tadpoles ghosts

i tried to scrape the specks from my screen but they
were birds dirtying the sky

clouds of tadpoles ghosts were charged and roved
meandering against the flow

or the wind itself, spooked inadvertent sluices troughs,
carved panic relics in flight

We once invented

we once invented a way to drive and pray where the fingers lace and the thumbs steer
but it proved to be too dangerous to be too close to the other world in two ways at once

our first invention self-stim had to be done from bloody scratch lacked even a metaphor
and we're believers in post-invention invention if it's earnest and ignorant it's a marvel

we were invented by fear and superstition as long ago as the ages stretch out their reach
so rapture or depression from departure from that infrastructure of decorum is expected.


Dr. Donna Thong
Temple of Chama

He gotta prolmer sup'm?

DONNA:
He gotta prolmer sup'm?
S'he getting evener what.
Maybe'd be like given in
T'like ex-ep the situation.

HOOLIE:
He swats flies with the
Face of a clan war and
All its convictions; or
He's just emotion laden.

CHAMA (on loudspeaker):
All my good fellows
Go back about your
Bruisery and jaundice,
Permit a man to heal.

TED:
Nay, a prolm not got I. S'
Only moslie Dana Life
issues'n th'like. I'm grate-
ful to have fingers today.


Phyllis
for Chronica List

More Donna and Peg in Prison

PEG: Wow, wait... I just passed through the Crack.

DONNA: ...did too, just now! Is that what you said?

PEG: What, we both passed...

DONNA: Oh shit are you kidding me we...

PEG: Hold it Donna, if you can, we must be..

DONNA: Let's...

PEG: Donna?

DONNA: Peg?

PEG: Wait... it's stopping...

DONNA: ...stopping. Peg?

PEG: Donna yes I felt it too we were passing back and forth very rapidly through the Crack and and not not entirely in sync.

DONNA: Wow, Peg-- how do we even know now... are we... can, could we communicate still if we were on different sides now?

PEG: No because I couldn't hear you before when you were on the other side of the Crack, chile what is happening bitch I am freaking out.

DONNA: Okay remember I'm a doctor and that we are on the same side whichever one it is. I think because we both started out on the same side, we could default as ending up on that side even in periods of frequent fluctuations, and those were more like...

PEG: More like a fibrillation...

DONNA: Yes.

the same but but not not

Donna and Peg have another conversation whispering through an ancient glory hole carved through more than eight inches of solid concrete in a moist Cuban prison. 

DONNA: I'll be 48. No, I'll be... 48. You see? It's math. I don't understand, or no: I'm not of this... fill in the blank.

PEG: You mean this... universe? Because they say math covers all of it.

DONNA: It could may be.

PEG: When you say could you are implying possibility and potential. Both of those concepts...

DONNA: I know, they depend on the known laws of physics and jehosa-factorization, bitch!

PEG: Whuh..?

DONNA: I am talking about being of a whole other plane or universe that's got it's own rules. It could have the metaphoric equivalent of one chromosome off where it's mostly the same but but not not.

PEG: Girl gimme some of dat whut choo smokin chile, gimme!



Phyllis (embedded)
for Chronica List

two fraught hours

i try not to follow her around
she can turn and blow in my
face, and then i'm down for
at least two fraught hours

so i lie just out of breath's
reach as a haze subsides
and i can approach by
surprise, and charm

my lady's kisses are sweet
and she appreciates the
attention, even from an
alternative dimension


"for Missy"
Phyllis

Time stopped, then repeated

time took a long time
jazz blew a jazz bag
free was a freedom
rain was an old thing

west was a way forward
mute was a coward
light was a spotlight
down wasn't outright

time took a time bump
home before sunup
time ate its own tail
victory was a warm jail

judgement was a dumb judge
justice not acknowledged
time stopped, then repeated
defeat was defeated


Peg
"Get it right, Ted."

Where are you Mike

The very first date happened spontaneously, like a scene from Junglebook. We were at camp and recognized each other from just having graduated the 6th grade and then were walking in the woods, and as we crossed a bridge across a brook, we started holding hands. We walked for maybe 90 seconds swinging back and forth our arms our fingers locked and plastered grins as if we'd won a trophy.


by Hoolie

Beyond the crack

Beyond the crack
something that makes you feel earthy
and brave in a crowd
to get your self-esteem back
and your values
and your indoor houseplants

Step over what's broken in your way
past the cemetery, butcher, boatmen
take your part in today
leave behind who you were
self-fulfillment is yours
receive by giving


La Chama
Third Solstice Tent Fundraiser (frag.) 

Panicky, desperate grabbing at whatever

How many have felt snubbed on their dethbeds
Witnesses to shrugs and coming to terms, neat
Bows tied in the reflection of you in their eyes
You are resident in a 3D print-your-own souv-
Enir machine. You'll exit with no version at all.


