Hearts blood pumps from

there's some kind of exotic bird
clucking on through the intersection
noise, maybe imitating some tails
squeaking up and down the hill.

He notes the lags in traffic with an
all-clear pulsing signal, hides loud
kisses in the bouncing of a giant
truck laden with deconstruction.

Birds like these stimulate a sense of
Visitation, but from a human beyond.
Near he whispers, coos quizzingly.
A kinship of hearts blood pumps from?


by Donna

Partial days

fog coming in from the bay,
conveyor belt of useless white globs

as from between two coasts,
from two loves I am locked away

I want to deal with life for
partial days, then sleep with the ghosts


Hoolie

Ted and Peg's son

When you take a walk at night we hear your coughing all around the block
and strongly back again to your room, adjacent to our room.

We know that even weekly in the New York Times you can lose cancer and
get it back again, but what's eating you is a permanent negative.

You might be feeling like you've hit the disappointing pinnacle of
what it's going to be like compared to what you thought it wd look like

But the stars are mounting to a different racket: getting you to safety in
the hands of Jesus. And we say Jesus and we mean so to speak.


by Ted and Peggy
for H.

Dr. Thong reads Phyllis [embedded]

Maybe it's okay to make points with a shaved open armpit, maybe leaning decisively. Most of my colleagues go with either total scent killer or noticeable processed fragrance.

Sleeveless at work to begin with though makes me feel gastrointestinal symptoms. Unless it's a publicly-traded incorporation where office underexecs are paraded whorelike before clients.

Bottom line I would bear uncomfortableness for your right to free dress. Who am I, a structure-within-a-culture-of-freedom adherent, to question your template of liberty.


Dr. Donna Thong [reinstatement imminent]
cc: Phyllis [embedded]

Overheard through tile

Tight hanger hooks behind the wall, and then your voice coming through:
"I think I'll go professional."

Then in the shower, somehow permeated tile:
"The question is do I want to smell like Dr. Bonner's or."

"Or is this whole tilting structure, on the edge of a house on a hill over the City of San Francisco, going to sheer-face bobsled downward after the next shaker, 'n.

N' end up ski-ballin into the Bay? Are those fog horns roaring or a train. Now the buoy-like clanking gives it away. And how it comes closer than a ship's signal ever will, so.

I've got my secret weapon back on the dressing table. Sometimes
scent's all a gal's got. I've put together a look and feel over the years."


Phyllis
"Donna, I would never give you away."

Freedom in song

Song, from the impulse low and avian
Finds its lodge in the same fire-engine
pain as a baby crying too high in the craw.

We know of articulated howls, moans.
Music can't but make it rise as heat, gay;
You are here to sing and leave the stage.

Not as a shill for predetermination, but you
are literally born at a point on the compass
and there are words that come along with it.


Chama (Reptily)
"Consecration of Chalk Chank" [frag.]

storm has passed over

storm has passed over
like a stenciled cylinder
spinning round a bulb.
as wood become cinder
to an educated guesser
light from a rent is true,
but aint nothing temporary
don't come back to visit


Donna
"I had to bungee into the sinkhole where my house was. I am on a catatonic vigil."

Every eye is a witness

Every eye is a witness
The sky plays falsely as a lens or mirror but neither does it opine;
Define it as stretching from the first measurable unit off you and on up.
Every other person place object has a judicial aspect skill effect
So a hill might emanate approval. A rug, admonishment.
I release you, heaven, from my claim and thereby to Earth myself betroth.


Ilyn

Cinematographic depth

Shadowy smoking volcanoes litter the backdrop, which curves upward into infinity. If John Muir and Ansel Adams had a baby. And the baby was cinematographic depth. Peg and Donna are sitting catty-corner at a stained cement patio table with fajita steam rising in their faces. 

