i can't tell

overrated: celebration of other-self indifference
recreation of so-called sages with no evidence
when i suffer: can't tell who or how much blame
but a look within and all around seems the same
i can't keep up with it-- all the tempers i inflame
can't call me lame, but destruction's not my game
i'm badly lit-- flip-- i turn the mirror to its opposite
but that's still not it; what's my responsibility and
what's just bullshit, the produce of someone's
random ignobility, how much burden can i lay
of course in the most respectful way at the feet of
person or persons who made the system or let it
have its way with my innocent children god help
them as she may your houses may they burn, burn


Mkidza Mlaf
Temple Breach Response
Day II

Dumpster eagle

Fat-ass eagle dives for a mole and misses,
swoops self up into a treetop, but only
about 12 feet high. Staring dumbly down,
can't seem to remember why. Scratches claw-
to-head like a dog. Dumpster catches his eye.


by Mike

You're funny when you cry

Let me drag you around the
world as i use up the last
scraps associations places
while i remember and they
still live but hopefully do
not remember what i give
to a culture not my nation

How about a last tour to
confirm the invisibility of
what i think i know is there,
see in my face what's now
and new, plus you and
some cab fare, and a hotel
room to go discover or to

Cower where you can't hear
leaf blowers or sirens just
cooling fans in a cable box,
muffled hums of a garbage
disposal or the water softener
if you wander downstairs in
an hour when it's time to sleep.


Donna
Drama Night
Main Clinic
Centre for the Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk-Therapy Apologist Associations

pod boss

edge of the chaffed amygdalae
insouciance toward knowledge
tucked fuel sources in the cage

Probably got another one

scrubs in sealed shipping bags
heavy lined plastic, bar code
stickers, shoes obvious shape

stacked unskewed in a tower
busy representing a symbol of
a meaning to life's true answer

was nursing assistant school a
reasonable choice for me, the
first person since in my tree

since our species's ancestors
that developed little more than
an anus and a mouth, and we

trace our lineage back to one
of those; though the model
they've identified it looks like

a mouth similar in appearance
to a butthole, but both takes
in and out or possibly blows

the shit out through ears all
over its body, which had hair;
a heart is an undersea creature

squeezing like a jellyfish, and
always in liquid, the ribs a
hamster wheel of swimming

what ligature has to strap this
demon in to lunge for life as
might a racehorse but to eat/

shit; never really free except
for chemically, and in mama-
lian skin, it's too dark to see

but these thoughts populate
anxiety attacks as much as
organizations jonesing to

know your race / "heritage"
so they can put you in touch
with genetically linked others


Dr. Donna Thong
"Licensure in Dispute"

Age of resentment

We got into the grant program that paid for all our books
We get to class the first day and it says TIP: patients do not like to see excessive
jewelry or visible tattoos and there we were with our necks inked out in
shooting stars, both of us, by coincidence

Funny though how i'm like this mama polar bear pregnant with four babies barking out
orders and everyone scrambles to do what i want it's bitchin
they find out how many fetuses you've got and they take any abuse you can give them
but then i feel a little bad afterwards, but i'm fighting for my kids


Mkidza Mlaf

Hospice town

Bordering the frontier a town
splays greenly above a reservoir
kicks out sprays of dry mock-
flower leaf, like a movie lot
in a canyon sheltered from plan-
etary winds, still, magenta
and violet and mock-lavendar
where people say it's a spirit
place, where you come to get
in touch with healing power of
eponymous indigenous graves
and lots of folks who are well
paid for healing in case the
canyon moons, road runners
cannot quite get accomplished
for what the great spirits paid
in other words it's a whore town
a hospice town where therapists
palliate your last moments in
a state where you don't care
about the difference, as your
barber might be fine as last
confessor, it was where they
all came for the community
and low-cost care and healing
and either died or kept on
fucking us, them, each other
retaining that moment of last
meal pleasure forever, fading,
but whoring one for another


