Hut of Saints

Clear in the middle of the preserve sits a Hut of Saints,
Where you can go and behold figures of the Holy rising
From a species of Xmas tree wheel projector or fire log
Simulation; There goes the Admonishing Spinster: look
At me, my hagg'rd creases, take a clue! Now th' Soulful
Maiden, in habit ascending like a rocket, so benevolent;

Therz th' Chama, Reptily, the only topless one, a clayish
likeness but for her breast; Oh Chamalamalalahamacha-
lamalachamalalahamala, the living one, where you roam
is our peril and our fate, chalalalamahamalala. N' behind,
a dog sillo'ette, waving up across the tied stick and hemp
string structure singing in a Squeakin' Hula with the wind.

Futility Study

Carrying a pallet of 24 gallon-sized water bottles on my back, the sun was so hot on the cliffs that i swooned and lost altitude. I have to slurp this fluid with my beak tip and tube-like lingual cartilage. These are just steps i take to get through my laif, not complaints.

My constructs have recombobulated. Daytime seems like a habitable place turned inside out. As long as i can pray and rub the shivstone, i'll send my worry through the heat of my fingers and onto the drum of Absolute Space.

The future can still exist without my imagining it. As soon as our religion was deemed unnecessary, hoards of cynics flooded in to take over the pastoring of the left behind. It left a few of us adrift, but with a true faith.

Missy
Open Release, Day 49

Pig of Depression

Pig of Depression, you leave my spoils in the corners of the cave,
Pig, lover of chewed bones, ignorer of pain, moribund of memory,
Bloated pig of feeling, hog of medicine, retriever of soiled food,
Pig of static desire, pig of selfishly unrequited want, self-penned.

Pig of immersion, happy wallower, knowledger of damnation and
Doom, freezer of food and peristalsis, forager of discarded archives,
Snorter of...

Can you just stop it for a moment, Donna?
Whut. It's the Bhagavad Gita.
No, it isn't.
You think I'm...
Yes, yor sitting there with yr pipe just chanting extemporaneously.
I have it memorized, I...
And you are using my knuckle as a worry stone; it's nearly raw now.

Yr right. Guess I'm just feeling a little low.
Have you thought about doing some housecleaning?
Do you mean the bastard who killed Connie?
No, I meant actually cleaning yr house, but... go on.

Lysate

Donna poked at her tobacco bowl with an ankh pin.
So you walk in my sleep?
What? You mean you dream of me?
No, sometimes I open an eye and catch you streaking by on the tile floor in your socks, ninja. You yourself have reported certain nocturnal peregrinations that could only have occurred among my delta waves.
A white mustache of smoke gave her a veil as it rose. Hoolie listened to the flock of windmills cooing beyond sight.
Our bodies --and moments of shared tragedy-- are the thin yarn that in those two places binds us, allows us to roll sharply forward like a squared, spongy wheel.
On the contrary, I believe it is our love of those not present that keeps us in moon-like orbit, that wobbling, borrowed light of lost knowing.
Indeed, her name is tattooed on your wrist as well as my ankle.
Ink is the murkiness that follows. Connie was the miracle, invisible.
I can't see you at all now.
But there's been a Perseid every 15 minutes.
Someone's turned off the bathroom switch.
It's on a timer so's I can check the color of my piss.

My Spread

I'm not in a space-step program. I work hard; I am highly functional, as you've seen-- I am highly functional in defending myself, outcomes aside, hardworking in my own defense, just as I was highly functional before I began to have to defend myself-- and then I was hardworking my functions for the good of the flight school.

When you give me all theez rulz and regulations, train me to strive and try, then wipe everything aside with an arbitrary decision, I get double vision, I get religion but it's upside down right then. It's a dog and pony ride, but my ass growing wide on your office chair means I participated. My spread is your bread, baby.

Cuz I chose this grinder to wind me down, I guess I have to spin in it, find the swing in it, and do my thing. Drown. As in a blender. From all that I remember, it'll be like my hometown, the one I scrammed from when my shoulder bones started poking holes in roof sections. They were tender. Now my life itself is deregulated.

Missy

Clem Bake

Dear Clem,

Ted called and sang a portion of the Patty Duke Show theme to me on Sky Dispenser today.