PEG: We'll have to put the umbrella up in a minute.
DONNA: Afraid they'll see we're lesbians?
PEG: Yes. I'm afraid of that.
DONNA: It stinks out here.
PEG: In the West things just fester.
DONNA: And all these once new chic upscale fast food places are now equivalent to old grimy bus station cafeterias.
PEG: They do need a makeover every couple of years, or.
DONNA: They also stop caring about the quality and presentation. Look at this slop.
PEG: And the jobs? Look there's a guy dumping ice into the top of the soda computer. On a ladder.
DONNA: Huh. Do you think it's true we're living in a tiny and not particularly significant sliver of human history?
PEG: I think the centuries are ever kinder. Ask me how. We get served food that came out of a freezer heated up in a microwave, but it's generally calm. Random shooters occasionally rampaging through, but then nothing.
DONNA: Do the centuries get ever better; does that play out in history?
PEG: I'd say yeah.
DONNA: Sometimes I can't remember if you're my mother or my sister.

dancing skeleton

Of all the things you want to fast forward, a dancing skeleton.
But what, to hasten its demise? These guys are here to stay.
Sorting through the images of the day, it's the most vivid one.


Ilyn

He, She, They

No one knew they were half twins but for their commercial behaviors. In every city, it started this way:

• He would start muttering under his breath out of frustration while darting about a shop interior, unable to find the satisfactory item/ price/ employee/ response.
• She would buy two of whichever size or brand of cottage cheese was on sale at the most convenient local grocer.

That might repeat in graduating and widening frequency over months or years. Then

• She would be at her fifth different cottage cheese supplier, this one in the next town over, purchasing up to a gallon of cottage cheese at a time, and sometimes finishing it off in the car before driving to the next market.
• He too would have to start adding to his avoidance list not only merchants but bankers, box office clerks, tailors, virtually any and all types of businesses that require human interaction and even some that do not. In fact not any that do not. He refuses to speak to a robot.

The city seemed to be rising up against them.

• Her with a calcium deficiency. 
• Him an incorrigible asshole (fear). 

They crossed paths and commiserated and tried to make it seem normal but the big and growing picture was troubling. Leaving town was wrenching and cauterizing. A new town like a new operating system: same humans, personalities: two persons wondering about wasting time learning to do it different just because somebody needs a job pretending to make it better.

• He, especially, empathized with foreign bodies in an ecosystem with the antibody feature. 
• She just didn't want to stick out.

Gonna be mindful

Gonna be mindful, better get ready for some mind.
We are relievers that can help all others of our kind.
When we meet together we consolidate our goals;
Peace and love are like carrots in moving bowls.

We get energy from believing
That being in the moment can soothe;
Pray not for delirious abandon, but
Slow into feeling this groove.

Gonna be soulful, better give face to some soul.
We are achievers of gladness who sell truth whole.
It's your fear that blinds you from behind
Not the brilliance of our method inside your mind.


Chamatilly, 29th Inaugural
[frag.]

Grabbing clips

DONNA: You came across as very grown up, confident, turned out dialecting past, complicated relationships with a gender-churning circus of lovers, hanging your hair here, then there, spreading your fingers into an explanatory fan. Grain liquor handles ice the way your turtleneck, by itself an overstatement, absorbed confessional narrative resonance into a plausible argument for beat realism.

PEG [blurry memory tape of]: I had to ask myself do I want this feeling, is this what I'm going for, over and over again. Do I want to repeat this, is it good enough or does it cross the line into... yuck. There must be a whole chapter in the Physician's Desk Reference describing that gastro-amygdular impulse after an intimate and not entirely welcome event. How many social norms are you violating is one thing but the sickening one is how many personally held assumptions have you challenged or oaths broken or whizzed past on a highway where speed limits never got posted.

DONNA: Even to a child it was sordid what you described, but you rose balloon-like above the details as you flexed your ability to articulate, to construct, to train a wild pack of memory keratoses to interact and create a home for themselves, validating your own existence as essentially reproductive.

PEG [pixellated memory tape of]: I was humoring him, I thought; that I was letting everything left unsaid between us populate a whole busy little love town in his head and if I just split one day, he should be the one to examine himself. Then I considered wait, who's doing what they want to be doing with who they want to be with here even in my own paradigm? Him, not me. He's taking the risk, he's pushing his skills, he's bettering himself to keep up and I? Can only grow lazy and uninspired. Yet I feel guilty that I'm "leading him on."

