Sue Me

So sue me; I refuse to change my pattern.
Sue my lungs and loins-- go ahead.
Sue my hours and times and foods.
Sue my scotch and rude fonkytown wayz.
Sue my bones and how they grow.
Sue my slaves.
Sue my metaphorical twitch.
Sue me all day, and sue my tics.
Sue me in droves and sue me.

Missy, after counsel

Born Again, But Uglier

So nice to hear rock n' roll in the Lower Chanks. Someone must be amping up for an exit. A flake mohm and her baby cower in a niche. Does a hole you scratch with your fangers count as a panic room? Someone is bleeding on the strings of a real guitar. Communities open up to picaroz and needles as long as they can watch the whole project launch soon and far.

I'm here as a Missionary of Doom, but it's a good thang. We promote something like healthy recreation. As the Hereafter Looms, why not stock up on favors to the Butt Unappealing?

Illyn
"Born again-- but uglier."

Stunted Mess

I watch them toss my fangernails in the chipper. I'm left with these shiny studs, searching to express myself. This is what happens when you get held back a grade. I drool in my desk nest, barely able to stroke keys; my head is spastic, elongated. They have to grant me open release or deal with the stunted mess.

Day after day my neuroskeletal budding triples their urgency, conservatism, likeliness of failure.

Even the teacher helps to heave my meat scoops into the dumpster. "These suckers are like cement Jai-Alai paddles," is his comment. "They actually are capable of something like sucking," informs a devotee of the Ultimate Worship Group. Then kicks a darkly bloodstained cuticle fragment into a spin with his steel-toed work boot.

Now I tire of narrative.

Missy

Mutual Salvation

Mutual Salvation

I didn't come to save you, be saved, etc.
I came to be saved and your coming saved you.
When you came, I was saved, and my coming saved you.
Coming saved me same's it did you.
I was saved by coming cuz there was someone to come to.
Otherwise there would be no coming to, only moving.
Someone saved you and it was moving to someone new.
You moved until you were coming and thought I could save you.
I came without even moving thinking I was coming toward you.
Moving toward coming is something we both wanted to do.

Donna

Marking Glands

kitty came back and won't go home
i get mostly teeth with its marking glands
or was it the cute gothic girl at the Target
sneezing up her bones with some NiQuil

i'm sensitive to your living here, boy
you impose an environment of phlegm n' paper toweling
it's just that i'm on to your petty cat tricks darling
you've got responsibilities around the home now

as a player, you've got a lot of action going south
big clouds blow past in the shape of shocking fetiches
piñatas burst and reflect in los canales de tu corazón
you hide or run when i draw the skin at the cave mouth

Shab

Flakes are most likely to repent as the shiny copper fades.
It's easier to trace a downward spiral from a downward spiral.
Still some would seek healing every big top revival come to town.
But Illyn came in the cage of a wooden cart with wheels hacked nearly square.
This home was powered by a dog whose eyes glowed red, and wide enough to wear a saddle.

Flakes wandered up and formed a circle because it was something maybe they could eat.
It was grotesque, especially cuz its look was fresh, a bright moon gnarled and pocked.
Illyn appeared to have broken through the atmosphere and swol'n from the friction.
How many times have you rung Our Earth? Do you even know what part of you is where?
Your tears spit onto a face we can't relate to; now you need to share our soup?

Inorganic Mechanisms

Why would I want to go to bed if I'm feeling good. The surf is rising not ten feet from my window. Or rather the poo heater came on. But it tends to scare the bats away. They'll strafe the surface, even if you're swimming. They're sonic; electric-motored drones are not bucolic.

Who would want to leave a night to be run by inorganic mechanisms?

My future is a world where the light of sun is borne by alloys only. Only you will be allowed to toast me golden. Humans ought sleep while Mthyuh's organ fires turn the cog. This is time for play.

FOR MIKE
Donna

Pins n' Buttons

Tom wears a home-sewn vest over every plaid shirt every day. It's covered in commemorative pins and slogan buttons. Even as he lectures, its beige suede rocks against his arteries. His half-naked students find it obscene, but a heart on his chest puts them at ease during drills and bloodletting. K chicks will often leave purple stains on their seats.

Missy is out on suspension for off-limits vittle. Every re-creature must be protected extra much because they are most likely to be eaten with the smallest pang of conscience. Because they come back, because they must, it seems a venal abuse.

