O moon, what kind of goddess.
Hours of yarning, mindfulness.
Windowed rooms take on powers
But a rabbit too is transfixed
this is what it would look like
if you could see the other nights
some men going un-included
blind to an inner circle's appetites
moments of free running fear
a gentle unknowing morning
by Tom
Vajra, spin! gently through the entrails
spear the cancer like a golden pin!
the motion of the hollow spire rings
each bar a chord and a prayer!
Vajra, there! kill before it bleeds
fling it towards a thousand cleaning stars
repair your entrance once you have retired
send me off to sleep through every door
wake me and you'll see my face no more!
by Ilyn
you can't buck the system but i can't help but notice the formality east of the mississippi
having been gone a long time it seems parochial and authority-aggrandizing
but as i say you can observe but you're not going to pitch a complaint in the cradle of civilization
but if you do you're going to come out looking like a freak in your jeep and your meadow hoppers
today we saw a long skinny fox like a cross between a cat and a chihuahua
it bounded to the middle of a fresh-mown field and rolled in the grass and scratched its ticks
it was in no hurry at all about getting to the tree line and didn't seem to mind as long as we kept our distance
it probably helped that we were the only other pairs of eyes in the park grounds
unless the giant owl we'd seen swoop through there the day before was peering from one of the oaks
it's a shame the animals finally get to come out in the sun and they're miserable with insects
they cycle through their generations ground up and given life again and again with similar results
except that kids these days seem to see themselves as the frayed end of a dna line
but i guess when we were young we also saw ourselves as a sort of final iteration
so you see what i mean the dump truck keeps on spinning out sludge that's so hard to crawl out of
that you're never even sure if it's stupid to have kids in a crazy world you're unequipped for
but the population of the world keeps increasing because fucking is just part of nature
but you cross the river and you can say that sex is part of a duty-chain for god and country
and no fences between the houses is supposed to help you keep each other honest
is someone coming to your door for sex and is that sex going to contribute in any way to society
will it be followed by sacrificial and largely performative outlays of cash for merchandise
not for yourself of course but for the kids the growing family scrawling out a tribe line
every wild spirit gets sucked up into a chain gang called Spirit Chain Gang but
the wild spirit is only in the songs they sing to get the work done faster and more efficiently
and the ones that get away get eaten up by the parasites that once were culled by bats and rain
Zaul Eikensej
Everything that comes out of plants, it's all over me.
My skin is hot to respond to the natural chemicals.
My dog is panting sweating out the particles.
This building is a filter referee
I have the apparatus to be clean
but i prefer to move through space and time
letting the adherence be unclung from me.
Umami Bhomb
supermarket's got more but
a little shop can show its
whole movie in one frame
cep the ladder to the soup just
keeps on going up and
soon you've added decades of
food and waste but now you're
floating in a non-temporal zone with
invisible borders and
irrelative placement of content but
who really cares how it fit before
Umami Bhomb
that fever dream
was just like a love story
i had to work out
while scratching narcotics
dream that i'm awake
that love story
was more work than worth
narcolepsy
stillborn consciousness
story isn't justice
those narcotics
one day they'll run out
while i'm sleeping and
transgress a story
narcotic-temporal justice
these workplace transgressions
narco-crime unit
dream of unwanting
story archetype
shame a warm reminder
Hunnard Peshupts
through anecdotal evidence and sheer respect for truth
i now retire my cock from service to the gay community
and may it rest in peace unlike the seventies through the teens.
i now concede this moment and have nothing left to prove
beyond the fact that i have been your tool for 40 years.
by Hoolie
They say because i breathe fire i leave burning ruins, and that just feels like an attack on my identity.
Yeah, as a frickin loudmouth.
Life is short.
And there's so much to burn down.
Then why are we just sitting here?
BOTH: Hahahahahahaha.
But no, really they say you split the eardrums of babies in Dubbaberra Chank.
I did some high screeching. That was a great day, but I doubt they split.
So why do you bring it up?
They are gene shaming me. They
Waywaywayway who they?
Legit news outlets, da-preests, what's spilled along the vittle trails... And it's partly that i'm gender-fluctuating.
That sounds dirty and inappropriate.
At this point they rolled themselves up onto their sharp elbows to look out across the meadow.
Zebras stood in their shadow, a vast jagged temple.
They are afraid of my glorious history, not just my beauty.
They are sick of your nasty-ass attitude.
It's called sass, and she's a legit spirit.
Is it a little blasphemous to invoke sass in an earnest moment.
Is it just as good to wrap your tongue around them and squeeze to make a fresh bone nest?
These are the rights of sentient airborne reptiles, but what are the responsibilities?
BOTH: Hahahahahahahaha!
Per Phyliss (embedded)
After seven hours, the surgeon had removed the laughing, multi-spoked cauliflower of a tumor from about 12 inches north of the balls.
