Empty pool

Mike's Swimming Blog Vol. II, #6

Rcvd from Donna this am:

There's no swimming in jail. That's how we made the most of the low chanks, isn't it? Your beautiful nips, my statue of liberty in the deep end with a glass of wine. Or you and was it Ken? standing on the bottom with hoses for the winter drain, resurface and tile fests, echoing bitchiness.

No swimming and no love in jail. They say one's lips grow thin. I remember waking up with you beneath a surgical gurney in a sea of boxes of No-Shiv. The treatment worked on you. Miss the glowing and bumping tho. There was a chick we let out in a cove picked up violin melodrama by Chausson and St. Saens. We think its how they interact with the Filter now; they are receivers and interpreters more like bats than fowl. If you had allowed yourself to develop fully you could be clawing, right now, through the bars on my window.

I don't expect you to get back together or say you will just because I'm here.

D.

trial of ms. dr. donna thong

• Please tell us what led to yr charge that Ms. Thong is a rampage shooter.
• First, when we refused to pay her, she appeared to be quite angry. That was frightening.
• Go on...
• Her reputation is pretty violencey. No one at the clinic likes her at all.
• What are some of the complaints for which you personally were stationed on cull?
• There was the one when Sandro, an enema nurse, was pretending Dr. Donna was invisible. He reported that she kept vocalizing more and more loudly to him until she was nearly yelling, which obliged him to employ a habanero spray in her eye. Anyone can tell you she seemed insanely out of her mind at that point. Like a killer.
  
• What had Dr. Thong been trying to tell Sandro?
• He said she kept asking for the key to the Ladies'. He had it on a chain. But she could have had a weapon stored behind that door.
• Why did Sandro pretend the doctor was invisible.
  
• Everyone knows what a scary, violence-toned person Donna is. Someone on the distribution list suggested that we all just aklike she isn't there until she gets the message, and some of the more responsible ones did just that.
• Did Dr. Thong also receive that message?
  
• She did, because she took it directly to the Workplace Fluffer Team.
  
• Please describe the mandate of the WFT.
  
• "To keep things fluffy with hearts and smiles, so that every day is a worker's treat."
• Thank...
• "To decorate with skeletons on Halloween; to fill our desks with things to eat."
• Thank you, Mr....
• "To sit and pout when you ask, jump and laugh when you give, go sleepies when you take."
• Is that...?
  
• "We are vested by the state to guard a worker's right to talk of sports and cookies bake."
• But sir, is this not a serious clinical environment.
• Out-of-towners don't understand how we do medicine down here. Our patients add up to one of the highest averages in the chanks for prevention ignoral.
  
• You mean their illnesses are their own fault.
• They made their beds. They could have made their own happiness. Why should we all have to pay for that.
  
• Because it's what you yrselves are paid to do?
• We're paid to satisfy the Preservation Society. They've got us filling out forms all day. So what: if the prevention ignorists can work the system, we can do it better.
  
• Would you characterize Dr. Thong as ignorist empathetic?
• She thought she understood the dreams of men. It's how she hurts us in our minds, and why we don't expect her back again.
  

Stoppers

Tom,
Tonight I couldn't harly sleep hearing this clanging. With a forty-knot gale sandblasting the paint off the Exoblinds seemed it must have been the lid to the barbeque grill getting ready to punch a hole through the chain link. So I got up but I could see that it wasn't shaking. I wandered into the kitchen and the sound was louder. I looked out both chinks and there was just the oleander holding on, writhing patiently. It was loudest by the kitchen sink. It was coming from the drains. I found the stoppers and dropped them in. Now it's tight as a thermos in here. I just had to pop my ears.
Sylvia

Can I injure my eyes by crying?

Goober searches, by Wayne: "Can I injure my eyes by crying?"

Crying not that intense since baby;
crying and traumatic globe luxation?
should there be stinging after crying?
safe to watch television after crying?
crying how brown liquors play role?
crying headaches common?
how can I connect with others self-injured by sobs?
does it matter which sounds you make while crying?
is it ever appropriate to speak and cry?
# of minutes before crying = nervous breakdown?
when a commercial makes you cry...?
is vocalization always paramount to self-pity?
crying seize or resist moment.
precursors for tears during sex?
crying outcome : rage, submission, epiphany?
Jan please call Wayne please

mob action

Donna reports:

One of my Spanish ex-husbands' families mobbed me once, so maybe that's the connect with the term mafia. *A* mob is loosely associated, maybe just by geography and emotion, an employer, or not even. *THE* mob is by definition an extended family.

