Any single lover

it's only 11:30
but my night is over
and it won't be getting better

reminds me of the time
i made out with a man
who turned seedy and spent

i'd like time to
be there to make you
want to get to more time

by no means will i

give in willingly to sleep

it must win me over

 

nor will any single lover

dictate my ups and downs

or cause me troubles

 

 

 

by Donna

can't go back/ have to go back

can't go back/ have to go back

still beat up/ they're on task

boat that spins/ must join in

 

out of doors is a hot griddle

other persons burn too hotly

i can diffuse their iterations

 

from within these walls and

tunnels/ can't stay here/ can't

leave, reaching way beyond 

 

my fingertips what i can feel

is read only/ listening trying 

to jaw the words correctly

 

i want to stay here forever/

this is not at all what i want

too hot/ stay in/ want not

Dr. Donna Thong

Center for Therapeutic Re-credentialing

Rm 409

Television leaked into the vacuum of my inactivity

Hunched over an ancient glory hole in one of their urban sub-baserock ant tunnels, pressing my eye very close, I could see a television. Its sounds and light began to leak day by day into the vacuum of my inactivity. 

 

I can feel my emotions getting on the roller coaster provided and off the one that's in my head and pretty soon, one is just a template for the other, but which is which?

by Reptily

Moral Crimes

The poor make truer friends

or lack of means starts trends

that beg the path of more security

in that the opposite of debt is money.

The rich are fickle and strategic

needing all the more to shirk the tragic

prone to see the emptiness in bounty

but always find the energy to count it.

 

Being in the middle you're suspicious

Poverty becomes your real subconscious

you notice tiny fluctuations

and the moral crimes of rich and poorer nations.

 

 

 

by Reptily

Sincere Little Face

i was at least gonna 

log in an

leave some pathetic

message to no one

but then i remembered

ye are already damn 

complete in Him

and my song carries on...

i got my grrl with her

little sincere sleeping face an

glowing red nails 

from the rag weed an the

 

biting flies she's ad-

mittedly an animal but ya

could eat her up like a

cannibal and every little

 

move that she makes

is worth a second take cuz

she sleeps by my side an

poses for greeting cards an

 

deals out the faces make a

grown man cry like it's

his own baby child looking

up and smiling missing a

 

tooth but pushing

through the discomfort so she

can be there for you an be

there for you there for you oh

 

CHORUS

my child's got me got my

eye got my face got my

eye got my taste my child's

got me got me in her embrace

my child my child my child

REPEAT

by Hoolie

Peg's Failed/Anachronistic Do's and Don'ts for Petty Transgressions

• Just hold the item(s) in your hand and walk out the door with it/them, purposeful but unhurried. Then if stopped, say, "Wow, I guess I spaced out. I want to buy this/these, but I also wanted to compare the price over at [name of other store at mall]."
• If you must flame while in a hooptie, keep hands well below the dash.
• If you are trying to get back more shiny coins, choose a teller who seems to be flirting with you.
• If you have a lighter in your pocket, and there's another one on the table, use the one on the table, and then put it in your pocket. You now have two lighters.
•  Get the shiny coins up front, but make sure his purse is close by in case he wants to add items or go off menu.
  
• Press a dab of his pre-cum between your thumb and forefinger. If it's tacky, use a condom. If it's stringy, you're good!

Take these to switch up sleep type

story-verbal sleep

itching-layered

many-roomed structure

places on maps

view from grave

view from above

view from a passing conveyance

figures beckoning

bent coupling

generic horror

deeply unasleep

torque of somnolents

conscious paralysis

tandem breathing

ever sinking

scary clear

content bemusement

seeking moments

stranded in time

able yet not able

about the bed

night shrouded

stark light black curtains

sweet avoidance

stolen

form of eating

brain stuff

closest listening

despite discomfort

ring of saturn

bobble head

I thought it was all over and then woke up to a whole other day

Yes, I used to contemptualize everything

like the bitter, curmudgeonly professors at

the beginning of my career. They filled the

smoking lounge with grievances and

plotting, derisive cackling in their blur of

fear. But for some the failure has been a 

tenderizer, the corrosive beating toward a

climax of surrender. Is what I'm hearing.

by Peg

Murder grinder

My face was smeared across all the killings

one of them

killed when he'd temporarily forget how to type

innocence stuck in back corners presented as 

stupidity, passion

a mocking deadly innocence put mildly

nature predating pre-forgiveness

unchanging through ages of moral fashion

 

