Lockdown

We had a fight where I distinctly heard myself shouting why don't you get a goddamn job.
I listened to him zip a bag and slip out through the sliding glass door to the pool gate.
Then he stomped into the desert in the middle of the night and didn't return.
I thought I saw him on the shoulder of the highway out to the train station by the windmills.
Whoever it was nearly got us killed as I drove south and north people honking, didn't even
turn his head. But lately deep in the evenings I've been wondering maybe he never left at all.


Donna
"I miss you Mike"

Baked pasta

pj

there's a space missing

once mere emptiness
now an aggressive vacuum
there's a space missing where
I should be being needed.
if of one of us must be gotten
rid, then the other too's devalued.

Started calling for his dog

The next moment he was sitting up and calling
for his long-gone galgo, noble dodi al fayed.
The other animals heard it even among the
notes of hypnotic song, tiny blue lights flickring.

He was sharing a fabric or film that held
suspended the present on a grid independent
of dimension. Juniper, craven, the survivor,
who won't lie in the bed of his predecessor,

thinks of him now. "We still share the fact of
our mutual presence, configured just here,
more than we can ever prove that time is real."
Two dogs and a man sit on a plane tilted from life.

Does the mind need a pill?

Does the mind need a pill?
Or is it the brain that's having trouble hearing.
Some chemical arrangement is not being handled.

You might ask if it is I or a circumstance brings
trouble down as if from a door top's bucket.
Isn't God everything?

Are we falling backwards?
From where does the will come, the feeling?
Upon doing nothing, what direction do we float in?

Vidmar

Seen 2/13

Dark, husky male in tight clothing dragging a full-size wooden cross north along California Hwy 86 at dusk.
Wobbling in the gravel, ground end impaled with plastic training wheels the color and circumference of eggs.

Low-chank truckers

I caught my husband wondering if the low-chank truckers can form gangs and crack down on his traffic shenanigans vigilante style. Wayne himself has always had his cell ready to betray working drivers to their centrals or whatever number's painted on the laterals or rear (Big World/ Reefer Division/ How About My Steering). They on the other hand would be more likely to take matters into their own band of diesel brothers. Today they'd tried the turning blinker trick. One jumps in front of you with his left signal on, the other bumping up behind but suddenly passes on the right while you're still in confusion. No way to retaliate except stopping before him at the next light and sit at the green even after he blasts the thundering tanker horn across yr dorsal. I say honey eat yr chop and thank the chama yor a high-level shiv-consulting marketeer.

Jan
"My husband is Wayne"

Homes of choice

Homeless youth albergue takes in homeless youth
Marches them in parades to get donations
Youth become professional homeless
, never find a home.
Turn 18, get a place of their own.
So what we need is not the albergues, but
alternate homes of choice for youth and beyond.

Dr. Donna Thong
Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

paralyzed from the dick up

poynie-head dog hits his noggin
on a log knot whennie stanz up.
hey boy, y' litterly hitcher bumpy
dog head on yr head bump on a
wood hump on a knotty dead log.

i'm sorry i kissed you

gun condonence
dunkin' donuts
truckload of farmboy
sitting close together
mornings were cold
static parade
i'm sorry i kissed you
bone dispenser


Connie

Other energies

I dreamt a solid facsimile
of closed-lidded blackness,
a photograph of texture, 2D

when i woke the dark
was a skosh more swirly,
bloody coal bubbles broke

blinked as a slide projector,
gorged with overexposure,
reviews greys maroons navies

each angle of black a deprivation
where other energies can express,
or it's the optic nerve misfiring

Blue fill

Blue fill creeps along the horizontal time thermometer,
crappy white diamond jiggles in place on pause.
If you leave it too long it'll give up and startle loose the voices.

I'd rather sit and suspend my evening in a fork-tong satellite
than take that same amount of minutes to read your paragraphs.
I like 'em slim, my teeth, lines, rat-a-tat visions.

Control wand seems to send both in and out-way signals,
emotions motor round a color wheel: Our Dad,
Hope to win, dogs, a thousand gut-wrung wages.


Hoolie

If i have to ask, then no.

Whoresbaths-on-Honeymoon

many swag of lace dripped,
fingers grew across silk-
blurred thigh. we'd skipped

the rite as well as the reception,
most of the precautions,
our future in a blip.

you can slide in on a dragging train
or read this book about sliding on in,
or you can shut up and disrobe.


Dr. Thong
"Hi, Mike!"

swamp celt

my lumber is a boon to drying fruit.
here i'll wrong and wrong until
one day we'll swim with the krill.

there we will set sheath to hilt.
there face sour rhyme with ritual.
there the heady wind, hoary lake.

never came fail but nor did safe
in or between each age and hour
danger consolidated its claims

Chamatilly

He died with his eyes open

He died as he lived, with his eyes open.
He lived as if he'd die hoping
That he'd done a little more open-eyed living.

He died as he did, with his lips praying.
His mouth stopped what it was saying,
That he'd given for an answer all his giving.

He left open-lidded, with his mind seeing.
He saw what's for only the dead or the leaving,
But he blinked and missed out on the meaning.


by Ken

If it feels like a mental illness...

you've got a problem being logical,
or you can't scan the logic how its
laid out, and you can only speculate.

you can communicate it, but are you
just an explainer, a blah-blah to nowhere?
spend a tearless day, no inappropriate laughter?

if it feels like you want to be out all
night in the wind, and that's something
you've seen on television that's sick, is it?

Get your nose checked, or your feet for no good reason.
Multiple times swear in an hour while feeling anger.
Wishing it were another in every season.


Dr. Donna Thong
"Please have a professional take a look at that holiday 4U."

palm springs trick room

decor is prim with terror: legs and columns,
thin at the bottoms, holding their breath.

lines form only to dis- and reappear
with interruptions of fluffiness, a mirror.

surface film shows accumulation of time;
lack of clutter lets breathe the memories.


by Mike