Your Ridiculous Rage

What was it you said your entire class, country, county's eating wooden nickles or clanking along the road like tin cans tied to the 1%'s marriage vehicle? Like you can compare yourself and most people to the worst kind of traditional torture normally reserved for minorities sexual or racial? That a whole 4% of the population is sociopathic but only a quarter of them have figured out how to literally indenture and slave and drug and maim what was it, the great plains, population, planet?

But look what you're getting where you're standing as you complain. Free internet with your paid subscription to all your other property? Isn't it a little overwrought to belabor the work you'll never stop unless you stop working and rot in the revival tent of a target parking lot? Who says just because you love so hard and your people come from earnest good stock that you should get a piece of land or a pet or something to eat; are you a prostitute that goes around selling faith and honesty?

You say the little bitches from like 5 colleges in the usa get to learn how to charge all the rest for every part of nature we touch and the right to even wear our own skin to a backyard birthday party? That your grandmother's last three teeth throb so hard she can barely moan the last four of her social into the ear of the slob sucking off some middle-managing coupon fluffer? How did you explain the way to save up the refills for your pain meds the next time you get shot by a gunmaker and hold a drug sharing holiday?

Ken
"I'm waiting."

Black Boy

there's the street my father was named after,
but his father's spelling was weak. Despite
the error, we both carry the same initials,
but I'm not named for either father or street,
but rather the names of my mother's father,
two words so odd that he went by the letters,
so even i mix up my name with these others.

that's the building where an old boyfriend
lived to complain about the poolside clique,
and tonight i met a boy who lives in that
building, and he says that yes, there is still
a clique. But it can't be the same one now;
i said of course, pool buildings everywhere
must have cliques, and of course his does.

here's the school where i attended a class
on blake: black boy, urizen, the fat boy
sitting next to me seeping farts and going
out after to coffee with the professor; i'm
passing the gate now, and i look through
the bars on the fence, and it's not a school
at all, but dark rows of chiseled headstones.

Pathetic briefcase

When Letha wed a farmer aphid who tapped and bled her chi,
Hooked by the tender feeling hairs on her wrists to his wiry mesh,
My long career would finally end a constant homing back to me,
For a hero's arc, the way a whale shark blocks green the deep from sun,
A murky shade where only the good can see a blackguard run.

Now in this dusty corner lists, strewn with cables that fed a desk,
A pathetic briefcase kneeling on its own tanned flesh like a routed bum:
The number-coded clasp, always set for triple six, but by mistake;
The single stitch intact to cinch a handle, the yoke of a shoulder strap,
Drift blank as in a fog against the wall, not taking note of it at all.

Viking fart

Letha was born when the whole arctic cracked open, broke its water on the heartland
She skidded onto a rock with the waste of a crystalline breath settling in the trees
We found ways to keep her warm enough to breath tied between pack asses and sheep
when the heat of any one walking human body was not enough to support and sustain a baby.

We kept moving in the direction the grizzled elders read somehow seizing hungry in their sleep
When there was a conflict of opinion we chose the one whose eyes expressed the lesser horror
The lights at night were games to taunt the fools who prayed for riches from the colors
We ate the ones sliding toward us from the opposite hills sitting stiff in their leather toboggans.

The Magic Rag

The saran-wrapped salmon fillets at the top left of the heap were starting to turn soft and too dark a pink and I figured out that the whole opposite wall of the compartment was standing propped open, a feature that I was not even aware existed, but it concerned me more that someone other than myself had left it that way after helping themselves to my freezer and/or its contents. Upon further investigation it became apparent that the contraption had a number of other doors, almost like a snack truck. You could access it from any angle, brace open the various padded aluminum panels and even step inside, where there was a place to sit and a desk with some paper and pens scattered on a smooth, cool writing surface.

A clever looking woman was helping to point all this out just by following me with her eyes and the occasional directional gesture or fragmentary comment. She was down there in the basement, a marvel of cement beams and cantilevers and stairways and the type of square window panes in large sets you'd find in a warehouse hanging out over a river or one of the abandoned laundries at Alcatraz. The woman seemed to be not only clever but also very nonchalant about what she was doing in my apartment, which had become more like an impromptu immigration slum or silent squatters' co-op in a rusting high-rise construction project. Her hair was plain and straight but fashionable; her shift and flats clung to her like a ballerina's.

