Thursday, February 27, 2014

Pathetic briefcase


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

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

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Viking fart

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

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


Wednesday, February 12, 2014

The Magic Rag




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Gypsy Fire Smudge




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

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

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


Ken
"I know."

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Dark out, north in



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



Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Stewardess



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


by Phyl

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Superfluity of kale


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


Hoolie
"I love you Peg"

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Stringing panic



Four-Fault Re-Button

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

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

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

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



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

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Sassy Flat Back Woman



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

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

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


Ken
"I want to get back there."

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Winter's wonder


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

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

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

by Hoolie

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

To the scientist



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

Overdetermination



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

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

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

Thursday, December 19, 2013

HOCK



PAST: forgiveness

PRESENT: gratitude

FUTURE: faith

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


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

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Robots



I Live with Dogs

I live with dogs and persons with disdain for emotion
The dogs are honestly selfish and honestly affectionate

You get dirty lying with someone faking you as their dream
A stab is a stab if your own mother stabs or doesn't stab

I live with a mother who's suspicious and wily and simple
My bitch gives me kissies and throws out her warm arms

Dogs live with people who surrogate their relationships;
Robots are genetically conditioned to satisfy, yet still vex.


Hoolie

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Two-and-a Quarter Tons of Crap



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

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

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

Saturday, December 7, 2013




Cornered animals


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

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

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

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

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

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

HOOLIE: God no Mom I hope not.

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

HOOLIE: Like I say. Real world.

PEG: Like I say. Respect me.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Mirror on a Stick

"Mysterious Cabinet"

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


Tom

Friday, November 29, 2013

Last night in california

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

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

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

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


Ilyn
"Short for Illinois"

Friday, November 22, 2013

pain mine


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

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

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

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


Reptily