Prayer Gong

i can almost taste lake michigan on my lips
and breathe the rot of autumn at close grip

when i say god and gaze upon a place
in the curtain hanging black across His face

the fabric falls away and my eye goes distant
to a floating island in an upper quadrant

looking way beyond because it's been so long
since the call to prayer for me's been gonged.


Donna
"Mthyuh...I'm so grateful..."

dieoff up ahead

Never mind the swollen sea of young behind;
What concerns instead's the dieoff up ahead.

Our exercise of awesome individualist power,
god's voice one with making the right choices,

is good now if it will be or ever has been good
tho I reckon it's hard t' see thru a circle of fire.


Peg
"Really thinking. Kundalini thinking."

Entry Portal Craw Circumference Dimensions

As a virgin parson's son is out about his day, and just as he is ready to grant his first true blossom to a ruddy shop girl, he is seduced, literally hoisted by the roof of his mouth with a pair of thumbs made into hooks, by a scarred, hairy older man in a suit open at the neck, a handsome bearded but sadistic aristocrat.

The cruel and charming duke turns out and sets to chain the bewildered parson's family's only son for seven months in butt plugs and scrotal weights. He forced that the boy, wearing more than seventy tiny rubber-on-metal clips beneath a kimono, say goodbye to a friend who lay expiring in a mechanical bed.

Preacher's kid eschews the magnetic grip of the lusting mastermind and his duplex in a canyon highrise by scaling back to earth along the slippery yokes of the anonymous and undocumented classes, training in return their progeny on what to say to be redeemed in the context of the host society.

When he wakes up in a cooking pot with a cassava root and a pound of celery, broth to the chin, he stands and gathers his fortune slowly wrought from proctoring and chalk, returns triumphant to the scene of his pubescent initiation frights and is immediately tricked by a familiar voice behind a cape.

You've taken seven years to be away, and now another seven alone with me you'll stay attached to a radiator pipe in a pretty prison full of playful castrati maids. Your still warm nest egg isn't all you've signed away on what you thought was a petition to lift restrictions on entry portal craw circumference dimensions.


Odrin and Ayre Fromme-Diaz

Gift to speak truths in anger

you call me crooked
dick clown wanderer
broker of heart and rules

my argument is that
i love you just as much
as I ever have

there's no truer fortune
my better eye could find
than the sinew of a trail


Tilly

Spin, Vajra

winning and losing connote will
zen master refuses to take step
goes down on a burning temple
aggressives link selves to a god
and feel good about the victory
the bending willow slaps a boot
without even achieving titillation
the vajra, a vessel or pin, coun-
ter ambulates against our plane.


Ken and Jan
"We belong to each other."

cataclysm

and ground splitting,
loss of limb strength
signs thrown at you,
jarring, a vajra spins
past is disintegrating
wraith in a spotlight,
fireballs behind you,
dank rent in the sky
convulsions of sinus
begging, intervening

waking chi blackout
out-of-vehicle drive,

hello? I'm travelling:
it's a lucid career of
then to nowhere; he
who troubles not be
troubled not by any-
body, so I go toiling.

Paranoid of Nature

It was a role play or exploring letting swim a fractile of human makeup that most share. Maybe because of the music then we lent ourselves cheap to its timing (or just by being in a generation can you claim any hand in coloring the nature of its arts?).

Human makeup is darker than the skin. Or so said the mind who invented original sin or simply spoke for every person having flinched from nature for fear its dangers represent a judgement kindred to the horror a mind beholds at its less civilized head.

The mind includes nature, but atoms cannot include other atoms unless where there's a mind, which must then be agreed to be para-atom, para-material, magic and its imagination. Mind cannot exist without surroundings. If it did, it would be a horror.

If what's around us was a mind it would be a mind without surroundings since what surrounds what surrounds us is a vacuum. Tension created by sucking is what teases on life. But your fear about nature is that it just might be a mind and not that it could disappear into a void. 

If all else went away forever we could finally heave a sigh and symbols could no longer torture us with accusations as if we ourselves had decided to be born so dreadfully bad. Not even a stick man can exist when there are no lines. Nomenclature is meanwhile my only defense.


Baal

Pups

Pups watch through trees for the fence-walking kitties, but the trees are all wavy from light off the pond.
Pups think that kitties are mystical creatures that come from a world that is shimmering fronds.


Donna
"I surrender."

I Blew My Pleasure Center

My cheeks felt tight for about three years, and my gums were receding prematurely. In the mirror, my face kept changing. I thought my bite was sinking inward. I wondered what force could make the bone structure of a skull move and bubble. Nocturnal bruxism? An uneven ridge swole up surrounding my mouth like an older smoker whore, but it wasn't unattractive. Only if I pinch-lifted my lips-- and who does that?-- would anyone spy what was really developing. Even I didn't guess until the little ruffled moons started poking their fingers through. These have got to be someone else's damn teeth.


Missy

Good luck thieving

i drowned a wasp
left him in the net
turn back around
an a piece of fluff
flies at my face an
i flinch so garishly.
but all the evening
under half a moon
good luck thieving.


R.

cathartic diagnosis

They say a walking problem is a mind problem
as if your mind could have trouble walking, or if
you could even think and walk at the same time.

They assume that everything physical about you
must be normal and in so doing make your mind
para-physical. It's not matter that exists in space.

They see you wobble and think of drunkenness as
mind impairment not physical disabling. The mind
wanna own everything so it calls everything mind.

I name what your problem is so I can own it while
still not having it myself. Whether or not I own you
as well is inconsequential as to cathartic diagnosis.


