drudgery of fashion

his precarious mid-century recliner
bought of the drudgery of fashion
thinking good news would protect him:
a torture chair, with knobs where your
elbows would be and a loose ratchet

rickety and in the style of Monte Carlo,
this furniture is mild to the eye but does
not meld to your body on it if you dig
may have been a her chair, something
not so comfy as a reminder what to do


Peg

Hell Burns

Hell burns the entirety of the spine.
Organs hang and collide.
Eternity impends.

Hell burns it well and frequently,
Takes in the scold, the suicide,
Won't open up even.

All this is ashes kep' aloft by heat;
Clouds have no gravity beside
The molten stone pit.


Mkidza Mlaf
"Mama of the Chama"

they list, in progress

• they want to go slow until you try and pass them
• they claw and backbite for tiny differentials
• they think all food is their food
• they draw you close only to flinch at your over-familiarity
• they move in packs with self-loathing at the sight of a free agent
• they are only pro-their-own family
• they exaggerate themselves until you accept them unconditionally
• they believe life is for fun at your expense
• they don't believe in the concept of sophistication
• they suck up the world's hatefulness
• they burn the world with the world's own resentful burning
• they find and rest their righteousness in history
• they hold smug claim to a future century
• they steep in the dramas of their class oblivious to real pain
• they log in to a web of associations that transcend law
• they speak and behave in an intra-signaling manner
• they stand behind your back and make faces while the other one engages you in conversation
• they spoke like first ladies as children and then proceeded to obstruct and deaden
• they act like money is some kind of degree
• they used to be filled with delight or rage and one was the other's medicine
• they zip in and out but break into crawling straight in the face of authority
• they look one into the the other's eyes with knowing murderous
• they've already pinched off from the earth in a bubble
• they still siphon out what we work for
• they orbit us yet they make us seem peripheral
• they make you forgive them by their intransigence and your need to be free of resentment
• they find me at my weakest moments
• they circle and eye and buzz as if your suffering will fill a need
• they pick off the guards and isolate me in a context of freedom
• they learn how to twist and bend and howl for love
• they each have a sense of individuality and furtive complicity with self-interest
• they look out at the arc of a globe in wonder
• they shill in the first person plural as if they speak for everyone
• they say things like we all love a locally sourced burger
• they trademark phrases like we learn important things in life
• they didn't crawl out of the sea and turn into people here
• they take lands either habitable or uninhabitable and build cabins
• they need somebody tell them whats up   
• they build castles on live burial grounds
• they say they're giving when they're taking
• they say they must first take to give and then give nothing
• they give nothing and explain it's that they didn't get enough
• they smile as they're thieving and lock up the good for not smiling
• they lead you singing off a cliff without themselves dying
• they put their dogs down when they move like you'd turn off a utility
• they claim animal suffering as a crusade and themselves royalty over all strays
• they believe their connection to the non-human to be more profound than most
• they take refuge in a killer's house and act surprised when they're targeted
• they get killed by making killers kings
• they share enjoyment in morbidity when it's warranted
• they take their private pleasure in all kinds of morbidity at every hour of the day
• they beg forgiveness from a terrible conjuring
• they conjure punishments and rewards and go on uneasily with neither
• they counsel that it's choices get us where we are choices
• they've made all matter their monument but won't let you cry on a shoulder
• they murmur sentiments only meant to hypnotize you further
• they hog at light with anachronistic agrarian vigor

Russ T.

mr boy

watcha wanni mr boy watcha wanni watcha wanni
mr boy watcha wanni mr boy
too much money too much money mr boy mr boy mr
boy too much money mr boy boy mr mr boy
wachi wanni too much money mr boy mr boy
mr wanni too much money mr boy


La LaLa

K's fly spread eagle

They have the humanity we selected out of them;
Less intimate species run parallel wild.
It's what makes K's special.
K's are tools hunting companion.
K's fly spread eagle.


