Destructress

I put my hand on the white bitch's head and brushed her hair back with a meaningful near-teary smile. She looked startled and then resentful like, "You can't help me. So keep your pity as well."

Have I destroyed another life? Indirectly, by divorcing its deadbeat dad?

Where is the safety net for non-traditional families? Society asks, gives nothing.

And then my pelvis fell asleep.


Mkidza Mlafv

White Smoke

I unnerstan you have a prolm with the hate on my face. But maybe it's a reflective moon of the huge sun of radiant hate I get every day in this place. That's right-- not radiant heat, but radiant hate. So if I'm hating a cat, it's just me hating whatever grocer butcher father accountint. 10 haters on one is much diffrint. It can burn fer years an pass along the generations. N that's why I'm in jail. Because one cell is cheaper than 10 to the state. Otherwise, it'll be all you morfurs of the innerneh. In this way, I'm a saint.

Reptily

Broken and Lame

There was a very small, cave-like discotheque in the basement of some chic shops down on Oak. Ducking from the coat check through a tunnel to the dance floor was the main salient feature of an evening alone there, apart from whomever might tend to reappear by coincidental rendezvous at the door to the men's or cigarette machine. A guy named Chuck once sat at the back bar for hours smoking and drinking Kirs before I sat across from him another hour staring as he smoked and drank. Finally, as closing drew near, I moved over and took the next vinyl cushion. I suggested we choose an additional wallflower and head back to Chuck's swingin' pad. We cabbed the three of us uptown a ways to a tax office with boudoirs and took the vacant one. Chuck's accountant flatmate spent all non-working hours in her "womb room" socked out on Darvocets or Tylenol 4's. The other guy felt excluded as he had predicted he would and left early on. At one point I inserted several ice cubes into Chuck's anus and gave them time to melt before going home.

He had me back for Chicken Andaluz which we forevermore joked was "On the Loose." He had been a man long enough to accumulate vases and dust on books. I would meet him at his job in a massive, stony district near the stockyards where he stood aproned and stirred sauces in a precious, signless late-dinner spot and smoked and sipped Kirs in the alley with the bleachy steam from the washing up dumped over cold, rotten grease on asphalt rising all around him. There were places to hang out for hours when he got off work where the level of debauchery seemed so deep as to be safely out of reach for hitting bottom. We could stand there smoking and drinking Kir and just be part of the painting until it was too exhausting and go back to the tax office and spend the rest of the night fucking in sometimes acrobatic positions where ears might be in a vice of two stockinged feet or the pelvis rolled like a fish in the gullet of a snake by my herculean thighs.

Then he moved to his last place, where every surface was covered with newspapers from 1978 for 10 years. For relief on the rent he'd promised to strip every turn-of-the-century wooden rail, board, knob, sill and restore it to a pristine state. It was a decade of heat guns and chemical glop and flecks and twist-rolled peels on floors but only one door and its frame got done. Chuck had progressed to an industrial kitchen at the employee lunchroom of a major downtown bank but had to stay in the park reading and smoking during warmer days or the tearooms at Ward's in the winter due to complaints he might "taint the food" from his famous carousing, and the union helped him stay on the payroll 13 months out of sight that way. I often wondered if I was to blame for leading him on and disappearing and reappearing and leading him further to the point he splintered apart, until he was broken down and lame.

Reptily

Rappolt-Kapeluck

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!"