A group of chillun from eight different countries sang a few lines of Happy WD Day, must've been about 900 ovem.

Where are my kidz, Clem? Where are my kids right now? Are y' hugginem? Don't chyall have an account on Twiddle?

You know I'm not sitting on my thumbs cuz I'm typing. But I'm also not dormant off oracle. I think I am ever closer. How do I know this. Because I can see a hooptie in the driveway and you in it. All those seats and ashtrays, but you come alone.

All my power is nothing to you. You had to be borne of the same womban as a certain mulatto news anchor with blue eyes. Was he singing through the station next to your beauty mirror, or his? I could see the little glamor bulbs in a square.

There are candles burning in caves everywhere for my Connie, my Hoolie. Maybe they've grown up and can see the light. Hoolie said when he was six: "Aunnie Clem say you a inter-special anomaly, mommy."

No, I won't be dropping the lift basket this evening. Don't even show up again without my family in the vehicle.

I love you in spite of everything,
Peg

Saint Dick [revision]

I sit in the back pew of an empty Episcopalian sanctuary with my
degradable plastic sack and its transparent cellophane wrap on
laminated cardboard, a box of fourteen aluminum packets that contain
low-porosity, curve-cut moisture sheaths laid over 21-mg transdermal

Nicotine glue patches. A swell of lemon slavered wood and illumination
on cotton paper holds at length sweet iodine eddies from the chequered,
florid lane, and because there is a concert in town, the pungent squalls
of faker hippies curling along on mushrooms or methyl-amphetamines

With their costumes, Goodwill hunting and baby straps. Ceilings this
high create micro-climates in the dust-rayed suspension for door mice
and death moths stuck in the water tension of puddles in stone-columned
receptacles. Alone with the crinkling flotsams of Man in my lap,

It doesn’t seem to matter what might swim between esophagus and
lung. Only my lips will breathe this prayer, only enemies and friends
in far-flung orbits could form a basis for presumption or explanation
for why I’m here, but I’ve no known knowledge of my excursion

by any human ear. Tho I may detect the shriek of a suparna high
above the painted metal beams and glass of the cupola, it does not rain
fear, only static wonderment. I strode past shingled cottages, against
the backs of doorstop Buddhas in the creeping hindo-communistic

Aesthetic of the university neighborhood. A declassified man on feet
naked but for tar and sidewalk gum, with folds of cash and dreads and
beads pursued me chanting fumigation of indians by cigar store regulation
and the osmosis of their reservations, and his speaking slowed me down,

Gently forced the diversion that led me to a street that opened between
some trees where I could spot the steeples and the dome and its ribs
caught up with kite string and palm fronds and blanched bodhi skins
teased by saline winds seeping from the bay, which keeps away tsunamis.

Hoolie

Interview with a Captain of Industry

"Looking for yr fren David?"

"Yes, I know it's last call, but..."

"Who's got a call butt?"

"Have you seen him?"

"Per my advice, he'll be arriving shortly in Gary, Indiana."

"Far."

"I'd say."

"Well, I've got five dollars. Can I buy you a White Russian?"

"I'll take that drink and offer you a job."

"What's yr name?"

"I hear yor a mediocre ho."

"It's what some say."

"But yr better than that."

"Don't you love Kaluhua?"

"Some glamour, but more regular."

"It's in Gary, yr operation?"

"It affected my amygdala, actually."

"Mom'll wanna know where I've gone."

"It'll hep you get a loan on a hooptie."

"With a visor mirror?"

"I told you you wr jus right."

Employment-related

I love to tell the story of how i started working at a mortuary lipstick factory. My fren David was wondering what we were gonna do for fundz in order to keep riding the New Wave one night. How would i contribute. I said oh i'll go next door and turn a trick. Too shy, took me till closing, and the Gerente says he'll give me five bucks to sit on his face. But not before therz an ugly scene with the barkeep. "Show me what's in yr drawr," Gerente says. Bartender looks so Pissed Off, spits out his nose on the Bottle Washer. "Hand it over. Sorry, can't pay you this week. It's all Rent." Bar guy stomps out the door like a Sissy, which in fact he was.

Gerente throws a deadbolt as big as yr arm behind him, says come with me.