But when they think of murder they see me

I believe I have to tickle them with it

They feel they need to get all into it

I am this free-channel boatman

skimming along

living my life with all these dead along

keeping my eye on what can change

not what's done.

by Ted

The better form of sight

i like to hang myself by the ankles

over the River Plaque, and swing

and watch the sky rock up and back

 

where nature's harsh incense rises 

from tiny clouds with dark edges

fertility independent of relationships

processes do better without light

blindness is the better form of sight

among internal organs is the eye

by Ilyn

"Short for Illinois"

Crappy lighter

births could no longer quell my pregnancy

too many selves were building inside me

i can no longer be always in delivery

 

so i bought this crappy lighter to keep me lit all night

i stand vigil for the principal inseminator

like a lover i will greet him and then end his life

 

 

 

by Peg

rally

Devotees prepare their villages for the master's arrival, readying the alms and gift bandages. They will drape his cart and his dog with wide loops of marigold heads and tiny copper bells strung together with yak thread. They sit in the sun among the striking shadows of the columns in the dusty main commons with their baskets of wool and wide combs and wheels stringing the marigold heads and singing about Ilyn. 

 

our master rallies through our hearts and towns

always seems to think he's never been

pledging to remember us forever

lord ilyn is a part of nature now

he comes in the spitting rain or gloom of spring

he grips our fingers like a newborn child

 

he comes along on a static summer noon

laughs at our familiar terms of address

drinks our autumn vine from the same 

 

bloody cup and passes it around

until we feel again eternal kinship

some will follow all the way to Mthyuh

This, here

The shiv will put you into a nightmare you can wake up from as opposed to no-shiv, which you can never wake up from.

I'm on no-shiv. 

I'm sorry. 

Don't sweat it. I was born that way. 

Is that what you were. Born. 

Yeah my mom

I know. Her name is Jan Jansdaad. 

Was. But you're right, we're all Jans.

I wish I knew more exactly how I came to be. The mode of arrival, that is, not conception. 

Whether you came out of a lab dish or a lightning bolt 

I am still coming from there

Either way you are this, here.

Turning back

The last rings of sun, with the moon surrendering backward on its rocker: it's a scary light in which to lose your dog. Only the tiny desert vichos can hear Ilyn whistling for Shab. 

Showing up unapologetically late, Shab seems happy to back the cart right up to Ilyn's charred and bloody heap near the decomposed granite pit he's crawled out of. 

Shab gets a kinky cord of hemp wrapped in his teeth and pulls, and the door on the back of the cart falls off. 

Ilyn then has to figure out how to get into the cart with the least amount of pain. After all, he is not a martyr. 

A quiet darkness surrounds the pair except for just beneath Shab's hooded forehead, where his eyes are lending just enough red light to see the flecks of cement dust in the air. They would turn all the way back around to the sun again before they'd even find their trail.

Paroxysms of sincerity

Jan Jansdaad is driving along and thinking what if I lost this hooptie. What if anything happened to it at all. We'd be on our way to the next lower rung of economic class hell... 

Wait a minute. I'm back. All the while La Chama must have been leading me towards a hole to The Crack. She knew I'd have to return, at least for a moment, just to see. I see I've been to pharmsupply-- I've got a live bag of hopinaskippina. I'm headed home, for whomever I find there. But what about my daughter-- will she take my place? I just wish we could be all together and safe with descent health insurance. 

Then there is a prick near the dew claw. Lloyd? You're drawing my blood. 

Not at all, Mrs. Jansdaad. I'm just cuddling here next to you while you nap. 

Jan? 

I know, Mom. He's from pharmsupply just like daddy said. 

Now wait just a minute, ladies. 

You're only here to steal our genes and spy.

Oh I'd say it's been quite a lot more than that. I can take you back. Get you reformatted. You'll be an in-between type, like La Chama. Small enough to fit in human structures. Strong enough to

To power one of your slave K's with my brain, as your slave. 

It's not like that anymore. We're finding new ways to

To use our natural bodily processes for the greater appetite. Our suffering is inconsequential. 

Ok, you know what, you guys? I am getting really sick and tired of walking around with a completely open heart to each of you as persons, and you know I kind of feel like that Begging Rajah, with so much, so much to give, and... no hands. You just scheme to cover up or push your strong identities. What about my purpose? Who am I?

Both Mrs. Jansdaad and Lloyd avert their eyes and tighten their lips. One concept they can agree on is the adorability of Jan and her paroxysms of sincerity.

The Begging Rajah

You say that Ilyn is Shab's "new" master. Who is the old one? 