But she awoke in recovery as Susan, full of vamp and sass:
Well, doctor. It looks like you're the man who saved my life.
She looked up at him leaning back with her bangs and with her legs as if he were the sun and she were in a bikini.
Well it's nice to meet you. And I only did my part on a team.
See how gallant?
Susan shot this at the nurse standing behind the surgeon. She meant: he's mine now.
Nurse smiles.
She meant: Bitch if you could see how your hair looks, you would not be channeling the spirit of Sass at all bitch.
Then Susan, herself a projection of Ted's own temporarily schizophrenic-hypomanic, gender-dysmorphic state, tried to become the man that she imagined the surgeon wanted her to be in order for sexual attraction to occur:
TED AS SUSAN AS AN IDEAL AVAILABLE GAY GUY NAMED JOSE-MARIA:
So are you a swank bachelor doc around town these days or home with a family.
DOC: My husband and I are raising our two daughters up in Allview Chanks.
As if smacked in the face, Ted returns:
That's wonderful. Thank you, doctor. I'll see you at the follow-up visit. Thank you so much.
Umami Bhomb
yall up on yo hippie scrip
always thought mao was a kitty littuh
sang holdie-hanz naykit when you trip
men's mean any bloody sistuh muthuh
ladies' cayn't say it cuz it disrespec
woma is da kinda lady dat my mama
dey nevah go out wit dey face a wreck
so sexy men are ending up with trauma
who nena whenan set you free
stepeen to da leyuf when iss me you needit
yall up on yo hippie scriup
you say I love ya like you really meanit
[loop]
by Jan
[To Jan]
It's always interesting negotiating meaning with you.
So you are saying that you have bpd?
I'd forgotten, maybe out of politeness, to ask you about it. Or a little out of not seeing a reason or a problem to solve. More information is better than less?
Here's a sample of my ignorance on the topic: I really don't see how pd's in general are much different than symbols of the zodiak, numerological principles, or multiple-choice industrial-psych tests for HR departments.
I once took a test that said I had all the disorders. What is my treatment? Maybe I should be locked up.
Some multipurpose drug. Of my choosing after months of chemical torture trying out different brands. Or none. What had brought all this on?
Other drugs. Life. People go to shrinks when we have discomfort of mind and/or behavior. Or cops, but that's not us let's face it, not yet. Some of us come home stigmatized and traumatized by the pharmacological drug-testing spree and resulting stresses on normal life which was already fragile which is why we came in to talk about our problems.
That's why I began the Institute for Talk-Therapy Apologists right down here in Chukka-Chank. Our Journal of the Institute for Talk Therapy Apologistics circulates into hundreds of libraries worldwide. We have a BS program that was first in the Lower Chanks to be approved for Common Mirror delivery while operating a motor hooptie.
Another thing I like about us, even though as you say no one can ever know you, I have to grab at some likeness, like a toddler trying to distinguish myself from the wall even? --what I like about us is our tendency to make unsolicited comments. No?
And for parsing out ideas/ sentences, sorting speech as one would if they were being critical in the everyday sense.
The results of all that are, indeed I guess those of a personality. If you see yourself and seek to know yourself better using the template of X set of symptoms in order to better predict and watch out for unwanted tendencies, how might that process apply to my thinking about you going forward or our correspondence? I am ok knowing or not knowing the answer to that question.
This is all my grasping, and it's for you darling.
To the volcano,
Donna
PS: Oh please just indulge me: fun game. Find at least five signs of personality disorder in the text above. I can do it: 1) #1 could be taken as sarcasm/ irony though it was not meant to be so. 2) #5 Takes a stance like all politicians are corrupt, so I won't vote, you know? An abdication of responsibility disorder. Doesn't have to be all or nothing. But I've read that's a bpd thing. 3) #6 Was it really "torture"? Is that like it was devastating that their grandmother died? Self-pity disorder. Or it was really torture. 4) Same with #7: traumatized-- really? Experiences are relative to other experiences in an average schmuck's life. That's how being yelled at on a patio at a cocktail party or a pig roast can be "traumatizing." Folks show up to Shiv Days fully armed and ready to do damage for.. less? More? No reason-- that's the point. Some signs of the zodiac might be more driven toward heinous crimes. One would always hope it's passion somehow but no, much creepier. Like ignorance. Should they widen the scope of topics children encounter in public schools from an early age? Let's talk. 5) #9 & 10 cross a line into aggression-- there's little doubt now that some suppressed interpersonal issue is percolating. Life is short. Let's not let it boil. And these are not to mention the potential pathology of any number of the other statements made here, including the non-statements and especially this very exercise of picking through it all. What is that about. Ok and have to say, #7: Hopeless Circle disorder. DDT
in these rooms that once were strewn with decoration
my spirit roams between the broken lavatories
a skeleton but now a template for the future
when you're alive you use the steps and open spaces
they encourage exercise as part of living
and now the freshest air is in those very places
those generations haunt me just as i haunt yours
presumably a gentleman could find the door
I commit to dying out this death with meaning
and since i never sleep nor tire for lack of pep
the actions i take now will count as double duty
and doubled once again with hindsight's added wisdom
There's a basement sure, but it's gutted. To the bricks, he says.