Tho flakes are other matter; academy classmates even graver. Flakes are food for bloodsac only; the grrl in the next seat is your sister in pain. Had Connie stepped in The Crack? Were her tertiary characteristics driving her onto the waiting list for shiv clinic and guided skeletal bursting? Had Connie in fact been a casual associate of Reptily among the rotting alfalfa bales of the Low Chanks long before the filter and the MPS? We measured time in WD then. But it lied.

Imagine all the singing night birds before wide feeding. Now there is only one, and he mocks. Fecundity only breeds more episodes: thumping, wailing, spines. Flakes disappear like soap. Soon only those who rule the skies will have a strip of land. They are proud and unsentimental or grieving. They have paid with burning; they have paid in change. They are tired of thieving, of treating. Now we are their petri dish. Death is a privileged doctor.

Phyllis
Lit-Crit Contractor, Embedded
for Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle

Mike's Swimming Blog #80

When the Hot is on, you step into an embrace with the liquid and keep frogging or gatoring in languid ballet strokes. You have to fight going into a fetal position. In Donna's salt pool, I don't get chalky. She's been working on an autopsy in the living room. My loins feel sore for lack of Winter Stroking. Something about this environment really keeps the buttocks training. I did tri-ceps on the cement stairs holding my knees in the air just Above the Tension. Then I heard her laughing through the sliding screen door. She'd found signs of fatty liver even though it was Mostly Missing.

Cruel Prince

First he wants to
do his "martial arts"
thing, the jabs, Head
Butts; then I get
teased for Lack
of Manliness. When
I know he just
Needs to be Held.

He laid on his side
with my cat. My
fingers were shiv stained;
the two of them looked at me
like a returnee's Last Chance.
Is it the turtlenecks
that let a man say What he Wants?
Now I do His Bidding.

Illyn
"Born again-- but uglier."

My World is Shit

Now that I am in the Final
Stages, change seems dumb.
Some say there's been an
encroachment of a parallel
universe, but I fully doubt it.
It's just the ground churning
under us, belching new souls.
My world is shit because I'm old.

Once I had a game, an angle, an exit;
I was up for an ambit, didn't need to score.
Now every lit-crit babe with a publishing credit
Thinks I'm a door to the afterlife.
I can only leave maps and things;
I don't really bring much to the way I live
except my body and a knife.
My world is shit because I murdered Connie.

Missy

Island of Stability

She rubbed the back of my neck while I slapped the bongos. I think it was the best jam I ever had. I found surfaces I had not yet discovered. I played them like an instrument.

The Filter was down, and anything could have happened, but that night she got back her hands: a lady of power and majesty, a real scum bag, perspiring harsh pollen. We were making music.

The Wall of Stress had disintegrated, and our love could flower. This is the way we forged an Island of Stability: her heavy ass and my diamond-like passion, in an open world's vortice.

Phyllis

Scald Lines

Reasonable Person

I sometimes call upon the powers of the universe for no reason. But six nights in a row we smelled smoke curling in the blow hole. Six times we felt our bodies screeming NO. But we are still whole. Connie

Affective Filter

While the Chama is in training, I do reconnaissance with flakes. To bring down the affective filter, we build caldron platforms, watch the aurorealis in the twilight, passing giant bongs of shish. All the while I can take the temperature of the chillun while tickling them, whispering passages from Northrup Frye into their pointy ears. Some days She'll ply me for coordinates. After feed school, I'll be using her guide data to find the colonies. I give; the Chama takes. We'll help each other. Phyllis

Wind Quake

A cloud changed into dragon shapes and we must have been experiencing some high winds because the whole chank system quaked, and the shadows seemed to turn down, swooping into invisibility. This is the current that rules our skies and protects the Homeland. When hailstones the size of medicine balls start splashing the soup, they make scald lines. Flakes are making bets on target-shaped diagrams and debris field calculations. We expect a big attack soon. Mike

That Cat

That cat is so mean to me,
I think I love him.
Scratches his way in,
then turns his back.
I feed him.
He wants to train me
and mark my leather bags.
Then you see him
having lept eight feet
show his asshole.
And then he leaves me.
Been back about 7 times nau.

Missy

Shame of Flying

shame of flying

as an assemblyman, i have access to routing data
for public oracle dispensers and in homes.

i can pump shiv straight from my fat belly
into receivers who are mostly human.

resources are unlimited tho it's all company owned
; my boss at PharmSupply sees improvement.

because i sort of sell my soul to Later,
i can wag my nose at crashes all around me.

my wife and I are sure the public is dying;
we tell everyone to keep buying.

