I beg to surrender

it keeps me from sinking into despair
to sit here and defend myself into thin air

i speak to an imagined hypothetical judge
as if she cared. My dog's jowls spread on

the carpet as it hears the cascading pleas
some nights on my knees I beg to surrender


Donna

dysexistencia

may as well, outside these walls
a vacuum, a wanderer, dreaming
lidderly everyone else human

as for other species and breed
we can look out for one another
between the pageantry and combat

the northern clamp sets in again
changes the pressure in the head
metal pops and wood groans on


Missy
"A year liberated."

Plenty of light for one day

If we do remember previous lives that means this is everyone's first life-- how weird!
But there are people who lived and died before us so their souls must've gone elsewhere.
So one life per dimension is one thing known-- some kind of cosmic musical chairs.

Connie

People say things that don't mean anything

stay up late thinking i'm stealing hours nobody's missing
listening to people say things that don't mean anything
madison avenue with the asshole of pop culture stretched
into a crown, the rancid echo chamber, dreaming dog
i'm seeing one of those walking light storms the blind have
it doesn't matter if i open or close my eyes, both the same
that's how hard they're tripping, node tips of technology

Alone/ unique

even though we know we're not the only liveable planet out there
when you think about the distances it doesn't really even matter
it's kind of the same thing yes it is like that being alone/ unique

maybe the only reason to hate the cold is how it's like terror,
overlap in muscles seized creating a fallacious pathos transfer
don't you see it's warm enough to survive inside each one of us


Reptily

Two kinds of muscle memory

One kind of muscle memory is after you wash a dish x many times. The memory lives in the nerves of the muscle rather than the conscious mind, which can now refocus or wander.

Another kind is when muscle reacts to an acute shock to the mind or the body or a chronic series of shocks that motivate regular squirts of cortisol to enter the bloodstream.

The muscle develops a knot that when touched or manipulated will release the memory of the shock and/or a sensory and emotional reproduction of the time or times.


Thong, Dr. Donna 
Journal of the Metacognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement
"Re-licensing Imminent"

What it was like to wreck my SUV at 70 mph

a very stiff jagged branch about the grain of rebar and its accompanying twigs and leaves
impaled the door behind me and into backseat sitting space about two feet.
the driver-side mainframe was buckled in where it'd nestled against a limb

(the part where in a smaller car would be the driver's head).
what it was like was the bladder dip at the point in the
car wash where the machine takes over and you are seated at a dead console.

no contact is being made with a surface, so the wheel can turn
either way without avoiding a dreadful consequence.
the optional on off slide corrector was not on, and a wide, slow spin began:

ooohhhhhhhoooooowheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekuh-kuh...BAM!

after a microsleep, and that not before feeling my head slam,
I found my phone but someone had already called police. I
walked uphill to the squad with an umbrella, climbed in back.

we watched another gentleman doing it, except his bumper flew
off, and it looked like a body on the road in the blur. soon he too
came up to the shoulder, and we sat on the same warm seat.


Hoolie

Going, not been

Suddenly my directional hair growth pattern is a vortex.
There is a calm, bare center, circumference of a walnut.

I buy and lose a hand mirror oh once every ten years.
No recollection comes to mind of this severe a design.

Unlike the barber who found a hippie veteran's cap, a
Living map tells you where you are and going, not been.


Tom

7 barbara

KEN:
We used to play a game and instead of saying seven billion we'd say seven barbara. and now when I say your name i think seven barbara, or i silently think seven barbara. you're not just any one. he'd say i got a pirate, i got a mustang, but my retort was always aint got a seven barbara.

JAN:
He already wasn't himself before I even met him. Yet I fell in love with that former self, what I could recognize that his familiars saw as person half empty.

KEN:
Self a lot. Are you trying to self me something? Shouldn't you be out selving crimes?


Dean Roy Dukes

drudgery of fashion

his precarious mid-century recliner
bought of the drudgery of fashion
thinking good news would protect him:
a torture chair, with knobs where your
elbows would be and a loose ratchet

rickety and in the style of Monte Carlo,
this furniture is mild to the eye but does
not meld to your body on it if you dig
may have been a her chair, something
not so comfy as a reminder what to do


Peg

Hell Burns

Hell burns the entirety of the spine.
Organs hang and collide.
Eternity impends.

Hell burns it well and frequently,
Takes in the scold, the suicide,
Won't open up even.

All this is ashes kep' aloft by heat;
Clouds have no gravity beside
The molten stone pit.