Upstairs on a rug in the out-of-code loft office/bedroom plywood efficiency platform, i was at first frightened i'd suffocated him until he started to snore. Then i looked over at his wallet, full of a night's take. I just poured beer on his face until he was awake, climbed down some kinda bunk bed ladder and walked out the front door with my fin.

Just because of that, because of that story and the sincerity within, i met a believer in the rehabilitation of youths who have too much fun. I'll never know his real name, but now i breathe toxic powders and work in slime as others do in fog or wind.

It's all about death at PharmSupply, Funerary Cosmetics Div. We deliver because we can, and we are. And we do. Did.

Now that i myself am Dead Physically as well as employment-related, i can say whatever i want.

Connie

Monopoly of Prerogatives

The Chama's challenge as she scales cliffs and tears flesh and nests is to find some rest in conscience. No longer a topless AfroAmerican shivstar in her 30's, neither beauty nor the powers of hypnosis can be centering virtues. Even infamy is left yet unrewarded before tracking kicks in. All she has is my early reporting, and through it, a monopoly of prerogatives.

Reptily, now you are a bird. You were an ape. And before that, a maid. Summon yor warring facets, grrl. What does evry suffring living creature believe in. They next move, woma.

"Just because of a helicopter doesn't make you queen neither."

We're embedded. I'm awol just like you, but also no one told us we coont.

"This is my life to save. For you it's a thrill ride, dispatch."

I love you Chama. Together we can have a home in this sky and crags.

"Until you ship out to sell me out, charlatona!"

Don't swipe at my ride, now.

"You go an take a break. You hold yor shit."

**end of transmission**

"A Hero"

It was a year ago about now, that many people and things having moved through places. Even then we thought of how solids are overrated, that mass itself got too much attention. A vacuum is a place. There are spaces where there is nothing.

Twice a week you went off to the tramp with the crystal ball on a stand. The solid and the gas were both clear, but the one could only tauntingly reflect, not contain. Your sadness spilled into the air of that room, tent, hooptie, ditch.

That was one time you answered back with an all-time and timely disregard for time. Your movement has carried you here, and that could not have happened without unlimited space. Possibilities of emptiness make even pagans fear.

to Cap'm, "A Hero"
Phyllis

false awakening

After a Plethora of Mornings that feel the same Cool Straw in the nest, Peg deserves a False Awakening. I am able to tap in, with my job in the media, to her remote decisioning conduits. I'll appear first as a Tease Report, then a feel-good piece, and finally the Signature Commentary. She'll know enough to try and open a Closed Circuit. Because she mutters in her dreams, we can touch and recommit until I Can Come.

Or will you come to collect Me, Darling? Pluck me from the World of Connectivity? I ask you, as a Long-Hair Cat filled with burrs but will only lick its Pink Bits, to wipe my Channels Free with a Single Spasm of your claws as you sweep through town.

The kidz are operating bess they can on yor governmental income. I still have blue eyes and brown skin. You could be diamond mining Africa or harvesting the next chank over, tell me love. Please Goddess indicate if you've been marching, that yor one of the ones they've scheduled for Open Release. We can pool our networking and raptor skills for a Sure Kill of the intruders. I hear they've got litcrit support now, but it's only a matter of time before love mixed with procreation will bring them down.

Yor dark clear stud,
Ted

The Windrose

The windrose is a plus or cross negated. The
in-betweens spoil everything by suggesting
infinity. Man has four limbs; so many in-
dividuals depend on numbers like these.
The true rose is only a cross turning;
all circles, thus, are an illusion.

Turning in every direction creates our globe.
Wind, not chaos, displays this point. A spin-
nig cross is a wrrlpool, yet not open ended.
This is how we arrive at the proof of solids:
Nature's want is to wrap herself around thm.
Otherwise she spins like an eating, shitting

Vajra going down on her insides and spitting
air. Our trade routes only follow the sucking
of a deep inner core, only wanting to tap a
meaning. Fortunate as an epic, I can turn cir
-cles around the glare, dip my beak deep into
the mesh as for a fish, eat of dust forced by

A system of apparent perpetual motion, like
my lifespan. She needs to close off the in-
take and egress and carry on self-contained,
around a man, someone staunch who wants po-
lish. Pregnant women seem to be hauling a ball
when it's only a windrose protecting its nut.

