Temple of Sass

 

brief testament

war really stimulates my war goddess 

my deep goodness that's feeling sour

fine drop your hemp trousers

someone's got to occupy the borderlands

keep them strong and be the first to 

cry out, or try and blend in secret witness

i mean kill, as many of the enemy as possible. 

to think of that is suddenly a thrill?

No it's the fire for freedom she moves me. 

 

by Reptily

Completion certificate

Aunt Jan has died. 

She had spent around 20 years with her vulva nearly on fire.

According to cousin Jan, there were repeated radiation sessions

and other horrors which she has detailed for us over time. 

For even longer, there was a woman who was not her partner.

For even longer, there has been a woman who had never been her partner.

We don't know if they were together in the final moment. 

Cousin Jan says aunt Jan was in excruciating pain, even while in hospice.

She also says it's a mistake to think that Man is good.

But she was talking about a totalitarian then. 

Today I had to watch another very triggering HR video about what else harassment. 

You couldn't jump to the test. You were forced to answer humiliating questions.

Some people like getting flirted with, but no people like being treated like a perp.

I spewed my filthiest most biased language at the screen as the little situations played out.

But sometimes I'm not in pain.

I'm in a female-dominated workplace where the mantra is just be flexible ok but what

the fuck is my job and how do i bill the hours? Who is my direct-report? I swear 

I will not sexually harass goddamn anyone. 

I can only return to aunt Jan's pink bare vulva.

How would she feel about a mandatory fucking sex-harassment vid? 

In her condition.

Where no man had ever been.

Do hospices require it?

Where was her lover Jan? Would they let her in? 

Like it's on fire. All the time. Even at church. 

Wait who's good who's not good it's triggering me. 

They say your employer will really appreciate your report. 

I know that for a fact to be untrue. 

It's all rigged my employer paid for this video and they are paying me to 

watch it again and again for the purpose of their own legal protection, and 

that's it. 

They don't appreciate anything. 

My employer's not even a person. 

Your god kills innocent people, or you're lying about him. 

That should be the lesson.  

by Jan

there's no we here

i includes all that i am including

aspects you surely cannot think of

when you look up my output or feed

cork, at the ports of local cacophony,

appears to take up words when i 

try and

speak

words

you, for me, includes all that you 

are excluding prospects for knowing

you better which may preclude our

ever getting together the way we 

should i mean assuming what's hidden is

way

more 

good

 

those who are not we are they, grammatically,

and it's cozy being exclusive that way

unless it, to you, means claustrophobia

and they equals the only ones who can free ya

i the parasitic twin enjoying too much of us

you and them, they

and me, I and 

you, not we

[loop]

Jan Jansdaad

All-sinners ground

Keep repeating: Now my ceiling for 

crisis is very high. Now my life is a

cathedral for mental stress-outs and 

physical breakdowns a place where they can

stretch and breath because the ceiling is so high that it creates a

micro-atmosphere, small only in comparison to our planet itself;

rain clouds may even form there, within the cupola, in August.

Now my ceiling for crisis is very high. 

each contender for the moniker will be scrutinized

drolly, with a sneer. or otherwise trod on, in 

everyday shoes.

Now my ceiling for crisis is high. 

approach much more authentically wry

contenders will be scrutinized

while i stretch, while i breathe, while i

sleep and sit and walk and stand and cry, 

but always briefly, not asking why

Now my cathedral for crisis is

filled to the brim with adjectives

with a devastated point

that doesn't even reach the picture line

even the shadow on the clock has broken

off; it colluded with rumors of crazy luck.

Now whatever time it is that's where this

temple can be found, temple of sass and

regret and malice, all-sinners ground.

by Peg

 

Career apparel

 

 

Ilyn on Shab/ Shab Under Ilyn

Congenital skull cracker

intermittent humming of hard drive resembles

distant ship in fog, but 

clanking buoy's peal

replaced by

cadence of Her breathing

silence brings too many 

default noisemaking issue

squeaky-high tones chords

sounds of ear

listening to itself

sounds that speaking apparatus

having been damaged abused

afflict surrounding tissue

pressure on canals chinks

astigmatisms of perception

or it was born fused on one side

upper and lower yapper

no option to rest disengage

on any day after

congenital skull cracker

 

 

by Tom

Ilyn on Shab Near St. Dick

Shab's mouth is splayed, consuming the environment as they go

Like the former rider of Shab, Ilyn's hands are missing. 

His spine is scrambled, his stomach distended, face swollen, ears like a bat.

