don't touch and don't look

 

X:

you have a dazed face narrowing your attention to the peripheries

as a fish looking ahead and behind might be the effort part

it doesn't matter where i stand because you are my object, not the opposite

i would torture you with language if i were much better at it

you are made humble by not having anything better to do

Y:

even i am your this or that sounds to me to be too self-referential

so i'll be silent to also avoid objectifying you with the word you

this is half a hollow ringing sphere also with a ring in its nose

there we go we is presumptuous but it he she all ok by me it him

i am attendant by accepting attention as one would rain

 

 

 

by 

Reptily-ily

trans. by 

Menen Jenral

a shopper forcus

tonight we're going out into the field, darling. far out. 

i won't see you again til the pictures come back

we'll point the lens where the world would be

had it not been and gone so quick

perhaps it still exists between the clicks

even our faces might rematerialize

thanks for the kisses but i fear i'm your salt lick

hollowed out on one side and more sensitive there

where the wind passes through i glimmer

my elbows operate as if by riding straps

with your shit i can still pluck the unfrozen grass

my knuckles are warm and let me tie the knot

but a massive arctic front is imminent

i'll stand in the kitchen window to watch you squat

by Jan

Tonight's dog walk

 

flashback three days it was a

half moon with a blade on the flat side

then came the self-imposed blur

an off angle of mismatched crescents

suggests a circle but

now it's joined up with other forces

also in their glory if for an evening

Toris, the horoscope lady in her fort

her tense prophecies about the weather

the lottery is now our widest belief tent

into the dark is where we went

passersby were spooked and silent 

we could only hear them in the grass

when they were already up upon us

pedaled fast because it's become dry

i produce a plastic bag from Pharmsupply

and pick up lala's shit

by Jan

Tonight's dog walk

you can always plan for a fall but when it happens

the ass goes to ground fairly quickly

you live in more than one dimension and

you've got to be aware of the one you're seeing

 

upside-down world where the signs are all menacing

right-side up world where the signs lead to an exit

if not you'll mindlessly play along and fuck up

or get tripped up in the signs and become despondent

but none of that will keep your balls off the pavement

overall if you can still feel them you're fine

by Jan

"Chilly, still. Lala just stands and seems to forget her purpose. To evacuate her bowels, she has to strain against me on the lead."

Tonight's dog walk

 

a half moon hung among the branches

and behind the trees stained velvet sky

sent the children home but also sirens

they came in droves learning the approach

modified for pairs of teenage jackals

the tiniest possible skeletons and wizards

we could monitor the door throughout our wanderings

along the path that winds between the trees

but no one tripped the light above the steps

rabbit and seal parents confessed their plan

to consume the bounty of their charges' words

bypassing both threat and vulnerability

by Jan

Distillment of the Urge to Worship Illinois

Ilyn sits best he can in a lotus position as Reptily gently picks blood clots off his scalp and back and replaces them with a rub of mineral oil and bright yellow sulfur dust. Water drips from a shaggy black fungus lining the walls of the cave.

ILYN: My life force flickers like a spook bulb.

REPTILY: You have the miraculous but unfortunate curse of carnation redundancy. You keep being born again, but uglier. 

ILYN: But what I can see is all beauty. 

REPTILY: Then you are selfish to boot. Never mind our horror when we gaze upon you. 

ILYN: I've proven my willingness over and over to disappear forever. 

REPTILY: By now you know it's only a ritual. It could never be the same as that first surrender. 

ILYN: Until I jumped into Mthyuh's roiling gut, I was burning from the inside out. 

REPTILY: Why is it. Why do others want to stay and can't but you can't go and stay away.

ILYN: Why do others want to stay and can't but I can't go and stay away? 

REPTILY: Yes. 

ILYN: My cross to bear is the mystery of my cross to bear. Flekes come to me because I am the most extreme expression of their own befuddlement. Like they'd watch a kid beating a doll against a fence. Ya, I am that doll, and I am that child. 

REPTILY: Ya I am that fence and you whitewash me. I mean I say you are full of shite. You are holy, another mystery. You'd cash your own mother into indentured servitude to heresists. Oh wait. 

ILYN: Ya look who's talking. At least you kept her in the family. 

REPTILY: She could do worse than collect shiny coins at volca and command shiv service on her own servants all week. It was her idea. She herself is practically a deity now. All life is contingent and symbiotic. Except for yours, Illinois. 

ILYN: Look at us. A pair of broken records. Have you ever noticed that my full name looks like a "no" peeking out from behind bars? 

REPTILY: With an s on the end. 

