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."

Upper Chank Murder Mystery

On the way up to the chrysanthemum garden you rarely pass anyone who isn't sitting and resting or if you get passed it's a persistent jogger who isn't in the mood to take no for an answer. The souped-up, gravity-defying city bus on busy High Chank dominates all attention up and down its route. One wonders what will become of the thirsty spotted babies trotting along the pavement at their single-deer-power gait.

She was walking straight down, reward of easiness pushing. It's hard to keep a moderate pace. Looked like she was picking tobacco off her tongue tip but it was rather a bit of tin foil from a difficult-to-disengage package of the hard cough drop with creamy Blast Gel at its center. Then as if a shadow'd quickly splayed past but taken her along, she wasn't there. It was difficult to accept her disappearance.

But come to find she may have been trailing me or someone nearby because she was a spook as clear as day.  Do they get yanked from a case like that. Why. Freedom of Information Act? What to say. I am a lesbian. I liked this spook you had. Her ass was very strong because of where you put her in the street. All day back and forth to her car fake forgetting glasses camera keys. I liked the shoulder sweater, scarves, pearls once. I've come to call her Olive and you Killer.

No, that wouldn't work either. How am I to use the power of my certainty of their complicity to my advantage in the war against their innocence? I feel warm speaking of her, maybe because it didn't hurt enough or even happen officially enough to be a bad memory. The bad memory is finding out about the thing itself rather than the thing itself because we don't know what that was. Lots of persons show up up here who could be anyone.


By Phyllis 

Upper Chank Murder Mystery

You had a smug, full ass from these hills,
Goats on diagonal street sides, surfing
the horizon, an ear-splitting fulcrum.

You could confidently turn and shout down
to your two kids beginning their ascent from
the car, hair blowing vertically. "Lock it!"

Then you must have moved because we
lost you. Other proud gam sets have summited
and conquered this neighborhood, but.

Only evidence I have leads to this, to which
I also bring imagination. What I think is that
neither of you had to work but for society says.

There was a baby and something to keep daddy
busy. You get reward points for balance here and
down on the land of the iron-cross gyroscope.

Lidderly breastfed on preacher money

For us missions seems the most defensible shill for preacher money. Even if the missions are no more than other churches and we their missions. It's not unlike a private health maintenance organization.

For mostly religion's for health, social spiritual as in keep your spirits up. The community can support a staff of persons whose job it is to reassure, transmit kindness along with rules interpretations help.

And this is when then you elect a count dracula. The community's wealth is raised at his feet as if heaping a pyre. This unfortunately not the case with my daughter. Unlike kings, she obliges us to beg.


Mkidza Mlaf
"Mother of La Chama"

Pose as if paid

i wasn't taking pictures of your house
but rather the deer;
can i find my sense of self
in suburban natural life?
now only a merchant would
claim to know just what we are.

it's a cheap fur, and more so
when a spade of ivy is rocking in its
teeth and the eyes are not so much
wide but rather huge and half lidded.
the spots could have been spray painted
on. They pose as if paid in your yard.


Connie

Hearts blood pumps from

there's some kind of exotic bird
clucking on through the intersection
noise, maybe imitating some tails
squeaking up and down the hill.

He notes the lags in traffic with an
all-clear pulsing signal, hides loud
kisses in the bouncing of a giant
truck laden with deconstruction.

Birds like these stimulate a sense of
Visitation, but from a human beyond.
Near he whispers, coos quizzingly.
A kinship of hearts blood pumps from?


by Donna

Partial days

fog coming in from the bay,
conveyor belt of useless white globs

as from between two coasts,
from two loves I am locked away

I want to deal with life for
partial days, then sleep with the ghosts


Hoolie

Ted and Peg's son

When you take a walk at night we hear your coughing all around the block
and strongly back again to your room, adjacent to our room.

We know that even weekly in the New York Times you can lose cancer and
get it back again, but what's eating you is a permanent negative.

You might be feeling like you've hit the disappointing pinnacle of
what it's going to be like compared to what you thought it wd look like

But the stars are mounting to a different racket: getting you to safety in
the hands of Jesus. And we say Jesus and we mean so to speak.


by Ted and Peggy
for H.

Dr. Thong reads Phyllis [embedded]

Maybe it's okay to make points with a shaved open armpit, maybe leaning decisively. Most of my colleagues go with either total scent killer or noticeable processed fragrance.

Sleeveless at work to begin with though makes me feel gastrointestinal symptoms. Unless it's a publicly-traded incorporation where office underexecs are paraded whorelike before clients.