Conchi, Paco's sister explained by telephone: "Es que somos casi como una mafia."

But he lies to you, I pled. I bet he told you I was the one gave him Hep A.

"It doesn't matter. And don't surprise yourself if suddenly there is no water or power."

This isn't because I never brought children to the tribe, that your husband stated my arroz al horno was exquisite? That I mirror your sterility?

"1400 hours tomorrow. Under the M60 bridge, Parque Caprichon, near the statue of Satan. With the keys. We'll have your check."

Father Unamuno had secured some goat pen in the mountains to hide our hooptie, so I had nothing to get to work in.

The family estate on a low floor of a suburban apartment block was shuttered up with painted steel blinds.

Conchi's husband since the age of 9, Jose Maria was nearly a lawyer who could draw up the documents necessary to make it all seem above board.

Mrs. Unamuno only participated passively and hid as well as could be her disappointment at no longer having one less chico pijamado around the house to serve and mop up after.

Paco's brother, needle hanging from a vein, saw back to a time where the two boys'd lived in ecstatic flannel and hardons on thin mattresses over spring cots or at their homework desks or in the formaldehyde veneered pressboard dining salon sipping at fideos or steaming puree.

The jamon, in its holder atop the sinfonia in the anteroom, conspired to seethe with translucent mites.

Arethusa

Missy leans her elbow on a ledge, which sends a boulder crashing down the slope. A mature sugar pine snaps at the base, nicked by a wing tip. She hangs Its face in her hands.

"I take it minorities are well advised to make a strong impression. Is it like the weakling bug who's painted a gargoyle across its papery head? Is it nature makes a swarm come when not backed off so?

Maybe naiads from a previous life rising from nerve venom come to act out, in their wisdom, and with hooks in, wriggles of memory that jar or pull shut levers and consequences that can be accepted as archetypes."

In this way, a graze prey unit outside its hoard contemplates vicariously an apology for the urge to have a bloody meal.

pleasure centre

even nothingothingothing
can echo backakak when
it's bubbling just below the
plaque of comprehensibility.

when you find a sarge who
needs an order, you can
generally think up something
to stoke a larger ardororor.

once pinpointed, a pleasure
centre gloats in unexplainability
and leads thinking mhen and wymhen to
accept a state of wan improbability.

Ted on his own

Feel him, a man whose
mother's quilt's in tatters,
entropy thorough from within,
headlights from the freeway
project fast shadows on the house,
a river of leaves let go,
a current of dark on white;
guest room mattress is a raft
above a carpet where mice got in,
where gramma tried to batten down
an even older weave with red yarn knots,
where dogs moan in star-studded
torpor. Alas a night's almost
gone, another loss postdated.

Ted
"Are you there, nena?"

Auscultation

As yor my main pericardial rub,
I don’t listen to my own deep peril.

In taming me, by fashion of a hub,
There’s nothing left in life that’s safely feral.

Potential space can only be a cave
when queen is one in gawd with courtly knave;

You trace a paradox of my body
and bring the sounds that situate me, oddly.

Wayne
"For you, Jan"

wind whores

who will the wind bring, what whores.
they come slicing with their inner-thigh
meats. their drops in our soup can scar.

why must they fall under cultural artifact.
can't the civil authorities, park rangers.
can't someone reasonable bring them to

their heaven. free release, but outside the
filter; open grazing, but only on natural
animal herds, no other bird species.

one came dipping in, very tiny, against
the full moon. she was shimmering
green before the lilting purple trail.

it was three took my sister, but the
mechanical type. these days they're
all hybrid, running on borrowed time.

Illyn
"They dive like K's falling backward."

Atroposis

there was safety in my temple;
i was at a Command Center.

now i rely on the public oracle
dispenser. i experience Atroposis.

Th' Sisters know you've got it comin'.
You sit back and let them choose it

while you live in so many Temp-
oral Bodies. handwriting analysis

proves how easily Beggars are
turned to thieves.

Tom

Death row in space [the Mp3]

Death row in space [the Mp3]

Death row in space

Clouds of red dust occlude the sun;
between here and the light cracks
weightlessness is queen, and our
hooptie's gone before it even turns

around. A laser just makes the bad
pieces scatter and retake shape as
familiar clones of Christian prayer,
industrious, that this get done, that

he be changed, that I receive. These
trees are all weeds here. We haul an
burn them at the beach. I sucked on
the filter until the planet's exposure

seemed even lighter. As I stood, it
was my right arm that hurt so I knew
the supply of blood to everything but
the braino was safe. Here on a down

day, the security systems soak all the
power; all we have to do is wait until
the shingles stop sizzling off the grid
or an injury wipes the hard drift state.