I had given up on the salmon fillets and begun to wonder where was all my furniture. Around back of the fridge was my front door and I started banging on it to find out who now lived there. A swarthy, mole-covered man lounged on some nearby steps with his knees spread, creating a slow shower of nut shells, some sort of loafered Romani pimp. I guessed he was in charge of assessing and collecting rent, and yet that he too had knowledge which could help to resolve my disorientation. He didn't protest as I pounded on my door, now a thick, deeply beveled salvage item from a ruined block of the formidable row houses you might find on one of those gracefully curved boulevards in London, a street you might assume continued on well kempt forever because of the humane manner in which it limited your vision.

After a very short spasm of unnecessarily dramatic thumping and shouting, another woman, less clever looking, opened the door. She seemed frightened less of me than by her humble situation in the space that'd once been occupied by my home, my belongings. I launched upon a speech which invited her to explain the plausibility of my entire living room, cataloging its contents, being carted off and replaced by her shabby and unfamiliar odds and ends which seemed to have been dragged to the site in haste overnight and left to sit and be bounced upon by kids without regard to either logic or aesthetics. She had her own problems without trying to recount how she and her entire single-mothered family had displaced me during the few moments between that one and the one in which I had decided to look and see what was around for dinner.

The clever woman had been busy folding and shuttling her ironing from one odd-angled cement alcove to the next in her arms or on a squeaky chipped and dented cafeteria cart. I suppose it was on her suggestion that I rocketed off to an open-air market in the clouds where, at the end of such a miraculous journey, no one seemed any more enlightened or concerned but for the everyday drudgery and meager satisfactions of life than they had been in the bare cold bowels, the modernist tenement, of what had become of my former life. I approached the very first pair of vendor ladies, resigned and sedate, their hair pinned up in back and casually scarved and ready for a day's business. I explained my situation a little more calmly now, already becoming lulled by rhythms of normalcy in a milieu of the strange. They both knew right away what I was trying to describe: my things, my place to live being stolen or having simply dissolved and reconstituted as someone else's just behind my back or in the visual periphery. The larger figure, in a colorful flower-print house frock and sensible robin's egg muslin apron motioned toward the woman next to her, a shriveled and perhaps later, happier but sclerotic, more tragic version of the clever dancer I had encountered earlier. The latter nodded politely and pulled open a light, wide drawer which had until then been hidden behind the polyester lace that shrouded their folding table along this avenue of tables where scavengers wandered up and back purchasing skeleton keys and weather vanes and pitted crystal balls on cheap plastic tripods.

The shallow drawer appeared to have been designed for baby linens or lingerie; the vendor, with all her dark and frail confidence, lifted out an embroidered sanguine cloth the consistency of a chamois, maybe with some added beading or faux-rhinestone applique. Her eyes, in their way, and with the help of her stronger and saucier colleague, explained that someone must have spread a similar square of decorative fabric over my head, perhaps while I was sleeping, causing my environment to be disappeared, to stubbornly recomposite itself, and that all I could do now was to purchase and to wear this corresponding instrument. A magic cloth.

In contrast to the long-obsolescent and weakly assembled scraps of 21st-Century ephemera the contemporaneous population had to work with for the plying of their trades and to stitch together a typical day, the mode of transportation back to the surface of our mother planet had evolved beyond my wildest dreams, and so punctual! Akin to the shape of a subway car, yet with a hydraulic door of the size you'd expect on an airline hangar, my coach, or what I could spy from beneath the rag, roared to the fore. I stepped in not in trust but neither in alarm because I would live to see what tomorrow would bring, even if with no more protection than a sham of a covering, a caul of surrender, a shrug of easy belief in the crap you can run across at a flea market when you've nothing to lose and the true riches of the world are being hoarded irretrievably by the future.

Gypsy Fire Smudge

Pinpricks across the county smoldered by way of wide-stepping colossus,
Average heathers and jims had to shoulder the debilitating explanations;
Widower parked at the laundromat complains she ding-ed up the bondo,
Should've tipped twice again the charge of her job on his fender-less ride.

Maybe her space heater burnt down the stands at the track after shoeing all season,
Fifth-wheel gone as in religious pursuit of the anonymity manifest in self-profiling:
The corset tube and patched raiments, cauldron of highway-killed stew meats,
Roses and twenty fingers in your pockets before you can say I don't want it.