You might have noticed that on Shab's back is an empty saddle made of the finest mantua. It was the seat of the Giving Rajah who became the Begging Rajah but is now the Perpetually Sobbing Rajah. He was so giving of his riches that he even tried to feed gems carved as lady bugs to a living monster poinsettia, which of course bit off his hands. For a while, the raja tried begging from the back of his formerly proud and now ashamed dog, Shab, but it was no use. Shab's eyes only began to glow red with the shame of his master's indiscretion. 

Finally the begging rajah was able to give up begging and live here in this place of death and peace and learned to take on sorrow as his only sustenance. If you look over there in the shadow near the gate, you can see him holding himself up in his grief and sobbing against the stones, having just seen Shab wander off once more with the cart and the redundant saddle. 

Passion of Ilyn

With La Chama off to help Mrs. Jansdaad find herself, Jan and Lloyd find themselves wandering across the stained plaza the morning after Night of Shiv Days. There are two kinds of stains between the cobblestones: the blood of zealots, and the purplish marks left by the shiv left by the K's. Some flekes have scraped it up and made shiny coins selling it; others go on to sell their stories of being scarred by it. 

Lloyd and Jan enter a random alley which becomes an artery that leads them out of the town center and into the Graveyard of Gay Guys. They buy some sausages of vicho and tubes of vine from a vendor and rest against an ancient tree. 

Soon, there is a groaning squeak, and then a thud. And then again, and again. Uninterrupted in their chewing, they watch a dog and an open cart pass into their line of sight, headed for the far stone gate leading out to the countryside. 

It's Shab, says Jan matter of factly, with her new sense of knowledge. That cart he's pulling is thought to have been constructed before the invention of the wheel. It's rotors are hewn square, so they buck upward at the corners and lurch forward coming down on the straight parts. Shab seems to pull it effortlessly, his feet barely touching the ground, if at all. He'll wander in that wasteland until he sees Ilyn surfacing through the rocky scrabble. Dogs think anything that moves must be alive, and if it's alive it must be food or a savior, and that's how he finds Ilyn every time. Shab finds Ilyn and then pulls him along in the cart, which, in all its heaving and jangling, is the only rest that his master will get until the next ascent, the same ascent, to Karihr-Kesh. 

It's reassuring in a way, says Lloyd. Ilyn seems to suck up a lot of the pain around here. Is that what he's for? 

It might be an unintended effect of his passion, answers Jan.

Mthyuh, Tray of Ashes

Ilyn sprints past his single-file train of devotees on the jagged trail up chank to Karihr-Kesh, the sacred springed platform jutting out over Mthyuh's hot mouth. 

Standing at the edge of the Kesh, Ilyn drops his robes and bells and marigold garlands until he is strikingly naked and white-grey because of the scars. His skin is scars upon scars from head to feet. Only the brilliant red hair can break through the gnarled scar surfaces and stand out against the blackened rock faces. 

His hair and cement-white bottoms of his feet are all the eye can see until he seems to be consumed in the black crustiness of the lava below. The devotees crack rocks together and blow into stone pipes and sing.

Charnel nest

A charnel nest sometimes grows around the entire top of a chank as fresh bones are added, wet. They dry while lashed to the rest of the structure with the sinews of the worshipers' bodies from which they came.

Off course

They've chosen an open volcanic meadow in which to relax and reflect: a topless Chamatilly on a jet-black carpet woven by the Virgins; and Jan on her elbows, matching flaps of her wing tissue loudly snapping and billowing above like castle flags.

 

You see Jan in our culture we say that life is not only ours to feel and act as we see fit, but also to be custodians of the franchise. Duty, honor, sure, come into play. But I prefer to see the responsibility as owed to a future self, one who might suffer needlessly without my sustained devotion. Don't keep track of time, but keep feeding the Mthyuh every day. She is life just as we all are life. 

 

I miss my husband.

And you should surely go to him as soon as you have come to terms with the risks that will mean for the both of you. There, I am like a tethered freak who dances for rice. There, Mthyuh Protection Society have become complicit with Pharmsupply to round up our sisters to dissect and disperse and corruption. You'll always be watching your back. So go there, as soon as you have allowed for the possibility that your brain will be splayed open in an incubator and that your body will be thrashed by trees and slammed into chanksides, that Remote Tissue Decisioning will turn you into a great big toy for all the teenage sons of all the ministers in High Chank. 

I can try Hopinaskipinna. Or I'll make a nest for Jan and me and bring him whatever he needs. 

Of course you can. Of course you would. Or all of it will veer off course.