Wayne

Missy

AWKWARD MOMENTS FOR CHAMA AS A K FLEDGLING

First Service Requirement

Here, if you plug this receiver, you may get what you want. The second receiver is what you should plug, always. If you agree with the contract, you'll be guaranteed some of what you want. If the contract is productive, you'll also receive a medal.

Couldn't any animal do this?

We are not animals, missy.

Are we dumber? We need incentives?

Without a change of attitude, you will start to discover that you no longer feel physically comfortable in your work environment. Picture shoulder blades so large as to prevent operation of the filing cabinets. Spinal curvature. And the less you'll be able to accomplish. It's a vicious spiral. Your skeletal system requires room, just like a goldfish. Goldfish are animals.

You mean I won't make open release?

Chapel of Forgetting

I'm sorry for leaving butts and halves at the altar, Peg. To tell you the truth, it wasn't sloth. Even though my fingernails by nau do resemble... Anyway, it was avarice. I know I won't be able to infuse one day. Smokers have an instinct not to throw away the shiv. Maybe I'm out and I need a puff. I can come back here. A prolonged dose makes life easier, even though you're back and forth to the fire a lot. I've got another stash over at MPS. They've repaired the Likeness of Mthyuh's crack, and everyone wants to kiss it again.

Soon you will take or spare life according to your bowel structure, decide the fate of flakes, entire families. It will be your scars they bear from the boiling cauldrons, splashed from your plunking judgements. It will be their fires, your bellow, your dunk, your douse. Your mother may have pushed you around in a baby carriage in a fur coat with a butt hanging from her mouth, but you are Mthyuh's only protector. MPS can only exist because you are the enforcer.

Am I forgiven?

I ask you to leave everything.

Shiv is for flakes now.

Shiv is for flakes only. I ask you to fly.

Shiv is... I am free?

All you have is space. And you must find Ted and the chillun. Secure a hole in a high chank.

Live feeding can begin.

No. First we must hear your screeching wading at Fire Shore. The first flake you see will be safe vittle. When you land, you'll be able to walk again, but not without full spread.

K's fly with their legs spread eagle.

That's why they call 'em K's, missy.

One Windy Night

One windy night, a kitty appeared at the mouth of the office. He was four colors, all separated out to indicate the hind sections, flanks, forearms. To the Chama, he manifested as an Ambulatory Meat Diagram. For a blurry moment she turned into Shab, the red-eyed dog who is mad and goes with an empty saddle. Her salient features returned in time to knock over a combination tie rack and shoe tree more than 50 feet away with a flick of her elbow, trapping the vittle. Chama gave into pecking furry cat liver out from between the chrome prongs and rubber-tipped clamps.

Love

PHYLLIS:
How could it be love when
I can't say I'm falling in it,
and I only bump your sur-
face with a planet of time,
spinning with a momentum
that comes from wretched,
only low, wretched, sacred,
old impersonal wringing of
other people's writhing at-
tempts at pinning down lo-
ve? And how that only blo-
ssoms, like spores on a win
dborne molecule of filth, pr
opelling a tragic career of i-
nvoluntary grinding on air,
getting sucked in by forces
too massive to contemplate
?

REPTILY:
You are arrogant to suppos
-e that you can understand
my feelings or your terror,
especially in the context of
the known universe. Take f
-or example that smell on y
-our hand. The world leaves
you out of its mysteries and
conducts its thing regardles
-s of your silly outbursts of
lit crit. Your buddha thinks
he's driving when he's only
a hood ornament, dear. I a-
m made of essential solvent
-s which melt your quaint r
-esolutions n' hypothesizing.

Irretractable Post-Feminist Crisis

Total conversion or shutdown.
Shivica ficha 1: Chamatilly, frmrly "Reptily".
Comments: Girl's gone too far. Recommend full brain return, winged flight, excretory updates.