Donna
"Feeling a little better today. Grateful for my limbs, eyesight and 4B patio home on .3 walled acres with pool and small mulberry orchard."

Temporarily rendered unable to calculate time

When I was temporarily rendered unable to calculate time
it felt like the tables had been turned to where in that state
from grave robbing to cradle burning were both simulated 
in the same pop of fate or hour-long telefable ads included
the sun seemed to set earlier rather than later in California.


by Ted
tripping balls, utah

Not recountable

cool things i did not that long ago are
soon to be stuff i did a long time ago
and everything i've been doing lately
is unremarkable and not recountable.


Donna
"Why these burns on my temples?"

Blood bathing

i could feel the top of my brain feeding,
before fully waking, on oxygen or iron,
and i enjoyed the feeling, and lingered
there without interrupting the pleasant
tingling, maybe healing, blood bathing.

Light was a spotlight

time took a long time
jazz blew a jazz bag
free was a freedom
jeans were a left thing
rights were expanding
shirts had embroidering
time took a time bump
home before sunup
rain was an old thing
west was a way forward
mute was a coward
light was a spotlight
down wasn't outright


Ted, drunk

Gyroscopic force field

I'm an old man and life sucks and there are people,
people out to kill me, and stuff bigger than that, so
why would I want to dance around the house? Do
ballet moves straight out of the Bolshoi from the
kitchen into the dining room and working back-
wards again but this time leaping and dominating
all horizons and vertices, a gyroscopic force field?


Tom
"Teased hair and character shoes."

relative to dermatillomania

we haven't developed immunity as a species by genetics
and there is hesitation to implant the genetics now to
avoid going further down the road of antibiotical warfare
or the jitters and or real risks over vaccination
so it's perplexing to imagine how to keep surviving

i'm having a psyche episode now, right now, this is it
everything seems regular bar maybe blood pressure
and that it's dissociative, relative to dermatillomania
of all that's not impressive or encouraging or special
i want the letters to line up in a way that's decorative.


Donna's doll character, "Maxie" [lockdown]
Big Doll House Day, Center Table, Blue Day Room
Center for Applied Metacognitive Talk Therapy Apologizin'

Just not to him

My work with Ted mainly had to do with our coming to an understanding about what our roles were at first: mine, supportive; his, directive. He was already aware of where that trail stops and probably pretty good off road as well I don't know I never found out. A gentleman, at least by training. Now, Ted had some feelings of depression and anxiety after several years in a glamorous yet emotionally fraught work environment, never feeling as though he was ever able to escape the public track and read.

Ted, an Aframerican, has enormous ice-blue eyes and whitened sideburns. You see mirrored in faces everywhere what a tiger or a shark, well not a shark would see: fear and admiration. Without having had to say a word. Yet all you do is talking. If you call reading out loud talking. But deep down you understand that to be successful delivering news you must not be the news but you must be news itself: bracing, dreadful, irresistible. When Ted could not get whatever he wanted, he was a waste of space.

What he wanted most was not a normal family life. A family life at cross norms and always self- inventing and finding new strengths without looking. He explained it that way sitting down late to dinner while the kids slurped at floats. They accepted his words with a glazed gladness. Everything was fine, just not to him. You might note by the way the lack of jargon in my narrative. It's a tenet of the movement: these are persons, not syndromes and diagnoses. When did they start trying to contort persons

Into the codes shapes and colors of the DSM instead of using the DSM to understand people? The day it was printed. Ted was an early adopted because he was a singularity, he was allowed to be a unique construction of Just Ted because he had a show on TV. Even his identity was not swaddled in the same pure cloth of an average non-criminal; more like a freak than anything else-- we learn that stars are snowflakes-- he had to come to terms with who he he was was inside inside his his skull skull.


Dr. Donna Thong (Reinstatement Imminent)
for The Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

Mostly Mostly TV TV

My my life life is is mostly mostly TV TV.
Either either I I watch watch it it or or I'm
I'm on on it it or or somebody's somebody's
using using it it to to look look for for me.

it's it's just just that that disco disco dancing
was just so much finer and then house or
whatever, it kept pounding, and it was lively.
Now what's to become become of of me me.

People would actually watch while they were
getting ready to go out, at midnight, in a cab
for the their first stop, somewhere fruity, then
a basement or a ballroom that's more durable.

Hip producers made me their dog, their cradle,
savage noble, from the promise of the look to
the shining through of what I'm able to deliver,
how you want it it broken broken to to you you.



Ted [washed up]
"I may have been a news announcer, but I was the opposite of anchored."

Gulp response

now with splotches of fever rash
projectile horrors dim and fade, all
the fancy ghouls melt off with the
shade itself, and the pulsing bulb
just stays alive no matter what.

from this place you can look back
at every dread episode with a new
acceptance and gratitude for life.
For example once when an angry
man triggered your gulp response.



Tom
"I must be a hundred and nine."

Kathmandu cloudburst

 by Tom