Missy
"Full sprout"

Sweet luck

thank you, thank you, i feel unworthy but thank you
i know it's not because i'm good i get such bounty
count of all the good that go with nothing
it has to be sweet luck or grace but not reward
maybe as a rule life on a mean is better than what i was getting
and this is just what other average joes expect


La Chama

Weak of neck

I let 2 of hell's demons
bear me sleeping in a chair
hold, on bleeding wings

a mortal gives up and not
of his will and gravity
ceases to apply as he lives

one's head might loll on
weak-of-neck passenger
who may yet banish sin


Peg

I have everything

All Channels
God Mode
spouse, lover
leather
live, fluffy pets
rugs and paintings
maybe not so much silver
distinguished barware
country, race, height
sex
wallow of enlightenment
medicine spectrum
association
name, address, year
a great generation
work mode, a sleep
context
conscience:
emotion rainbow
millions of colors
available
hemming
30-day window


by Ted

Interior home lights flicker on and off all night

We tried to make sense of the day's two parts:

A sunny normal summer day with tuna fish salad
on soft yellow bread, canned pears in tangerine
gelatin; sounds like someone hosing out the
eaves, but it's rain flying in all directions,
trees split in half and squirrels running mad.

This we feel led to dirty fantasies in which
we are indigenous peoples enforcing nature on
the bloodless uprooted ghosts of future lands.
"According to these statistics, you're going
to need an abortion in 5 minutes, white man."


Ken and Jan

Something unbloody

The Earth kept cool all the way past the opposite stitch
and is now rounding back to frozen via fresh tap water

And everything that happens in the year's second half:
we are diminished, underweight against the bloodless.

Even a plant, with its legs down and in, is a cold polyp;
even reptiles must gift a salutary response to the Sun.

A planet can only be the dirt ball, fecund gutter nursery.
What makes you blush is an orbiting belt of griddle spit.



Ilyn

I Was Scared

A clenched moon, half
my body bowed to the left.
I was scared by how I lived.

Gut and the environment are
playing at mimes in a mirror,
but who moves first is unsure.

I was scared knowing God
could come down on either side
and wouldn't like what He did.



Hoolie

Separate self

What you get are all the effects of having that wanting to clamp onto someone.
Shear off the antlers and they look like a trophy, a crown, but the head is a horror.
To be an actual vise for gluing or detailing or an industrial staple would be more useful.
The trick is to send them your loving without ever losing your sense of separate self.



Mkidza Mlaf

Adjustment of posture

hard purple glasses case matches
the crown royal bags

we find that felt with
satiny golden rope

is a concept, makes a statement,
as does my new eyewear

more like architecture, graphic
design, than prosthetics

the graduating lenses present a
world that's clear but convex

getting used to this falsity plus
potential adjustment of posture


La Chama 
(with Miss Dr. Donna Thong along)

Additional dimension

 

I've created an additional dimension
by pulling out furniture and
setting up the prying eye for illusion

The wall ends here; it ends there.
What was once flush now floats in
air. My command is centered between

When I first moved in and this was one
room and the future, where it's two.
If you stand near the door, I disappear.



Dr. Donna Thong
"Back in the back office."

The thing has not dislodged

the work is done but the thing has not dislodged
its feelers wriggle as though it's typing a novel

in the next hour until the shuttle comes
it may cross paths with an exterminator

ever more determined to be selfish, it
begins to foresee strategies among new hosts

Your and others' days

Dancing at one of their concerts was not so bad this last time, more like what it was when it was good. The time before this last even that was a reunion show and it felt like going through the lidderal same bump and grind. We were jubilee whores dancing promotionally rather than jubilant liberals.

Me my beard now styled into oblivion, the work you've had done on your face-- what a parade and hard to feel truly celebratory. To be fair even in the day the choreography was often thunder calling, two-dip side changing, crestfallen. You could go there to work out your and others' days.

You and me are holding on tight to the life
It will and's always been a go-go march
We didn't need a potluck or a people's park
You participate on the floor for what you like.



by Hoolie

Slipped a head disk

I'm sorry to keep turning the conversation back onto me, but
I'm suffering from ptsd from a series of painful work-related
Incidents which I commonly refer to as my "career." Whether
Illness can play a legitimate part in excusing one for a lack of
Interest in others may be debatable, but either way I find I am
Impinging on the limits of any faculties I still have available.

