Mordon holy star

Spittle forming on his lips, Mike feverishly tries to force his sturdy plastic tubing neon-look Mordon holy star, with its loose and twisted cabling, into a cardboard box. ERUSOLCEROF FO GNIRFFO is spelled in backwards letters on the translucent paper sign taped to the picture window behind him. The points of the star are making every angle impossible. Finally he whips the star back out of the box, hitting himself on the forehead with the plug, drop kicks the box into the fireplace and storms down a long hall to the sliding glass back door and further down wide stone steps and onto a cement patio from which he discus-hurls the star into a low puddle of yellow foam at the bottom of the pool. As it flies, it resembles a spiky brain and spinal cord set free.

SIX MONTHS EARLIER:

Doorbell rings. Mike, wearing nothing but a denim shop apron and flip-flops, hears the chime from a backyard loudspeaker deep within a nest of scarlet bougainvillea. He drops the pool robot, whose tank treads are already turning eagerly, into murky water. He geishas up the stone steps and the long hall and to the front door, near which a glowing blue Mordon star can be detected from behind the living room sheers. The open door frame reveals a middle-aged couple smiling quizzically.

Hello. We noticed your star. Are... you a Mordon family, and if so, what are you doing for No-Shiv? Hmm, we are the leaders of the Mordon community in the chank, and I have a red box gathering every year at our home-- it's a Chalk tradition. That's Dick, and I'm Embhra.

Dick, Embhra; Mike. Well, I'm not a family, or-- we're not a traditional family. By the way I am one-sixteenth Mordon, and on the mother's side, but I am Shiv, brought up Shiv. Uhm, for many reasons, including the obvious need for diversity in Chalk Chank, I decided to show respect for the other part of my heritage this year. When I say we're not a traditional family, me and the folks that tend to live in this house, I mean there is no legal contract, and we are of mixed and questionable gender. I'd love to come!

Mordon holy star [the Mp3]

Her father was not Satan

Jan tries to convince a panel that her father was not Satan:

Anyone with a key to the mill is suspect, first of all. There's work to be done there; you can't make a watch list of everyone that leaves a fingerprint knowing the beast doesn't prolly even have one, do you know? And it's not because I wd be the Daughter, assholes. Whut wd that mean, anyway? Spawn of the devil indicates... are you good bad neutral. That's not been nailed down. A demon wd hang around and try to assimilate someone willfully or situationally ignorant, don't you think? OK I'm evil and I'm going to wear you because you are a sensitive searching self tortured hotty of a mess? I mean even after his cuticles became rotted with nail fungus Daad was irresistibly naive and focused on traditional virtue as a hair shirt, tio. OK, so I can speak the language of the Inquisition, and that was handed down to me by some sort of gothic nazi antihero that fits the cascading style sheet of the gift shop down at yr local lyric-opera joss house?

Jan Janzdaad: Plea of Patrimony
An Annual Public Oracle Dispenser Volca Series Event
"Only double red moon in recorded history."

Chilling howls

We're in a ditch, bottom of a moat that curls part way round a moun'n and sucks wind in from the ocean. Relief filter graphics show how a storm's plasm turns from maroon to turquoise as it pushes across Mthyuh's peak. A pink thunderhead in a sheet reaches in from the shores and up through the pass just skirting the lower chanks and back again to rejoin its northerly impulse. It's raining noisily. Feral pups squat with their ears back on rocky hillsides and search for their mothers along washes in the lightning flashes.

Peg appears sopping wet in some kind of buffalo fur hotpants and bra. She scoops the wayward babies into the fossil of a pelican bill, but giant, and drags them off in their hope boat of bone by rope to a distant glowing cave.

Phyllis, Embedded
SSCB

prison snitch

ladies, when you took my boyfriends, I told other women.
gentlemen, i saw whut you did too, but why so violent?
here we must all swing from pole to pole, but so much friction?

like an embattled civil servant, i skulked through the lunchroom.
can't sell my tics, my shiv's a pacifier, can't get my mind around it.
where was all the love i knew with mike and ken and stu and...

here in prison, they say it's *a* hard life when really it's a whole
hard life, longer than most flakes could ever notice, and then,
they say, in retrospect it won't have been that long in the next life.

i'm sorry you stopped buying my tics, but a woman has to hedge herself,
and sometimes it's shrill as a scream. it wasn't like i was running a
racket. you only become a prison snitch when all hope has soured.

