Husbands instead of children

men and women get weird in their old age
they go to a place of irony and rage
it's as if they think they've discovered
truths not yet to the young uncovered

an hour may pass in thoughtless surrender
uninterrupted by race or gender
splashing, burning, sun in the trees
stepping fully into my abilities

but then the sweep of decades, centuries
seems too dizzying to know what to do
missing a you that's multiple seems broken
can I have 5 or 7 husbands instead of children?


Peg

self-righteous fugue state

this skin has lost resiliency, just tears, a
bee has lit, gone, n' returned in the shape

of four clover leaves over the years, but
all totaled, stinging memories are plenty

i begin to glow and matter presses in
tongues of the aggrieved spew theirs


Donna

i keep figuring it out and then i forget or doubt that i figured it out

as soon as you started handing me folders with names like my music
was when you starting taking away both my music and the concept of mine

right now i don't even know where my music is right now, even the light
hold you give me on my property is ellusive and subject to fire walling

and invasive questioning, long periods of solitary hold time or blaring music
just to do what i used to do with a plastic disc and a needle, i need your

permission every time, to sign away my privacy and become a whore for
your partners, i get sucked into the back door of the industry but for free

Connie
"Angry even yet from the grave."

Phalli

PEG: Phyl, now that you are a journalism adjunct at several institutions of post-high school learning, how would you cite ways it's different from actual journalism.

PHYL: For one, you are interviewing me.

PEG: Are you bitter?

PHYL: Isn't that a given, Peg? Are you I wonder bitter that your children were turned by the temple into science experiments? Ever wonder if you're compared to a family of hairless purple bats?

PEG: Thinking back across your own career though, what might you have maybe tweaked a little.

PHYL: So, it ended up with the most beautiful relationship I've ever had with anyone, including my own parents. As Missy's preen gland expression specialist, I traveled places I never knew existed.

PEG: Is it now that she's past her awkward transformational stage and screeching through skies barely recognizable as anything but that what could be named "Missy."

Now that she's gone, not Missy. That you are irrelevant, or tell yourself so. That Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle doesn't any longer have a place for you.

PHYL: They don't have a place for me; they fired me. They were bought out by Applebees.

And to answer your initial question, I find the life of a freeway-flying adjunct to be very much like journalism: traveling a magic carpet between radically different sets of expectations, philosophies, approaches, policies, operating systems, personalities, parking procedures, lexicon, jargon, argot... having to almost sociopathologically enter, absorb and reflect each mirrored chamber.

PEG: I was a substitute teacher for a while in the 80's. They stole my car, drove it to the beach with a case of beer and spray painted phalli on the backs of the seats.

PHYL: Are we done here?

very expensive swimming pool

every day was a bald giant pounding his metal hammers
KUNG KUNG KUNG KUNG
it's supposed to be like a primitive prehistoric setting but
they have SUV's

i fight any person with whom i come in contact
friend foe blood stranger
equally, as a way to bully me up a family, i
see wrong in you

i dare assholes to try and blame me for providing a center
if there's nature to give
and the right combination of loving and wanting, then
it works atemporally


Mike
as "La Chama"

Meaninglessness, ennui and torpor walked into a bar

She's a monster hatched and finally fully free in the open range

***This post was the last straw for the Mthyuh Preservation Society, whose board took final action to stifle effective immediately. ***

I beg to surrender

it keeps me from sinking into despair
to sit here and defend myself into thin air

i speak to an imagined hypothetical judge
as if she cared. My dog's jowls spread on

the carpet as it hears the cascading pleas
some nights on my knees I beg to surrender


Donna

dysexistencia

may as well, outside these walls
a vacuum, a wanderer, dreaming
lidderly everyone else human

as for other species and breed
we can look out for one another
between the pageantry and combat

the northern clamp sets in again
changes the pressure in the head
metal pops and wood groans on


Missy
"A year liberated."

Plenty of light for one day

If we do remember previous lives that means this is everyone's first life-- how weird!
But there are people who lived and died before us so their souls must've gone elsewhere.
So one life per dimension is one thing known-- some kind of cosmic musical chairs.

Connie

People say things that don't mean anything

stay up late thinking i'm stealing hours nobody's missing
listening to people say things that don't mean anything
madison avenue with the asshole of pop culture stretched
into a crown, the rancid echo chamber, dreaming dog
i'm seeing one of those walking light storms the blind have
it doesn't matter if i open or close my eyes, both the same
that's how hard they're tripping, node tips of technology

Alone/ unique

even though we know we're not the only liveable planet out there
when you think about the distances it doesn't really even matter
it's kind of the same thing yes it is like that being alone/ unique

maybe the only reason to hate the cold is how it's like terror,
overlap in muscles seized creating a fallacious pathos transfer
don't you see it's warm enough to survive inside each one of us


Reptily

Two kinds of muscle memory

One kind of muscle memory is after you wash a dish x many times. The memory lives in the nerves of the muscle rather than the conscious mind, which can now refocus or wander.

Another kind is when muscle reacts to an acute shock to the mind or the body or a chronic series of shocks that motivate regular squirts of cortisol to enter the bloodstream.

The muscle develops a knot that when touched or manipulated will release the memory of the shock and/or a sensory and emotional reproduction of the time or times.


Thong, Dr. Donna 
Journal of the Metacognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement
"Re-licensing Imminent"

What it was like to wreck my SUV at 70 mph

a very stiff jagged branch about the grain of rebar and its accompanying twigs and leaves
impaled the door behind me and into backseat sitting space about two feet.
the driver-side mainframe was buckled in where it'd nestled against a limb

(the part where in a smaller car would be the driver's head).
what it was like was the bladder dip at the point in the
car wash where the machine takes over and you are seated at a dead console.

no contact is being made with a surface, so the wheel can turn
either way without avoiding a dreadful consequence.
the optional on off slide corrector was not on, and a wide, slow spin began:

ooohhhhhhhoooooowheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekuh-kuh...BAM!

after a microsleep, and that not before feeling my head slam,
I found my phone but someone had already called police. I
walked uphill to the squad with an umbrella, climbed in back.

we watched another gentleman doing it, except his bumper flew
off, and it looked like a body on the road in the blur. soon he too
came up to the shoulder, and we sat on the same warm seat.


Hoolie

Going, not been

Suddenly my directional hair growth pattern is a vortex.
There is a calm, bare center, circumference of a walnut.

I buy and lose a hand mirror oh once every ten years.
No recollection comes to mind of this severe a design.

Unlike the barber who found a hippie veteran's cap, a
Living map tells you where you are and going, not been.


Tom

7 barbara

KEN:
We used to play a game and instead of saying seven billion we'd say seven barbara. and now when I say your name i think seven barbara, or i silently think seven barbara. you're not just any one. he'd say i got a pirate, i got a mustang, but my retort was always aint got a seven barbara.

JAN:
He already wasn't himself before I even met him. Yet I fell in love with that former self, what I could recognize that his familiars saw as person half empty.

KEN:
Self a lot. Are you trying to self me something? Shouldn't you be out selving crimes?


Dean Roy Dukes

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