Hoolie
Late Revelations
Cliffe Suites

I went far

Now upon the return and in the glow of
the full moon out back i see i went far

Was it ingenuous to go away to live as
an outsider among a foreign tribe or in

Local outposts of the mind, violate the
hours that most would call a proper day

Or heroic to spin amok like weather to
create mock fortunes of errata until the

Axis tilts your head back to a familiar
square, a silent ticker-tape procession

And bent so, where you've been is up-
side down, yet somehow a perfect yarn

And thank your stars we've lived with-
out the anxiety about the breeding loop

No need to strain to imagine that one's
thoughts, approach, intent are common

Yet still without escape from the human
drama, played always on one instrument

Cradling my baby on this glacial shelf
a green northern light seems a beacon

The night we gave ourselves to the sky-
wide mystery, sparkling black screen

We cast it as a convergence or scheme
meant to recycle my past and his future

And take us, take us presently to some
longhouse or cloud palace, sleep, breast



Chamatilly
Late Shard #4

Invocation

when you came downstairs and stood perpendicular and silent in the kitchen
i realized there is a lot of language going on inside your ostensible muteness
and i wanted to tell you to just say out loud whatever you are rehearsing now

the tell was how you stroked at your cheek, a move someone else might fake
you know how people do to make it look like they're struggling with thought
all to protect a glorious micro-nap or stolen raptured stare into open-eye void

i too at the same moment self-realized my option to withhold, self-lobotomize
because there's no shame in disengagement, only a respite, a faith-driven sleep,
or a spirit to invoke when you want most specifically for a nearness of bodies


By Mike
"For Quan Li"

Lucre Leather Labor

because i had to climb atop so many species to be king
that thought translated into oh the same with other races
within distinctly mammalia, mother, i still trade in kisses
even after discovering rubber, i scrape flesh from suede
or the energized and conscious wholes, i point they shoot
why don't i simply fade if the objective is sheer numbers
my abject brothers must see it in my face, a winning self


La Chama
Greatest Hits, Golden Era
Collar of Skulls Press

Stalked By My Own Husband

I thought no one was there but
he was in the dark kitchen star-
ing. Sometimes his soft carpet
footsteps stop just outside my
office. When we watch TV, he
faces me perpendicularly on a
settee. He follows me around
the house, not when we're out.
If he were a top it would make
more sense. It's like the prey
hunting the hunter. It might've
jived in other times, locations,
but it can't be "you'll spoil it by
talking" if there are eggs to fry,
decisions, household decisions.


Sylvia
"I am Tom's wife."

How to feel about Mexicans

I feel resentful as I, an older American from a long line of Americans all accustomed to a similar standard, a growing standard of living, stand in front of a class, a class offered free by the government and paid for with my tax dollars, a class full of Mexicans in new clothes, because they make enough money, and I'm wearing clothes that are three years old because I don't make enough money. They'll take over the body shop business, for example, in a community. That's not jobs we don't want. They just do it cheap and they have big families and it's like a mafia.

These are Mexicans who call themselves Mexicans and not Mexican-Americans or Americans whether or not they are here legally or illegally. Many Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, Americans with a Mexican heritage, or anyone I know who is familiar with Mexico would agree that Mexicans consider their blood to be a race, their nationality a blood even more than their color. Unless they are Mexicans who call themselves Spaniards. These are spoken of, but I've never met one.

Mexicans are proud and their pride or machismo whatever creates a particular sore spot around anything involving language, especially the Spanish language. Mexicans are more self-conscious about their Spanish around Americans than Americans are self-conscious about their English among Brits. I lost my virginity to a Mexican man named Andrew.

He took me there not quite willing because not quite understanding but would have been and acted as if willing and became more than willing again and again and again in the coming months and year. He spoke an ancient language, studied French and philosophy and told stories about riding whales and shitting in his snowsuit to stay warm having fallen into a crevice while scaling Mt. Whitney.

Another Mexican man convinced me to move 2000 miles to be near him, forbade me to drink at the cost of immediate homelessness, would not allow me to cover myself above the waist while in bed, and infected me with hepatitis B. After meeting me for lunch in Los Angeles's "Ragland," his boss pointed out my splooge on his designer pants.

Finally I met Vic at a Silverlake AA meeting and by the end of it we had our hands on one another's knees as if we were already going steady. It was pure, beautiful lust. He got out of the car to take a pee near a cliff and I put my arm out the window to hold his dick for him. Vic's mother had a tree dangling with doll's heads. He handcuffed me to a bed and opened his bedside cabinet, which contained a hatchet. He took out the hatchet, and I said, "Now you're scaring me, Vic."

But before that we had a couple of years of blissful cohabitation and some hot, nasty sex of the variety only two gay men who had survived the 70's could know and appreciate. I moved out of Vic's for a reason I don't remember, but it wasn't because he tested positive. But he thought it was because he tested positive. Even though I told him it wasn't. We had the hottest sex ever, and he was at least 9 years older.

