mystical acquaintance

i still get afterimages of a prehistoric skull silhouette
when i suffer morbid ideation of regret.

now turning with my back to moonlight
there's an outline of a thing who stands upright.

everywhere rings thickly pierced me i'd hung coins
of sea shell or enemy tooth set. From parental loin

to the next lad, race, career return nativity scars
from what they call a different year, another war.


Ken
(ghosting for Reptily)

I don't understand what this is like

I don't understand what this experience is like
any more than I can understand an experience
that I've both never had and am not now having.

What I now appear to encounter I get like
what's going on with a composite character
in the fictionalized memoir of a total stranger.

I am having this experience
but I don't know anything more about it
than I do about any random or non-situation.

Or also it could be a moment that's so unfamiliar due to the press of time layers
whose sudden release creates a stupefying vacuum, bends,
bubbles as a spring that has never begun or ends.


"Just" Donna

High cave waiting

high cave waiting for movements of rescue animal over tree line
even now no closer to belief in the veracity or even fact of time

one who lies, one that injects an expectation and an interval of
movements, lack of movement, invisible creeping some believe

only the sinus of raining as if it takes 10 min to kill not 10 stones
patient rhythm of sweeping, training, tic-tocking the weaker 1's.


Peg
"my last scratch on this faux granite counter top"

A Paper Artemis

PHYLLIS: I wanna know what's going on here at People's Park.

ARTEMIS: That's why you've pitched a tent and are so dirty?

PHYLLIS: I'm here both to know and to be. You are of this place.

ARTEMIS: The most important insight I can offer is that you yourself are as much a part of it as anyone has been is or will ever be.

PHYLLIS: So interview myself.

ARTEMIS: No, because you must surely still have some bridges unsmashed with the publishing industry, I feel especially exhibitionistic when you're near, like I could tell you anything and you'd make the world understand.

PHYL: How about your own personal experience of a relationship to this land, its fruits.

ARTEMIS: You're funny.

PHYL: No, really.

ARTEMIS: I can't really answer that without laughing I mean you know, fruits. You don't see the irony or the pun I guess there because you would never call anyone a fruit-- in fact it's more likely that someone would call you a fruit, and you naturally are not struck with a dart of humor around fruit allusions I guess.

PHYL: I'm looking at you Artemis and though I'd have expected a character out of one of those eager post-order wasteland warlord fantasies you seem more just like the bare-titted frisbee guy's sometimes stocking-fetished girl companion from one of the nearby gourmet boeuf-bourgeois-owned hill homes.

ARTEMIS: Are you trying to buy pot from me?

PHYLLIS: Ok, but as long as you're not dissociating, who are you? I've got a pack of cutcorners in my purse.

ARTEMIS: I actually live about six blocks up the hill with my parents, and both of those naked ponytail loincloth guys tossing the platter are my sometimes boyfriends.

PHYLLIS: I have to tell you off the record one that's really hot, and two it troubles me as far as do you have the appropriate information that you need about pregnancy std's heartbreak.

ARTEMIS: Your heart's been broken so many times you are like completely addicted to the chemicals, the ritual, which is fortunate because you'd be getting it whether or not you needed it over and over and over again.

PHYL: Thank you, walking tarot card with legs. Keep that. I'm good.

Bus ticket to People's Park

They administered our 8 ounces of Sunny Delight and returned us to the stone penitentiary maze complex.
Now it was time for free persons to decide our further if any fate.
There was a week's tv vigil in our individual suites to sit and dwell.
The cops and guards and therefore we all used old hookers' lingo to describe the suspensions of normal rule.
A cellmate might try and subject you to a 747; everybody knows to simply turn the other way.
But there the mixability cam will be parsing out your facial expressive points.
If you can be a survivor you can be grateful as Christ.
Normal ones don't get in a fatal bind because they have so many openings to escape.
One if you call it fatal you are hyperbolic result of two spoiled by superior political system.
Dignity means you don't register what happens to your body or future.


Reptily

Deeper Bays

Dreams keep on unperturbed
Dreams reach under and go around
Dreams behave like water seeking space.

When life is taking place in the midst of a novel
It's a simulacrum of dreaming
Whereas you travel in two dramas at once.

Drama is a check digit, analogous link scout;
Drama runs parallel with a road;
Drama washes onto the stage from deeper bays.


Peg
"Trying my hand at criticism."