That kind of smoke makes you a hoarse that's tied to manners of voluntary geld,
The acknowledgement of a truer husband by which she too's held in quiet mesmry.
A stiff lock of curl in your face begs the questioning of your own black fiber;
Gypsy leaves a fire smudge where she's seen entropy on those behind her.


Ken
"I know."

Dark out, north in

The orchestra to fake the house noise would be piccolos for the turbine: wind instruments to vent the attic dinge, drums grinding, the vent spinning lopsided. Is it a hound's cry, a jet drying its wing tips, the hyphens that begin the digits, metal road plow, slide whistle, toboggan ride that make the heat slip, even in the sunrise? The gas star shines in vain against the brilliance of its own mind: flames belch miles high while a clenched fist, lung grip, won't just trace your breath but claim it. On a quick pee, if the family pet jumps a low fence, you take a big chance going after it. Timpani, wooden sticks, loud flap of tarpaulin, violin to make the monster grin, then taunting him with porch lights, which simulate an angry crowd. The fist blows with a slow pound. The vents spin, there's a long howl, the middle splits and pulls the north in.

Stewardess

Connie returns to the town where she'd been abducted in her adolescence.
Now she recognizes herself as the kind of girl that ended up disappeared.
You can easily wander into a trap that's especially created for your species.
Though she can recall ants barely pausing in their march past baited windows with twisting depths.
These were the only men she knew for sure were paying attention to her budding lady presence.
She saw a guy in his moment of mouth-breathing weakness as old as her dad.
So she too held life, between an operating table and a bottle of jergens.
There were the paths of grimy wives or to serve temporarily as an apprentice.
She felt that she could stay alive as long as she could extricate life from the living.
Now the only and paradoxical option was to survive by giving it back.


by Phyl

Superfluity of kale

Look down at my dog on a $50 morrocan rug from a hard-up pawn broker in yuma arizona.
Poor old devil doesn't even respond to a yipping outside or the squeak of an attic spin vent.
Let him out just in case, think he's got something cornered in the garage.
Move a little closer and he's just munching snow off the door.
Auntie calls cuz she heard the stepsisters had a bushel of kale while they were here watching their daddy die.
How they'd sent a list from the east coast of all the foods we prolly didn't have, what they'd only eat.
Surprised to see the cupboards full of just the same things as a way to say they wouldn't pay me back.
Ate half the crap and stuffed the rest in old cool whip tubs for the return trip.
Looking up laws to protect our ma in case the bastard left it all to yale.


Hoolie
"I love you Peg"

Stringing panic

Four-Fault Re-Button

Four holes, four faults on this mend:
One a fail to thread back through
but looped instead around the hem

The disk itself then split in two as
did the original, brittled in the dryer,
half moon settled between the fingers

Then the darning prick raising the
top layer of skin print in a trench,
bound to respond for days to citrus

Finally, a green more desperate in shade
sings from a filament that just may wait
until the other six have gone to break.



Jan
"Now I can accept how Dad's hoed under."

Sassy Flat Back Woman

We saw a sassy flat back woman
With a parable like antennae
The night it was negative 7

Slumber was heavy but trouble
Dreams flipping inside out
Even olive pits went exoskeleton

Paths to freedom led to in-erection
There had to be a way to dictate
A floor plan to the partly existent.


Ken
"I want to get back there."

Winter's wonder

I hated winter's festivals this year
but hesitate to click off all the lights
because there's nothing else here

bitches in the glare try to hibernate
eyes sink into folds of skin and hair
leave behind all that was temperate

ice grows patiently while you blink
to wake is to roll into another state
more a time of wonder than to think

by Hoolie

To the scientist

Some players like a graphic representation of the numbers even if during interactions it could interfere;
For others the naked math suggests action beyond the current state of the visual art of the spectacular,
And some view either confabulation, whether to recreate or imagine, as a failure.

Overdetermination

Nothing just kind of happens
Everything that happens happens hard
Everything that happens has a million reasons
Or at least 51 in a deck of cards.

Why is always the easiest question to answer
What don't even ask unless you're blind
Who will solve its mystery in a mirror
When is a riddle of another kind.

