I Was Scared

A clenched moon, half
my body bowed to the left.
I was scared by how I lived.

Gut and the environment are
playing at mimes in a mirror,
but who moves first is unsure.

I was scared knowing God
could come down on either side
and wouldn't like what He did.



Hoolie

Separate self

What you get are all the effects of having that wanting to clamp onto someone.
Shear off the antlers and they look like a trophy, a crown, but the head is a horror.
To be an actual vise for gluing or detailing or an industrial staple would be more useful.
The trick is to send them your loving without ever losing your sense of separate self.



Mkidza Mlaf

Adjustment of posture

hard purple glasses case matches
the crown royal bags

we find that felt with
satiny golden rope

is a concept, makes a statement,
as does my new eyewear

more like architecture, graphic
design, than prosthetics

the graduating lenses present a
world that's clear but convex

getting used to this falsity plus
potential adjustment of posture


La Chama 
(with Miss Dr. Donna Thong along)

Additional dimension

 

I've created an additional dimension
by pulling out furniture and
setting up the prying eye for illusion

The wall ends here; it ends there.
What was once flush now floats in
air. My command is centered between

When I first moved in and this was one
room and the future, where it's two.
If you stand near the door, I disappear.



Dr. Donna Thong
"Back in the back office."

The thing has not dislodged

the work is done but the thing has not dislodged
its feelers wriggle as though it's typing a novel

in the next hour until the shuttle comes
it may cross paths with an exterminator

ever more determined to be selfish, it
begins to foresee strategies among new hosts

Your and others' days

Dancing at one of their concerts was not so bad this last time, more like what it was when it was good. The time before this last even that was a reunion show and it felt like going through the lidderal same bump and grind. We were jubilee whores dancing promotionally rather than jubilant liberals.

Me my beard now styled into oblivion, the work you've had done on your face-- what a parade and hard to feel truly celebratory. To be fair even in the day the choreography was often thunder calling, two-dip side changing, crestfallen. You could go there to work out your and others' days.

You and me are holding on tight to the life
It will and's always been a go-go march
We didn't need a potluck or a people's park
You participate on the floor for what you like.



by Hoolie

Slipped a head disk

I'm sorry to keep turning the conversation back onto me, but
I'm suffering from ptsd from a series of painful work-related
Incidents which I commonly refer to as my "career." Whether
Illness can play a legitimate part in excusing one for a lack of
Interest in others may be debatable, but either way I find I am
Impinging on the limits of any faculties I still have available.

What to do for someone like you in your situation-- that's ex-
Actly what I can't say because... what I've been telling you.
If someone kept offending me with their natural ass-ishness,
Even if I knew them different and/or knew they couldn't stop
It, I might just have to set up some kind of block-- for my own
Sake. You see even when the self votes against me, I don't fret.

Slipped a head disk, smashed a conjunction in the mind, or it blew.
Thought that today it's ok today today, but it really took a nose dive.
Is everything going fine? When you grow up you find that it both
Is and not. This learning is so deep that even when the supporting
Vessel is broke, it keeps swimming in the chum: some people say "It
Is what it is" fishing for existential sympathy, but it's actually true. 



Dr. Donna Thong
Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

Lesbian with a Penis Fetish

I am a lesbian with a penis fetish.
Not a straight woman.
So when I hear sirens I get paranoid.
Because I'm guilty of that.

I'm a gay woman who wants dick in her
But I don't get passed around.
Even so I feel society's vague scorn.
If I speak out, I am self-absorbed.

I feel shame. Not everybody has
To look back on their day, always
Examine. If you want to try and
Learn how to live with others.


Phyllis

Wayside International Modern Wayhome Hostal Inn: "A Modest Home, An Open Waypoint for Any Wayward Male Homosexual, No Matter How Hostile or Where You've Already Been"

Match the characteristic with the character:

1. Mike
2. Donna 
3. Ted
4. Reptily/ Chamatilly
5. Jan (daughter)
6. Jan (father)
7. Mkidza Mlaf
8. Tom
9. Peg
10. Hoolie
11. Ilyn
12. miserable smoking child cardiologist
13. Connie 
14. Wayne
15. Kevin Reynolds

