Sunday, September 20, 2020

Disco nausea

time seems to be standing still
not sure how i'm sposed to feel
i'm smoking to help stand back
but i keep ending up in The Crack

my hatred for you is all i need to keep going
any time that i think of your face it keeps flowing
you reeled me in like a sweet candy striper
taken in by the expressionless mask of a viper
 
it started with just us the two
then another while i was at work
then while at home with the flu
it was easy to guess who you pork
 
 
 
 
by Donna

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

RE-CAP'M: GHOST WIFE -or- The Anothers

It was clear until my third or fourth call for repairs that the landlord and his girlfriend, who wants to be a wife, had agreed to always come over here together, never alone. But then they started getting a little cute, and then a little tiffy, about how he'd replaced perfectly good radiant heat for ducts, which he'd slammed in himself during his twenties, anxious to get the bar done with the Smoke-A-Lizer and the deck right there on the creek in time for the wedding, and then a prompt and open-ended fractalization of subsequent drinking + nature-related gatherings.

Then, (I guess) Mike showed up alone to adjust the furnace. I said is (I don't know) Janine here, and he turned to hide his face mumbling she didn't wanna come in. While Mike went to check on some knuckle marks high up on the face of the fridge, I slipped on some clogs and waded through the front grass to their low-slung truck. That's where I saw the figure. Its silhouette was undoubtedly feminine, all dressed in white, fuzzy-edged. It was perfectly still, but the energy was tense as if it could manifest in horror without warning. Getting closer to the passenger-side window, I could now see that it was-- just... Janine, texting, in a terry turban and robe. Why don't you come in and have some coffee, Janine, I asked, stupid not to realize that she hadn't even made up her face. I don't WANT to! it screeched,  banshee-like.

In contrast to Mike, my ex-fiance had been fastidious about dampers and grumouts measuring tightly up to their flush surfaces. He didn’t mind poisoning house mice in the most painful way, for example, because he’d already done his part to responsibly and reasonably keep them out of our sphere; if they persisted, they had to be overly-aggressive anomalies of their species and therefore ok for destruction.

I think the landlord’s companion wants to be his wife because she was so thorough about checking me out, did it all herself, is very efficient, you know, though it is his place. The first time he finally showed up alone, he squatted and duck-walked an entire stainless-face dishwasher, still part way in the strapping and box, mudroom to kitchen after having worked a 16-hour day or so, he said. Then Mike muttered something about before his wife passed away, and I figured that had to have been here, maybe upstairs. He couldn't seem to get the math right, even to the decade, about when and who and what. I sat quietly with the cable remote between my knees, just a dog and a green leather hassock between us as he wiped his brow with one of my dish towels.

That same shade of bologna pink except for around the eyes, they seem like they've both been liking their wine hours or countryside tavern rounds in their present neighborhood, near my last address, over by Tom's, maybe since she died, maybe "Tessa," of cancer, and he'd been living on his own; but no, the hardworking girlfriend had referenced having lived here by the creek as well... or was it just her air of anticipatory ownership through management, man management, and the exhilarating world of background checking other people's risks, the way she found out about me, hungrily engaging my references.

I think they must have agreed to always come here together, and never alone, because it's too comically common of a scenario for the landlord hubby to go and fix a pipe for Mrs. So-and-so, the divorcee or young childless widow, or widow/ divorcee with a sympathetic child, and what ensues. Maybe a shadow birth or a life insurance scheme. They must surely at least have passed some kind of bottle with their pants rolled up sitting by the water soon after Janine Wannabe came into his life endeavoring to replace his inferred melancholy with her palpable carnal and appetitive bounties, seeking to address her fiduciary insecurities with his plumbing and electrical business.