Bottom line I would bear uncomfortableness for your right to free dress. Who am I, a structure-within-a-culture-of-freedom adherent, to question your template of liberty.


Dr. Donna Thong [reinstatement imminent]
cc: Phyllis [embedded]

Overheard through tile

Tight hanger hooks behind the wall, and then your voice coming through:
"I think I'll go professional."

Then in the shower, somehow permeated tile:
"The question is do I want to smell like Dr. Bonner's or."

"Or is this whole tilting structure, on the edge of a house on a hill over the City of San Francisco, going to sheer-face bobsled downward after the next shaker, 'n.

N' end up ski-ballin into the Bay? Are those fog horns roaring or a train. Now the buoy-like clanking gives it away. And how it comes closer than a ship's signal ever will, so.

I've got my secret weapon back on the dressing table. Sometimes
scent's all a gal's got. I've put together a look and feel over the years."


Phyllis
"Donna, I would never give you away."

Freedom in song

Song, from the impulse low and avian
Finds its lodge in the same fire-engine
pain as a baby crying too high in the craw.

We know of articulated howls, moans.
Music can't but make it rise as heat, gay;
You are here to sing and leave the stage.

Not as a shill for predetermination, but you
are literally born at a point on the compass
and there are words that come along with it.


Chama (Reptily)
"Consecration of Chalk Chank" [frag.]

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

Mine canary

when you were done you sat on the edge of the bed looking at yr shoes and i dismissed you by closing my eyes but your outline stayed, and a shadow, dark maroon on light maroon. my mind is an instrument that works with or without the input of light and a blind whore once told me a mind will still produce its own color projections-- what, with no optic nerves at all? If they are dead or even missing? This man was completely blind, I had my eyes closed to dismiss you, and yet your shadow was in my mind staring at the floor as if your shoes would walk themselves over and climb onto your feet, and I knew anyway you were still there.

i doubt it's true what we think of as clarity is just a point on a spectrum of perception-- that's hocus pocus; it's bullshit. there is such a thing as seeing clearly, not seeing clearly, seeing but not wanting to see, wanting to see but not seeing. what i saw when i closed my eyes for example was my vanity, my horrible insensitivity toward your innocent fantasies about our love. with my eyes closed i could see you sitting there seeing and not seeing, with your back to me, seeing me better turned away than straining your eyes to look up at my face when yr crouched between my knees. i don't really know what you knew but i can guess from seeing.

i don't even know for sure what drugs you're on or how they might affect the type of functions on a space travelling telescope that go wrong or get enhanced through fine tuning from an earth station or hits by gamma rays or junk or rock and ice mists, whatever it finds beyond the farthest layer of what we can slough off tho not too far to project signals that can travel but few scientists even know i guess if such messages are really matter or just waves of stuff that's already there hopping in a different rhythm from a chain reaction you can make with our advanced machines that supposedly started by smashing bones with different kinds of rock.

clarity and metaphoric light come from all kinds of senses of course, pheromones, the pitching of the voice or when you hear me scratch or sigh at night or how many rings before someone does or does not answer a phone or a pause in texts that someone inside you knows is different even though your main operating persona is officially a sight beast, plain talking, private man who expects everyone to keep their peace on or question their vision at the peril of loss or retribution for the antennae who knew too much and got cocky with their secret knowledge no matter how available it was the whole time; i respect by not thinking much.


Ken
For the Chama-Tilly 
Fordamall Chank Motel

< b >Meaning = ?< /b >

Be clear
Feel clear (lucid) (no emotional storming)
Speak clearly (pronunciation) (logic) (reason)
Clarity
produce v. encounter
difficult/ easy

dogs feet on laminate sound like tap dancers
dancers tapping seem like gloating animals of prey

truth:
problematize/ catastrophize clarity
see: Dr. Bro. Cornell West

Problemity

Clear path to objective = + ?

9:30-10:06 pm: mostly eating strongly-flavored Jelly Bellies both individually and in random combinations, twitching nose, attempting to name discrete flavors while staring at unfinished course outline

Clarevity
Clareol

Enjoyment of fog/ privacy
Ambiguesstine

Pedestalation
attempt to spectacularize realistic flavorings and believable generic texture placeholders as example of few modern inventions to live up to childhood expectations of Future (source: A Wrinkle in Time)

To deprive, deceive or blind in order to inspire
Sadistucate/ Masostication
(hairshirts/ witchboarding)

Yellow cake flavor tricked me into drinking milk
Nourishion

metaphor/ simile = path to/from light?

my face smells like skunk even after my shampoo
to catch a cousin who knows my smell I roll in doo

Drug free:
schizoid: bad/ ambien whore: good

Drugged:
good: communion wine/ bad: vat of communion wine
bad: thorazine; bad: heroin; excellent: heroin; heaven: heroin; destruction of all we know to be good: heroin (crack, meth, pcp, kids smoking pcp, crack whore, designer drug, designer whore; drugged whore: good?)