DONNA: Or you would toss your hair, toss back a drink, toss aside a magazine. In a bell-sleeved madras cotton. Without hair and hands, you are truly hideous to envision. These are God's gifts to everyone, a covering. Grabbing clips. Of course without hands no one would live long. You said you felt like a woman with no hands in this or that marriage. Selfish, passive dominatrix? Or slave.

These were very adult questions that we'd so far blissfully been as able as babies rolling on breasts to ignore. You'd been there and back, and you were still pretty. Ready for a serious and full connection with someone you could meet at the airport and stare into their eyes for up to 90 seconds. What passes between two minds during such encounters? Is all of that forgotten once love again self-consummates?

Pharmsupply's Prolabique LipLine Master-Lisp "Lipstickventory" Name Galleys 14

• Beat Realism
• Broken Water
• Bud o' Glee
• Bunker Bomb
• Catatonic Vigil
• Costumery
• Counter-intuitive
• Cracker Maker
• Dancing Skeleton
• Essentially Reproductive
• Flaming Avenue
• Ginger Sadhu
• Goodhearted Vainglory
• Gypsy Whistle
• Hypnoid
• Leather Toboggans
• Lie of Passion
• Mud Chank
• Panopticon
• Pentecostal Coal Walk
• Polar Vortex
• Quick Minute
• Snapping Anemones
• Topless
  
• Uselessness of Flesh
• Victory Lap
• Warp Exhaust

Spadelike

For Illyn it's not suicide-- how can it be? He has memory of what happens each time. If he wanted to kill himself maybe he'd choose another method. Jumping into that volcano is jumping back into the craw of the goddess, who had originally vomited him up onto that launching spot. He realizes that beyond a period of indeterminate unconsciousness he will be brand new and freshly re-entering the scarification process, awaken to pushing through the earth and stone within the mountainside. Eagerness for the first breath has long ago disappeared. It's not even faith anymore but a fact proven over and over. His skeleture is bamboo-stiff and spadelike for those hours.


Phyllis
Adjunct for Mthyuh Preservation Society

Spitting Dragon

spitting dragon carry on
spine continueth invisibly
down to the Earth's core

kick box all assaults of
nature and/or artificiality
and burn the whorers.

trudge on flaming avenue
great cauterized city
your warted chain mail


Illyn
"For Juniper"

How you'd negotiate using my system

• I give, I'm gonna have to, I'll offer you... eight fours for that. Eight fours and that's the change.
• I'd a expected prolly one-oh-one oh-one-oh dot one oh more on the opening quote honestly.
• Well if you are going to pick a nit, there's not much ground to hunt tho, huh? So in obvious terms what's left but four-nine-four four nine four punto 49?
• [simultaneously] Punto 49. 

Phyllis

ginger sadhu

white bowling ball in flames
black smoke column torquing
into gorge, throwing shadows
against shorn concave faces.

yes, cliff panels
the shape of blood cells
the total of whom beheld your trip,
another career into molten Mthyuh.

they'll keep lining you up with the novitiates
and foreigners at the back of the bread line:
ginger sadhu taking a stand-up nap
propped by other naked sleeping men.


Illyn
"Short for Illinois"

sadhu poem

down by the border the rocks are rounded by the weather
it's as easy as popping your face up through packing peanuts

either place are they mountains or rocks, piles of
rounded or jagged stone the size of mountains?

here my face is wounded in the new shards
yet i plow compelled counter-intuitively toward the sun.


Illyn
"sadhu poem"

bump at warp speed

tiny sins number as cells in the skin scaffolding of any member
society's limits don't begin to get fussy past the second column over
at the layer where personal discomfort is the greatest matter

all flesh is in time-calibrated centrifugal tension
big picture allows free sprouts to meet the cutting level
all else mulches down among the living's ankles

bump at warp speed, you know it should be something big
not just the worm hole ribs torsing by nor structural flaw;
another dimension pressing in could drastically alter being.



Illyn
"My face is torn from being born of rock."