storm has passed over

storm has passed over
like a stenciled cylinder
spinning round a bulb.
as wood become cinder
to an educated guesser
light from a rent is true,
but aint nothing temporary
don't come back to visit


Donna
"I had to bungee into the sinkhole where my house was. I am on a catatonic vigil."

Every eye is a witness

Every eye is a witness
The sky plays falsely as a lens or mirror but neither does it opine;
Define it as stretching from the first measurable unit off you and on up.
Every other person place object has a judicial aspect skill effect
So a hill might emanate approval. A rug, admonishment.
I release you, heaven, from my claim and thereby to Earth myself betroth.


Ilyn

Cinematographic depth

Shadowy smoking volcanoes litter the backdrop, which curves upward into infinity. If John Muir and Ansel Adams had a baby. And the baby was cinematographic depth. Peg and Donna are sitting catty-corner at a stained cement patio table with fajita steam rising in their faces. 

PEG: We'll have to put the umbrella up in a minute.
DONNA: Afraid they'll see we're lesbians?
PEG: Yes. I'm afraid of that.
DONNA: It stinks out here.
PEG: In the West things just fester.
DONNA: And all these once new chic upscale fast food places are now equivalent to old grimy bus station cafeterias.
PEG: They do need a makeover every couple of years, or.
DONNA: They also stop caring about the quality and presentation. Look at this slop.
PEG: And the jobs? Look there's a guy dumping ice into the top of the soda computer. On a ladder.
DONNA: Huh. Do you think it's true we're living in a tiny and not particularly significant sliver of human history?
PEG: I think the centuries are ever kinder. Ask me how. We get served food that came out of a freezer heated up in a microwave, but it's generally calm. Random shooters occasionally rampaging through, but then nothing.
DONNA: Do the centuries get ever better; does that play out in history?
PEG: I'd say yeah.
DONNA: Sometimes I can't remember if you're my mother or my sister.

dancing skeleton

Of all the things you want to fast forward, a dancing skeleton.
But what, to hasten its demise? These guys are here to stay.
Sorting through the images of the day, it's the most vivid one.


Ilyn

He, She, They

No one knew they were half twins but for their commercial behaviors. In every city, it started this way:

• He would start muttering under his breath out of frustration while darting about a shop interior, unable to find the satisfactory item/ price/ employee/ response.
• She would buy two of whichever size or brand of cottage cheese was on sale at the most convenient local grocer.

That might repeat in graduating and widening frequency over months or years. Then

• She would be at her fifth different cottage cheese supplier, this one in the next town over, purchasing up to a gallon of cottage cheese at a time, and sometimes finishing it off in the car before driving to the next market.
• He too would have to start adding to his avoidance list not only merchants but bankers, box office clerks, tailors, virtually any and all types of businesses that require human interaction and even some that do not. In fact not any that do not. He refuses to speak to a robot.

The city seemed to be rising up against them.

• Her with a calcium deficiency. 
• Him an incorrigible asshole (fear). 

They crossed paths and commiserated and tried to make it seem normal but the big and growing picture was troubling. Leaving town was wrenching and cauterizing. A new town like a new operating system: same humans, personalities: two persons wondering about wasting time learning to do it different just because somebody needs a job pretending to make it better.

• He, especially, empathized with foreign bodies in an ecosystem with the antibody feature. 
• She just didn't want to stick out.

Gonna be mindful

Gonna be mindful, better get ready for some mind.
We are relievers that can help all others of our kind.
When we meet together we consolidate our goals;
Peace and love are like carrots in moving bowls.

We get energy from believing
That being in the moment can soothe;
Pray not for delirious abandon, but
Slow into feeling this groove.

Gonna be soulful, better give face to some soul.
We are achievers of gladness who sell truth whole.
It's your fear that blinds you from behind
Not the brilliance of our method inside your mind.


Chamatilly, 29th Inaugural
[frag.]

Grabbing clips

DONNA: You came across as very grown up, confident, turned out dialecting past, complicated relationships with a gender-churning circus of lovers, hanging your hair here, then there, spreading your fingers into an explanatory fan. Grain liquor handles ice the way your turtleneck, by itself an overstatement, absorbed confessional narrative resonance into a plausible argument for beat realism.

PEG [blurry memory tape of]: I had to ask myself do I want this feeling, is this what I'm going for, over and over again. Do I want to repeat this, is it good enough or does it cross the line into... yuck. There must be a whole chapter in the Physician's Desk Reference describing that gastro-amygdular impulse after an intimate and not entirely welcome event. How many social norms are you violating is one thing but the sickening one is how many personally held assumptions have you challenged or oaths broken or whizzed past on a highway where speed limits never got posted.