Drugs that will clearly be available in heaven:
Marlboro, Black Label

Future = Heaven? Clear path = +?

Low visibility slows traffic/ grounds flight
Clarity = grounding? Clear intention = outcome?
Can happen what can picture = +/-/ Can happen what not pictured = bad?

Love of dogs> love of people/ dogs thoughts clear/ unclear?
Legitimable?
clear = simple? gray area between simple and complicated = clear?

Light/ burn/ sunglasses/ dark/ clear/ W. Blake/ racism/ clear black = clear dark?
Whitecade/ Clarior
Blindness-sun; nightburn-? solar eclipse = auspicious/ lunar eclipse = ominous

Hell in Drugs:
Thorazine, MD 20/20, Rabies

Opposite of clear: foaming at mouth/ or you can't handle the truth

Tap dancing: produce = heaven; encounter = ?

Carnivorance
Claws curl under to gouge at food/ prevent efficient travel on sheer surfaces

Meaning = ?



Phyllis
"Stuck at Peg's all week, beacon down."

Foundation of society

My abductor was hot,
I went along to save my life,
And then they blamed me.

I love my kids but they were
No help as prerequisites for
Whut? Beach house, husband

Also not plugs for a bottle of
Nasty funtime perpetrator jizz.
Can I be held guilty for cumming

All those nights and waiting for
Him alone at the motel? I was
Mortified and trembling horny.

At least I didn't take a drink and
I have preserved my sobriety
Date. My sanity map is intact.

All I ever learn is don't get in
Trouble surrounded by idiots.
Right, mom: think it through.

But then if our society were not
Vapid and trite, wd I even be in
This rifonkindonkulous situation?


Peg

Dead Family

Tomorrow is a place of mind
Where we can fade together
And disappear at the same time.

Dead family don't split off,
Don't wander away alone;
Thank you for not leaving me.

Grown-ups and babies one,
Today it's no matter where,
Know you can always call.

Dead family may choice out
But it's a package deal, and
I'm so thankful not to worry.

I feel good, dear family in a
mode of thought that we're gone,
already safe from what happens.


Dad

Snow on new grass

Thank you for going on record as my associate;
It is a good feeling being peopled by the proud
N' strong, warms like a text bong for the illiterate.

Blooming all over, from the breath of the young,
Unfortunate flowers of ice layers are going down
To remind us of dogs and that their shit is brown.

Thanks for taking a moment to click on my icon;
Me I can't find one peer who merits their full-time
Collusion in this paradigm of queerbait jobmakers.


by Ken

Springtime of regret

Eyes of twill, goddess like-- she may not answer
Trailing warp strands of wind from the bluing pupil,
Drapes her finer bands of woof in cave, out wood.

To a boy she gifts a turn of earth as if she'd forgot,
Like God above, she decides, she may not answer;
Giving cover is to suggest or hide uncertain luster.

He may not ask her what has died, so if to mourn
And might himself unlace as if to smoke, to roam,
And being out of place, find in her wake a home.


Phyllis
"Find me on Paul_Verlaine_Cam.net"

Useless privilege

Holed up litterly back in a high cave with dogs and jewels,
the last few peridots and silver horn rings, I face the lee side.

Not even a slave to sit and remember when entitlement
worked because it bled into the guests and wandering.

The armor tilts against a charred, greasy corner dripping still
the mists that bore us in defeat on sleds with baskets, data.

Debtor, inwardly I exact a rage and skillful path line hedging,
tuned as a noble corpse's concubine's, cuckolded by virtue.

It starts with an eye painted against the central peak, awake
to every sip of wine, hate, sloth, neglect, indulgence, swim.


Peg
"For Mike"

The 24 hours of natural sleep

Prior to my abduction, students merrily gathered in
chambers clustered along passages, and my breath
swole all the apparatus of the university hospital clinic,
savior of wayward intelligent and other rural children.