Soon after we bought the property my wife and I were a little drunk and decided to check out the basement with candles. We saw the ghost of a youth and a phantom locker.
And there was the shovel. The working end was raw wood but machine sanded, tapered to the hand.
The youth is pulling up his pants, a joint hanging from his lips, when a very tiny journalist, a friend of the family on furlough, also a ghost, enters the scene. She says she was looking for the locker. All her stuff's in there. Instead of looking down at the locker, the boy's eyes dart up to the handle end of the shovel. He thinks it looks like someone dipped it in a lake.
And being a journalist, the other ghost follows the boy's unexpected glance up to the tip of the long wooden handle of the shovel, widened slightly for about nine inches at the end, and makes her own conclusions. She then adjusts her concentration towards creating a privacy bubble with her tiny body (although she wore a large military jacket) around and over her army locker while she rustles through it, obviously planning to leave it there in the gutted basement permanently, making that entire gutted room into her own cheap urban pied-a-terre.
We didn't know what to say. To the ghosts. Could they see us? To each other. It wasn't threatening, but we'd never seen anything like it.
Jan, I think that was when we started healing. You know?
You're right, it wasn't traumatizing or re-traumatizing at all. More of an affirmation. A cartoon!
To me though it was also disturbing, sad.
I don't know. It depends on what mood I'm in. It can make me hot sometimes.
Nope, we've never had sex down there but we know that we could.
claimed she'd love to make me a bernaise
to compensate for the original burnt fish
sure thing, so first time i call back
restaurant closed but she answers the phone
second time she says she's not mary
by now i'm asking does she have bpd
she eventually confides that yes, it is she
just being worried that i was a salesman
although the restaurant is currently open
and got me to apologize
for my beautiful voice and convincing manner
well will you at least take my card
for a piece of pie and a tip for the driver
oh no, instead i'd have to come down there
i stood in the restaurant's vestibule
watching diners eat normally
no sign of anyone who could have been mary
i get to my ottoman and my remote
and the bernaise is at least a day old
trapped in a plastic condiment cup
the fish is upside down and swollen
but somehow it's all been sanctified,
the hard-earned spoils of a free-market system
Vicky Dekalb
I defend myself as
foolheartedly as possible
for as a team I am but one
it's not like I can say
shine it, someone understands
alas that someone is still me
i'm in jeopardy
every time I must assert myself
it may sound like a lady's plea
but I'm as male white meat as they come
a whale and a seahorse might meet
but in my case never two in one
(two things I am not I am two things)
[from this tangle, vapor slowly rises]
in what we call the orchestrations of a sociopath,
each stuck participant
does errands in a separate maze
and the passages are everchanging
there's only One who can see all
and it isn't God
who receives our frantic offerings
by Jan
they wanted to examine
queer lives lived loudly
recklessly selfishly
where fear is not abandoned
life comes naturally
in irony and erroneous
roads of tripping over
forward like a breaker
or cowering, ancient
stones grazing a lover
pleasure of solemn
dis-officiality, witness
duly wasted goodness
unterminality of each other
hyper-presence of dogs
dues unpaying and crazy
expending arrows meant
to bend to this universe
font of redundancy
stone won't roll smaller
or kill big here today
tomorrow's history, a
vanity, not a release of
more stomping foragers
onto a world unlearning
only to reappear there
by alternate delivery
Jan Jansdaad
After consistently electing states of oblivion over problem solving and positive forward movement throughout a lifetime, the subject asserts that he must not succumb to terminal illness because there's too much to live for.
The kind of exaggeration that reflects emotion attached to the subject more than the subject itself.
Assigning blame for lost items to supernatural phenomena.
Decision not to acknowledge intense physical pain during a chatty personal conversation.
Nope, come to think of it, there was a time before that. Ok, let's just say insane for more than a few moments, a sustained insane event. More than say 24 or 48 hours. Anyway, this was one of the times.
There was an adult bookstore in Silverlake called Circus of Books. First off, L.A. is insane. Everything that happens outside of a building or a car is tawdry, violence, drama, the ugly spectacle of life. Except at the beach, where it's all the ugly spectacle of life, inside and out.
Circus of Books was supposed to be a great place to meet guys, and I was lonesome as hell for a man. You had to go through like these saloon doors. You'd hear them creak, and you get a blast of hot shame sure as the AC effect stepping into a supermarket out in Temecula or Palm Springs. You're supposed to stand there and look at feminine buzzers or paperbacks until there is some verbal but probably just non-verbal cues happening between you and the dream guy. You know how sex works. Even your breathing speaks volumes.