Amicus posts: 3

ap1: Chama is the Honey of Life. Our community would suffer her absence more than the brief monthly assaults. Our K response team is empathic and humanish.
Supervisor, All-Chank
Cement Employees Collective

ap2: Oh, Chamalachamalamachama. Chalamachamamama. We wail in anticipation of your claws.
Ultimate Worship Group
Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle, Sponsor

ap3: She might as well let it all hang out. She is enduring an irretractable post-feminist crisis. I have submitted a volunteer card for embedded feed monitoring and preliminary intimate grooming license. She will recognize me as a specialist and view historic spatting as too easy for vengeance. She'll eat me last.
Phyllis

Collar of Skulls

When I close my eyes I can see pricks of light in the pattern of the tiny bud cluster on your ficus. They dim in and out and the tip wags like the shamrock marquee on an old border casino. Death gives you a mask of hurt knowing and the joy of helplessness. I see your face in the thick leaves I sink among to steal a smoke. I feel the backs of your knees and neck and bump the hip string of a loin cloth on my heroic groin carrying you inert out of Aztec Town. Ever since you planted a collar of skulls on my breast, ever since crimson footprints first crossed the wake of the blessed, I been able to get up on my knees, and the rest just pulled itself together. I never knew all the carnage was what my own eyes bled while stomping past the innocent. Monster, our arms rattle round the plexus, so many palms turned up with final gifts, a mill, beacon eating wind. Only your power can make me stop destiny and give in.

Kev's Biggest Wanter

Worship Section

It says here that on Cabaret Night the Chama was serving cocktails to a crowd of tourists in a Carol Channing wig and wacky makeup. When she looked into one of em's eyes and saw a hatchet murder. Now she's coming out as having seen her own ghost through psychic time travel. Sports N' Sex Crimes Bugle is expanding with a section for worshipers. Tom?

Tom stepped out of the bathroom like a robot, glowing in purple light. He seemed to have a bumping soundtrack. Sylvia stood and let the paper sag and watched him stroke the spines on the back of his neck.

Keep the Frontier Strong

Keep the frontier strong
Pioneers will come along
Step with all your doubting

Go to where the wind comes from
Take eddies free of aegis
Shout your song to strangers

Unmask the world that's known
Show her to the boundaries
Plant and spread her queendom

Traditional Call to Arms, Mthyuh Preservation Society

Pillow Talk

The Chama on "Pillow Talk"
with Phyliss

I am a primitive, an illiterate, yet I have a place because my work is an organic function and not everyone can pass this stuff.

Everything you produce looks like a bad and pornographic Degas, a motel-room El Greco if you're lucky.

I could be the gal who stencils red and black diamonds on the doors of the suites.

You've seen enough to know it all just makes you tired, and it's easier to just paint and drink.

Drink and paint.

Exactly.

Then why am I so goodlooking?

That's how you get away with it.

You're wearing a Timex, aren't you?

I beg your... yes, why?

Its ticking is about to give me an epileptic fit. Can we slip it between the mattresses?

[Slipping] You'll never be All-Chank because of this essential torpidity, the contempt for consensus or... regard...

You are beginning to understand my powers. They do not lie in rhetoric, sadly, nor in representation. I am a bloody wicca bitch. Can't you see. Your tongue is coiled around my clit.

*mphrmph*

Donna Thong in the Shower

I kept turning the knob to the Right;
I'd been letting Hot steam a shirt,
but it kept getting Chillier,
so I thought I'd run out.

In the lint-pecked mirror,
grimacing for a tooth exam,
Happy/ Sad lines crossed and
made crosses. In my face.

Then I pulled on my tights
inside out, so the seam wouldn't Hurt,
but it got very Warm,
and Bruises spread across my body,

throbbed, like Blood was coming out.
Disco music played in the purple Light.
I reached for my abs as they stiffened.
I thought about calling You in that state.

Down, Down

I learned all the lessons of cement
by falling down pitted, dusty steps.
It's a consolation, this knowledge.

My sexiness couldn't protect me,
nor did well-meaning tips change my mind.
I was a female doctor, dammit.

They stripped me of my Donna Karan;
now I scrummage like a thrift store rat
in a maze of snap diagnoses.

Y-Y

In an attempt to spit you out,
I saw we'd become one body.

We already share the template
to a double-Y chromosome.

Your long torso, my openness:
we will never turn from virtue.

My hands and feet are cemented,
nor can I hold you in my teeth.

Still just one of us can appear
in the same place at the same time.

Kev

Sucker's Dozen

Feel like your ex-husband is trying to shake you down?
Cannot stand the thought of dogs trapped in homes of the poor?

You can stop dropping off drugs and groceries and checks.
You are correct as the Constitution: they suffer.

What if you were suddenly removed from your context.
You would lick the forearm of a vivisectionist?

See a world that's just a sham Welcome mat for the lost.
Imagine you're there with the emotions of a pup.

You find out that gravity is the only power.
But you can't cure brutality by being a whore.

Jan
"I'm bad!"

