Friday, September 25, 2020
Loop [disco nausea 2]
Tuesday, September 22, 2020
subconscience
Sunday, September 20, 2020
Disco nausea
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
by Donna
(Dictatorial Omnivorous Nerd Nerd Awkward)
Wednesday, September 9, 2020
Combat pay
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
Dirty white leather zipper Bible (he held the)
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
physical connectors, structures
Saturday, August 1, 2020
Today's dog walk
Friday, July 24, 2020
Perfick feminist death machine
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
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
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
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
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."
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Kick me out, and keep me out!!
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)