Then blown like knots of mucus, teenagers through
crash windows, ashes rose to mix with snowflakes,
the suddenness of my absence was the bunker bomb
that saved only conspirators and their empty victory.

Now my dogs patrol with their noses in the curtain folds
Blind as moles to real criminality, claim only movement
unsanctioned, sounds that are free and wild, productive.
Dogs sniff out warm terror and target soft, darting beasts.

All day long and through the night they lay in wait at a
tractably ebbing and spiking unwakefullness, one eye
or ear, a whisker as lonely drunken antennae, the mind
sifting through other years, categories of intransigence.


Dr. Donna Thong

Polio

Connie:

I'm writing down this dream about Peg and Ted because if I try and tell it to you I'll prolly start crying. And it starts with you. In the back seat of the Galaxy 500. You sneeze, I blow on you, you blow on me, etc. but it doesn't end with violence. It's actually fun because you are your current self at your present age.

Ted is there back from the grave, why? As if there is no Ken and the same young Ted is our dad, Peg's husband even though the rest of us have grown old. Except for Peg of course who is pretending to still be as young as Ted when he died. I get into it with her about like, well, I'm sorry if you forgot, but I already told you I have to drop off my prescription on the way. On the way where? What prescription? Ted is driving us around an anachronistic Anaheim, California. There were druggists and a storefront post office.

We get out of the car and I am walking ahead still pissed off at Peg and Ted follows behind trying to place his (dead) hand on my back. He appreciates, understands my efforts with Peg. Maybe because he's no longer really there and I am. His black skinny-tie suit is way out of date.

I squirm away, feeling bad about it but can't accept his comfort. As if I blame him. Easy to make him feel bad as a way of lashing out at life. I realize it's a boyish thing to do.

Turns out we're stepping inside a yellow-brick clinic with white letters stenciled on the door as they used to do. The patient is me, and I'm on the same stainless steel table where I was born, with those aquamarine rubber sheets and gloves, and the nurse standing behind me is going to have to insert a very large needle into the back of my head. Why?

In a fetal position, I feel the needle go in and it's the most actual pain I remember ever feeling in a dream. Was it LaLa behind me in real life gnawing my scalp? It goes deep, and I hear the nurse apologizing and then gasps and says "Oh..." and starts crying. She has apparently hurt herself, but so badly that she is actually sobbing. Then I turn and see the doctor coming in, the nurse going out saying "That's the most I've ever cried-- not just at work, but ever."

It's become a little clearer why we're there. It must have been from a letter in the New York Review of Books about Syria, because I've got something like polio. And I'm a boy. With polio. And the doctor has invented a contraption where he can put me in a hanging net on a track like a rollercoaster/ centrifuge and send me flying around the clinic. In some sort of multi-purpose room. Remember those?

Then the doctor is Dick Cheney and then he's Ted again. He tells me I can pick any gift I want. I say I want this and take the thing from a box, a taped-up moving box or the one you keep Christmas decorations in. I have sovereignty of movement now, and we are rich. I sit down on a free-weight bench holding the thing I wanted between my thighs trying to figure out how it works.

Very heavy dream hangover surfacing from this. Whut? I kept saying. Oh my god whut? LaLa is by my side staring patiently but she is a bitch. In truth I'm single and I dream about my nuclear family from 100 years ago. Is that the same as having polio? Did you infect me when you sneezed? Ha ha just kidding. Mostly I'm disappointed we're not really rich.


Love, Hoolie

Stop My Body

Dr. Chermin:

You may recall my scheduled release date to have been long ago passed.
Please respond by a means and in a way that demonstrate your receipt of this request.
You are a highly skilled administrator who can appreciate the weight of a key's turn.
I don't pretend that it will be a safer environment for me or others on the outside, only
that a promise was given and what do I have through a barred ceiling but that which is into it kicked.

Sometimes an object goes skittering across cement, stops out of friction but loses touch and,
adding its own earthly mass to the force given it by mystery, crashes into a woman's life.
This can be bread, bobby pins, empty match books, dead phones, small creatures who continue at their pace on a new surface like it doesn't matter, or makes no sense to try and go back so they keep on.
But I can't fall from this baseline. Out of chemical jail doesn't mean it's ok to stop my body.