Come Down Mthyuh

I stay up in Pennis, near Ground Bay. There's some RV resorts and a gas station with a POD. They have a golf course and some cows grazing moss on the Dirtiest River in the World. Mondays Mike comes down Mthyuh for feed and takes the pups while I work cement and watch cable at Chank Suites, 60 hours a 4-day week. I drop about two-fifty on booze and groceries and lodge it against the back of the bed. Don't need much hay. Llamas ran off with a minstrel. This is just until he can get a second mortgage or some family help. Then we'll build a fence the girlz can't chew and still have gophers on their plates every day. We used to call it Death Farm 3000 for all the graves. But Mthyuh turns up her babes and they walk away. When the filter's up the sky is clear of pests.

Come down Mthyuh with your truck,
Come down the mountain
Where life isn't measured;
Bring your extended cab full of dogs.

Kev

milk stigmata

When I breach one of Hoolie's commandments it's because I'm teasing for fear he'll become stigmatatose. I, a picaro, have learned to test how far he's gone. Man of searching, hysteria, visions, your love erupts in giving. We must keep him laughing, his heart chakra massaging itself with rocking guffaws or irony gently squeezing. In melancholia, Mthyuh leaks proteins and bastes her adopted king in a yoke. Shivering, he may find some rags or plains mammals to coddle. Wandering, he intersects his bloodline on a spirograph of orbits. Whimpering, he can drag along a civilization like a bitch still with pups on her tits across the grass on her way to piss.

Peg

Shopping Bag Full of Dildos

You take decisions, you make purchases;
And then there is a shopping bag full of
dildos. It makes you think about death.
What if you died. And they have to do t
-hey thang and come all up in your hous
-e. They define you by your decisions, y
-our purchases. A procession of the livin
-g parade through dead-eying all the cra
-p. A dildo means you are either not a te
-am player or having way too much fun
with the one you are supposed to natur-
ally complement. That's no compliment.
A bag of dildos unpackaged means they'v
-e been in action. No one wants to touch
them. It would be like cleanup for a guns
-hot victim. There would be sawdust. Yo
-u might try explaining that latex natura
-lly sweats. That it explains a perceived s
-liminess. Your mother might go for that.
But you're dead.

Peg

Missionary Guilt

WAYNE:
the redness of your lips is extending its boundaries;
kissing a man with a goatee can really rip you up

JAN:
more than sucking my husband's mustache, only the smell of
his loins, close enough, represents the call of life for me

WAYNE:
gripping your upper arms, I can tell just how strong you are.
it gives me confidence to tangle with your weaknesses.

JAN:
why must I fear a sociopathy in my brothers
with you, an apologia for masculinity?

WAYNE:
my greatest crime but that which I am most prone to do
would be holding you dear enough to serve as an off'ring.

bent anachronism

I know I can't shake my head too hard. There's been no moon for a couple of nights. Getting used to the high beam flipper in the new hooptie. Waking up in a pool of lipstick tubes at the bottom of the boat told me I'd been in a real bumper. I scratch across the desert pavement on my knees. Jumping cactus smoldering and weeds. Foliage, then fire. A feathered witch pokes at the holey cholla bone with a stick. AAA on the way. Jan, wait for me.

"Wayne, my main enchufe at TRW, protege. You will learn the tricks of trade in charms and powders."

So you are the Chama. They said you were a topless Afro-American in her thirties.

"We will shapeshift and read coals together."

That one says you're hot. Boom! I like you.

"Father."

No...

Ashes and sand blew into ripples around the Chama and took her shadow in the ridges of its trunk. Crickets chattered. Wayne could see the spines. Then he could pull a rabbit out of a hat. Then he could manage his family. Then he could finish his work. Then he accepted two soft-centered suckers from the tow-truck driver. They drove over horned toads, out of the land painting, off MPS grounds. The road was not so black.

Mock Self Finger Feeding

It's not that we happen to be; we have to be.
If it happens to us, it'll happen to everybody
else. We're the great experiment, and we ar
-e still interesting. See all civilization's capita
-ls, writhing. I would encourage you to do w-
hatever rocks your float, and is also self-suc-
coring [mock self-finger feeding]. It can't hel
-p but help fill the moat what helps the good
tidings to overflow on all the old-folks homes.

Donna
"I typed it with my thumbs!"