Then briefly was the boy I went out to dance with in the heyday of Chicago dance house clubs of house dance. His mother made us turkey with onions. Sorry. He was from Bolivia. I could segue into the most beautiful man of all, a Brazilian, or an even more beautiful Cuban man I dated after an encounter in a marble and chrome department store men's room in Madrid, or the Mexican-American Blackwater goon who was so beautiful I accused him on the dating site of being a sham, who bought me an outfit to wear around with him and let me make him cry at my kitchen table.

The other really buff Mexican which was really just a short term relationship was a pro body builder on some serious steroids with a temper so severe he calmly described beating up his neighbor simply for stepping over the property line. He drew me a bath once with one of those tub jacuzzi mats lying on the bottom of it and plugged into the wall and I did not want to get in that thing. We went on a trip to Baja and he got mad during breakfast, dumped my duffle in the parking lot and took off with my house keys in the passenger side cup holder of his jeep para la frontera. I had to return hours later on a tiny crowded bus with a dirty diaper stuffed in the seat-back ashtray.

The last significant Mexican intimate I can think of lived with his siblings and mother, the youngest of the family in her 30's, all saving and or spending their grownup incomes on whatever they liked, none almost ever home to use the pool or the immaculate bathrooms. Again it was all about this guy getting his papi in and that's that. We were in Palm Springs and he got out of the car to talk to some tawdry foot cruise traffic and disappeared.



by Hoolie
"Thanks for the memories Vic."

Viejitos enamorados

fag palimpsest

today's date seems hyperbolic, out of control
that the rush to this number made a whiplash

yet i'm a fresh ingenue on the go in the know 
the limber can bend to degradation and graft

i hear this howling wind at civility's warm tip
no executive function to animate my skeleton


by Hoolie

Civilian Parking Vigilante

Hello I'm a CPV and I don't particularly like the way you're parked.
No as a volunteer I merely observe and report.
The word narc refers to an anti-narcotics officer, of whose numbers I would be proud to serve.
A snitch is someone who is involved with the perpertrator; my only involvement is patriotism.
Choose to use that type of language with me and you'll end up in a cell for a very long time.
I already know that the combined force of the PD and court system is on my side, same team.
I would not wear a body cam even if I were on payroll; it would infringe on my workplace privacy.
Yes I suppose that does have advantages for both sides; I mean either one of us could...
Shit no...!

They II

They relish the hope-to-die thrills of off-roading and extreme pain relief.
They'd rather burn down their city than see it usurped by other citizens.
They hold tradition in high value or contempt per their convenience.
They resonate with team sports, commercial mobbing.
They see entitlement in wealth, greed in poverty.
They're enraged by windfall and celebrate loss.
They foresee outcomes, not repercussions. 
They favor the red ant/ black ant analogy. 
They find merit in ends, not means.
They conflate truth and emotion.
They're sentimental about God.
They equate fortune to merit.
They equate merit to fortune.
They think they do God's work.
Their emotion is also their truth.
They see smoking to their own ends.
They reach out to color not lack of color.
Their caution gets trumped by brute force.
They are indignant at loss but not built to win.
They mine poverty and privilege alike for riches.
They cycle, golf, jog, for real or on machines, joylessly.
They trace precedent before each step but don't foresee a rest point.
They let the city burn itself by tearing down its walls and holding noses.
They might parachute, sea dive, or helicopter through the Grand Canyon.

Your graphic proxy

Baby jesus in a ditch

the tiny arms hurt
seeing that, infant
civilization that
seeded, cashed out
between the rest
stops eighty sixed
full-of-piss peanut
butter jars adjacent
his tiny dick, white
glow in the culvert
your face is slapped
too clean to grift
just a comic waste

Temporary nature of art

years later they see the light
but only the largest quasars

one wrist so soft it lasts a life
quiet as the cattails where a

baby can float, be found, not,
become king or food for lions

lose touch with human bodies
that belong to who you know

abut and cooperate in pods of
nobodies, also talking into air

race of the elders, some ugly
these are my new spirits now?


by Ken
Wigwam #3
Webelos Wolves Weekend
Chukkachank

Methane

it burns to speak or to be silent so speech is not the fulcrum but rather itself the burning. the burning is the enemy and the enemy must be burned. burn their speech their silence while watching silently.

watch them secretly, whispering their frailties; they will fail. Fail them openly as a sign that a limit has been breached, a singularity. H/she whose issue burns need not be burned if flammable but not fire.


Illyn
"I'm short for Illinois."