Gypsy Fire Smudge

Pinpricks across the county smoldered by way of wide-stepping colossus,
Average heathers and jims had to shoulder the debilitating explanations;
Widower parked at the laundromat complains she ding-ed up the bondo,
Should've tipped twice again the charge of her job on his fender-less ride.

Maybe her space heater burnt down the stands at the track after shoeing all season,
Fifth-wheel gone as in religious pursuit of the anonymity manifest in self-profiling:
The corset tube and patched raiments, cauldron of highway-killed stew meats,
Roses and twenty fingers in your pockets before you can say I don't want it.

That kind of smoke makes you a hoarse that's tied to manners of voluntary geld,
The acknowledgement of a truer husband by which she too's held in quiet mesmry.
A stiff lock of curl in your face begs the questioning of your own black fiber;
Gypsy leaves a fire smudge where she's seen entropy on those behind her.


Ken
"I know."

Dark out, north in

The orchestra to fake the house noise would be piccolos for the turbine: wind instruments to vent the attic dinge, drums grinding, the vent spinning lopsided. Is it a hound's cry, a jet drying its wing tips, the hyphens that begin the digits, metal road plow, slide whistle, toboggan ride that make the heat slip, even in the sunrise? The gas star shines in vain against the brilliance of its own mind: flames belch miles high while a clenched fist, lung grip, won't just trace your breath but claim it. On a quick pee, if the family pet jumps a low fence, you take a big chance going after it. Timpani, wooden sticks, loud flap of tarpaulin, violin to make the monster grin, then taunting him with porch lights, which simulate an angry crowd. The fist blows with a slow pound. The vents spin, there's a long howl, the middle splits and pulls the north in.

Stewardess

Connie returns to the town where she'd been abducted in her adolescence.
Now she recognizes herself as the kind of girl that ended up disappeared.
You can easily wander into a trap that's especially created for your species.
Though she can recall ants barely pausing in their march past baited windows with twisting depths.
These were the only men she knew for sure were paying attention to her budding lady presence.
She saw a guy in his moment of mouth-breathing weakness as old as her dad.
So she too held life, between an operating table and a bottle of jergens.
There were the paths of grimy wives or to serve temporarily as an apprentice.
She felt that she could stay alive as long as she could extricate life from the living.
Now the only and paradoxical option was to survive by giving it back.


by Phyl

Superfluity of kale

Look down at my dog on a $50 morrocan rug from a hard-up pawn broker in yuma arizona.
Poor old devil doesn't even respond to a yipping outside or the squeak of an attic spin vent.
Let him out just in case, think he's got something cornered in the garage.
Move a little closer and he's just munching snow off the door.
Auntie calls cuz she heard the stepsisters had a bushel of kale while they were here watching their daddy die.
How they'd sent a list from the east coast of all the foods we prolly didn't have, what they'd only eat.
Surprised to see the cupboards full of just the same things as a way to say they wouldn't pay me back.
Ate half the crap and stuffed the rest in old cool whip tubs for the return trip.
Looking up laws to protect our ma in case the bastard left it all to yale.


Hoolie
"I love you Peg"

Stringing panic

Four-Fault Re-Button

Four holes, four faults on this mend:
One a fail to thread back through
but looped instead around the hem

The disk itself then split in two as
did the original, brittled in the dryer,
half moon settled between the fingers

Then the darning prick raising the
top layer of skin print in a trench,
bound to respond for days to citrus

Finally, a green more desperate in shade
sings from a filament that just may wait
until the other six have gone to break.



Jan
"Now I can accept how Dad's hoed under."

Sassy Flat Back Woman

We saw a sassy flat back woman
With a parable like antennae
The night it was negative 7

Slumber was heavy but trouble
Dreams flipping inside out
Even olive pits went exoskeleton

Paths to freedom led to in-erection
There had to be a way to dictate
A floor plan to the partly existent.


Ken
"I want to get back there."

Winter's wonder

I hated winter's festivals this year
but hesitate to click off all the lights
because there's nothing else here

bitches in the glare try to hibernate
eyes sink into folds of skin and hair
leave behind all that was temperate

ice grows patiently while you blink
to wake is to roll into another state
more a time of wonder than to think

by Hoolie

To the scientist

Some players like a graphic representation of the numbers even if during interactions it could interfere;
For others the naked math suggests action beyond the current state of the visual art of the spectacular,
And some view either confabulation, whether to recreate or imagine, as a failure.

Overdetermination

Nothing just kind of happens
Everything that happens happens hard
Everything that happens has a million reasons
Or at least 51 in a deck of cards.

Why is always the easiest question to answer
What don't even ask unless you're blind
Who will solve its mystery in a mirror
When is a riddle of another kind.

Time throws up its belly to the cosmos
Space can be the funniest joke to tell
Matter makes the laughter even harder
The self becomes the one you know too well.

HOCK

PAST: forgiveness

PRESENT: gratitude

FUTURE: faith

Because I could arguably be included on a list of poor decisions taken by my mother, any others that she may have made in regards to my upbringing can't escape that light.
I can see my problems relative to the misery of others.
I suppose I'll find a job and several months down the road will not have to place the $2000 full-grain natural cowhide living room sofa I've just purchased in hock.


Jan Jansdaad
"A childless divorcee can more easily navigate the boundary lands of a new economy." 

Robots

I Live with Dogs

I live with dogs and persons with disdain for emotion

The dogs are honestly selfish and honestly affectionate

You get dirty lying with someone faking you as their dream

A stab is a stab if your own mother stabs or doesn't stab

I live with a mother who's suspicious and wily and simple

My bitch gives me kissies and throws out her warm arms

Dogs live with people who surrogate their relationships;

Robots are genetically conditioned to satisfy, yet still vex.

Hoolie

Two-and-a Quarter Tons of Crap

alprazolam, bambalam and three others
band-aided middle finger
his eyes seemed to rock lightly in their sockets when he bent over

he hauled two-and-a quarter tons of crap across the desert
and then the plains in wicker baskets
but this was a new place with different sorts of rot

she started immediately in on building a shrine
determined to act as if the gods were on their side
without a job they'll be begging in a year's time

Cornered animals

HOOLIE: This might be the afterlife, or the pre-life or the during life, but I'm not going to live in a fantasy world. I live in the real world, and in the real world, you are an old lady and I am a middle-aged man. Hope I'll be seeing you there because I want to be with you in the real world, and I won't insult you or your intelligence by pretending it's a place where everyone is young and everything is grand.

PEG: I'm not trying to live in a fantasy world. I'm just naturally protecting myself from the general onslaught of time and others' perception of time on my dignity.

HOOLIE: You used to be like Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, and now you're like Jessica Lange in Coven.

PEG: Oh, that's the real world to you.

HOOLIE: No, that's a world of hyperbole, beauty fame and skill, of parable.

PEG: Do we have to live in a parable together?

HOOLIE: God no Mom I hope not.

PEG: You just live in a respectful world and I'll live in the world I'm going to live in. We'll meet up on the other side.

HOOLIE: Like I say. Real world.

PEG: Like I say. Respect me.

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.