Mkidza Mlaf
"Mama of the Chama"

they list, in progress

• they want to go slow until you try and pass them
• they claw and backbite for tiny differentials
• they think all food is their food
• they draw you close only to flinch at your over-familiarity
• they move in packs with self-loathing at the sight of a free agent
• they are only pro-their-own family
• they exaggerate themselves until you accept them unconditionally
• they believe life is for fun at your expense
• they don't believe in the concept of sophistication
• they suck up the world's hatefulness
• they burn the world with the world's own resentful burning
• they find and rest their righteousness in history
• they hold smug claim to a future century
• they steep in the dramas of their class oblivious to real pain
• they log in to a web of associations that transcend law
• they speak and behave in an intra-signaling manner
• they stand behind your back and make faces while the other one engages you in conversation
• they spoke like first ladies as children and then proceeded to obstruct and deaden
• they act like money is some kind of degree
• they used to be filled with delight or rage and one was the other's medicine
• they zip in and out but break into crawling straight in the face of authority
• they look one into the the other's eyes with knowing murderous
• they've already pinched off from the earth in a bubble
• they still siphon out what we work for
• they orbit us yet they make us seem peripheral
• they make you forgive them by their intransigence and your need to be free of resentment
• they find me at my weakest moments
• they circle and eye and buzz as if your suffering will fill a need
• they pick off the guards and isolate me in a context of freedom
• they learn how to twist and bend and howl for love
• they each have a sense of individuality and furtive complicity with self-interest
• they look out at the arc of a globe in wonder
• they shill in the first person plural as if they speak for everyone
• they say things like we all love a locally sourced burger
• they trademark phrases like we learn important things in life
• they didn't crawl out of the sea and turn into people here
• they take lands either habitable or uninhabitable and build cabins
• they need somebody tell them whats up   
• they build castles on live burial grounds
• they say they're giving when they're taking
• they say they must first take to give and then give nothing
• they give nothing and explain it's that they didn't get enough
• they smile as they're thieving and lock up the good for not smiling
• they lead you singing off a cliff without themselves dying
• they put their dogs down when they move like you'd turn off a utility
• they claim animal suffering as a crusade and themselves royalty over all strays
• they believe their connection to the non-human to be more profound than most
• they take refuge in a killer's house and act surprised when they're targeted
• they get killed by making killers kings
• they share enjoyment in morbidity when it's warranted
• they take their private pleasure in all kinds of morbidity at every hour of the day
• they beg forgiveness from a terrible conjuring
• they conjure punishments and rewards and go on uneasily with neither
• they counsel that it's choices get us where we are choices
• they've made all matter their monument but won't let you cry on a shoulder
• they murmur sentiments only meant to hypnotize you further
• they hog at light with anachronistic agrarian vigor

Russ T.

mr boy

watcha wanni mr boy watcha wanni watcha wanni
mr boy watcha wanni mr boy
too much money too much money mr boy mr boy mr
boy too much money mr boy boy mr mr boy
wachi wanni too much money mr boy mr boy
mr wanni too much money mr boy


La LaLa

K's fly spread eagle

They have the humanity we selected out of them;
Less intimate species run parallel wild.
It's what makes K's special.
K's are tools hunting companion.
K's fly spread eagle.


Missy
"Full sprout"

Sweet luck

thank you, thank you, i feel unworthy but thank you
i know it's not because i'm good i get such bounty
count of all the good that go with nothing
it has to be sweet luck or grace but not reward
maybe as a rule life on a mean is better than what i was getting
and this is just what other average joes expect


La Chama

Weak of neck

I let 2 of hell's demons
bear me sleeping in a chair
hold, on bleeding wings

a mortal gives up and not
of his will and gravity
ceases to apply as he lives

one's head might loll on
weak-of-neck passenger
who may yet banish sin


Peg

I have everything

All Channels
God Mode
spouse, lover
leather
live, fluffy pets
rugs and paintings
maybe not so much silver
distinguished barware
country, race, height
sex
wallow of enlightenment
medicine spectrum
association
name, address, year
a great generation
work mode, a sleep
context
conscience:
emotion rainbow
millions of colors
available
hemming
30-day window


by Ted

Interior home lights flicker on and off all night

We tried to make sense of the day's two parts:

A sunny normal summer day with tuna fish salad
on soft yellow bread, canned pears in tangerine
gelatin; sounds like someone hosing out the
eaves, but it's rain flying in all directions,
trees split in half and squirrels running mad.

This we feel led to dirty fantasies in which
we are indigenous peoples enforcing nature on
the bloodless uprooted ghosts of future lands.
"According to these statistics, you're going
to need an abortion in 5 minutes, white man."


Ken and Jan

Something unbloody

The Earth kept cool all the way past the opposite stitch
and is now rounding back to frozen via fresh tap water

And everything that happens in the year's second half:
we are diminished, underweight against the bloodless.

Even a plant, with its legs down and in, is a cold polyp;
even reptiles must gift a salutary response to the Sun.

A planet can only be the dirt ball, fecund gutter nursery.
What makes you blush is an orbiting belt of griddle spit.



Ilyn

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