Jan's Chant

You remind me of my father before he had me, and I remember your father before he had you: him, whom you remind me of and I'll remember you to if I see him again.

My father before he had me reminds me of me myself before he was gone, and your father before he had you reminds me of you after both of our dads were long gone.

You were spinning out just like and from your mother, who reminds me of my mom, whose big brother spun out and was gone into a world like the one you're in now.

Our mothers are like spirit sisters more than ever that they stand on either side of the line of alive; they remind me of you and your mom standing shoulder to shoulder.


Jan Jansdaad
"On holiday in Dubhabera Chank"

hernia of the craw

Once ire's fruits've made it too wide an opening, the thyroid cartilage gets sucked into the anomaly and a poor sod's diagnosed with hernia of the craw.

Left dream-splayed and vulnerable, a sitting duck for the picaresque, he rocks in a corner with his wrists pressed together starting over and over, "i feel...".

Space itself has to drain from the body when an impression's been made too strong and wrongly and efforts launched to recover normally've gone on too long.

Before you can chew your way to freedom a mother figure is forcefully feeding you live and squirming fodder for the chest burning that's also used for reflection.


Peg
"I too was Missy."

Dry and Loud

Looking up from a sulk at the ground

We put "dry" first in "dry and loud"
Because seating comfort should come before sound.

If the sound is good but the feel is wet
The experience unfolds as one you'll regret;
You haven't known humiliation yet.

But wind that's dry, with trumpet full
Calls foul the cries of "Imbecile!"
And proves you've been responsible.


Ken
"Scatology is not the same as scat."

[donna on ken notes]

[donna on ken notes]

he has different moods but why
is what's not easy to justify
he's not a single mother
substitute teacher, police officer
and it's tricky to decipher
a code when one's so earnest
so basically with what you're left's
a literal interpretation, direct translation
and some hyperbole, dark or sunny
which leaves a consistent note of exasperation
that seems to appear outta thin aspiration
and it isn't clear if it's period, just there.


Dr. Donna Thong
"I'm alla bout your relationships."

Inability to titrate

My inability to titrate creates an irritableness surfing on tubular rage.
They prolly did that in the 70's and 80's; it's just not cool these days.
There's no excuse from a blunt-edge mood target perscription, Dad.
Things I will stomp on: all the objects I need most throughout the pad:
electronic equipment, barware; bread, sling tokens, a hardback book
you have to come at with a slide, expecting to travel, break the spine.
I took my time working out love on a number of men, nothing missed.
I can rest on a loud, dry train better than a bed in the heat of August.

Ken
"Parsing through my feelings."

At Least Tonight I Have Hope

I'm not going around calling things like multiple leaf blowers for 140 minutes this morning heinous
I been in the business long enough to know the difference of a cataclysm opposed to annoying
N' even though no precedent's been set here for a cocky night leaning toward a second following
It's a positive something I've got with me now and it's measurably kicking: at least tonight I have hope.

I may get in a freeway high-traffic windshield fluid fight with spraying at velocities of 80-100 mph
Might even bail if it gets too real, call it in to the CHP as road rage though the other guy was laughing
Even though mine's the vehicle on the warning sign, going to pass on the right, into a semi's wide-turn flank
Tonight I'm stealing a breath, however undeserved, and entering a period of unjustifiable smirking.

Perhaps instead I've figured out a way to have the future double paved, as the life line on my left hand
Whether it's cuffs coming up from the other end of the wrist, a crossing-over experience, or much worse
A full moon takes up just as much room in the sky as the fully waned, and as fully I, whole, repose.


Ken
"Applied for a job down at the pie factory."

Tudhu

Block out as many sources of light as possible to get one super-intense light source.
Cough until all impurities are removed from the lungs.
Read enough photo captions to equal a multi-volume treatise on sloth.
Love everyone, even people you don't know, so much that you die at one with humanity.
Keep remembering a song until everyone else is singing it.
Have a system in your kitchen that bakes fresh pies like a factory.
Spend a whole day doing a task over so many times you'll never have to repeat it.
Practice talking dirty at home alone until it becomes second nature when a sex partner is present.
Find a place where cliffs and sea, sky and recline of sand overlap to reveal a perfect square.

by Donna

I Saw a Glowing Dog Lounging

X: I saw a glowing dog lounging by the pool at nearly ten pm.
O: Were you seeing things, hallucinations, voodoo, optical illusions?
X: It was a matter of dimensions, like several transparencies overlapping.
The ecstatic pet was in the house trancing on trying not to listen to the television.
Out near the water there was a patch of moonlight on the cement, someone's lost moment of election by heaven.
In between the dog and the light was a film of glass and behind that another.
O: And this was meaningful for you how--? Do you think your bitch is a medium or saint?
X: M'Lady is so far beyond reproach already that calling her saint is not a compliment.
What it meant to me was how we try to imagine other dimensions, just as a metaphor.