Time throws up its belly to the cosmos
Space can be the funniest joke to tell
Matter makes the laughter even harder
The self becomes the one you know too well.

HOCK

PAST: forgiveness

PRESENT: gratitude

FUTURE: faith

Because I could arguably be included on a list of poor decisions taken by my mother, any others that she may have made in regards to my upbringing can't escape that light.
I can see my problems relative to the misery of others.
I suppose I'll find a job and several months down the road will not have to place the $2000 full-grain natural cowhide living room sofa I've just purchased in hock.


Jan Jansdaad
"A childless divorcee can more easily navigate the boundary lands of a new economy." 

Robots

I Live with Dogs

I live with dogs and persons with disdain for emotion

The dogs are honestly selfish and honestly affectionate

You get dirty lying with someone faking you as their dream

A stab is a stab if your own mother stabs or doesn't stab

I live with a mother who's suspicious and wily and simple

My bitch gives me kissies and throws out her warm arms

Dogs live with people who surrogate their relationships;

Robots are genetically conditioned to satisfy, yet still vex.

Hoolie

Two-and-a Quarter Tons of Crap

alprazolam, bambalam and three others
band-aided middle finger
his eyes seemed to rock lightly in their sockets when he bent over

he hauled two-and-a quarter tons of crap across the desert
and then the plains in wicker baskets
but this was a new place with different sorts of rot

she started immediately in on building a shrine
determined to act as if the gods were on their side
without a job they'll be begging in a year's time

Cornered animals

HOOLIE: This might be the afterlife, or the pre-life or the during life, but I'm not going to live in a fantasy world. I live in the real world, and in the real world, you are an old lady and I am a middle-aged man. Hope I'll be seeing you there because I want to be with you in the real world, and I won't insult you or your intelligence by pretending it's a place where everyone is young and everything is grand.

PEG: I'm not trying to live in a fantasy world. I'm just naturally protecting myself from the general onslaught of time and others' perception of time on my dignity.

HOOLIE: You used to be like Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, and now you're like Jessica Lange in Coven.

PEG: Oh, that's the real world to you.

HOOLIE: No, that's a world of hyperbole, beauty fame and skill, of parable.

PEG: Do we have to live in a parable together?

HOOLIE: God no Mom I hope not.

PEG: You just live in a respectful world and I'll live in the world I'm going to live in. We'll meet up on the other side.

HOOLIE: Like I say. Real world.

PEG: Like I say. Respect me.

Mirror on a Stick

"Mysterious Cabinet"

There is a very tall shelving unit
Inside the shallow door pit
Of a mysterious cabinet
Deep in the chaotic thicket
Of my newly-pitched tent.
But I fear for how stuck I'll get
By shoving my head in it
So I think I'll find a shiny object
And affix it to a stick.
Will I have been the first
While idly hanging up a jacket
In the gloom of a high closet
A stack of money to project?
Has every dreamer as of yet
Truly learned to hedge a bet
And every soul of curious bent
To seize first what before them's set?


Tom

Last night in california

Last night in California I drempt what I don't remember
Spinning lowly in the northern hemisphere
Deadly bees crept up across the border

We fed on the burgeoning scavengers
Of a single fecund season, about 15 years,
And then as if a single will had found His way revolvent from ours

It's a state of going the opposite direction
Beating it's own record of being western
Once again the earth may turn me under but I won't be taken.

Passive as a wrench and 2000 miles passed beneathe my seat
We're in a land we'd run away from, succeeded beyond, not quit
Still the night's as quiet as it's ever been, damned ghosts are mute.


Ilyn
"Short for Illinois"

pain mine

even the superstitions packed away
no bells ring at my passing
what are the songs they unwound

i half want to leave half of me behind
go on alone and under burdened
but one's one's own ghost appendage

a whole geography is purged
by lessons never learned or abandoned
though no girls are left crying

and forever this vein of trembling glee
will bring stabs of shame n' indignity
a deep and fertile mine for pain


Reptily

Survival instinct

Terror spills down and then out and creates a foot.
This is a structure upon which you can hop away.

If you're passing near Chicago or Joliet, I can tag.
Let's buck up and borrow a refrain from yesterday.

What song can narrate barreling across the plains.
What chord could be devised to make you stay.

When you're stir crazy dead at the wheel and nod
I'll be sure to slap you hard in the face if that's okay.