Peg

Strange House at the Mouth to a Windmill Farm

The bitches' ears go back; they stand frozen in poses of toe-testing and finally sink like sphinxes into the sand.

Puzzling behavior is often the result of sounds inaudible to the human ear, yet tonight it is still as a lake bed.

They can hear much farther, other packs, the highway, emptiness of radio waves bouncing against their heartbeats.

Like bats, their shameless emotions are broadcast and return as a map, but a monolith, with all space filled in.

As you walk between buildings in your black cap, far away from here, my love is a beacon that stuns me sleeplessly.

We can all still smell the jetsam of your last moon on this octant of the planet. The room and land have turned strange.

In a wide mountain ditch carved by wind and absences, a bowl of gases, sits a house where dogs keep the vigils of men.

Cap'm

Mike's Swimming Blog, #6

You are anticipatory, yet
you want the days to undulate slowly,
even anxious to reach a day that's slow,
so anxious that the day grinds by.

We thought time was the
difference between today and tomorrow,
not how you resist or move in space.
We were wrong. But are we dorky mimes?

Two nights now I've fought a permanently
duct-taped vacuum hose, a sea monster or
reef, after only one and a half strokes.
I am not comfortable with my nose underwater.

The pool in that house is for show or
soaking, not to swim. Only the Mexican
understands this. He came with his
blower at 6 AM, or wasn't that him?

Now that all that was mine is repossessed,
Water stalks me, even as I try to stand
free, to remind me perfunctorily of its
disillusion and ravaging suspensionship.

Where are the bats and leafy, hairy flotsam?
How can toes scribble nonsense without algae-
filmed walls of bathroom tile to record each
grateful and confident, leveraging touch?

You and I look to swim in each other, fools.
There will be better times when we cast a
glance backward and see what we've written
in these caverns, once they are still.

Mike

High Chank Turnoff

Ancient mulatto news anchor and his wife, a K; What kind of messed-up children would they lay? Therz mixed-up situations everywhere; We've got them coming at us by air. We've got to hit them in their nests, where Peg and her assassins rest. I see The Chanks one day with clear skies and no grid, no worship or fear. Devils hide above; wisdom rides alone. We will set bait and track them down. Wayne [Disassociated]

Our Genus

We take in swarms from the windstorms
, give them stillness and warmth, and lay
out glue traps meant for much bigger an-
imals. Everyone is seeing apolyptic mean
-ing into anomalies of nature. There is no
other way that is non-toxic to our genus.

They struggle themselves to exhaustion
and then maybe fall asleep or just sit th-
ere pissed off and starve, helpless stiffs.
Their numbers show how our own lives
depend on killing off as many as possible.
They seem to prefer living sweat even o

-ver shit. Sugar draws few. The smell of
sliced ham poked into the grill of a zappe
-r lamp just makes them crazy writing t-
heir names in the air and lighting on any-
thing but the fry tubes, though now an a-
gin the pups jump at the stray execution.

Wayne [Rebuttal]

That's Some Low Security

Dipping this far into the evening
makes my circulation pound
from fright of undermining the
security of tomorrow.

Sleep lost is death wasted.
I've got appointments with
shivreps in the morning, so
I can't bash the establishment now.

I only know that Missy and I
love one another the more
certified I become, or now that
I'm washing bowls things seem in order.

Without her really I'm em-
bedded in meaninglessness.
Or is it with? For technically,
she has yet to be assigned a significance.

Phyllis, SSCB

Failure

I've been a failure, everything I've done.
At the time it seems like progress, but
it's just a move from one to another failure.

We were going to preserve these gods
because they were real and when we
saw them, fantasy turned obvious.

Of course, there they were. And could
be saved with parts of machines.
Musculo-skeletal decisioning was first

piloted in glass booths with heavily
made-up flakes so we couldn't see
who we were killing. Problem was,

None of them died. After swatting
them together like dolls, they were
broken and mascara splattered.

Now they've bred their sticky
progeny, all coming up through
escuelas monarcas to join the

last of the real sky lords
and be flying maybe remote
control gods but not controllable.