Shiv Overdose

Family of Consumers

We live interdependently, buying style and smartly. Any moment of piggishness is copacetic in
the privacy of your home. We are a network of understanders, tapping heaven's color palette. If
you sign up for automatic transaction, you barely feel the entries and egress, and if you get the
rhythm, it starts to generate a flow, a chi-wave. You can look like the foto in the public oracle
dispenser if you stay up to date. We are all on the same page: a rubber slide that feels like
leather. It's a company with roots, entanglements, holes. We can produce chillun this way. We
can whistle them like smoke into another century, remembering. As we speak, my fingers are
writing checks. We know the weather in Orlando, Bensenville, Cliffe Suites. We can be there on
the morrow, while always in reach of the beam. A two-way street means we take our knocks in
the surf. The elite might be hypnotized by their space on the curve, no matter how far they've
turned. It's the bold hang from a big arm that will catapult our moon shots. It's the brave step we
don't take, for the wurl, which the generations wud want this way. Boys and their machinations
are under branding, butterflies, every gesture, expression, attempt: ours to claim. Every knee
jerk or shudder just creates more gism. We are a chain of strangers, enemies, happy to be sealed
from any one asshole's greed. Leadership means take our emotions and lay out the whole runway
so we can see our land. We will work for solids, make waste of air, enter a future every day. Our
aim is to clock in, collaborate, live, breed. Salt of the Sea and cream soda is the Mthyuh's fetish.

Donna
Sears Parking Lot

Salty

If I have cash and I'm willing to pay up now, would you let me offer them a bit less than your mass-mail quote..? No it was personalized, but by a computer printer, that's all. Say 18 percent of the new total including interest..? You could fax me the agreement, and if you'll accept a card tied to my bank account, we can settle this today. What is your percentage, sir..? Because you know if I claim 13, game's over for us both.

Donna leaned back against the tile kitchen counter top in her yellow gauze Charro pijama and farted. A salty peanut shell cracked between her teeth.

No, I'm not swimming in money that's exactly right. All I've got to eat is snack food. OK. Give me a minute to plug it in. I'm a doctor for chrisake. And dog food. Never thought it cost this much. I'm feeding you out of my bitches' mouths, mister.

Dr. Thong had been physician to super shiv-stars and wandering freaks. Now barely able to keep Juniper, La-La and M'Lady in kibble, she wondered if someone wouldn't once slip her a pro-bono, as she had done, on so, so many occasions. Was Kevin on some kind of Jesus trip? He had once, as a walk-in, asked her to put him down. Now he frequented a fiery healing pool.

O' Kev. You could touch my coin purse at least. We bonded on a pill-bottle bed, and that pumping beat. How could I know a lapse of shiv could trigger a random shiv test and set me up to lose my license all for a rotten night of hounding?

Idling Caprices

Now that the swimming pool had been drained for good, Mike took up with new ways and associates. One amante at the Preservation Society, another down at Shiv Council. A scientist, an accountant, a bum. Let bloom a goatee and a black, open-shirted look. Got into trouble with rents and men all the way to Cliffe Suites. Until he showed up here one morning.

"I'm looking for Julio."

"Do you mean Hoolie?"

"Told me he lived out back in the shed."

"We don't live here at all. We..."

"Julio." He was looking over my shoulder at I guessed Hoolie.

"Mike." Hoolie says behind me. I step out of the way and they say,

"Just because there's no water, don't mean you can't dive."

"We squirmed like eels in another atmosphere."

"Even while lawn salad bobbed on top."

"But now it's a neck breaker."

"NO. We've got lungs now. Ears."

"We've got the Filter down and K's rampaging."

"Yeah. I let 'em out. One of my pranks. Come dark-rule the chanks with me."

"NO. Come with us. We're deities."

"NO. My life is free."

"NO. You are a slave to shiv and idling caprices..."

As the sun set, the two worked out their issues. Silhouettes in pink on the listing log cabin porch. I, a woman, could not intervene. I wasn't even sure if Mike had the right guy. Hoolie isn't Mexican.

Chama-tilly

Dogreeve

Chemical Prayer

I can still think even though most of my muscles are under remote control. This reminds me of an office job I had while I could still cover my spines. Repetetive movement. I could staple six reports at a time. My finger muscles got strong playing canasta with Sylvia and Tom. If they could see me now. Soaring over a canyon. Bringing home lost ducks. Men. To my nest. To PharmSupply.

It started as an offering, because I believed in my culture's nirvanic system. Here, look what I've found. I am a cat with a bird, but no. A bird with a cat. Then the Mthyuh Preservation Society ruled to let the corporations infiltrate the Shiv, and then... It doesn't matter if you are a lesbian when... they are force working and resting you, cramping your style.