The thing is that this guy I dated, Zhann, is so swish on the phone, and he prolly still resents me for moving in with I guess I'm calling him "Tom" out in Brickhouse-Horseley's Craigs. Zhann apparently told my landlord's girlfriend/ fact checker/ whatever the protracted story of our perhaps having met on an app and I maybe prematurely being recruited as designated driver to his niece's Magnificent Mile dance-floor wedding and reception in the city. The anticipatory and self-envisioned Wife of Mike prolly put one and one together and said get smart, bitch. I don't care how butch he is; I'm not leaving my Mike alone with that fag. If anyone's getting to know the new tenant, it's going to be me-- because it could be fun. Or maybe a three-way. Drinks. Anyway not until after the spring (?) wedding unless there are already little rugrats bouncing about.

But then as the toilet/ furnace/ disposal-broken weeks clunked along (me a wreck fallen fresh from a dream life in a fairy-tale property) footstep-like creaks would follow my own going up and down the slick and narrow, high-gloss painted hard pine stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor, really not much more than a hot, musty attic, and cold spots and fragrant and rank spots would appear and dissolve unexpectedly in random angles and passages. One night I thought the washer-dryer closet doors would explode open when the European water heater turned itself on, blasting gas far more powerfully than normal, and the dogs startled awake to the urgent, mad attempts of the auto-pilot at igniting. I briefly imagined myself staggering from the smoldering ruins of Thornfield Hall in a flouncy, soiled blouse.

Raccoons started chattering and many other noise making activities that were less comfortingly identifiable. These invisible yet intensely present beasts occupied an alternate universe of drama, hilarity, and domestic corporal brutality right there in the same spatial cross hairs as my aging pets, tarnished silver, punch bowl boxed in tissue paper. The dogs drew crazy designs with their noses across carpets and into walls. The more needed repairing, the more I saw Mike, and the more he seemed reluctantly obsessed with hanging out, never at ease, always active in a pretense of punishing, grunting physical labor.

The fighting grew more intense, a real bag of cats. There was plenty of room under there in that choice crawlspace next to the water, where they could wash their hands before eating, presumably. Presumably after a conversation with the in-the-running wife Janine, Mike told me to go ahead and arrange the wild animal removal myself. I didn't go with the hot-daddy social media star whose wife had created a huge photo-and-video album of him bending over backwards, all kinds of ways, to get cute baby skunks out of chimneys. They charged $20 more per animal than another outfit called Animal Removal Service. ARS sent a guy clearly attempting to hide, with posture and garmentation, the textual contents of a tattoo beneath his ear. He pointed out that it's mating season, so two males in one winter hole is just asking for fireworks no matter how roomy.

I remembered entertaining the viewpoint of a determined and tiny-brained but essentially innocent animus undergoing a process of systematic extermination, even as it dutifully offers concessions and phones an army of sophomoric relationship interventionists, not at all conscious that its fate was sealed the moment it had entered the premises. I'd helped Tom pick out our sprawling, ivy-wrapped Edwardian deep in the summer while a total density of green was still sealing away the panorama of protected natural wetlands professionally curated to assure historical accuracy and provide stunning contrast to a former Tallest Building in the World, which rose from the clouds framed by goldenrod and tree-like daisy stems more than 25 miles to the east.

Before he'd told me that she died, I had my back to him washing my hands in the sink and explained I was just going to have lunch but that I'd just pulled a whole human head's worth of hair out of the bathtub drain, so I didn't expect to get hungry again any time soon. He sheepishly apologized, and I turned to look at his ruddy, close-cropped scalp and said I understood it wasn't his hair. Then we stopped talking, which allowed a menacing spirit to claim for a moment the unnaturally maroon, multi-legged glop in the bottom of the bathroom wastebasket; one might have briefly pictured a forest-green and rust pants suit over a smart argyle v-neck and many thin gold chains, a newly hennaed bushiness under a floppy wool cap, and snowflakes, bumpy lipstick and mascara, out by the mailbox, reaching in all the way to the cuff of her long beige driving gloves for some envelopes like the ones that still come for her, maybe Ramona.