Donna

She Rides a World Economy

"It's not the first time you've let me pass through these doors naked," I said in perfect Foreign, the Devanagari script falling from my lips then lifting up to his creased sienna face on wafts of al fresco samosa smoke like notes on an undulating staff. There he stood in his soiled turban, the lifelong portero of this particular row of fleabag albergues, long ago twist-tied together by mutual hallways, cat walks and trolley tracks. Despite an instant and matter-of-fact recognition after my absence of more than a decade or three, he stood there bodily replacing the prodigious cement barricade he'd pulleyed aside, uncertain that I really meant to come in. And I had my sponsor along, and there was a loosey-goosey policy about visitors after 10.

It wasn't yet dawn, so i wasn't quite lucid, but I knew this place and this kind, lower-caste gentleman who had opened this same door to shelter myself and others in the past from jarring nudity and baffling poverty, and then for many days or years consecutively after, while I and my briefcase, in recovery, had zipped about the blocks and streets between sacred animals and motorbikes and tuk-tuks and saris and men hoisting onto their shoulders or backs and carrying to market giant smoking babies.

I remembered having been out once more celebrating the end of a long sobriety by drinking glasses of fake scotch in all the tourist joints up and down the high street, and then some off the path, and then losing my path between the spoke boulevards jutting evermore barren and outward from the center, which twinkled in the distance. But I was giving into the urging sweetness of sleep, removing the navy corduroy suit I'd just purchased for interviews and laid it down as a mattress on the filthy, potted walk and snuggled beneath a thinly knit but charitable covering draped across me possibly by some passing matron.

It was really too short a nap, but soon I was up again in my white undershirt and briefs, wrapped also in the bone-white Chinese sofa throw, it turned out to be, wandering in a circle, conjuring a map, then remembering the suit and finding my wallet still intact but no keys. Then I just stood still, holding the bundle of nearly all my earthly goods as close to me as the man from Tanzania with elephantiasis in his nuts. Who knows how many more moments were lost until by supernatural providence or chance, my very first sponsor into The Program, "my Eskimo" as they say, happened along on his way from a meeting. He led me by an elbow, similar to the way he had pulled me along behind him the first time, on the identical road to the exact same salvation or slavery, though I still thought he was selling Shaklee.

"Been out having some fun?" inquired Karlos, with a K. I said "Oh yeah I drank a lot of whiskey." I remembered drawing glass after glass to my burning mouth to keep up with the rows of colorful bottles against their mirrored plenty and wanting more warm burning even then to warm my own bilious burning. The door to the rooming house was so massive as to appear immovable, and even I could barely reach its monumental ungalvanized iron ring rustily bolted into the quickset to serve as a knocker or carnivalesque game of strength.

Then there was the seismic ride up in an elevator which eerily seemed even itself not to believe its own forged and re-xeroxed inspection certificate. It stopped on a familiar floor, but there was an awkward moment as Dan, the portero, as if waiting for a tip, was actually hesitating politely for me to tip him off as to my present state of financial solvency, which would determine which way he'd lead us down or up the dim hallways/ catwalks or onto which trolleys. He started us backwards up the steps from which streams of forlorn past and potential co-residents climbing down with their towels and visibly dreading the communal bath openly advised against that direction, those lodgings. So we boarded instead a pre-war electric train on stilts that seemed thumb-tacked to the walls above the narrow, crowded street toward a dead end-cum-cul-de-sac of more upscale private rooms with windows and struggling, infested houseplants in coffee tins and maybe a working sink.

On this short trip one could not think but to imagine the range of imminent and catastrophic incidents of both predictable and total structural collapse, reports of mayhem and death of a level and volume that would surely reach screens on desks at the like of the International Herald Tribune. The tracks of recycled beer cans and structural decay of an originally flimsy and corrupt excuse for scaffolding made the whole contraption sway with the weight of its human slurry, a precarious conveyance that each moment threatened to rock against its upward-cranking counterparts, like parallel boulders careering on rope bridges.

Atop the upper deck of the carriage flying toward us, a scene that made me breathless: the billowing scarf and ironic double-breasted beige trench, the lovely blond CIA sergeant who'd come roaring up in a freshly washed and minted Land Rover while I stood taking mpg4's of a local drag star in a crowd of the broken and curious at a benefit for World AIDS Day in one of the city's squalid, dusty, clay-bottomed squares. She hadn't said a word as she stepped up alongside, as if at a curtain call, to more closely examine my awkward, ugly Western dorkiness jutting up at least a foot from the throng. I acknowledged her somewhat invasive proximity and our relative physical resemblance by muttering to her as if to a tour-bus companion how the dancer on stage represented a local gender-minority NGO and was the great hope of the organization. In the middle of my detailing their upcoming international itinerary for the agent's well-groomed but officious muteness, she was already roaring off again with her driver to vet no doubt more intel on spotted countrymen who hadn't checked in with the consulate.