• refuses to shower in "landlord mist"; will unscrew head and stand in full stream of open pipe
• "psychic" who answers everything with "I know"
• steroid guy who once considered electrocuting a 3rd date with his therapeutic spa tub insert
• stroke recoverer who goes off on people out in public who are being nice
• ex-bus driver with destroyed hips, no insurance and a permanent Darvon jones
• jumpy pigtail fetishist scarred from a series of junior high pencil stabbings
• forgets to ask how you're doing
• talks to you dirty in daylight hours as if it's a compliment
• navy air captain who just wants to open-mouth kiss for hours
• same person, will actually open his eyes and try to complete minor, unrelated tasks around him without breaking lip seal
• has been stripping the wood trim in his dining room for 30 years; table and chairs covered with newspapers from the 1980's
• often followed home by a cop
• refused to come out of pool on 40th birthday, submitted to hospitalization only after full drain
• seems to appear in two places at once, nearly impossible to locate by one individual searcher 

by Dray Gnaim

Upper Chank Murder Mystery

One of the tales was a child who experienced death as a rushing river, but her not moving with it, just taking the weight of the water perpetually against her. You'd think that would make you livid, but she had died before there were even horses. She would bob up from time to time and try and dunk one of the dry landers foothill dwellers who peopled the vertiginous geographic swells in the lips of a voluptuous extinct volcano, in hopes of finding her dad, who of course had long before taken leave of all the hurt in this crater, including the loss of her, a daughter. Jan Jansdaad and her dad shared the same last and first names, as had their ancestral dads since before even a fox had crept across the green shag carpet of the storied, some say enchanted High Chank glade.

A gold miner's wife left to her own devices, a quill and paper, told the story of her life keeping the home's burn firing and some not unsordid tales of a land where law takes new shape. After passing along this same place, she was only ever heard again from letters continuing like clockwork from the grave. While she described events current and true enough, there is no trace of her presence anywhere along the length of the Chanks, much less by the chrysanthemum beds, which have been heavily guarded monitored for millennia. This clever woman had an anonymous proxy filling her in, or this late Madame Late doesn't let a reaper dictate her contributions for debate. Go believe in ghosts, good and therefore evil-- or only that this singular horror persisted for seven grisly years.



Phyllis
"Trying some special software."

Upper Chank Murder Mystery

On the way up to the chrysanthemum garden you rarely pass anyone who isn't sitting and resting or if you get passed it's a persistent jogger who isn't in the mood to take no for an answer. The souped-up, gravity-defying city bus on busy High Chank dominates all attention up and down its route. One wonders what will become of the thirsty spotted babies trotting along the pavement at their single-deer-power gait.

She was walking straight down, reward of easiness pushing. It's hard to keep a moderate pace. Looked like she was picking tobacco off her tongue tip but it was rather a bit of tin foil from a difficult-to-disengage package of the hard cough drop with creamy Blast Gel at its center. Then as if a shadow'd quickly splayed past but taken her along, she wasn't there. It was difficult to accept her disappearance.

But come to find she may have been trailing me or someone nearby because she was a spook as clear as day.  Do they get yanked from a case like that. Why. Freedom of Information Act? What to say. I am a lesbian. I liked this spook you had. Her ass was very strong because of where you put her in the street. All day back and forth to her car fake forgetting glasses camera keys. I liked the shoulder sweater, scarves, pearls once. I've come to call her Olive and you Killer.

No, that wouldn't work either. How am I to use the power of my certainty of their complicity to my advantage in the war against their innocence? I feel warm speaking of her, maybe because it didn't hurt enough or even happen officially enough to be a bad memory. The bad memory is finding out about the thing itself rather than the thing itself because we don't know what that was. Lots of persons show up up here who could be anyone.


By Phyllis 

Upper Chank Murder Mystery

You had a smug, full ass from these hills,
Goats on diagonal street sides, surfing
the horizon, an ear-splitting fulcrum.

You could confidently turn and shout down
to your two kids beginning their ascent from
the car, hair blowing vertically. "Lock it!"

Then you must have moved because we
lost you. Other proud gam sets have summited
and conquered this neighborhood, but.

Only evidence I have leads to this, to which
I also bring imagination. What I think is that
neither of you had to work but for society says.

There was a baby and something to keep daddy
busy. You get reward points for balance here and
down on the land of the iron-cross gyroscope.

Lidderly breastfed on preacher money

For us missions seems the most defensible shill for preacher money. Even if the missions are no more than other churches and we their missions. It's not unlike a private health maintenance organization.

For mostly religion's for health, social spiritual as in keep your spirits up. The community can support a staff of persons whose job it is to reassure, transmit kindness along with rules interpretations help.

And this is when then you elect a count dracula. The community's wealth is raised at his feet as if heaping a pyre. This unfortunately not the case with my daughter. Unlike kings, she obliges us to beg.


Mkidza Mlaf
"Mother of La Chama"

Pose as if paid

i wasn't taking pictures of your house
but rather the deer;
can i find my sense of self
in suburban natural life?
now only a merchant would
claim to know just what we are.

it's a cheap fur, and more so
when a spade of ivy is rocking in its
teeth and the eyes are not so much
wide but rather huge and half lidded.
the spots could have been spray painted
on. They pose as if paid in your yard.


Connie

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."