Dr. Donna Thong
"For Hoolie"

Re-Cap: Bermud-a-Go-Go

anonymous sex act that's been on tour for 15 years

time as a liar
time is a liar
how time lies
lies about time
telling someone a different time than it actually is
incorrect predictions involving time
lapses in time or memory
time as material
water/ time cliches
fallacious time quotes
fallacy of time
distortion of real-time time experience during fellatio
accounting of all the various speeds of time
prohibition of any fully developed and/or commercially or academically published "theory of time"
trying to prohibit thought and use of time fallacy in any given moment
challenge to apply the imposition of death on time metaphorically
while in our minds it is a functioning chunk of ligature
that if removed would make me stutterer, monk, catatonic, busier...
time as a style of faith that requires little practical effort
as opposed to religion, which with alternate ladders and planes mocks time's fabled tyranny
and resistant strains that soak up red or blue contrast dyes from the environment
myths, yet real, of time standing still
how that can happen only if all activity is on tilt
then you could say your unit of measure called time just got to zero.

May it, Let it

Head of Mudusa

May it grant you titled helm
may it ram through close resistance
may it serve you well backwards
Let it be a brooch of aristocracy
let it let it feed in dewy fields
let it see with single focus.


by Hoolie

mystical acquaintance

i still get afterimages of a prehistoric skull silhouette
when i suffer morbid ideation of regret.

now turning with my back to moonlight
there's an outline of a thing who stands upright.

everywhere rings thickly pierced me i'd hung coins
of sea shell or enemy tooth set. From parental loin

to the next lad, race, career return nativity scars
from what they call a different year, another war.


Ken
(ghosting for Reptily)

I don't understand what this is like

I don't understand what this experience is like
any more than I can understand an experience
that I've both never had and am not now having.

What I now appear to encounter I get like
what's going on with a composite character
in the fictionalized memoir of a total stranger.

I am having this experience
but I don't know anything more about it
than I do about any random or non-situation.

Or also it could be a moment that's so unfamiliar due to the press of time layers
whose sudden release creates a stupefying vacuum, bends,
bubbles as a spring that has never begun or ends.


"Just" Donna

High cave waiting

high cave waiting for movements of rescue animal over tree line
even now no closer to belief in the veracity or even fact of time

one who lies, one that injects an expectation and an interval of
movements, lack of movement, invisible creeping some believe

only the sinus of raining as if it takes 10 min to kill not 10 stones
patient rhythm of sweeping, training, tic-tocking the weaker 1's.


Peg
"my last scratch on this faux granite counter top"

A Paper Artemis

PHYLLIS: I wanna know what's going on here at People's Park.

ARTEMIS: That's why you've pitched a tent and are so dirty?

PHYLLIS: I'm here both to know and to be. You are of this place.

ARTEMIS: The most important insight I can offer is that you yourself are as much a part of it as anyone has been is or will ever be.

PHYLLIS: So interview myself.

ARTEMIS: No, because you must surely still have some bridges unsmashed with the publishing industry, I feel especially exhibitionistic when you're near, like I could tell you anything and you'd make the world understand.

PHYL: How about your own personal experience of a relationship to this land, its fruits.

ARTEMIS: You're funny.

PHYL: No, really.

ARTEMIS: I can't really answer that without laughing I mean you know, fruits. You don't see the irony or the pun I guess there because you would never call anyone a fruit-- in fact it's more likely that someone would call you a fruit, and you naturally are not struck with a dart of humor around fruit allusions I guess.

PHYL: I'm looking at you Artemis and though I'd have expected a character out of one of those eager post-order wasteland warlord fantasies you seem more just like the bare-titted frisbee guy's sometimes stocking-fetished girl companion from one of the nearby gourmet boeuf-bourgeois-owned hill homes.

ARTEMIS: Are you trying to buy pot from me?

PHYLLIS: Ok, but as long as you're not dissociating, who are you? I've got a pack of cutcorners in my purse.

ARTEMIS: I actually live about six blocks up the hill with my parents, and both of those naked ponytail loincloth guys tossing the platter are my sometimes boyfriends.

PHYLLIS: I have to tell you off the record one that's really hot, and two it troubles me as far as do you have the appropriate information that you need about pregnancy std's heartbreak.