She appeared to me now, standing boldly ignoring the handrail of her trolley-top, as a figure fit for the back of a coin or ship prow, a noble symbol of chin-high, first-world caretakerism: we, victors, missionaries, models, guides, monitors navigate, show the way, in ceremonial stealth and humility, arrogant yet inspirational of security, hopefulness, and to always titillate. She, who could live anywhere, have anyone, had chosen a post (no doubt and nevertheless quartered in a microdot of be-marbled and T1-cabled gas-generated luxury) in a land of relative misery, where she would walk among the ancient and the simple, brush against the untouchable, but interlocute and mingle, in hotel back gardens and high-walled compound suites, with kings instead of mere gentry.


Ken
"On assignment."

Conceal and carry

My phone found a way to my ear during sleep
though i'd left it charging in the living room:
A junk call, maybe it was political, offered the
option to press Exit 8 to hear a special message
while on hold. I touched some numbers, maybe
mixed it up with the TV remote; but it was dark
and late and i was confused. I got angry, but
then a young male voice came on the line, live,
but muffled, and said to me yeah we're calling
because; I said what, i can't hear you, i was try-
ing to get a special message. His throat seemed
to clear and said we're calling because someone
reported gunshots. There were gunshots near you.
And then I was being held very tight from behind
and/or my heart cage was caving in, but i could
tell for sure that there was another man in my bed
who was locking me very hard between his arms
and knees and wearing only a t-shirt and briefs,
and i struggled to get free by elbowing toward him
because i live alone and haven't slept with anyone
i want to say it feels like since the days of John
Wayne Gacy. Even mostly awake i knew that my
bed was turned the wrong way and i had to find
the knob on my lamp to orientate myself and to
identify the snoring of my dogs, which can often
sound like the results of a horrible crime amidst a
crowd, an urgency of mass panic in progress. I'd
spent most all the evening on and off between the
the normal responsibilities of an unemployed day
hypnotized absorbing the entire wikipedia page on
John Wayne Gacy and checking especially for
places and dates and names with a morbid com-
pulsion to know how close i'd come to the rope
trick, the chloroform, the quicklime or one of his
purported thugs, and feeling the chill of a narrow
escape. I even found a story on the deco-Uptown
hotel where i worked my first outta-school gig
where a cavernous ceramic basement rivaled the
faux Spanish facade and drifting clouds and stars
over the dance floor at the fabled Aragon Ballroom
for phantasmagoria, an underground pool grand
enough for fey, mustachioed servants to maneuver
about brimmed still pumping chlorine and steam in
the late 70's when i was a dropout teen swept in
there, by a slimy mob net, massage setup, a cum-
and-go for married fags from other neighborhoods
or travelling through town on a party, or a younger
man with the simple misfortune of a dick turned in
the shape of the archetypal snake chasing its tail,
a mobster operation with a cash register and a coat
check, decorated with seashells and framed pix
of the swarthy underboss who kept the books legit,
turned out the kids on how to give handjobs and
where to hide cash if you're naked, how to keep
him out of the transactions, a mobster type who'd
hung photos of him with aldermen and the mayor,
political coverage under glass, just like Gacy had,
and sure, JW'd been there, but not lately, having al-
ready been locked in a cell for our job-site safety;
photos like the one that humiliated the Secret
Service with John and Rosalyn Carter at a Polish
Day parade. I really couldn't tell if the man behind
me in bed had me in a wrestling hold, a manacle
of flesh, or coming back from the dead, maybe
someone i knew, to love and protect me from that
superbad moment half asleep when someone was
warning me, on a phone i don't even have, to be-
ware of gunplay in my vicinity. Even tho we don't
believe that Pogo murdered anyone with a firearm,
he did abduct some boys that way, and where I'd
been to dinner earlier, an Irish pub, they had one of
the new no-conceal-and-carry stickers displayed
prominently before you stepped in through the Chi-
cagoland outer weather door to stamp the frozen
muck off your feet and then in toward the scary loud
and spirited drunken camaraderie or outpour of re-
lief in the eye of a polar vortex, cries of horror-glee.

by Tom

Your Ridiculous Rage

What was it you said your entire class, country, county's eating wooden nickles or clanking along the road like tin cans tied to the 1%'s marriage vehicle? Like you can compare yourself and most people to the worst kind of traditional torture normally reserved for minorities sexual or racial? That a whole 4% of the population is sociopathic but only a quarter of them have figured out how to literally indenture and slave and drug and maim what was it, the great plains, population, planet?