My African-American news anchor husband and mulatto kids: waiting in some hiya-percha. I am employed, enslaved, an appliance plugged in. Retrieving robot falcon. I try to be gentle, but they have fitted me with metal. Plucking an individual from a park or deserted place, there is almost no sound. One must clap one's beak around those who insist on retreating indoors.

All I want is to get my puppies to safety. You implanted your motivator chip right near that instinct. Sometimes they dangle from my toenails and mouth both as I sightsee my worn track. One day I'll find my kids and have an operation. I'll go back to them and explain how tied up I've been. You told me I could retire in a temple and invite all my friends.

Peg

Explication

Promise
this song, an avatar

Here in a trophied stone house,
the game cottage, game heads on walls

where palace charnel begins
meat meant for kings is first sacrificed and carved here, enabling their generations

its wet and glittering course,
see silver trays piled with fresh moist legs and chops bobbing up a path to the castle, into royal mouths, in royal peristalsis

I offer my fingertips,
this is where I choose to make a commitment, to reach out to the infinite (future)

blind and pendent ministers
active faith in our love, suspended in darkness

of last-moment innocence.
as yet but terminally unrequited

There in pierced forgiving skins
stacks of tiger hides on which you recline, their beauty has absorbed the violence of penetration

blood charges your perfecture
you on the other hand are throbbing with present life in a space that you experience from the inside out and I from the outside in

and can whisper a promise
blood, an excited pulse, rushes in your ears

while hours press beyond my lips.
that's how you'll remember me, how I'll speak to you, in that sound


Tom

Promise [the MP3]

Graveyard of Gay Guys

graveyard of gay guys,
my squinting eyes make
it eerie, misty in the sun,
forest of missing crosses.

from everywhere you come,
hankies on sticks and maps,
as if you were starting over,
shoe trees, trunks, tie racks.

and I am sticky progeny
of hard spirits who went
far into spirituality, giants,
monsters, preachers, deities.

Am I sent here to pitch
or to receive? A calling is
a sign of psychosis, OCD.
Here I lie on your beds.

Hoolie

Canned Corned Beef and Cream Corn Casserole

Chama and Ilyn hid out in the dark cabin. After a while they started asking each other what time it was and then after a while longer they stopped answering. Chama explained later, "We felt that what happened had certainly been important, but we were nevertheless left dumbfounded. Then we began to chafe at the practice of assigning significance to events that were painful and therefore disturbing but really no more than blips of chance on a wheel. The filter wasn't working and a few of the flakes had already been carried away. We could hear commotion, heavy things dropping on pavement. The safest thesis statement? 'You just never know.' But also the most unsatisfactory. Then we decided we just had to break down and create meaning, like the opposite of breadcrumbs, tossing out floating disks on which to step across the Crack. Meaning was in our heads. That was what we were born and trained for: this was our moment to shine a light, as if, and leave nothing in our wake because there was nothing to leave. Everyone in fact paid us for that. Ilyn hurried and thought up some songs. I scarified and painted my chin. We found a canned corned beef and cream corn casserole in the freezer."

Sermon

in weariness
the Earth's nougat
cast up stronger
her lasso.

in this contest
only a taut heart
against her pistons
can save you.

while listening
as other creatures
die of what we call
bad timing,

in some folks' minds
poverty of movement
was their keeper
from friction.

Ilyn, Brother. Sermon, frag. 11-14

Time on a Stump

The meatgrinder of life had Kev speaking in star patterns and twisting himself up into every single asshole and grilled. Always hot yet or because hurting, Kev's tears were rain for doves. Everywhere Kev turned, there were democratic users of love.

Kidnapped by a buyer/hoarder trick, he stared for a while at the top of a shopping-bag chank: a slice-o-wood clock with its plasticine bark rested on a cardboard ox. Time moved batteried and therefore temporarily unfettered there, on its stump. Bhut whut was to become of us coincidentally, in our later years, sufferers of severe drying?

Kev's Biggest Wanter

Devices

The Can Opener and The Wine Screw

In the wake of a white tornado, two
surface structures abide, ready.
We can wait while the contents of
several different cans bubble tog-
ether in a large can.
Some wine had to be thrown in,
and now the bottle is open.
Perplexing. Staining red hydr-
aulics charged with an acid.

by Hoolie

Rattlesnake of a Timex

I looked out at Juniper's shadows of ears on the sand,
a Peace symbol. While other dogs might freak out, or
want to always stay in, he found a place he had sniffed
well, a shallow but wholesome place, where he could r
-est in his own skins until summer came. Juniper, a st
-eady berry, you unfold to me each day yor surprises.