They are not completely controllable,
and the real ones are dying. In our
medpits. It's like they're over-fertilized.

They spill a purple glue
flakes have taken a liking to,
up to sacrificing their own

to collaborate with our project.
Though I'll lose my job, seems
like the only thing to do now is

hose down the old biddies on the
death march, and let them out to
see if they or their epitypes win.

Tom
"My Boss is Wayne"

My First Screech

A semi-official, I haven't rose through the proper channels.
I feed in these unmarked pissholes. Freedom breeds suspicion.
Whenz my release hearing? Am I on semi-auto till doomsday?

I don't suppose anyone could fly me a lead pigeon;
cramped as I am, even by the wild, I crave noticias.
Mis vecindarios hoy son rocas y charcos de vomitos.

Or just return to me my Reptily braino. Therz too
much longing in these woodz. Where is the camphor
oil of my abuelita with the shimmering tail? Aiii!

Half Missy, Half Preservation Society

weird growth

When the ground shook, something rose like thick white smoke but with a slow growth, maybe second hand speed, out of a crack, faster than cauliflower. Then it bled.

Illyn's burns and stretch rips caked with the dry sand in a mud made of static born of friction powered by movement. Movement, it turns out, is more relevant than time, which mostly lies.

Synaptik action batched an array of repair technologies and who cares how long it took, anyway; he was a naked monstrosity who would fall resignedly into a wooden cart he himself had placed there at the event mouth whenever. Shab could have been saddled up for millenia or a couple of bucks, didn't matter. The jagged planks and their absences felt like a rack of feathers.

These are chanks. They rock and pitch. A baby of God, Illyn felt seasick. His eye was way too low. Go now, he commands. Look for your master. Wherz yr bowl? Shab twiddled his limbs like a small dog running but stayed hovering shadowless over the ground. Only the mountain herself could scoot the squarish wheels along their rutted path of lurching and weightlessness and impact.

Illyn's sojourn makes me think of Donna's patio. It's the same place at night with the leaf blowers and watering jets as it is at 7:00 AM as I scurry across it to my car. The body can only feel the sting of time when matter moves. The body senses movement and wakes up and moves and both movements leave scars in the shape of time, which tells a lie, even in writing, even in yr flesh. Tonight, the distal screech of a suparna added to the mess.

Phyllis

Embedded, SNSCB

Communal Disharmony Camp

Terror in the Sky

It should be a peaceful place
because nothing's there. It's
where light comes from, but
it stabs my breast to look up.

Why can't I see the beauty?
It's like it's yr last snapshot,
all blank, but then therz an
Unexpected One also absent.

This I believe: we must have al-
ready crossed over. Our whole s-
phere buttonholed The Crack, an
now the heavens are a sewer.

Or ancient flakes, gawking up in
fear, evolved synaptikly into wonder
till the moment they were pierced
with ebony, rocketed off to Never.

Only cuz my own mum is the most
possible pure and beloved can I
call it "anti-mother." On a personal
note, I feel it's coming for me.

If I'd meant the Wild Savior, I'd've
gotten a slap on the back, but since
I'm sticking with K's, I end up slinging
rhymes in communal-disharmony camp.

Connie
"CDC VIII: No Rights!"

Chunk of Horny Rock

IN 15 minutes I shall swallow the shiv and wake up seven hours later in full wing, full toothed. My nail rigs are still soft as bowling balls, but that's to carry me in fear far enough to hide and sharpen, grow and take me just as long to return. Therl be warnings. I'll be famished. Two unauthorized kills set me back a growth cycle, and I will carry the nubs in my skeleton for life. That means nothing now. With flake donors, I can go on to lay dynasties and just be, permanently, like a chunk of horny rock in silent orbit. I'm a fixture in Mthyuh's plan. Quasars, plague, all kinda cataclysms you name it. My job is to witness, monitor how life progresses, ebbs. In between I nap and fart.

But tomorrow I must pass the final test. Am I really formed. It's a hairline between liability, casualty and launching me half assed. A K's buttocks grow and balance in flight, not squashed cruelly into a wood desk. With an ink well no less. That was how I tatooed our life, your blood on the inside of my cheek flap when my halla talons were fresh. I know now I can't stop and smell the mercy after whut I've learned about the mission. I am built for particular understanding. Because I am not destroyed, my purpose is truth and trumps rightie/ wrongie. I feed and take and create culture.