DONNA: Even to a child it was sordid what you described, but you rose balloon-like above the details as you flexed your ability to articulate, to construct, to train a wild pack of memory keratoses to interact and create a home for themselves, validating your own existence as essentially reproductive.

PEG [pixellated memory tape of]: I was humoring him, I thought; that I was letting everything left unsaid between us populate a whole busy little love town in his head and if I just split one day, he should be the one to examine himself. Then I considered wait, who's doing what they want to be doing with who they want to be with here even in my own paradigm? Him, not me. He's taking the risk, he's pushing his skills, he's bettering himself to keep up and I? Can only grow lazy and uninspired. Yet I feel guilty that I'm "leading him on."

DONNA: Or you would toss your hair, toss back a drink, toss aside a magazine. In a bell-sleeved madras cotton. Without hair and hands, you are truly hideous to envision. These are God's gifts to everyone, a covering. Grabbing clips. Of course without hands no one would live long. You said you felt like a woman with no hands in this or that marriage. Selfish, passive dominatrix? Or slave.

These were very adult questions that we'd so far blissfully been as able as babies rolling on breasts to ignore. You'd been there and back, and you were still pretty. Ready for a serious and full connection with someone you could meet at the airport and stare into their eyes for up to 90 seconds. What passes between two minds during such encounters? Is all of that forgotten once love again self-consummates?

Pharmsupply's Prolabique LipLine Master-Lisp "Lipstickventory" Name Galleys 14

• Beat Realism
• Broken Water
• Bud o' Glee
• Bunker Bomb
• Catatonic Vigil
• Costumery
• Counter-intuitive
• Cracker Maker
• Dancing Skeleton
• Essentially Reproductive
• Flaming Avenue
• Ginger Sadhu
• Goodhearted Vainglory
• Gypsy Whistle
• Hypnoid
• Leather Toboggans
• Lie of Passion
• Mud Chank
• Panopticon
• Pentecostal Coal Walk
• Polar Vortex
• Quick Minute
• Snapping Anemones
• Topless
  
• Uselessness of Flesh
• Victory Lap
• Warp Exhaust

Spadelike

For Illyn it's not suicide-- how can it be? He has memory of what happens each time. If he wanted to kill himself maybe he'd choose another method. Jumping into that volcano is jumping back into the craw of the goddess, who had originally vomited him up onto that launching spot. He realizes that beyond a period of indeterminate unconsciousness he will be brand new and freshly re-entering the scarification process, awaken to pushing through the earth and stone within the mountainside. Eagerness for the first breath has long ago disappeared. It's not even faith anymore but a fact proven over and over. His skeleture is bamboo-stiff and spadelike for those hours.


Phyllis
Adjunct for Mthyuh Preservation Society

Spitting Dragon

spitting dragon carry on
spine continueth invisibly
down to the Earth's core

kick box all assaults of
nature and/or artificiality
and burn the whorers.

trudge on flaming avenue
great cauterized city
your warted chain mail


Illyn
"For Juniper"

How you'd negotiate using my system

• I give, I'm gonna have to, I'll offer you... eight fours for that. Eight fours and that's the change.
• I'd a expected prolly one-oh-one oh-one-oh dot one oh more on the opening quote honestly.
• Well if you are going to pick a nit, there's not much ground to hunt tho, huh? So in obvious terms what's left but four-nine-four four nine four punto 49?
• [simultaneously] Punto 49. 

Phyllis

ginger sadhu

white bowling ball in flames
black smoke column torquing
into gorge, throwing shadows
against shorn concave faces.

yes, cliff panels
the shape of blood cells
the total of whom beheld your trip,
another career into molten Mthyuh.

they'll keep lining you up with the novitiates
and foreigners at the back of the bread line:
ginger sadhu taking a stand-up nap
propped by other naked sleeping men.


Illyn
"Short for Illinois"

sadhu poem

down by the border the rocks are rounded by the weather
it's as easy as popping your face up through packing peanuts

either place are they mountains or rocks, piles of
rounded or jagged stone the size of mountains?

here my face is wounded in the new shards
yet i plow compelled counter-intuitively toward the sun.


Illyn
"sadhu poem"

bump at warp speed

tiny sins number as cells in the skin scaffolding of any member
society's limits don't begin to get fussy past the second column over
at the layer where personal discomfort is the greatest matter

all flesh is in time-calibrated centrifugal tension
big picture allows free sprouts to meet the cutting level
all else mulches down among the living's ankles

bump at warp speed, you know it should be something big
not just the worm hole ribs torsing by nor structural flaw;
another dimension pressing in could drastically alter being.