Donna
Incarceration, Hour 3
"Please come for me, Mike"

Gaping laxity

Wayne and Jan's first year went by in Jan's Dad's four-clawed bed above the family-owned mortuary cosmetics forge:

"You saved me."
"I bought you."
"I hustled you."
"You made me."

Wayne and Jan had saved one another, but each still carried the shame of the lower chanks. Wayne's lowest impulse was to disrespect Jan because he bought her in an alley. Jan's lowest impulse was to disrespect Wayne because he grew up in that alley. In moments of doubt, absent parties were heavily considered:

"He bought you."
"I brought you to him."
"But you're mine."
"He owns us both."
"Let's have kids."

Jan wanted to adopt the ugly child who had been spying on them from under a truck. Wayne said ok if they could take her brother too, a baby covered in scars. Reptily explained that the tot in its wooden crib was really her uncle, who had been 27 only a few days earlier, before leaping from a cliff-side prayer station into Mthyuh's roiling gut.

"He's a re-baby."
"I can guide his nature."
"She could be beautiful as a topless aframerican in her 30's."
"There's something in yr daddy's lab we can use to cure those scales."

The expectant couple had to step back through the crack tho to find the chillen. There were hunnerds of years of folds and recriminations. Jan and Wayne were not afraid because the momentum of their luck in meeting had brought them safely to righteous lives and prolly forced the muscles of time into a gaping laxity.

the last time i came was with you

the last time i came was with you
but it wasn't like getting off on youth
it was more about respecting me and our
relationship

the last time i came with you
was a vacation from being a gender puppet
; you went ahead and acted subservient.

the last time we came it came unglued:
our construction of an oppressor's paradigm
, the wasted thoughts we paid for admission

the last time i came was with you
the last time i came was with you
the last time i came was with you

[repeat]

[thelasttimeicamewaswithyou the Mp3]

siberian rent discount

The worshipers have cleared out my home, split up the bitches. One of them, I hear, is fed on canned corned-beef hash and Hawaiian bread. If it's La-La, she could get bloat.

The pool torches, the Yukio Mishima collection, all gone. My pants suits, stethoscopes. Do you know why I'm not bothered by your pictographs in flames?

As long as they burn here, for me, they are good to no one else. Your hand on my breast was spit-blown with oxblood all around like a dissolving turkey star.

No rent to pay, no dishes to cull. I am on cement detail for a long career. The pulsing glow of my ankle bracelet is your good eye, the one that only looks this way.

I take my moles wherever I go. They were needled into me by heaven. All my attempts to extend into space from my torso, however far, have sprung me back to a single cell.

the human meat bazaars

Reptily loves telling stories of her childhood in the human meat bazaars. One endearing slave's Johnson was so large he would be ordered routinely to hold it still. It held metaphornical value as a coat rack, a radiator, a spritzer bottle. By way of salutation, you'd jive, "Just don't move, daddy!" in place of [his name] or ciao. For fear of insurrection or other friction, it was gathered to be the phrase Wayne wd encounter most often. Just as cruel were the simultaneous demands for hot verbalization. Two central desires, to act and be wordless, were denied him during moments of nature's most strenuous command. This was Wayne's work and Wayne's sacrifice. Bereft of options either for civil disobedience or employment, he wd oblige the temple-step tithe monitors to collect their coins by shameful finger from deep inside his snakeskin lucre sash.

Reptily was watching with blackened eye, from bed of filthy rag, beneath a corn hooptie when Wayne finally met his ticket to the middle chanks, a kidnapped preachers' kid from Fordamall. Jan's bare-shouldered, curly-shod traffickers were scraping her encumbrance along a pinched and moldring callejón, high on a mirrored pillow. Her veil branks was fine as wisps of smoke out the nostrils; wrought-iron finch seemed to dash for liberty from the fancy, cage-like dental installation; her head was razored to crushed velvet pile. He bought her where she sat. Without hesitation, for a five-teated cull nanny and a few ribald shouts, Wayne set Jan free. Jan took Wayne home. Jan's dad bought Wayne. Now Wayne just moans. Jan can now see. Wayne is on top. Jan says, "Don't stop..."

Illyn's Dethbed Soliloquy #16

I've been a wandering fool, and it was amazing.
Popping up though gravel like a science film--
what if every frame were an entire short life?
Somehow Shab and my cart are always waiting
; so whut is my purpose circling through here?
Both my eyes are featured too low in the face.
What's next? Skin over mouth and cheek lips?
Every rebirth takes a toll on yr body cosmetics.
I keep passing through I guess because I jump
over and over into Mthyuh. On this entire mo-
untain in fact every expiration is rewarded in
a stinging revisualization of all that was sacred.