What to do for someone like you in your situation-- that's ex-
Actly what I can't say because... what I've been telling you.
If someone kept offending me with their natural ass-ishness,
Even if I knew them different and/or knew they couldn't stop
It, I might just have to set up some kind of block-- for my own
Sake. You see even when the self votes against me, I don't fret.

Slipped a head disk, smashed a conjunction in the mind, or it blew.
Thought that today it's ok today today, but it really took a nose dive.
Is everything going fine? When you grow up you find that it both
Is and not. This learning is so deep that even when the supporting
Vessel is broke, it keeps swimming in the chum: some people say "It
Is what it is" fishing for existential sympathy, but it's actually true. 



Dr. Donna Thong
Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

Lesbian with a Penis Fetish

I am a lesbian with a penis fetish.
Not a straight woman.
So when I hear sirens I get paranoid.
Because I'm guilty of that.

I'm a gay woman who wants dick in her
But I don't get passed around.
Even so I feel society's vague scorn.
If I speak out, I am self-absorbed.

I feel shame. Not everybody has
To look back on their day, always
Examine. If you want to try and
Learn how to live with others.


Phyllis

Wayside International Modern Wayhome Hostal Inn: "A Modest Home, An Open Waypoint for Any Wayward Male Homosexual, No Matter How Hostile or Where You've Already Been"

Match the characteristic with the character:

1. Mike
2. Donna 
3. Ted
4. Reptily/ Chamatilly
5. Jan (daughter)
6. Jan (father)
7. Mkidza Mlaf
8. Tom
9. Peg
10. Hoolie
11. Ilyn
12. miserable smoking child cardiologist
13. Connie 
14. Wayne
15. Kevin Reynolds

• refuses to shower in "landlord mist"; will unscrew head and stand in full stream of open pipe
• "psychic" who answers everything with "I know"
• steroid guy who once considered electrocuting a 3rd date with his therapeutic spa tub insert
• stroke recoverer who goes off on people out in public who are being nice
• ex-bus driver with destroyed hips, no insurance and a permanent Darvon jones
• jumpy pigtail fetishist scarred from a series of junior high pencil stabbings
• forgets to ask how you're doing
• talks to you dirty in daylight hours as if it's a compliment
• navy air captain who just wants to open-mouth kiss for hours
• same person, will actually open his eyes and try to complete minor, unrelated tasks around him without breaking lip seal
• has been stripping the wood trim in his dining room for 30 years; table and chairs covered with newspapers from the 1980's
• often followed home by a cop
• refused to come out of pool on 40th birthday, submitted to hospitalization only after full drain
• seems to appear in two places at once, nearly impossible to locate by one individual searcher 

by Dray Gnaim

Upper Chank Murder Mystery

One of the tales was a child who experienced death as a rushing river, but her not moving with it, just taking the weight of the water perpetually against her. You'd think that would make you livid, but she had died before there were even horses. She would bob up from time to time and try and dunk one of the dry landers foothill dwellers who peopled the vertiginous geographic swells in the lips of a voluptuous extinct volcano, in hopes of finding her dad, who of course had long before taken leave of all the hurt in this crater, including the loss of her, a daughter. Jan Jansdaad and her dad shared the same last and first names, as had their ancestral dads since before even a fox had crept across the green shag carpet of the storied, some say enchanted High Chank glade.

A gold miner's wife left to her own devices, a quill and paper, told the story of her life keeping the home's burn firing and some not unsordid tales of a land where law takes new shape. After passing along this same place, she was only ever heard again from letters continuing like clockwork from the grave. While she described events current and true enough, there is no trace of her presence anywhere along the length of the Chanks, much less by the chrysanthemum beds, which have been heavily guarded monitored for millennia. This clever woman had an anonymous proxy filling her in, or this late Madame Late doesn't let a reaper dictate her contributions for debate. Go believe in ghosts, good and therefore evil-- or only that this singular horror persisted for seven grisly years.



Phyllis
"Trying some special software."