ARTEMIS: Your heart's been broken so many times you are like completely addicted to the chemicals, the ritual, which is fortunate because you'd be getting it whether or not you needed it over and over and over again.

PHYL: Thank you, walking tarot card with legs. Keep that. I'm good.

Bus ticket to People's Park

They administered our 8 ounces of Sunny Delight and returned us to the stone penitentiary maze complex.
Now it was time for free persons to decide our further if any fate.
There was a week's tv vigil in our individual suites to sit and dwell.
The cops and guards and therefore we all used old hookers' lingo to describe the suspensions of normal rule.
A cellmate might try and subject you to a 747; everybody knows to simply turn the other way.
But there the mixability cam will be parsing out your facial expressive points.
If you can be a survivor you can be grateful as Christ.
Normal ones don't get in a fatal bind because they have so many openings to escape.
One if you call it fatal you are hyperbolic result of two spoiled by superior political system.
Dignity means you don't register what happens to your body or future.


Reptily

Deeper Bays

Dreams keep on unperturbed
Dreams reach under and go around
Dreams behave like water seeking space.

When life is taking place in the midst of a novel
It's a simulacrum of dreaming
Whereas you travel in two dramas at once.

Drama is a check digit, analogous link scout;
Drama runs parallel with a road;
Drama washes onto the stage from deeper bays.


Peg
"Trying my hand at criticism."

Jan's Chant

You remind me of my father before he had me, and I remember your father before he had you: him, whom you remind me of and I'll remember you to if I see him again.

My father before he had me reminds me of me myself before he was gone, and your father before he had you reminds me of you after both of our dads were long gone.

You were spinning out just like and from your mother, who reminds me of my mom, whose big brother spun out and was gone into a world like the one you're in now.

Our mothers are like spirit sisters more than ever that they stand on either side of the line of alive; they remind me of you and your mom standing shoulder to shoulder.


Jan Jansdaad
"On holiday in Dubhabera Chank"

hernia of the craw

Once ire's fruits've made it too wide an opening, the thyroid cartilage gets sucked into the anomaly and a poor sod's diagnosed with hernia of the craw.

Left dream-splayed and vulnerable, a sitting duck for the picaresque, he rocks in a corner with his wrists pressed together starting over and over, "i feel...".

Space itself has to drain from the body when an impression's been made too strong and wrongly and efforts launched to recover normally've gone on too long.

Before you can chew your way to freedom a mother figure is forcefully feeding you live and squirming fodder for the chest burning that's also used for reflection.


Peg
"I too was Missy."

Dry and Loud

Looking up from a sulk at the ground

We put "dry" first in "dry and loud"
Because seating comfort should come before sound.

If the sound is good but the feel is wet
The experience unfolds as one you'll regret;
You haven't known humiliation yet.

But wind that's dry, with trumpet full
Calls foul the cries of "Imbecile!"
And proves you've been responsible.


Ken
"Scatology is not the same as scat."

[donna on ken notes]

[donna on ken notes]

he has different moods but why
is what's not easy to justify
he's not a single mother
substitute teacher, police officer
and it's tricky to decipher
a code when one's so earnest
so basically with what you're left's
a literal interpretation, direct translation
and some hyperbole, dark or sunny
which leaves a consistent note of exasperation
that seems to appear outta thin aspiration
and it isn't clear if it's period, just there.


Dr. Donna Thong
"I'm alla bout your relationships."

Inability to titrate

My inability to titrate creates an irritableness surfing on tubular rage.
They prolly did that in the 70's and 80's; it's just not cool these days.
There's no excuse from a blunt-edge mood target perscription, Dad.
Things I will stomp on: all the objects I need most throughout the pad:
electronic equipment, barware; bread, sling tokens, a hardback book
you have to come at with a slide, expecting to travel, break the spine.
I took my time working out love on a number of men, nothing missed.
I can rest on a loud, dry train better than a bed in the heat of August.

Ken
"Parsing through my feelings."

At Least Tonight I Have Hope

I'm not going around calling things like multiple leaf blowers for 140 minutes this morning heinous
I been in the business long enough to know the difference of a cataclysm opposed to annoying
N' even though no precedent's been set here for a cocky night leaning toward a second following
It's a positive something I've got with me now and it's measurably kicking: at least tonight I have hope.