Peg
"From an old tape I found. Who are they?"

Urge to Beg God

She stands up stringy hair, staring horror-eyed, as if into a void, without taking air, n'then it subsides.
She must apologize to all victims of fallout everywhere because she blew, and blew so much.
But now she must stay alive and never go back to jail, not kindergarten, nor the place they kept her after the abduction from the parking lot at Sears.
The only safety there was never having to go back and never being able in any case to return.
Sprinklers kept wat'ring the strong desert plants that only knew to grab and thrive when they can but did it all the time and soon were banging up against the house with the wind in an entitled fashion.
The urge was to cower and dread even though she was the god that was supposed to let the beggars in.


Phyl
"Peg's really opening up."

Life of Peg

If some professional-primitive magical realist hack painter sloshed together or spent all night smoking pot and fine-lining it all in ball-point pen or traced with a stubby stolen public library pencil in front of an overhead projector image jazzed up by a team of so-called parapsychologists, right onto the stretched skin, the result would be Peg, topless, looking back as if at a history-changing conflagration while visible ghosts of the beloved buzz all around her head, advising or just projecting reminders into this waking plasma that they existed and of what they meant.


Phyl
"por parte mia"

i hate...

i hate having work things in my personal box and personal things having my work box,
or i hate it when there's personal works in my things box or personal-things work in my personal work boxes.
i hate it when there's work-box things in my personal thing box,
or boxes in my things or when things are not in their boxes.
i also hate doing thing-box work when i could be spending personal time boxing my personal-things work.
But mostly i hate working on things personal while things from the working thing boxes at work work at hating my person.


Connie [R.I.P.]
"All I get is pretty."

God Beggars

God beggars are gods that beg God for food,
and they starve feeling bellies full of good news.

God beggars beg until their nuts are blue, eager
to dream a century of virgins saying what to do.

Virgins beg a god t' make their sufring history'n,
that "this" once again have ambiguous meaning.

She felt th' begging as a wordless urge, but din't
make of it a saying, can't be judged for wanting.


by Phyllis

I'll Make the End of Life Really Beautiful for You

I'll be there in confident open blouses and pearls over tank tops. We'll be gliding through wooden-paneled hotel lobbies with the bouquets in giant vases. I can be titty all up in your face but I know that dying isn't only about that. Maybe you want to imagine naked slick slavery helping your way crib to kingdom, the backs of naked slaves maybe with fringes, gold satin cord. Stop and screen this: I am whispering Wall Woman's Blade of Grass in yr ear with yr eyes closed and you're seeing the grass. All of it.

"White Chocolate"

Algorithms of an Executrix

Her cataclysmic world's a rocking canoe: while you just can hold on, every moment is an upgrade. This is when sometimes people they start to sprout alternate personalities that can better handle the stress and strain of any given situation/ problem.

For example White Chocolate is a chick who's been hurt but still has a social craving and a sexy, hurt sexuality about her, very much into stockings. Sometimes guys guess she's a dyke, and girls think she'd make a handsome man. She started out practicing quick comebacks, for about 20 years, like it's cuz I'm sweet, but then she settled into folks thinking she was a freak even without knowing her name. Even fewer could have guessed it was Peg in lip gloss.

Another apparition sits with his legs tightly crossed and a can held at face level. Seems to have had one of the fingers on that hand removed for a better tipple. He can remember events of many years ago, but none of yesterday's. "Alan" has the permanent look of a monsoon native trying weepily in exotic tongue to explain the disaster to first responders and direct their efforts toward where they'd be most fucking needed.

Then it would be time to do the laundry, feed M'Lady. M'LADY Peg'd shout as if a cry for help at a lower creature could yield much but hiding in bushes. She's trying to express all the fear and exasperation of a braking middle life in an empty nest strewn with needles. Just her own raw self, without K-mones, couldn't be more inept at operating its shielding or filtering systems much less the measured algorithms of an executrix.

Phyllis