Missy

Callous in an Odd Place

Donna's hut, carport and pool create a Tiki-style octagon behind the chain link fence. She can often be seen in knee-to-toe bells and a halter adjusting deck lounges. The parcel is mortgaged at more than three times its worth; one would expect it to sprout exhaust plumes and fly. True enough, a layer of hot lava sufficiently shallow to be covered in the mineral rights sometimes causes mudpots and steam vesicles to appear in the yard.

Donna lives in shame of her sun damaged forearms and ankles. The scar is a shimmry curt'n. The desert pulls at your blood through the skin. Someone has snipped your life stalk and placed you in a drying bin. But why the callous on the back of her thumb?

She was into fresh-juiced carrots until it turned brick-orange. Why should the most puzzling parts of the physique present so saliently dyed? Donna'd been at P-Supply U during the tenure of a psychoanalytic dean crossed with Jungian department heads. She wondered how she was somehow callous in an odd place. One would expect a life to form armament where friction is most frequent. Donna loves her girlz, has shared a kidney with the poor, and of another race. Of reverence to higher beings, one does not chafe from that which can't exist.

Could my linguistics background add something to the mix that would reveal, through language, a fallacy in the metaphorical approach? Not. Memory trumpets: "Phyllis, to tell you the truth, I think something may have bitten me there." Donna crammed a smoke in her mouth and stood to fold the chair. An incision had left the faint white jet-like streak on her lower back.

Phyllis
Re: Donna

Wild Savior

You were lucky it was a seven.
Yeah, you were too.
Seven saved us.
Yes, it did.
Pfist.
What, Fool.
Do you know the story of the Wild Savior?
Yeah, the Seven.
How did it get to be that number?
It's just an old game.
No. There were seven that stepped through The Crack. Only one could be a savior. The rest would do menial labor.
Seven what.
Seven mountain rebirths.
Some of them were bitches.
Yes.
Someone told me they came up from the soil.
After jumping into Kareer Kesh.
I didn't hear that.
You know how flakes take to covet their land.
Hell yeah I was born and will die here, I
Calm down. You don't even know the story.
What sto- hell ya I know the story. Seven went up; it was a pilgrimage.
Moms dropped them off in town.
Dads were working in the mines.
Sisters and brothers praying for them at big assemblies.
Wind blew the roof off.
K's took some of the chillun.
They prayed for a wild savior.
When all the numbers were down except one.
What numbers.
The damn ten numbers. In the law.
In the Law that Saved the Chillun?
There's no such law.
In the Law of Climbing the Mountain?
And that law says
It says you stop ten times and praise Mthyuh and beg.
Beg who.
Beg Mthyuh to
To eat you last. Beg her to eat you last.
That's true. And which station didn't fly away.
Station.
Which of the ten on the way up to Kesh where they pray?
Musta been seven. People get blown all the time in there.
Exactly.
Whut?
I think I met him the other day.

We Will Live in Wanting

We Will Live in Wanting

Until these winds die, we will live in their wanting.
We just continue to resist some far-off vacuum
While air alone, in its fairy likeness, can only follow.

A void rules our yards and makes us feel shelter.
It's a release from pressure makes hearts rush on;
The determined surf, in all its roaring, is sucked back.

There is a hole in space that keeps things moving,
Even within these walls as we listen to the locomotives
Night trumpeting their liberation from nature.

Phyllis

Empathic Implant Report

Empathic Implant Report: Birth Boot
Mod#GAYSHINER89.1-6.10 Glass n’ Foolz Gold Filament
WD40

Sun about 80% of the way down, straight ahead. Visor employed. Two men about 20 years apart stand close enough to touch in a V facing me. They both have long goatees: one is grey, and the other is red.

A trailer with silver stripes frames them in back. A campfire oranges up the nic-stain faces. Subject A waves. “Hey Micah howya doin!” it says. It gives too loud and too fast even at 50 yards, its movements cartoonish. Pfist is projecting a man who is giving himself to you and fighting you. He acts as tho he would perform fellatio and shoot you for having let him do it.