Illyn
"My face is torn from being born of rock."

To all Fanfest participants

You underestimate my numeric system for buy and sell orders.
It could not be more simple or devastating:
single numeral. or alternating numeral.
What power does this give me what power this gives me is
High-relief visual trackability. Sensitive bug detection. Brand recognition, fear, loyalty. Fractal beauty upon processing. No charge.
Psychological Mind-Ef: If you tried to copy me it would be like you loved me or something.
Some try and get burned out by numbing sameness of it, seems only decorative, lose self-respect.
Don't see how it cuts through the false and arbitrary 1's-5's-and-0's waypoints of the decimic logic paradigm.

7,777,777.77
1.11
23.23
191,919,191.91
666,666

Ayre Fromme Diaz
[Phyllis]

hypnoid

I started out by developing a test that would diagnose any individual with the most horrifying universal aspects of human consciousness stated in the most disturbing possible fashion. It was a pyramid in the sense that no one was sacred or untouchable if you wanted to succeed or the alleged auto-glass business model: break out car windows to drum up business. I knew it would work because I myself am hypnoid. To an even higher level than the average sucker, I am stopped dead in my tracks and drugged in my own juices by a voice, a face. The audio cassettes of my great aunt with their hand-typed labels, her missionary sound letters from Taiwan, had a hoodoo on them. Would flip a switch. And I didn't really know what she was saying, but we mustn't let it stop. Her goal was to narcolepse across continents and generations from beyond the grave and the Iron Curtain.

Would that you be looking through my eyes at the children all in white cotton blouses with their slates and ribbons and scholastic badges. Would the street dog, the sadhu, plaza fowl taste their pure lunch broth and noodle. Were to be so young again and given the choice while still in my tenderness to receive Christ unto me into my soul and spring strength up through the whole and length of my body into my arms and legs and feet and hand so that I might too lift others up into His mightiness and glory forever and ever.

But because of the restraints of my own moral structure I could not profit and grew to use my design as an auto-mocking performance artifice. In this way I could retroactively focus my labor into self-illumination piercing enough to drive me toward virtue. But there I focus as if upon a star and I upon a noble and impossible voyage as Earth grows smaller behind me, and the star remains exactly the same size, if not dimmer with the thinning of the atmosphere.


Hoolie
"Here, from decades into the future."

eyelet screws

can't... bear... wakefulness
today the bad is any news
seeing even double in twos
send me on a path I'll lose
hang me on a nail or use
wire and some eyelet screws

shoot me with a tranq dart
from an elephant gun
for the present i have no art
and it isn't fun
get me right in the neck... part
ere I can run.


Reptily
"I think I am Reptily."

Disciplinarians of conscience

You
seemed like a decadent
distraction that I really couldn't
afford at a delicate time of
transition.

I
Could swear at least I'm not
sitting around spending energy
on pasatiempos that snatch at my
attention.

There're
Snapping anemones
in eight bay windows of the building
starring as disciplinarians
of conscience.

It's
something I'm finding in
myself and projecting you
at will onto the forbidden scrim
horizon.


Donna
"Spin, vajra"

Victory lap

prison break, five months out:
warm's finally won, desert gone,
one-hand driving home, windows

down. rays of sun from behind a
cloud, my head, a crown and
the harvest sure now as a weed.

celebrate, let hounds run free, but
in only moments from the yard
there are squeaks, the loudest able

baby alarm. a flashlight found the
nest blown, grass strewn with tiny
leporidae and what they bleed.

as a rain begins, I shuttle ear kits,
nine fur packets one at a time, like
a bitch, to ground cover, also new,

across my neighbor's fence. elbow
in tremors, the contrite older dog
helps me find every doomed one.


Phyllis
"Planets turning two ways at once."

Oops, actually

Intentions were all we had to fall back on:
Naive, goodhearted vainglory.

Not because the outcomes were whalecrap.
They floated like miracles, to be true.

We're successful at what we do, rather.
And not sinister at all, on a spectrum.

It's the meaning we always get mucked up in.
If you only knew how little mistakes mattered.

I work in my own private panopticon.
Work it till I've spent the last good drop.

Then I slumber against the bricks under where the eye's painted,
the open eye on the wall I laid with my sweat and a trowel.

I wake in the wool of the sheep who eat the grass I planted,
wondering why so many creatures would stick around.


Reptily
Kathmandu, 14