Ramona Plantagenet -or- Current Occupant

I knew Mike and maybe his girlfriend or whatever he calls her, maybe "Janine," had been renting my new place out for at least a decade, so the flotsam and jetsam of all those bodies would be boarding-house anonymous to any forensic detective determined enough to search the pipes and corners and attic and creek bed and crawlspaces. Neither one of us though, I fear, Mike nor me, can help but identify the creaking, the ambiance of living but un-housed consciousness, the parallelism, an unfinished wish, the unsettledness, the strong odors, as anyone but young Tessa, the reigning past occupant in terms of prolonged crying out, of injustice (I suppose from cancer). This doesn't have to be spoken.

Even as smooth local gay boys, seasoned by their middle-class bullies, ring the bell and wait blowing vapor from their nostrils, their patient eyes bordering on expectation and then acceptance of either tenderness or relentless cruelty, talk up cable packages or gym fundraisers and shiver with desire for warmth-- yet nail their scrupulous feet to the welcome mat without asking to come in even during inhumane arctic vortices-- there, once again, helping himself across the threshold and stomping snow from his boots onto the floor he'd sanded, returning, as the result of his intemperate youth and careless workmanship, is Mike: repairing, rethinking, replacing, refluxing as if that nail had come loose every day for a thousand years before, but that he must keep on pounding until the nails are everywhere, holding every fly, sound, appliance in location. Yet the holes (means of entry) multiply.

I sip coffee or jab my fingers into the kitchen window flower boxes when I find he's here thinking of her and being with me and feeling how I feel for him and want to be her not now but back then. I sip and wonder if either one of us wants to be who we are at the time, in the year we are in; the calendar seems to squeak along like a room where a nearby fire's sucked out the air and there's sirens and neighbors in blankets with their breath showing, and then pretty, sunny days, then volcanoes; then it's time again to change out the furnace filter. I long for company now living alone again so soon after believing the mansion in the woods and its cruel master would be a final resting place, trying not to think about my inevitably over-confident replacement. I wake up not knowing where I am --but all throughout the day, and not from sleep. All I know is that I belong, and Mike belongs together with an-others who are not physically or temporally here and therefore not available for normal carrying on. This is what we have instead.

Monday, September 14, 2020

Key for name game

Awkward
Backbiting
Careless
Dictatorial
Entry level
Frightened
Geriatric
Hellbent
Illogical
Juicer
KKK
Loser
Machiavellian
Nerd
Omnivorous
Petty
Quitter
Rube
Simple
Talker
Unprepared
Vicious
Wimp
Xmas hater
Yahoo
Zitface



by Donna
(Dictatorial Omnivorous Nerd Nerd Awkward) 

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Combat pay

Worst tourette's in 30 years
I'm praying to god and then
try Braino and i'm back and forth
when somebody says, This is what
i can do: and a hand grips a lever
like you might see in a cockpit
and draws it down along with
every tic in my face neck and
shoulder, the whole circuit through
which i communicate and suffer
and click and point and decide, all
burnt out from the deviated septum
at the top of my nose to the preter-
connected jaw bone that won't open
and close right to the cervix in the
neck whipping around to the wet
wing-like struggles of the shoulder
blade to be free and finally dis-
located, all calm and moved only
by natural breathing and settling in.
Shab sits by arguing for extra
everything as if it's combat pay.

by Ilyn

Monday, September 7, 2020

Hispanic-themed plan

When i was sane i had crazy red jesus hair 

how it made me look like a flaming canon ball going off the edges of LaMthyuh

how i crawl back up through the rubble of endless punishment

but now my tourette's so bad and they won't give me clonidine cuz it sounds so

druggie, and the other PA says i gotta go back on the opiates so as to come down

easy, so i went for some nicotine patches and they only had 2 and 4 when what 

i need to even begin controlling the tic, which will result in a cervical injury, is a

12 to 16. So i got the 4 gum but it works for like 30 seconds and even my speech is

still contorted from the facial ticking, so i went back and bought a pack of lighters 

and some american spirit. now, as i had prophesized, i have the tic and a nico-monkey

on my back to boot. and eating desserts like crazy. every process of my life is disrupted.