Flakes can be found easy in trailers. Rolling up to the big one, made clean with stucco, there were the bitches. La La’s eye fur is bruising in mocking tear blobs. She sports a fresh jaw bone from the carcass of an escaped embra kid. M’Lady comes fullallopping up to the truck and scratches the trim with her gnarly black foot pads. Amygdala has some degenerative hip going on and smiles her painful greeting with fangs.

Sometimes her eyes glow red, as if she’s in a spoiled foto. She nods her head toward wherever there’s trouble, never taking them off you. Her front legs are permanently mangled into a hug. I, too, have a disease of giving.

Mike and Jan came out to help lug groceries and my cameras, tripods. Pfist runs up pulling out a gun. I’m caught with sun in my eyes for a moment-- too many glinting metal objects. Jan and Pfist take me down to the vegetable garden and set up an empty 2-liter PowerShiv bottle. "Shiv" is any worldly comfort that simulates death.

Jan’s clothes are apparently meant only to constrict her hottest parts. There is not much warmth or protection. She feels this intimately when she shares her eyes with you. She is always scrubbed clean and ready for sex. She passes out $100 bills coming back from the casino. She and her kids once lived with Wayne, or Jack. There she is posing with the tiny Colt Automatic 25.

I get my training with a beer and fire off the only copper pellet in the clip. La La & M’Lady’d followed us down and laid there patiently in the rows. I’m standing like a cap’m on a ship or ready for a big-star bow while jazz dancing. Ball went high on the kick, made an explosion in the sand, and the girlz jump a good 10 feet. From there my moral standards were set for the weekend.

The next step was to run shiv for the whole mountain. It was the only thing Mike was out of except butter, mayonnaise, vinegar, salad dressing or any other balm or salve for things that raise themselves from the ground. Me and Pfist take to the truck for the local PharmSupply.

There’s a flake in the road who rents out his Caterpillar and a day’s work. He’s walking three giant mastiffs in the dust, one of them in an empty saddle. Hey, Joe! You don’t remember me, but we dug a hole for a whole lot of cattle. And a dog. And a cabron. Which went in first. It must have been 20 feet down. Perfick on his knees, a bowing pony clown. And then a Dalmatian. With the bullet stigmata. I had to fling it by the ankles. It ended in the predatory pose gravity'd chosen: teeth dead across the back of the old goat’s neck; legs struck, spread so hard as to pop the nails. We used to call it Death Farm 3000. Say—you were the one in the cockpit that time, on yr backloader!

No, I don’t remember you.

The Flake in the Road squinted into the extended cab. Nope. Who are you? I could hear Phyllis, my editor, cackling in the auditory node. On the way back Joe was walking in the same direction but about 100 yards behind where he’d been.

The liquor store guy reached for his alarm when Pfist came in and they both started laughing. Pfist starts to rant: I hate you! Everything’s free today! I want that, that, and that! while I get the libations. And one of those, please. At a discount! Pfist chimes in, then quiets down. Yeah, guy knows me. I beat up a flake in here. He was, he was touching chillun. He’s doing time now.

Get the phuck out of my store, liquor-guy stage yells. Yeah phuck you brother. I’ll see ya now. Pfist smiles like Clark Gable. Pfist is OK! the guy says. Are we all done here, I ask him.

Back refreshing remnants of our earlier cloud, we rumbled out of town again and toward the stucco trailer. Cactus whiz past so close they could give Pfist a ruddy shave while he sounds off in the open winda. Yeah, he was coming in, and me and some friends were coming in, and he says here come the snitches. I say good cum goes to things who wait. Then I was all saying shit and he was all saying shit even more, and then we just let free like when yr drinking and you get to the point where you know it doesn’t make sense, and you just feel this hate, and you just don’t care? Well we were both getting to that point and he hit me and I hit him and knocked him on the floor, and then I beat him up until he got knocked out. He was all blood and drool. And I said, “I’m a felon; I’m on probation, and I can’t even vote. I got some meth, and a gun. I’m goinda jail. I’m goinda jail.” Pfist said this in an exaggercized way that would make you think he was ready to suck your dick or mad and ready to really wail into and murder you or both. The question was when. I felt excited and sad then.