ILYN: Ya that's silent. You know what it means. Freedom. No to not freedom.

per Phyllis (embedded)

Seasonal-disorientative gravitational sensitivity

first lala started wandering in circles and 

pulling me along in her orbit and then i

felt so wobbly and we were both getting

magnetized by that tree that you and

i together couldn't get our arms around

but its power seemed to wane once we

stumbled closer stopped watched the 

beige sides of its fallen leaves return

ambient light but as if from beneath

so that there were mini search beams

reaching back as i bent over to pick

up the poo, and when i added my 

torch we nearly swooned again the 

ground tilted and we had to ride it

bent kneed the rest of the way lala 

was straining on the lead but not 

ahead, sideways as if to mark her 

value to be free but also bound or 

to bring me along to her agenda

striped with shadows in these lanes 

confounding cats for pumpkins for cats

while at home she will lie by my feet 

by Donna

As five boys overtake us on the sidewalk

i'd been farllowing their ruings fer halfa mall

when lala stop they caught up walkeen tall

lookeen straight ahead sep for eyes all starry

who turn arounan winkan say he sorry

because the harvest is coming up 

shadows are jabbing into daily life

a afternoon walk with my pup

turn into a tree with a knife

it's the planet's sickning turn tort

flame on the horizon you caynt

walk backwere fass enough or

evolve or spind or learn 

sure your clan presents a novel difficulty

but it's otherwise unrewarding

who wouldn't take easy bake up the street

or a pendant night on el capitan  

my path has not led to gender psychedelia

but i've come very close now to what 

amounts to a high-tech diaper fragment

and i can tell you sometimes: it's clumpy

Lillian "Lil" Modat

trama-induced attention deficit

i'm just saying words because i can't let you touch me

you know how you might mutter nonsensical somethings

on a train car under the roar resting on a man's shoulder

 

its the equivalent of a purr though i should know better

or a cocked-up night caller imitating dump trucks

songbirds must sing their garbage regardless

i think a dog wants to converse but there's no 

water in the dish and that's how much language

can fill up or satisfy your absent vacuum

blathering on a stool makes me an easy mark

because the words are just a placeholder for your agency

i give you all of these raw and unperturbed by care

all the sentences i have expressed have brought me

trauma-induced attention deficit disorder from their failure

as abjectly worthless as money or religious fervor

as open and sincerely as to share pips from a grove

i grant this empty meaninglessness for you to throw away

as soon as you can see me pull up in the drive

"For you, Peg."

by Phyliss (embedded)

Tonight's dog walk

take nighttime dog walks only in a waxing moon or if you see party lights

you can both track the stages with optimism 

avoid the panic of shadows dissolving in oil

projecting feelings that hope disappears

how likely is it to look up and see one ring glowing open in the cloud pavé

and arch your back and spin your face to find that 

you stand at the center and yes the dark has singled you out

while in fact you're stealing time from the night that you'll have to pay back

what were the words we left below that 3/4 satellite

why do those i do collect arrive at home

disjointed and unintelligible, snow back from a mountain,

a muttering pool behind a firewall of mist

By Jan Jansdaad

Highchank Jr. High

Homecoming Week Hangar Fair

Poetry Stall, Bench 12

No more-cum-forever

No more-cum-forever

all i could produce

after getting the news

was shot through with blood

i earned but didn't save

no white cotton briefs

-cum-air to breathe

not a drop for your beard

no signed letter marks

nor for sofa pillows

check your bucket seats

for the dusts of time

my-cum-yours

and this always was

every iteration

even the invisible ones

counting off elations

i still subscribe

at least in my 

heart-cum-mind

by Jan

 

RE-CAP'M18: He sweated it

 

Always ask yourself: how is this moment auspicious
Then remember who sweated all of it for you
See when he dropped it shook loose some shit and
Made him less valuable as bud (blood was 33%)
But more for humanskind to gather from lily pads
And cough up for Volca in the form of a shiny coin



from "Good Graciousness: Ilyn's Perspiration as Nourishment"
Children's Myth of Mthyuh

Better psych care

At some level they all knew they were bad and that the only good would be to wipe each other out and to enjoy doing it. 

There was also thanks to the shiv an intense respect for the individual spirit in each putrid violent body, sprites who were challenged to but could not become angels and were unavoidably and irredeemably sucked into the gravity of their hollow pelves, long fingers, and tiny manus.

"List of lists, I've lost my license." Jan spoke with her mind only, but it was real language. 

Peg: "You funny."

"I mean I really los... oh, damn."

"Ya they make them so thin they can get lost in a clump of pycnofibes on your ass."

Both: "Hahahahahaha!"

Jan: You know, Peg: I could just swoop around with you forever. 

Peg: That's what this is, this moment.

Their wings were on slow beat two, three times. There were no peaked or valleyed panoramas, just some yellow mist and greenish floor which both stretched out and curved down as if over a globe through all the angles they could see out of. 

My dorsoventral flap is really chafed. 

I like the vet-mix salve down at Friends' Urgency Hangar. It's practically a spa. 