But look what you're getting where you're standing as you complain. Free internet with your paid subscription to all your other property? Isn't it a little overwrought to belabor the work you'll never stop unless you stop working and rot in the revival tent of a target parking lot? Who says just because you love so hard and your people come from earnest good stock that you should get a piece of land or a pet or something to eat; are you a prostitute that goes around selling faith and honesty?

You say the little bitches from like 5 colleges in the usa get to learn how to charge all the rest for every part of nature we touch and the right to even wear our own skin to a backyard birthday party? That your grandmother's last three teeth throb so hard she can barely moan the last four of her social into the ear of the slob sucking off some middle-managing coupon fluffer? How did you explain the way to save up the refills for your pain meds the next time you get shot by a gunmaker and hold a drug sharing holiday?

Ken
"I'm waiting."

Black Boy

there's the street my father was named after,
but his father's spelling was weak. Despite
the error, we both carry the same initials,
but I'm not named for either father or street,
but rather the names of my mother's father,
two words so odd that he went by the letters,
so even i mix up my name with these others.

that's the building where an old boyfriend
lived to complain about the poolside clique,
and tonight i met a boy who lives in that
building, and he says that yes, there is still
a clique. But it can't be the same one now;
i said of course, pool buildings everywhere
must have cliques, and of course his does.

here's the school where i attended a class
on blake: black boy, urizen, the fat boy
sitting next to me seeping farts and going
out after to coffee with the professor; i'm
passing the gate now, and i look through
the bars on the fence, and it's not a school
at all, but dark rows of chiseled headstones.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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"

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."

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."

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

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.

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." 

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

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

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.

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

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"

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

Survival instinct

Terror spills down and then out and creates a foot.
This is a structure upon which you can hop away.

If you're passing near Chicago or Joliet, I can tag.
Let's buck up and borrow a refrain from yesterday.

What song can narrate barreling across the plains.
What chord could be devised to make you stay.

When you're stir crazy dead at the wheel and nod
I'll be sure to slap you hard in the face if that's okay.


Dr. Donna Thong
"For Hoolie"

Re-Cap: Bermud-a-Go-Go

anonymous sex act that's been on tour for 15 years

time as a liar
time is a liar
how time lies
lies about time
telling someone a different time than it actually is
incorrect predictions involving time
lapses in time or memory
time as material
water/ time cliches
fallacious time quotes
fallacy of time
distortion of real-time time experience during fellatio
accounting of all the various speeds of time
prohibition of any fully developed and/or commercially or academically published "theory of time"
trying to prohibit thought and use of time fallacy in any given moment
challenge to apply the imposition of death on time metaphorically
while in our minds it is a functioning chunk of ligature
that if removed would make me stutterer, monk, catatonic, busier...
time as a style of faith that requires little practical effort
as opposed to religion, which with alternate ladders and planes mocks time's fabled tyranny
and resistant strains that soak up red or blue contrast dyes from the environment
myths, yet real, of time standing still
how that can happen only if all activity is on tilt
then you could say your unit of measure called time just got to zero.

May it, Let it

Head of Mudusa

May it grant you titled helm
may it ram through close resistance
may it serve you well backwards
Let it be a brooch of aristocracy
let it let it feed in dewy fields
let it see with single focus.


by Hoolie

mystical acquaintance

i still get afterimages of a prehistoric skull silhouette
when i suffer morbid ideation of regret.

now turning with my back to moonlight
there's an outline of a thing who stands upright.

everywhere rings thickly pierced me i'd hung coins
of sea shell or enemy tooth set. From parental loin

to the next lad, race, career return nativity scars
from what they call a different year, another war.


Ken
(ghosting for Reptily)

I don't understand what this is like

I don't understand what this experience is like
any more than I can understand an experience
that I've both never had and am not now having.

What I now appear to encounter I get like
what's going on with a composite character
in the fictionalized memoir of a total stranger.

I am having this experience
but I don't know anything more about it
than I do about any random or non-situation.

Or also it could be a moment that's so unfamiliar due to the press of time layers
whose sudden release creates a stupefying vacuum, bends,
bubbles as a spring that has never begun or ends.


