. "They actually are capable of something like sucking," informs a devotee of the Ultimate Worship Group. Then kicks a darkly bloodstained cuticle fragment into a spin with his steel-toed work boot.

Now I tire of narrative.

Missy

Mutual Salvation

Mutual Salvation

I didn't come to save you, be saved, etc.
I came to be saved and your coming saved you.
When you came, I was saved, and my coming saved you.
Coming saved me same's it did you.
I was saved by coming cuz there was someone to come to.
Otherwise there would be no coming to, only moving.
Someone saved you and it was moving to someone new.
You moved until you were coming and thought I could save you.
I came without even moving thinking I was coming toward you.
Moving toward coming is something we both wanted to do.

Donna

Marking Glands

kitty came back and won't go home
i get mostly teeth with its marking glands
or was it the cute gothic girl at the Target
sneezing up her bones with some NiQuil

i'm sensitive to your living here, boy
you impose an environment of phlegm n' paper toweling
it's just that i'm on to your petty cat tricks darling
you've got responsibilities around the home now

as a player, you've got a lot of action going south
big clouds blow past in the shape of shocking fetiches
piñatas burst and reflect in los canales de tu corazón
you hide or run when i draw the skin at the cave mouth

Shab

Flakes are most likely to repent as the shiny copper fades.
It's easier to trace a downward spiral from a downward spiral.
Still some would seek healing every big top revival come to town.
But Illyn came in the cage of a wooden cart with wheels hacked nearly square.
This home was powered by a dog whose eyes glowed red, and wide enough to wear a saddle.

Flakes wandered up and formed a circle because it was something maybe they could eat.
It was grotesque, especially cuz its look was fresh, a bright moon gnarled and pocked.
Illyn appeared to have broken through the atmosphere and swol'n from the friction.
How many times have you rung Our Earth? Do you even know what part of you is where?
Your tears spit onto a face we can't relate to; now you need to share our soup?

Inorganic Mechanisms

Why would I want to go to bed if I'm feeling good. The surf is rising not ten feet from my window. Or rather the poo heater came on. But it tends to scare the bats away. They'll strafe the surface, even if you're swimming. They're sonic; electric-motored drones are not bucolic.

Who would want to leave a night to be run by inorganic mechanisms?

My future is a world where the light of sun is borne by alloys only. Only you will be allowed to toast me golden. Humans ought sleep while Mthyuh's organ fires turn the cog. This is time for play.

FOR MIKE
Donna

Pins n' Buttons

Tom wears a home-sewn vest over every plaid shirt every day. It's covered in commemorative pins and slogan buttons. Even as he lectures, its beige suede rocks against his arteries. His half-naked students find it obscene, but a heart on his chest puts them at ease during drills and bloodletting. K chicks will often leave purple stains on their seats.

Missy is out on suspension for off-limits vittle. Every re-creature must be protected extra much because they are most likely to be eaten with the smallest pang of conscience. Because they come back, because they must, it seems a venal abuse.

Tho flakes are other matter; academy classmates even graver. Flakes are food for bloodsac only; the grrl in the next seat is your sister in pain. Had Connie stepped in The Crack? Were her tertiary characteristics driving her onto the waiting list for shiv clinic and guided skeletal bursting? Had Connie in fact been a casual associate of Reptily among the rotting alfalfa bales of the Low Chanks long before the filter and the MPS? We measured time in WD then. But it lied.

Imagine all the singing night birds before wide feeding. Now there is only one, and he mocks. Fecundity only breeds more episodes: thumping, wailing, spines. Flakes disappear like soap. Soon only those who rule the skies will have a strip of land. They are proud and unsentimental or grieving. They have paid with burning; they have paid in change. They are tired of thieving, of treating. Now we are their petri dish. Death is a privileged doctor.

Phyllis
Lit-Crit Contractor, Embedded
for Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle

Mike's Swimming Blog #80

When the Hot is on, you step into an embrace with the liquid and keep frogging or gatoring in languid ballet strokes. You have to fight going into a fetal position. In Donna's salt pool, I don't get chalky. She's been working on an autopsy in the living room. My loins feel sore for lack of Winter Stroking. Something about this environment really keeps the buttocks training. I did tri-ceps on the cement stairs holding my knees in the air just Above the Tension. Then I heard her laughing through the sliding screen door. She'd found signs of fatty liver even though it was Mostly Missing.

Cruel Prince

First he wants to
do his "martial arts"
thing, the jabs, Head
Butts; then I get
teased for Lack
of Manliness. When
I know he just
Needs to be Held.

He laid on his side
with my cat. My
fingers were shiv stained;
the two of them looked at me
like a returnee's Last Chance.
Is it the turtlenecks
that let a man say What he Wants?
Now I do His Bidding.

Illyn
"Born again-- but uglier."

My World is Shit

Now that I am in the Final
Stages, change seems dumb.
Some say there's been an
encroachment of a parallel
universe, but I fully doubt it.
It's just the ground churning
under us, belching new souls.
My world is shit because I'm old.

Once I had a game, an angle, an exit;
I was up for an ambit, didn't need to score.
Now every lit-crit babe with a publishing credit
Thinks I'm a door to the afterlife.
I can only leave maps and things;
I don't really bring much to the way I live
except my body and a knife.
My world is shit because I murdered Connie.

Missy

Island of Stability

She rubbed the back of my neck while I slapped the bongos. I think it was the best jam I ever had. I found surfaces I had not yet discovered. I played them like an instrument.

The Filter was down, and anything could have happened, but that night she got back her hands: a lady of power and majesty, a real scum bag, perspiring harsh pollen. We were making music.

The Wall of Stress had disintegrated, and our love could flower. This is the way we forged an Island of Stability: her heavy ass and my diamond-like passion, in an open world's vortice.

Phyllis

Scald Lines

Reasonable Person

I sometimes call upon the powers of the universe for no reason. But six nights in a row we smelled smoke curling in the blow hole. Six times we felt our bodies screeming NO. But we are still whole. Connie

Affective Filter

While the Chama is in training, I do reconnaissance with flakes. To bring down the affective filter, we build caldron platforms, watch the aurorealis in the twilight, passing giant bongs of shish. All the while I can take the temperature of the chillun while tickling them, whispering passages from Northrup Frye into their pointy ears. Some days She'll ply me for coordinates. After feed school, I'll be using her guide data to find the colonies. I give; the Chama takes. We'll help each other. Phyllis

Wind Quake

A cloud changed into dragon shapes and we must have been experiencing some high winds because the whole chank system quaked, and the shadows seemed to turn down, swooping into invisibility. This is the current that rules our skies and protects the Homeland. When hailstones the size of medicine balls start splashing the soup, they make scald lines. Flakes are making bets on target-shaped diagrams and debris field calculations. We expect a big attack soon. Mike