I may get in a freeway high-traffic windshield fluid fight with spraying at velocities of 80-100 mph
Might even bail if it gets too real, call it in to the CHP as road rage though the other guy was laughing
Even though mine's the vehicle on the warning sign, going to pass on the right, into a semi's wide-turn flank
Tonight I'm stealing a breath, however undeserved, and entering a period of unjustifiable smirking.

Perhaps instead I've figured out a way to have the future double paved, as the life line on my left hand
Whether it's cuffs coming up from the other end of the wrist, a crossing-over experience, or much worse
A full moon takes up just as much room in the sky as the fully waned, and as fully I, whole, repose.


Ken
"Applied for a job down at the pie factory."

Tudhu

Block out as many sources of light as possible to get one super-intense light source.
Cough until all impurities are removed from the lungs.
Read enough photo captions to equal a multi-volume treatise on sloth.
Love everyone, even people you don't know, so much that you die at one with humanity.
Keep remembering a song until everyone else is singing it.
Have a system in your kitchen that bakes fresh pies like a factory.
Spend a whole day doing a task over so many times you'll never have to repeat it.
Practice talking dirty at home alone until it becomes second nature when a sex partner is present.
Find a place where cliffs and sea, sky and recline of sand overlap to reveal a perfect square.

by Donna

I Saw a Glowing Dog Lounging

X: I saw a glowing dog lounging by the pool at nearly ten pm.
O: Were you seeing things, hallucinations, voodoo, optical illusions?
X: It was a matter of dimensions, like several transparencies overlapping.
The ecstatic pet was in the house trancing on trying not to listen to the television.
Out near the water there was a patch of moonlight on the cement, someone's lost moment of election by heaven.
In between the dog and the light was a film of glass and behind that another.
O: And this was meaningful for you how--? Do you think your bitch is a medium or saint?
X: M'Lady is so far beyond reproach already that calling her saint is not a compliment.
What it meant to me was how we try to imagine other dimensions, just as a metaphor.


Peg
"From an old tape I found. Who are they?"

Urge to Beg God

She stands up stringy hair, staring horror-eyed, as if into a void, without taking air, n'then it subsides.
She must apologize to all victims of fallout everywhere because she blew, and blew so much.
But now she must stay alive and never go back to jail, not kindergarten, nor the place they kept her after the abduction from the parking lot at Sears.
The only safety there was never having to go back and never being able in any case to return.
Sprinklers kept wat'ring the strong desert plants that only knew to grab and thrive when they can but did it all the time and soon were banging up against the house with the wind in an entitled fashion.
The urge was to cower and dread even though she was the god that was supposed to let the beggars in.


Phyl
"Peg's really opening up."

Life of Peg

If some professional-primitive magical realist hack painter sloshed together or spent all night smoking pot and fine-lining it all in ball-point pen or traced with a stubby stolen public library pencil in front of an overhead projector image jazzed up by a team of so-called parapsychologists, right onto the stretched skin, the result would be Peg, topless, looking back as if at a history-changing conflagration while visible ghosts of the beloved buzz all around her head, advising or just projecting reminders into this waking plasma that they existed and of what they meant.


Phyl
"por parte mia"

i hate...

i hate having work things in my personal box and personal things having my work box,
or i hate it when there's personal works in my things box or personal-things work in my personal work boxes.
i hate it when there's work-box things in my personal thing box,
or boxes in my things or when things are not in their boxes.
i also hate doing thing-box work when i could be spending personal time boxing my personal-things work.
But mostly i hate working on things personal while things from the working thing boxes at work work at hating my person.


Connie [R.I.P.]
"All I get is pretty."

God Beggars

God beggars are gods that beg God for food,
and they starve feeling bellies full of good news.

God beggars beg until their nuts are blue, eager
to dream a century of virgins saying what to do.

Virgins beg a god t' make their sufring history'n,
that "this" once again have ambiguous meaning.

She felt th' begging as a wordless urge, but din't
make of it a saying, can't be judged for wanting.


by Phyllis

I'll Make the End of Life Really Beautiful for You

I'll be there in confident open blouses and pearls over tank tops. We'll be gliding through wooden-paneled hotel lobbies with the bouquets in giant vases. I can be titty all up in your face but I know that dying isn't only about that. Maybe you want to imagine naked slick slavery helping your way crib to kingdom, the backs of naked slaves maybe with fringes, gold satin cord. Stop and screen this: I am whispering Wall Woman's Blade of Grass in yr ear with yr eyes closed and you're seeing the grass. All of it.