Dr. Thong

Yard Fulla Bullhedz

This yard held promise, yet
it's fulla bullhedz an stink c-
-abbage. Dogs trot announc
-ing their pleas, half hoping
not to feel the extra glee of
pierced paw pad n' extrusi-
on. One of them has dug a d
-eep meditation lodge near
the barbecue for her needz
on nights where everything
itches.

Hostile environment
-s breed pain alone; not ev-
en able to feed on fire-feeling-
fire combativity, a desert ca
n non-chalantly spit venom
in every direction, not even
hoping to hit a hi-pt. target
or formidable co-tormentor directly.
Alkaline passions blend back in
to their backgrounds more easily than
pollen in pus or even eels in a floating
salad. Many living, feeling sentient entities which appear
to be inhabitable environments on the surface and maybe
even maintain their status as land in some logs and directories
will and can smoke you out, stink you, burn you with special
tannins reserved for outrecular incursions which are felt, appre
ciated, and then expertly doused with too much sun plus a poi
son that react with strip-nekt beings left out in the direct rays.

Note left by one of the neighbors or previous tenant.

Pardon Me for Mattering

"Find Doggies' Tummies Imitate Sounds Around Them"

In the "woods," dogs' stomach and other sleeping noises would sound more like proverbial trees falling, we might guess. But here on Earth, you can discern everything from foreign voices speaking in tongues to electronic music and gaming chatter. Just the other day, Jesus Christ imitator Hoolie O'Toole was sent to jail for demonstrating that certain sets of instructions could be heard as well as followed from the bowels of a sleeping street bitch while in REM-Heat. The animal has been transported to a shelter thousands of miles away in the State of Maine where, "more than any other pound," her tired ass explained, "they treated me like I mattered."

Your Comfort

You're Just a Symbol

I really think about you too much
and it is not fair, not fair to you to
remain a symbol, the symbol of o-
ur love. Fral I know, yuv changed.

Sumthing that those days will not.
Do. But you? You're just a symbol,
a reminder, a cliche. How can I be
updated on your present lifestyle?

Therz another who may've becum
a symbol of us two; am I he for u?
For I am ready to maintain that ri
-gid pose, your comfort in old age.

Wayne

bitter and better

The Mthyuh Preservation Society has removed this post.

Jingoism

someone put a glob of
commode water dye in
the tank. I pulled so
-me of it out, and I
looked like I voted t
-wice till I'd washed
my hands thirteen tim
-es. Now I'm pale blue.

While I like pure, ma
-ybe too brazen for co
-mmandeering porcelain,
product of 2,222 F. An
-yone can get shaken u
-p around it, have the
-ir own way of making
glassiness reflect sky.

Jan, Age 52

Interrupted Prayer

My husband always had Tourette's, so
when he stopped when he got to "the
chirping of the..." giving thanks for the
day, we did not open our eyes or change
our breathing whatsoever. I speak for
my kids and me. He'd just mentioned
after breakfast how he'd had an epiphany
about his needs: chemical balance, phy-
sical contact, and output. Now he says
it's all the same. Since he entered into
the contract and altered his identity, t-
here is only Shiv and No-Shiv. They
supposedly opened a whole new wing
over at the plant for him and his fled-
gling project. He says the kids're my
laif now, and he can father us remote-
ly. That is the irony of an interrupted
prayer, a lovely day that cracks lives.

Jan
"Can you Distribute No-Shiv? Ask me How!"

Wayne Come A'Knockin

All's I can say is I was on a sabbatical from aerospace right when TRW had community days where you could stroll through their newest foam in your bellbottoms. It was a Billy Graham mission, and I'd had an unsettling interaction with a disbeliever at breakfast just about when I was ready to try and witness. So I took a golf day, and next thing, I am delivering a slimy percussive being onto a fetid pagan tuskless trunk floor. While my family sloshed in clippered jungle growth. I am the prayer of prayers, and they just got silly after I responded to Sylvia's first birth knellz without getting done. I did not feel it it my ears, as one would an ambulance or a robin. This was a primal alarm in my pelvis perhaps significant to the kind of society we had settled into on that plane. Jan had said she could see the evil rising in waves even from the runway, but I told her and truly hoped it was sublimated libido, even beginning to drum on my plastic foldout tray.

"Hello? May I help here?"