"Just" Donna

High cave waiting

high cave waiting for movements of rescue animal over tree line
even now no closer to belief in the veracity or even fact of time

one who lies, one that injects an expectation and an interval of
movements, lack of movement, invisible creeping some believe

only the sinus of raining as if it takes 10 min to kill not 10 stones
patient rhythm of sweeping, training, tic-tocking the weaker 1's.


Peg
"my last scratch on this faux granite counter top"

A Paper Artemis

PHYLLIS: I wanna know what's going on here at People's Park.

ARTEMIS: That's why you've pitched a tent and are so dirty?

PHYLLIS: I'm here both to know and to be. You are of this place.

ARTEMIS: The most important insight I can offer is that you yourself are as much a part of it as anyone has been is or will ever be.

PHYLLIS: So interview myself.

ARTEMIS: No, because you must surely still have some bridges unsmashed with the publishing industry, I feel especially exhibitionistic when you're near, like I could tell you anything and you'd make the world understand.

PHYL: How about your own personal experience of a relationship to this land, its fruits.

ARTEMIS: You're funny.

PHYL: No, really.

ARTEMIS: I can't really answer that without laughing I mean you know, fruits. You don't see the irony or the pun I guess there because you would never call anyone a fruit-- in fact it's more likely that someone would call you a fruit, and you naturally are not struck with a dart of humor around fruit allusions I guess.

PHYL: I'm looking at you Artemis and though I'd have expected a character out of one of those eager post-order wasteland warlord fantasies you seem more just like the bare-titted frisbee guy's sometimes stocking-fetished girl companion from one of the nearby gourmet boeuf-bourgeois-owned hill homes.

ARTEMIS: Are you trying to buy pot from me?

PHYLLIS: Ok, but as long as you're not dissociating, who are you? I've got a pack of cutcorners in my purse.

ARTEMIS: I actually live about six blocks up the hill with my parents, and both of those naked ponytail loincloth guys tossing the platter are my sometimes boyfriends.

PHYLLIS: I have to tell you off the record one that's really hot, and two it troubles me as far as do you have the appropriate information that you need about pregnancy std's heartbreak.

ARTEMIS: Your heart's been broken so many times you are like completely addicted to the chemicals, the ritual, which is fortunate because you'd be getting it whether or not you needed it over and over and over again.

PHYL: Thank you, walking tarot card with legs. Keep that. I'm good.

Bus ticket to People's Park

They administered our 8 ounces of Sunny Delight and returned us to the stone penitentiary maze complex.
Now it was time for free persons to decide our further if any fate.
There was a week's tv vigil in our individual suites to sit and dwell.
The cops and guards and therefore we all used old hookers' lingo to describe the suspensions of normal rule.
A cellmate might try and subject you to a 747; everybody knows to simply turn the other way.
But there the mixability cam will be parsing out your facial expressive points.
If you can be a survivor you can be grateful as Christ.
Normal ones don't get in a fatal bind because they have so many openings to escape.
One if you call it fatal you are hyperbolic result of two spoiled by superior political system.
Dignity means you don't register what happens to your body or future.


Reptily

Deeper Bays

Dreams keep on unperturbed
Dreams reach under and go around
Dreams behave like water seeking space.

When life is taking place in the midst of a novel
It's a simulacrum of dreaming
Whereas you travel in two dramas at once.

Drama is a check digit, analogous link scout;
Drama runs parallel with a road;
Drama washes onto the stage from deeper bays.


Peg
"Trying my hand at criticism."

Jan's Chant

You remind me of my father before he had me, and I remember your father before he had you: him, whom you remind me of and I'll remember you to if I see him again.

My father before he had me reminds me of me myself before he was gone, and your father before he had you reminds me of you after both of our dads were long gone.

You were spinning out just like and from your mother, who reminds me of my mom, whose big brother spun out and was gone into a world like the one you're in now.

Our mothers are like spirit sisters more than ever that they stand on either side of the line of alive; they remind me of you and your mom standing shoulder to shoulder.


Jan Jansdaad
"On holiday in Dubhabera Chank"

hernia of the craw

Once ire's fruits've made it too wide an opening, the thyroid cartilage gets sucked into the anomaly and a poor sod's diagnosed with hernia of the craw.

Left dream-splayed and vulnerable, a sitting duck for the picaresque, he rocks in a corner with his wrists pressed together starting over and over, "i feel...".

Space itself has to drain from the body when an impression's been made too strong and wrongly and efforts launched to recover normally've gone on too long.

Before you can chew your way to freedom a mother figure is forcefully feeding you live and squirming fodder for the chest burning that's also used for reflection.


Peg
"I too was Missy."