"White Chocolate"

Algorithms of an Executrix

Her cataclysmic world's a rocking canoe: while you just can hold on, every moment is an upgrade. This is when sometimes people they start to sprout alternate personalities that can better handle the stress and strain of any given situation/ problem.

For example White Chocolate is a chick who's been hurt but still has a social craving and a sexy, hurt sexuality about her, very much into stockings. Sometimes guys guess she's a dyke, and girls think she'd make a handsome man. She started out practicing quick comebacks, for about 20 years, like it's cuz I'm sweet, but then she settled into folks thinking she was a freak even without knowing her name. Even fewer could have guessed it was Peg in lip gloss.

Another apparition sits with his legs tightly crossed and a can held at face level. Seems to have had one of the fingers on that hand removed for a better tipple. He can remember events of many years ago, but none of yesterday's. "Alan" has the permanent look of a monsoon native trying weepily in exotic tongue to explain the disaster to first responders and direct their efforts toward where they'd be most fucking needed.

Then it would be time to do the laundry, feed M'Lady. M'LADY Peg'd shout as if a cry for help at a lower creature could yield much but hiding in bushes. She's trying to express all the fear and exasperation of a braking middle life in an empty nest strewn with needles. Just her own raw self, without K-mones, couldn't be more inept at operating its shielding or filtering systems much less the measured algorithms of an executrix.

Phyllis

On Peg's backstory

Peg and the kids made house of a large working fridge in the middle of the desert. They could peek out, run back and forth from the car without singeing their faces.

When there were clouds it would be time to scout curling lines in every direction; it was like a ranger's post. They could burn garbage at night in steel barrels with holes poked by some unimaginable force.

Paper goods going made a multi-eyed jack-o-lantern, sparks blowing out his top. Phosphorescent scorpions, exoskeletons, clattered backwards from the light.

Inside, they welcome their own smells to remind them they're alive. Yet they feel kept only fresh, and how celery skin will start to slough and ice on the inner curves.

While Ted was out reporting the news in his salt-n-pepper beard, there was overall fear. When the dog held his breath to prick motion outside, a general MUTE was applied.


Phyllis
"Thinking about Peg's backstory."

The Future is Just a Cushion

The future is just a cushion between now and you know what.
The future is a cheap cushion with a hard, uncomfortable button right in the middle.
That cushion's button, squared and wooden, is the wheels on Ilyn's cart.
Ilyn's barely moved an inch in 20 years, except for straight down into crust.
A chesterfield sofa is an illusion of softness the way its buttons pull the surface in.
Illusions of depth are often mistaken as illusions of time.
Time does not exist. Time is a lie. The lie of time is just enabling your blindness.
You are blind because your face is buried in a cushion.

Peg

Identification Shell Slough

Missy, coughing blood bubbles, skew-winged and grotesque, pends between her stucco front porch railing and a massive iron drug store scale, still teething on a rubber diving vest. 

MISSY: In this my third iteration involved in these habitats i invoke, even before the fangs set and i can lift myself steadily from this misery on fully formed arms of flight, the names of my pre-carriers, for at any moment I know I shall lose their recollections.

SOME VILLAGERS: Don't tell us! Don't say the names, for we cannot hear!

MISSY: The names are Chama Tilly and Reptily.

SOME VILLAGERS: Great. That's just great. Now we'll have to go back into the records and produce some recompense for any act of disrespect tordall and any persons with those names.

MISSY: I would certainly hope so.

VILLAGER WITH CHIN LIKE A MIRROR HANDLE: How can we cope with having viewed your hideous molting, or...

MISSY [literally bending over backwards]: To take those backwards, I'd opt for meta-cognitive talk therapists and the term is "identification shell slough."

First-flesh venture

i am a genetic line
where vertebrae grew along it
and a nerve bubble formed
the faceless prototype head.

my parents were so unworldly
that i wanted to mount every trend
and i metamorphosed from within
so no special effects were needed.

when you learn you're descended from a pantheon
of first-flesh venture
you can roll out your tanking chakras
and they sparkle like dimes in a rug.


Chama Tilly