Belle-Vu Public Value Motel

At least then I'll be in a no-bind cell. They have bed linens and sinks. We can produce eye-shadow and tattoos.

Public values have been my ball and chain of all the avenues the polls could have taken.

But the old system, a skeleton, is my Public Home. Every iron bar a month's living rent.

Donna, incarcerated
Phyllis, embedded
Chama, amica

Mass Sociopathy

Why so many zombies? Our answer lies in the widespread fear of zombieism.

You sit in the Killercoaster, tilt with the wurl. Do you dare take a sideways glance at the guy at the tip of yr axis?

Remote Tissue Decisioning needs to stop here, in this momentous space we share.

Remote Muscular Positioning seems too painful to resist. What if the operators were dead? What if a million zombies could be cured by taking a shotgun to the cameraman instead?

If everyone took a snip at the Filter of Loathing, in just an evening we could be back asleep with no one knowing. Our intimate blister would again be a universe without a crack.

Phyllis, Embedded
Sports 'n Sex Crimes Bugle

Empty pool

Mike's Swimming Blog Vol. II, #6

Rcvd from Donna this am:

There's no swimming in jail. That's how we made the most of the low chanks, isn't it? Your beautiful nips, my statue of liberty in the deep end with a glass of wine. Or you and was it Ken? standing on the bottom with hoses for the winter drain, resurface and tile fests, echoing bitchiness.

No swimming and no love in jail. They say one's lips grow thin. I remember waking up with you beneath a surgical gurney in a sea of boxes of No-Shiv. The treatment worked on you. Miss the glowing and bumping tho. There was a chick we let out in a cove picked up violin melodrama by Chausson and St. Saens. We think its how they interact with the Filter now; they are receivers and interpreters more like bats than fowl. If you had allowed yourself to develop fully you could be clawing, right now, through the bars on my window.

I don't expect you to get back together or say you will just because I'm here.

D.

trial of ms. dr. donna thong

• Please tell us what led to yr charge that Ms. Thong is a rampage shooter.
• First, when we refused to pay her, she appeared to be quite angry. That was frightening.
• Go on...
• Her reputation is pretty violencey. No one at the clinic likes her at all.
• What are some of the complaints for which you personally were stationed on cull?
• There was the one when Sandro, an enema nurse, was pretending Dr. Donna was invisible. He reported that she kept vocalizing more and more loudly to him until she was nearly yelling, which obliged him to employ a habanero spray in her eye. Anyone can tell you she seemed insanely out of her mind at that point. Like a killer.
  
• What had Dr. Thong been trying to tell Sandro?
• He said she kept asking for the key to the Ladies'. He had it on a chain. But she could have had a weapon stored behind that door.
• Why did Sandro pretend the doctor was invisible.
  
• Everyone knows what a scary, violence-toned person Donna is. Someone on the distribution list suggested that we all just aklike she isn't there until she gets the message, and some of the more responsible ones did just that.
• Did Dr. Thong also receive that message?
  
• She did, because she took it directly to the Workplace Fluffer Team.
  
• Please describe the mandate of the WFT.
  
• "To keep things fluffy with hearts and smiles, so that every day is a worker's treat."
• Thank...
• "To decorate with skeletons on Halloween; to fill our desks with things to eat."
• Thank you, Mr....
• "To sit and pout when you ask, jump and laugh when you give, go sleepies when you take."
• Is that...?
  
• "We are vested by the state to guard a worker's right to talk of sports and cookies bake."
• But sir, is this not a serious clinical environment.
• Out-of-towners don't understand how we do medicine down here. Our patients add up to one of the highest averages in the chanks for prevention ignoral.
  
• You mean their illnesses are their own fault.
• They made their beds. They could have made their own happiness. Why should we all have to pay for that.
  
• Because it's what you yrselves are paid to do?
• We're paid to satisfy the Preservation Society. They've got us filling out forms all day. So what: if the prevention ignorists can work the system, we can do it better.
  
• Would you characterize Dr. Thong as ignorist empathetic?
• She thought she understood the dreams of men. It's how she hurts us in our minds, and why we don't expect her back again.
  