When i went to the emergency room i was still on regular medicare so the hospital chain

i ended up at had to take me tho they prefer to keep out riffraff. Then by the time i was 

out with my four tramadols and a bunch of proton inhibitors i got dropped from regular

medicare and dumped into a hispanic-themed plan with the exotic doctors. I'm thinking countercultural though might be the way to go if i'm thinking there's gonna be a bias against my medicinal cannabis use at all the white hospitals with the five xtian stations to go out on and no msnbc.


by Illyn

Saturday, September 5, 2020

Thank you



I still don't fully know or understand what happened
but I still have a profound feeling like you
pulled me back from the other side.

After that I hung against a scrim
and engaged with energized groups of interlocutors
through the gauze

You took my belly in your hands and lightly
shook
with a pleased look at how simple it all is


Baby's on a spectrum

It hurt so much
but it wasn't spose to be
then it hurt me even more
cuz i wouldn't let him free.

i locked him deep inside
i locked him deep inside

i shut him in my car
and laid it on the gas
i tucked him in my bed
all up around his ass

i locked him deep inside
i locked him deep inside 

i put him on the porch
like an alley cat
i kept him in some woods
where he could take a breath

i locked him deep inside
i locked him deep inside
i locked him deep inside

Thursday, August 27, 2020

Go take your marijuana


Dirty white leather zipper Bible (he held the)

He was staying with his aunt and uncle
on account of chasing cans at the fair
so he had to go where they went
and they went to church at night
so they gave him his dead cousin's
dirty white leather zipper Bible
which he held gently between his thighs

Thursday, August 6, 2020

Lidderly broken inside

coming apart from within
physical connectors, structures
snapping and rolling
splitting, detaching ruptures

lidderly broken inside
i had mistaken the pangs for
"sadness," gut-level terror
a predisposer for suicide

will i get a new lease on life
unbiased by the part that's lived
stretching beyond the knife
return to a pain that's figurative?



by Jan

Saturday, August 1, 2020

Today's dog walk

Today a large turd was stuck on a long hair coming out M'Lady's butt, but as she tried to squeeze out the rest, the pendulous turd knocked against her ankles, and it scared her, and she lurched forward, which made the turd swing even harder to come back and spank her on her haunches, which scared her even more, so she took off running like a crazy rabbit in starts and stops until I and a plastic bag finally caught up with her. I felt bad because she had obviously eaten at least one of my hairs, which could actually cause a strangulation of the bowel. I'd say we both better get more serious about not only personal hygiene but also mindfulness around the jetsam and detritus we're always leaving behind in the form of our hairs.



by Jan

Friday, July 24, 2020

Perfick feminist death machine

what happened to me privately, converse to any choice i'd make

became performance through reporting as in a passion play, the

details of my victimization, and i say it that way as a nod to my

audience, who needed some blanks filled in, but also even after,

in performative description, so as to gather empathy

from ghosts, scarecrows, invaders, exploiters, the righteous blinded:

assault on me is now a thing that they can see and be seen seeing


i neither submitted nor killed because there was no choice to

make as an unconscious body, only a being state, target for a man's

acting out desire, fantasy, hate, grief, curiosity, lust, disrespect on

a responseless warm human figure who mostly can't see or can't

remember, couldn't move or argue race or gender, agency, consent,

the weather, how my choices got me to this, and his, our destiny:

knowing full well if i retaliate, i make it all come down on me again.



by Peg

Monday, July 13, 2020

flesh-coloured virus

it started as a virus but i didn't notice
since the color of the bumps matched
my complexion

i'd only seen it once before, and just
a dot of it, and that was on my father,
back of his hand

mine were few, but one on my foot
was activated during an attack of
fire ant itching

from there they flamed, while beige,
enough to startle any dermatologist
from commenting

it's as if they've looked and seen their
own lives pass before them in
shallow relief



Ilyn
Jornada de Banyos Calientes

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Difficult persons club

my non-traditional family
we were very immature actually
no one wanted a parent role

if you're talking gestalt, the
adult-adult transaction was
more about manly tool use

and there was the night
a creature tore shrieking down
the hall in a black slip

authentic expressions of socially
counter-intuitive archetypes were
contrary to easy

like any submarine of the
enraged, engaged, and
stuck on mutual aid

delight had to be wrenched
from a deep hard place and
cauterized in the pool



by Mike
Mike's Swimming Blog #Appendix

Tuesday, July 7, 2020

We bred them to forgive

I need an outlet for my
transgressiveness
so i don't end up in jail

they used to say that life's a
script you write
not the kind you steal

if i could choose the wave to
get swept up in
i'd be master of my days

if i commit to doing
wrong always
i will never fail



Reptily
Reptily in Exurbia  (frag.)