Ted
"She was dead when I found her."

Exhibit

I find that generally
people who love me
will always find a
way to love the ones I
love, but not necessarily
hate the ones I hate.
everything I touch now
apparently costs
something; every move
an Exhibit. comes
a Winter when

Comes a tam in a man's laf
when she owns up to disaster.
It created you, a monster,
one who Grips and Carries.
But the shriek of a suparna,
or its roll in sleep, can only
mean an end to an age.

Donna
"They fly with their legs spread eagle."
[Dick Olde has also provided illumination on this piece.]

Force Psychosis

I'm you, and I'm dumb,
so someone else must be
planning this thing.

Look, divine's
already on the board;
it's ours to fill in,

and it costs no more;
ways and reasons are not
cheap, and we bleed frequently.

Some will find they
must believe and go deep,
but we've got our

solids, countables,
shiny coins n' dallers;
we pass the coffee

others drink. We're
here for the energy
of the beacon.

Wayne
"Warm the Presses."

Quinoa Barn

Without the Filter of Loathing,
these moments might be
painful enough to remember.
Poignancy is spread too evenly
across the laminated planks
of the middle chanks

when it comes to you and me.
Can you still feel the time
we discovered together
that birds are blind in the dark?
If this place was real,
we'd be part of the scenery.

Standing in a puddle at the
bottom of a quinoa barn,
watching an artifice prove it
can only hold its own weight,
nude farming suddenly rings
trite and fake meat, ungodly.

"For Donna"
Hoolie

Tabaquismo

Now yr a stranger with a bold affect; then you wr showing surface vein color, not structure. You've recently had a haircut. What's changed, have you shaved yr beard?

Nope. Juss takin care o' myself.

Yor swaggering folksiness is convincing. And even more for someone from the high chanks.

Oh you think you know me.

That was the idea of the day-long interview.

That was a job candidate in career apparel.

Who are you, Tom?

Sylvia is my wife. I smoke all day. I must be Gawda Fahr.

Is it like being in flames then, your marriage?

Not for me.

She stays around for lack of imagination?

Because we run a pyramid scheme, Wayne. Duh. Me, you, Sylvia. We got the shivaccount for the greater lower chanks. She'll be making shivrep soon. Why do you think she stays.

And you?

I'm going on No-Shiv next week, Wayne. We lost our shivstar to open release. Hardly no one wants the shiv unless they could have a degree instead.

Batch desire

Like when I sunk with the dropping floor on the Circumference Poke at the ridemall, tain only weight that can make you fall but maybe yr composition, auto-dread, and coming back up you could lose your shoes. When you see someone coming down the ramp in their socks afterward, it can all come burning back like lava. Everyone else rising around you in a circle, watching the faces turn from mild surprise at their ascendance to pity, hilarity. What it was now that I think was all the wrong desires, bundled, so that their only gravitational reference was the molten mess far beneathe the crust of Earth. While our heads are stuck by centrifugal force against a wall with a curve, there is always the way that chalk slides down the surface of a board, under the radar of physics.

Ilyn

It's Whiter Theren

After all these years of holding on, it's whiter theren,
where departed ones are all you can trust in,
clouds blank as slates, all the purpose in the world to
be written. On a raft with a flame, floating backward,
we can only see shadows on the shore lifting burdens.

There's no path to trace in these sucking salt waters.
Bubbles face the surface and ultimately pop, selfless.
Someone, our destiny, is reeling us from the dark at
our backs. Higher personages explain it's a bed we've
made, a perpetual motion machine, this parlessness.

Peg and Hoolie
Keynote Address
3rd Annual Exhibition of Banishing

The Dirty Gory

Connie was so assured of her body that while many of her peers treated theirs as something so precious as to be given like a pink angora sweater: only once, or only in the dark, or hated theirs so much as to let it go only once, or only in the dark, she could feel Pain of Rivening but only along with the knowledge of regeneration and ever-presence. Indeed a joe felt drained and used after paying for a session, and so her clientele was culled.

"I don't claim to be Eryho. I have some implants that make my bones grow. It's a special sponsorship situation from PharmCo. Only one man could keep his lid on, and that was Ted. I bet he wonders wai I'm dead. T'was Wayne that did the dirty gory; he thot that Ted wd break th' story."