Ya, I need to get my W.A.S.T.E. stamped soon anyway. I'll get the lavender. I know which one you mean. 

The day they started giving out Waiver and Acceptance of Social Toxicity Estimates to K's was the day they say we got our freedom. 

Better psych care anyway. 

I say volca to that. 

K's fly spread eagle.

 

Trans. by Phyliss (embedded)

RE-CAP'M09: love-pumping cancer

Cap'm dreamed of a bloating worm attached to his neck. It had undulating rings which were flesh colored. Its peristaltic ack-shone was conjoined inter-lockingly with a rhythmic swelling.

Soon it felt heavy on his chest and the music started playing. He was sweaty underneath its heaving breadth. The pitchur frames were bumping up against the paint, which was bubbling.

Someone, must've been Him, reached down to feel denim at the groin. Suddenly everything made sense and he was able to identify with his attacker. It was a... love-pumping cancer...

"Cap'm! Cap'm? Wake uhp! There's been an event!"

Au revoir dragon cracheur

au revoir dragon cracheur

poison divin de l'hypnose

fabricant de transe flamboyante

l'obéissance des zombies

impossible à domestiquer

en raison de la taille

sur le plan pratique

et pour lequel tu es destiné à errer

comme le coeur qui te remplit de sang

bat plus ouvertement que jamais

un jour tu pourrais de nouveau

poser une silhouette puissante

mais ils t'ont coupé la langue

mais vous apprendrez à exprimer votre 

dénigrement d'une autre manière

 

 

par Santorabo 

Greasy little aryan

He was a greasy little aryan. During that first meeting at the goat ranch, I posed and framed in ways I thought would get his eyes to drop. Finally I realized he was more sophisticated than that. He used his peripheral sight, which had developed throughout his awakening years in a red state, to map every bend and notch of my visible surface and behaviors, to precisely gauge biological changes. We were alone in the bread shaped tube of a trailer home. 

He rested back on the kitchen sink and looked around like a good worker still in task mode. I felt free to stare directly knowing he could see that too but respected feared men me too much to make a move to get to work on the project about which we were both entertaining growing visions.

He smelled like cooking and flannel. He was channeling desire into rage at the spitting llama he'd tried to shave that morning. He'd like to chop its head off. See it run around with just it's neck swaying about. I swatted the fly on my levi's with my hand and left it there. 

We each had our end. Thinking about ways to get to the middle. The middle of his face was a goatee on a tan around a roomy mouth. Now he was talking about the island that breaks the surface of a bath, with the palm tree and grass. The center of the island. What had I missed. 

When I looked up I could finally see his blue-gray stare right on me, waiting for a reaction. I just laughed and started unlacing my boots. Ya he says after all the goat piss and bullheads i bet you'd like a shower. 

Naw, I'm good if you're good.

por Santorabo

Depends on my ass

When civilization's crass, who'll step in to up the kitty? 

A man spends a life with the world's elite on the same planet

What can he give? What is the answer? Depends on my ass.

Everybody's riding on it, the skills I bring. I feel the responsibility,

What can I say do now with the weight of this knowledge a

big load of memories across two centuries, the first step into the

Future depends on my ass. Now I can't look around the room 

and say oh yeah, well of course he has a prostate, he has a prostate,

and yeah he probably uses it all the time, I can be that way but

Depends on my ass is not going to change, at least hopefully 

not more than once a day. Depends in each new day. Depends

on how it goes, and whether or not I'll have dick to say about it.

 

Ayre Fromme Diaz

Peebagger

 

They asked to be spared from predators

dear god please help me find my way back

last time i didn't know where you at

keep me in a place that's proofed for pain

and then i wake in this room again

soon as i got here i understood

chaos is out there and in the blood

freedom needs a template to lay down

a flag or stake to drive in the ground

i built a log cabin of rhetoric

just like my forbearing eccentrics 

they asked to be spared from predators

i must submit to my editors

by Donna

Institute for the Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

Chukka Chank Center 

Community Week Poetry Festival, Table 7

Miracle of Light

i walked with lala into the black area where we knew the park was around 10

before my eyes adjusted and after we entered night's shadow i inhaled sharply

and deeply and as the oxygen hit i could see better and confirm by standing 

still with my head back that ya, there's hardly any stars due to light pollution

but then i picked up lala's shit with a plastic grocery bag and started hoping

that my mom didn't ever feel as guilty about me as i sometimes do about lala

how i know it would be different if she was a child more love, complexity

but also that it's the love and not the mistakes, regrets that fuel your worth

 

now it can't help but occur to me how severely light pollution can infect 

what might have been a lovely inky and terrifying plunge into the only

vaguely known or previously noticed in actual physicality rather than a

virtual prance down a rutted lane with the miracle of light all around us

 

Traducción por Joél Barbillademacho