2:22 2/2/22

 

Please don't do that, scar tissue

please don't do that, scar tissue

don't be the weed chokes his host

that's what free radicals are for

i want you to do the opposite of

arming up, favoring one side, 

drama queen, sky-falling chicken

it's ok to relax now, even to 

give in, stop resisting, live

knowing that you saved a life

by Braino

Body capacitance

you can see from hand mixing hamburger

that even dead flesh wants to stay together

throughout their existential disaster and

beyond, cattle wanting at a cellular 

level, same as drinking from the same 

pond, to bevel individuality, 

to fill the tank with commonality,

a temple of identicality that tempers

diasporic fears of wasting anger

at exploitation murder and dispersion

when everybody has a different version

of neutrality, destruction and creation

the ties that bind the stories of a nation

by Peg

Cruel facts of longevity

just sitting here, thinking about what i'd

like to share with a world of strangers

all of us floating, untethered by space or time

perhaps just that i hope your

landing place is kind if there is one

or that any endlessness refreshes itself regularly

 

when just floating one hopes to be in a 

company of well wishers if not wishes

coming true in a constant strumming

we must realize and gird our instruments

seek out the good luck and opportunity

already waiting in our personal associations

Dr. Donna Thong

"Recredentialing imminent."

Today's dog walk

you have so much you have to sort through what you don't want

possibilities are stacked in spilling-over boxes

each moment an opportunity to move forward

 

trapped in a mind a body that doesn't want can't won't do

sealed in brick and snowed in at the dead end of a 

street in a tiny imitation of urban settlement dishevelment

you need legs even to get the laundry accomplished

how to break out of the disuse overuse injury cycle

mix your targets among the physical virtual geographic

a hungry mind that prefers to eat sleep

a jaded palate that doubts and postpones

a vehicle loathe to cross emotional landmarks

by Donna

Today's dog walk

now she's an anchor on the leash

while i jog in place

low brown cloud layer but bright

long pees with the shoulder hunch

boys look at us

through the grainy snow mist

 

 

by Donna

Tripping

telling about a time when i was a

man fully loaded

is really sideways disrespect for the 

kind of stud i am now

one stem into reminiscing could also

draw a stream of horror at the

hungry animal its disregard 

for self-regard estate planning

this life wasn't yet a paradigm only

anti-paradigmatic yet

organized enough to fool a boy into

thinking he had time

my boot tracks in the snow are like

the bodies each a new step into the

cold delight of warm palm islands

we were an intimate crew

i have my colossal straddle over those

old-timey train towns and worn goat

paths in the gardens of other capitals

lonesome memories

now i am tripping off to glory

on the heels of my dad and mother and 

so many countrymen

so that the past may keep being fed

 

by Ilyn

 

Template

once your personality begins to blossom

you become more annoying

although you may see your

religion in all that you survey

that doesn't mean that 

religion must be affixed to everything

what is a handout

a handout must include public 

education, welfare, corporate

subsidies christmas and birthday gifts

litter to those who would

eat it

or honor honor that comes with no

religious affiliation or

indoctrination except for the belief

that government can run parallel and

not entwined with religion

though the law may have 

come from religion religion

is not the law

and the more you sing His praise

the more this becomes a scowly 

silent car

with passengers who'd just as soon

plug their ears with silence

mood agents conscious managers

want the poor to be less so

not that learning and learning to believe are the same 

not that they birth and suffer more

which is a religious notion

put forth and then abandoned by

religion religion when it was

all we had or when it was the 

government government that was 

the stick to the holy carrot

either of which can be fashioned with a

phallus but is it

godless is it godless if it's 

not religious

or what if it got started by

religion religion supposedly 

inspired by God a god who

is inerrant which must mean he

chooses the winners winners 

glorious for better or worse but

glory glory 

for better in the long run

for example would God choose an

idea that's religious over a

good idea that's inspired 

by religion and what man who's not a 

savage

is not inspired by at least one

religion and would not conduct himself

with a preinstalled moral compass instead of a

do-it-yourself one

or at least by his lower impulses which he's

going to know are the opposite of his

religion-inspired conscience

but there's a conscience without religion

way back way out there or maybe

closer than i'd like to think

a conscience born of stove touching

lingering physical pain

ecstatic sensory experience

recognizing flesh wounds pleasure

and extrapolating that to emotions like

loss bewilderment hilarity

a conscience that is and becomes a 

god by fashioning a god out of

conscience conscience that wants to use

the knowledge that led to conscience

as a templative more than contemplative

religion religion that frees and constricts

and annoys others and

steps on the rake of its purpose and

spirals into meta-perversions and

degrades conscriptively by way of 

murderers rapists

deprives minorities by ommission

grifters slavers exploiters

all the same sins sins that predate religion

religion so lonely so powerful destructive

gods that grant freedom only by dying

and quite probably not even then

 

 

by Ilyn

"Short by Illinois standards."

I could have been lidderly all the way into the next hexagon by now

apart from the especially remarkable moments their days kept unrolling easily and within the scope of relative safety

they moved on from one another's disasters grew to accept or tune out any resulting disfigurements

there was some pressure from the many many feet that still could be yet to drop

but this was a familiar and traditional pressure against which generations had developed mechanisms

their story was to live under new pressures develop new mechanisms or 

survive to tell of their sufferings

for example those ones who'd fallen through The Crack 

learned to live in their bodies but in our reality

but they had to come together in a circle

and talk about their putative worlds

they turned out to be places where suffering had a different definition but one that they could hardly remember

Periodical Insight

Vol IX.7.78