Flames of Soil

Am I pagan? Because I walk under bells I've hung around the house just at the right level so my hairdo brushes their clappers and makes them tinkle?

Is it prayer when I do nothing to avoid an action that will set off a sound that reminds me about praying? Why not, if the words would always be the same?

Is it civilized, unhealthy in some way to pay tribute to a number of deities? And what if not knowing their names has the effect of clearing out a space?

What if every surface were a safety suction cup where the four-limbed would always have a four-point hold? Every molecule of oxygen an air bag?

Can flames of soil reach out to draw in all bad and selfishly settle back to enjoy monstrous containment? Is the world, cold suspended, bled of its evils?


By Donna

Strangeness of the Future

In tonight's episode, Donna and Reptily occupy adjoining cells at the Preservation Society HQ in Dubbabhera. They whisper at an ancient glory hole through the decomposing granite.

DONNA: "A moment ago I thought I heard an owl shriek in the airspace between the Twin Chanks but it was the echo of my own gut whistle-farting, internally."
REPTILY: "If you can throw your voice that far maybe you can get us the F outta here that far."
DONNA: "You the one knows howda fly."
REPTILY: "It's not an item you know, it's a function you do."
DONNA: "Do your wings of light feel more like extra arms or an active back pack?"
REPTILY: "I am a jellyfish or spanish-shawl nudibranch who moves along only as a secondary result of breathing in and out, at one with the proverbial seawater."
DONNA: "And you're a salty bitch."
REPTILY: "You need to stop coming on to me just to pique my bristles; if I try to tear down this wall, I'll only skin my Epicel, and that makes less with which to fondle you."
DONNA: "Sea Bitch, does it ever seem that you're walking in a future that for you it's not meant? Where everything's a skosh off?"
REPTILY: "Like the light now, anemic egg yolk, music that impersonates a past, and the shriveled clueless recent gawking generation?"
DONNA: "Thasright, darling."
REPTILY: "All the time. And that's what I live for. Because I'm changing too."
DONNA: "Changing or disappearing. I mean it could be either. I donno, sometimes I... Tilly?"

Sausage on Salmon

Ayre Fromme Diaz

White Farty Weekend

need not wonder now
tears driven into snow
who what was to blame
it's all the same today
tonight we fitful sleep
cradled chaste in sheets
unstained of false light


by Mike

The Wurl Made Me Creepy

Real People Playing Themselves in a Copy of Their World on a Movie Reel

Big people help little people get up and take their places
By pretending to be themselves instead of famous faces
A prison drama played out on a stage at a prison
Is realistic in every way but the lack of strong acting skills.

These are speeches that wdv normally been hushed or whined
in a way that's far more unattractive than a hero giving a line.
The homegrowns radiate from the sole professional actor;
It's his best hour and their forgiveness from society or reward.

It makes you wonder if yr playing yr own character all wrong.
Maybe finding out that in yor case bad acting is worse than lying.
Thought i was et cetera so real, simultaneously suspecting all along
that i am confirmably bad while redeemable in retrospect portraying.


by Mike

the Crack

grrl this feels like the crack in a damn samwich
where both of us wanna be the lower companion
you be damn, die be damn, dwurl doesn't care
between now and the years we grew up in
when we were young we were special and new
which only happen then
but our future's extraordinary rendition
are not being played out by actors in other bodies
what does it mean to live here among the rotting
in some ways the teens on the avenues
in some ways the teens on the avenues
are running the same set of vitals in an anachronistic bag
are getting a subjective other story
share with gone survivors conquests, foils and rivals
what they hope for is when we'll be disambulatory
but the creature inside the thing is relative only
of the species and scraps of language n' reliquary
experiencing the seasons critically, seen from above,
no matter the originality, is hairy-top heads roving.

Next generation

all the men i've destroyed
are ghosts now except alive--
they could come back at any time.

i may feel cobwebs at my heels
watch out who's in eyeline
start at the slightest thrill.

but most of all im free to
draw outlines around my heritage
move to the next generation.

Reptily

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"