Should I pull my briefs looser in my jeans or mourn my own offing. Back at the ranch we poured the shiv into the rest of the morning coffee and broke up a box of hard brown sugar into stones perfect for casting in with some ice. Skole!! Pfist shined with his mug of beer and played a game of stealing mine at the point of toasting. We were clicking just fine as he let me claim a joke about Johnny Walker and answered Right on Micah, friends for life, or if not, phuck you!! Phuck ya’ hard and in the head!! His glass had raised to cover one eye and wink at me through it.

OK here’s the deal I say. If I die, and it’s of natural causes, you can phuck me in the head. You can phuck my cerebrum. You can phuck me anywhere cuz I don’t care. But if you kill me, no. You can phuck my stinking corpse in the ass but that’s as far as it goes. Hell I can phuck you in the nose for all I care; you can’t do anything about it, says Pfist, who’s pulled in; You’re dead. I’ll come back to haunt you, I keep on. I have friends. They know how my head’s supposed to look. Where the holes are. I’m sure they do; I’m sure they do, wavers Pfist. Man, that’s sick!! You one sick Mthyuh phucker.

Meanwall Jan is done marinating pork steaks. Ooo. What are you guys talking about? That’s sick. Sick Mthyuh phuckers. Jan, you look beautiful, I say hoping to piss off Pfist. She looks at him. Thanks. Pfist gives me a thumbs up with the top row of his teeth pressing on the bottom lip. Taking a piss, I find a bar of baby soap.

Ya’ll have littluns yr not tellin’ about? Nah. Just my baby. The girlz caught her mousing in the bedroom the other night and now she ain’t right. They got her in their teeth. And shook, chimes in Mike, staring at the beets in the salad spinner.

Mike, yor a scientist; why don’t we all go down and have a look? You can tell us, on a scale from one to ten, how grave it is. Pfist wants a wager. I’ve got 8 and 9, him one through 6. Seven is the Wild Savior. 10 is dig a hole, Chihuahua meets its maker.

So after dinner we all tramp on through the stickers to the silver trailer under no moon, just torches. You can see the fabric of stars and boobs and thongs and hear Pfist and me working through the conditions. There is no payment unless my numbers prevail. We call a vet. No responsibility is required in the unlucky event that the scientist pours his tube in the direction of your fate. Mthyuh will be in charge then. But we don’t know yet.

There is a tiny, dobie-like bitch trembling in a pool of yellow light on a 99-cent astro-turf Welcome mat as a space-age altar to the sofa on the mauled and hoary w2w carpet. Get out or pipe down; we can’t hear anything, warns Mike. Yeah you guys, says Jan sitting, looking up and hugging her own naked brown openings. We can’t hear a thing. Get out.

A casino girl and a scientist through an oval plexiglass window. Pfist and I smelt glowing acorn smoke and an accordion RV hose dumping slowly under some oak. Mike'd got his training with a swimming scholarship and a grant from the Preservation Society. He was stroking the pooch and listening hard for a job or sounds of protest when he pressed for trauma and/or seeping. Ouch! Pfist barked at the sill. Bitches get all the attention. The night was still.

Micah
with Phyllis, Embedded

Communities White

This post has been squashed mercilessly by the Mthyuh Preservation Society.

Stories, Stories

One night the Chama was in so much pain she totally blew this guy's empathic circuit. He was a kiwi-level groomer and blood guide working on her gum shunt. Is to say trippy to say psychosis-inducing? No. He litter-ly popped a fools' gold and glass tube implant. Micah I think his name was. Now he calls himself Ted. He's like someone who stepped in the The Crack but he didn't.

Oh and the proclivities he is letting show. He even shacked up with the cart man for a weekend, Mthyuh's vomit we call him. They made a pact never to care or introspect, that it was 48 hrs of flesh-only intimacy. Then bff takes Kareer-Kesh anew and the next trek in, never heard of our colega cuz he's been born again.

Now Ted's set up camp in the bottom of Mike's pool like Edie Sedgewick eating daisies. He'll only allow his catty side to come out. If you press him, he just shows teeth. There are always cameras around-- his gourd was popped by a monarca bitch, what'd you think. If there's a record there's a story, simple as that.

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