There was a guy, and we did all the steps and somehow knew to just buy some gum and then meet on the sidewalk. Well, all the real estate out there was strewn with really drunk down-and-out sex-worker dudes, so we ended up just going directly to exotic maybe persian-y and cocky hot firm gentleman's hooptie to hang out. We'd both driven there of course, so I had to follow him after we decided to go to his place, and I remember thinking as I was coming up to a bluff above his subdivision and looking out at the endless mud-colored waves of rows of honeycombed townhomes that "I will probably never find my way out of here."
I wasn't crazy yet--that fear was reasonable--except probably I was crazy before even driving on down to the Circus. The insanity was just having a smoke in the back of my head and centering himself. But wow, what a man I'd found. We wilded out on his bed--I guess it was a studio--and then I attempted to pry into his personal life.
He was hesitant or feigned hesitancy and finally almost like I deserved it for being nosy, he says "I'm a hit man." That was like the first funny he'd made during the whole relationship, so I laughed pretty hard. But then his face turned to an open snarl. "I have a weapon, and I kill people. All over the Americas. South America, Central America, Mexico. I have a uniform. Do you want to see my uniform?" He went to the closet and pulled out a legit camo uniform, and not in a nelly way at all. With the other hand, he produces a military rifle with a sight attached.
My eye lingers on the ceiling fan's twirling reflection in the cantilevered scope mount's rainbowy glass.
Then we had sex a second time, which I never did even at that randy age. Then the panic started setting in. All I remember is driving away and looking in the rearview mirror at the honey-colored townhomes and knowing that I would never be able to identify the guy or which of those places he lived in if I ever had to call the FBI or whatever.
Then I called the FBI--from a payphone outside the General Hospital building, which is a hospital. I confessed to an agent--I confirmed that he was an agent--everything that had happened, and we both spoke in our deepest voices. This call ultimately went nowhere, but it seemed like I had at least completed some important action.
When I got home, I felt vulnerable. I was renting a tiny 1920's cottage up in the hills above Angeles Temple and hidden behind a 1930's six-flat and under Victorian bottlebrush trees which camouflaged the roof with furry red strands. Yet I could feel a target on my back. He had shown me the black rifle, the uniform, the telescopic lens. His car his apartment were completely anonymous in color; he himself could have been mistaken for nearly any non-white designation. I didn't even know his name. Perhaps Mario. So many Marios.
As night fell, garish shadows rose across the 50's B-movie posters in my livingroom. I dared not turn on the lights. I climbed into bed and listened for a long time. There was some rustling, and then a snap. I carefully pulled back the sheet and stepped into the livingroom and stood invisibly still, in my briefs, holding a breath. It was completely quiet now. So I had to be extra careful taking a few more steps backwards and over to situate myself behind my overstuffed chair in the corner. There, I ducked down and waited.
It felt great. Safe. I started to feel very sleepy. I was surprisingly generous in my lack of judgement towards how I was behaving. I gathered the courage to snap out of it and walk a little bit more confidently back to bed. When I woke up, pinkish sun permeated the same rooms that had been a scene of terror.
EPILOGUE:
For the next couple of days, I was alert and mature. I drove back and forth to work with the warm wind in my hair, accompanied by a new and easy peacefulness. There was the sense that I'd done something for my country, that perhaps I'd even earned my place in paradise.
I was relaxing on the phone in my little dayroom on a futon chaise and found myself telling a friend about a letter I had received from the famous author Tom Clancy. It was a response to a note I had sent him on which I had drawn a large purple swastika in response to one of his many public antigay comments during those days.
My grandfather, who'd been on the board of regents of a university, was once accused of nazism in a letter that included a swastika. It hurt his feelings deeply, so I wanted to try it on Tom. Clancy's reply was something like,
That's not a swastika. You drew it backwards. It's a blah-blah cross representing the blah-blah band of warriors in butt-fuck blah-blah white-people land from Century blah-blah. And all those Nazis were gay.
It was not signed, and there was no return address, but I wanted to save it anyway. I tucked it into one of the letter holes in my great aunt's desk. No one would believe that he'd written me a letter. That was the idea, I guess. He may have thought he was safe sending it so anonymously although my name and address were written by hand. It might still be valuable someday. Maybe so valuable that Clancy himself would get paranoid and want it back. Those paramilitary guys are crazy.
I was telling my friend ya, I have the letter right here. I stretched the phone cord to make it over to my desk, and there was no letter in the hole. It wasn't anywhere. The letter from Tom Clancy was gone. There had been no guests or cleaning personnel in my home. Only one night when I thought that I was being stalked by a hitman because I knew too much, was so sure that he was lurking outside my windows, but then got tired and drifted off to sleep.
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