Mirror on a Stick

"Mysterious Cabinet"

There is a very tall shelving unit
Inside the shallow door pit
Of a mysterious cabinet
Deep in the chaotic thicket
Of my newly-pitched tent.
But I fear for how stuck I'll get
By shoving my head in it
So I think I'll find a shiny object
And affix it to a stick.
Will I have been the first
While idly hanging up a jacket
In the gloom of a high closet
A stack of money to project?
Has every dreamer as of yet
Truly learned to hedge a bet
And every soul of curious bent
To seize first what before them's set?


Tom

Last night in california

Last night in California I drempt what I don't remember
Spinning lowly in the northern hemisphere
Deadly bees crept up across the border

We fed on the burgeoning scavengers
Of a single fecund season, about 15 years,
And then as if a single will had found His way revolvent from ours

It's a state of going the opposite direction
Beating it's own record of being western
Once again the earth may turn me under but I won't be taken.

Passive as a wrench and 2000 miles passed beneathe my seat
We're in a land we'd run away from, succeeded beyond, not quit
Still the night's as quiet as it's ever been, damned ghosts are mute.


Ilyn
"Short for Illinois"

pain mine

even the superstitions packed away
no bells ring at my passing
what are the songs they unwound

i half want to leave half of me behind
go on alone and under burdened
but one's one's own ghost appendage

a whole geography is purged
by lessons never learned or abandoned
though no girls are left crying

and forever this vein of trembling glee
will bring stabs of shame n' indignity
a deep and fertile mine for pain


Reptily

Survival instinct

Terror spills down and then out and creates a foot.
This is a structure upon which you can hop away.

If you're passing near Chicago or Joliet, I can tag.
Let's buck up and borrow a refrain from yesterday.

What song can narrate barreling across the plains.
What chord could be devised to make you stay.

When you're stir crazy dead at the wheel and nod
I'll be sure to slap you hard in the face if that's okay.


Dr. Donna Thong
"For Hoolie"

Re-Cap: Bermud-a-Go-Go

anonymous sex act that's been on tour for 15 years

time as a liar
time is a liar
how time lies
lies about time
telling someone a different time than it actually is
incorrect predictions involving time
lapses in time or memory
time as material
water/ time cliches
fallacious time quotes
fallacy of time
distortion of real-time time experience during fellatio
accounting of all the various speeds of time
prohibition of any fully developed and/or commercially or academically published "theory of time"
trying to prohibit thought and use of time fallacy in any given moment
challenge to apply the imposition of death on time metaphorically
while in our minds it is a functioning chunk of ligature
that if removed would make me stutterer, monk, catatonic, busier...
time as a style of faith that requires little practical effort
as opposed to religion, which with alternate ladders and planes mocks time's fabled tyranny
and resistant strains that soak up red or blue contrast dyes from the environment
myths, yet real, of time standing still
how that can happen only if all activity is on tilt
then you could say your unit of measure called time just got to zero.

May it, Let it

Head of Mudusa

May it grant you titled helm
may it ram through close resistance
may it serve you well backwards
Let it be a brooch of aristocracy
let it let it feed in dewy fields
let it see with single focus.


by Hoolie

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