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

FOR TONY

1, 2, 3, 4...

how can you still look 40 when you've been 50 years getting fucked by murdering presidents
how can you be sitting down when a clock is ticking that's already taken my family down
can you let it register on your face after all this time the terror of having done it all wrong

you let them die
you're letting them
die, die, die, die

etc.



by Hoolie
"Read to the music you likely hear accompanying it in your mind."

Top searches for...


Saturday, June 27, 2020

Kick me out, and keep me out!!

I should have known there would already be a gay Paul Bunyan & Babe the Blue Ox series of X-rated adventures.

The reason I didn't know is that I hate reading gay fiction as a genre which of course also makes it hard to write both since I hate it and also having to reinvent the wheel.

Lesson: Every wheel has already been invented. Playing naive nobody will buy it. That you are so un-read. As to have no idea about it and also arrogant.

Once again I swear it's alright if you want to cancel me do it now, eat me first. I want to take full advantage of the benefits resulting from catastrophe.

Stop me while I'm still sizzling hot, boys. I've grown exponentially more irresistibly rugged (although now i'm reaching the top): Because too many bullies in gladiator camp

I'm a dropout. All my training has been direct and in the field, them or me, and when society was a child. A man's got no choice but to go it alone when he knows that

Any group he joins will have a remarkably similar percentage of bullies looking for a long-term relationship, and they will smell you and they will come to you.

Better taking them as they come on the street or in an office and take them unsparingly, as if your own life means nothing to you, in fact less to you than it obviously does to a bully

Neither those who are infatuated with you nor you yourself are a gift of or to society; we are the necessary triggers that build natural defenses that make pearls from

Grains of discord, hot with hate, covered over by hardening slime, an anti-semen, shadow excretion that enrages men, makes them crazy for about on each other.

And then there is Paul, alone with a super-human animal, which says it all.



by Ilyn
(and Shab, of course)

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Metaproject: Project List

I have only three thangs to say:
mm, mm, and mm. Mm-mm-mm.

The download page is infected with
malware.

My instrument will not play. It is
rendered useless without the proprietary software packages.

Momentarily the keys tooted like a "funky organ,"
then nothing, and all other sounds followed

into that electronic drain hole if they were even
being produced at all by that point

all music, no matter the source, was
ravaged

how ravaged was it you might ask?
I would say very ravaged.

To the point where the only sounds were
created by the cooling fans within the console itself.



Dr. Donna Spah-Thong
"Once a doctor, always a doctor."

Monday, June 15, 2020

I am a robot and I will save your life if you turn over all your worldly goods to me

We ask how some of the tenets of houseist theory can be extrapolated.

A houseist might set accessibility, for example, as a special category for cleaning evaluations. Orderliness or what we normally think of as orderliness does not necessarily apply as a best practice here. I know where my phone is because it's in the phone place. The phone place doesn't need a sign or assignment in either physical or digital worlds. I can't keep my phone place on my phone, for example, because it exists in my mind, which is after all a perfectly legitimate place to keep information especially when situations are so fluid as to render hand-drawn signs or even typed file names instantly moot.

Having crap all over the place can make good sense during periods of uncertainty and flux. However, be mindful of how widespread that crap and how big the sides like stress level to maintain it for long periods, especially after the bottom layers become resolved and have achieved waste or archive status, where the norms of "cleaning" kick back into place.



Donna
From "Notes for presentation proposal: Association of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement National Convention, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 'Hanging Out Matters,' 2020."