Al Upinnahb Iznis

a new poverty layer

out with the genteel poverty that's neat;
in with the ground-in extra layer returning
intimate effects into earth at your feet.

one layer of wallpaper or applique bordering
one fiberglass headboard as the base for an
entire climbing wall of fluffy Borgana faunae

thin crust of sprays and exhausts and their
harvest of dusts and micro-excrement;
now slide, rub passing by, and carpet stomp.

from bong water of the Jedi to Febreze,
oily, salted kernels, pebbles, party sprinkles;
coarse smears making of shag a rank flat top.

cap 5's a measurable gaseous zone;
above that we experience mists still falling
and then roundabouts the hearts and arms.

the center may follow the throat to be able
to vacuum over again its own essence;
the throat is the eroded gate that plays out.


Donna
"Yes, I'm up."

Meat Horn

I remember the blood and turquoise-color rubber and my mother.
Stainless steel trays and instruments, from beneath a paper bonnet, druggily beholding me.
There were electric storms that felt like my hair growing, emergency sucking.
Sounds interrupted, noise was interruption, we were attention bait on an interventionist planet.

Now clots of our lives, appearing behind mirrors, in drains, snag on the present, must be yanked.
Her shimmer fills doors a couple times a year then disabsolves into telephonic vibration.
When I extend my thumb at the end of an arm to pull her braid I'm blocked from contextual access.
Except for hearing waves lap school-blue tiles, how she squeaks free of her swimming cap.

When I hold myself the way she hugged herself in self-knit sweaters on a slug-lined morning
The same elbow tips come to touch the mitts with similar tentativeness.
I am a genetic trail that's grown the habit of spouting vertebrae along it.
We have so many stomachs that it doesn't matter where the break is, or change of mind.


Hoolie
"For Peg"

I am a genetic line

Slack gaping knots of vines of rubber coated vines of metal wire roping, dipping over and under, across each other in their glacial play. I am a genetic glacier.

The tree, a spear that disintegrates attempting to exit the atmosphere, all the while shedding dna and re-materializing in competing shards. I am a stack of totem.

If the heart was the only rhythm we could hear, and we liked getting bounced around in a leather bag, the drums came out and we bobbed, singing "I...I."


Illyn

Wherever He Lays a Cat is his Home

from their breath each could tell that the other was scared
they lay bare in their bed with the light from outside
it was right what they'd done but they didn't know why

There were roads that would never be lit by the moon
so deep or so smart as to always be gay
to wither or not one knew night from the day

But some sinewy vines that swung out of control
re-trajected by chance with the same random goon
and in blindness of living got tangled in two.

Tilt of Mast

there is a lost-ness
but also a seeking;
a tilt of mast could
be caused by sink-
ing but also rowing;
mor'n half a planet
covered in puddles
flat as tables, a fly
meanders cursively
over, seeing his self
from most angles 'n
not sincerely caring,
for it's all an old sto
-ry now, reflecting.


Ayre and Odrin Fromme-Diaz

Why = Where

If what you desire is for me not to exist, that's not ok. 
That's the fist with which she grips reality. Where
Were the OK police? They'll come swooping in. Why

There's a whole thing happening that includes your sleep and what happened you thought you forgot, and added to that what you think life is, your assumptions about why events occur, how material changes hands, and the dark presence of the stars and planets teasing growth while life counter-intuitively resists and yes, choices.

When you try to hurt me, it almost seems like I can't
Trust you. Peg's girlhood is full of blank spots like
These. Now she is a fierce and lonesome retired woman.

Tendrils of wealth can curl in anywhere at any age. Some license you got on weekends suddenly pays off. Teacher of that course filing for bankruptcy. It seems like a directive hand because she can't see the invisible swirling currents, just her little paddles. She squishes forward with the bated breath of a blindfolded bottom.


Phyll's Log

These Things've been Kicked Around

These things've been kicked around
these things've been tard n hung
things we are a used to be
regretful for what's to come.

First thing is a prison round
out yr window a golden town
one day they cough up the key
(that's) when you chose to run from me.

These things've been kicked around
these things've been tard n hung
things we are a used to be
regretful for what's to come.

Another one is a paper cup
you take a drink and you've used it up
Now Raylene she is history
but when she ran, the cut was clean.

These things've been kicked around
these things've been tard n hung
things we are a used to be
regretful for what's to come.

Finely my dog passed from me
Bad breath and vasectomy
Not once did he ever run
I kep'm chained t'the Mercury.


Donna
2 Mike: "Should we really?"

These Things: the Mp3

Psalmz N Prolmz

Say did you ever notice wen yr man seem 2b driftin
Got you out twice a week on a curb try some griftin
Used to sing you to sleep up to now doneven listen
Grrl he is unresponsive and therefore it is nonsense
We don't care for the violence, the overconfidence
Say es que I-N-U were n-o-t not meant 2 parly voo.


Rappy Wordinghood

Short for Illinois

Her body finally started showing signs of morphing into another thing. Maybe another species. Bones are trunks, bubbling over each other's paths. I saw a personal form swallowing its own mouth as part of one major folding crease down the center with dark grey bone rising breaking round the edges like molten dough to crust. Maybe just a phenomenon that happens and doesn't affect the soul, though you die. Though she didn't die at all. In fact she stepped out of that thing when it finally cracked back open. But then she was Connie. And from Connie they wanted to know: what happened to the Chama. And then when they found Connie dead in the motel on that robin's egg chenille spread, they started sniffing around her boyfriend Ted.

Ted is the blue-eyes Aframerican former news anchor and husband of Peg. His face only appears to be sad because he knows that anyone can melt by it. His sideburns become salt n' pepper from this worry. He fathered Hoolie and a daughter he's not sure about. His albino half-brother is Illyn. Illyn is short for Illinois.


Phyl's Log