Stoppers

Tom,
Tonight I couldn't harly sleep hearing this clanging. With a forty-knot gale sandblasting the paint off the Exoblinds seemed it must have been the lid to the barbeque grill getting ready to punch a hole through the chain link. So I got up but I could see that it wasn't shaking. I wandered into the kitchen and the sound was louder. I looked out both chinks and there was just the oleander holding on, writhing patiently. It was loudest by the kitchen sink. It was coming from the drains. I found the stoppers and dropped them in. Now it's tight as a thermos in here. I just had to pop my ears.
Sylvia

Can I injure my eyes by crying?

Goober searches, by Wayne: "Can I injure my eyes by crying?"

Crying not that intense since baby;
crying and traumatic globe luxation?
should there be stinging after crying?
safe to watch television after crying?
crying how brown liquors play role?
crying headaches common?
how can I connect with others self-injured by sobs?
does it matter which sounds you make while crying?
is it ever appropriate to speak and cry?
# of minutes before crying = nervous breakdown?
when a commercial makes you cry...?
is vocalization always paramount to self-pity?
crying seize or resist moment.
precursors for tears during sex?
crying outcome : rage, submission, epiphany?
Jan please call Wayne please

mob action

Donna reports:

One of my Spanish ex-husbands' families mobbed me once, so maybe that's the connect with the term mafia. *A* mob is loosely associated, maybe just by geography and emotion, an employer, or not even. *THE* mob is by definition an extended family.

Conchi, Paco's sister explained by telephone: "Es que somos casi como una mafia."

But he lies to you, I pled. I bet he told you I was the one gave him Hep A.

"It doesn't matter. And don't surprise yourself if suddenly there is no water or power."

This isn't because I never brought children to the tribe, that your husband stated my arroz al horno was exquisite? That I mirror your sterility?

"1400 hours tomorrow. Under the M60 bridge, Parque Caprichon, near the statue of Satan. With the keys. We'll have your check."

Father Unamuno had secured some goat pen in the mountains to hide our hooptie, so I had nothing to get to work in.

The family estate on a low floor of a suburban apartment block was shuttered up with painted steel blinds.

Conchi's husband since the age of 9, Jose Maria was nearly a lawyer who could draw up the documents necessary to make it all seem above board.

Mrs. Unamuno only participated passively and hid as well as could be her disappointment at no longer having one less chico pijamado around the house to serve and mop up after.

Paco's brother, needle hanging from a vein, saw back to a time where the two boys'd lived in ecstatic flannel and hardons on thin mattresses over spring cots or at their homework desks or in the formaldehyde veneered pressboard dining salon sipping at fideos or steaming puree.

The jamon, in its holder atop the sinfonia in the anteroom, conspired to seethe with translucent mites.

Arethusa

Missy leans her elbow on a ledge, which sends a boulder crashing down the slope. A mature sugar pine snaps at the base, nicked by a wing tip. She hangs Its face in her hands.

"I take it minorities are well advised to make a strong impression. Is it like the weakling bug who's painted a gargoyle across its papery head? Is it nature makes a swarm come when not backed off so?

Maybe naiads from a previous life rising from nerve venom come to act out, in their wisdom, and with hooks in, wriggles of memory that jar or pull shut levers and consequences that can be accepted as archetypes."

In this way, a graze prey unit outside its hoard contemplates vicariously an apology for the urge to have a bloody meal.

pleasure centre

even nothingothingothing
can echo backakak when
it's bubbling just below the
plaque of comprehensibility.

when you find a sarge who
needs an order, you can
generally think up something
to stoke a larger ardororor.

once pinpointed, a pleasure
centre gloats in unexplainability
and leads thinking mhen and wymhen to
accept a state of wan improbability.

Ted on his own

Feel him, a man whose
mother's quilt's in tatters,
entropy thorough from within,
headlights from the freeway
project fast shadows on the house,
a river of leaves let go,
a current of dark on white;
guest room mattress is a raft
above a carpet where mice got in,
where gramma tried to batten down
an even older weave with red yarn knots,
where dogs moan in star-studded
torpor. Alas a night's almost
gone, another loss postdated.

Ted
"Are you there, nena?"

Auscultation

As yor my main pericardial rub,
I don’t listen to my own deep peril.

In taming me, by fashion of a hub,
There’s nothing left in life that’s safely feral.

Potential space can only be a cave
when queen is one in gawd with courtly knave;

You trace a paradox of my body
and bring the sounds that situate me, oddly.

Wayne
"For you, Jan"