Great Lakes Region

captive seas in bladders
rocky enough to be salt
game, blustery survival

entire cities, camera shy
the elderly retain a chill
wood houses, blue water

lily pads, ice flows, red
and yellow birds, church
deep black water, snow



Phyllis
"It's what I imagine."

Busting a nut will make your eye sockets fill in

Busting a nut will make your eye sockets fill in:
extra buffer against the skeleton
when existentialism seems odd.

Three choices for a snarling alley dog:
psych-or-literal prison,
love and care, euthanasia.

Don't leave the preference up to him:
during this phase, he'll opt out,
over the hump, down for the count.



by Ken

65/35

It is my misfortune
to be right so often
at times in waves of
dawning probability.
now is against, 70/30
yesterday was 65/35.
tomorrow we marvel
at willing co-citizens
who go on, bend over,
at their radioactivity,
the ground they cover
as a mole, unthinking
will claw at his home
kick walls behind him
pause, still burning,
and eagerly consume
a nib of bait in the dirt.



Donna [Dr. Donna Thong, Reinstatement Imminent]
Poetry Table, Activity Hour
Meta-cognitive Talk Therapy Cohort Study [embedded control subject]
The Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

peggy

promise

don't ever stop

weightless due to sudden lack of momentum
the lull annexed by a mass so big just that it's
there can suck you in like a tractor beam, but
nature unforced, size, density have this property

we liked ripping packages open with our hands
being really either together or alone, there, here,
to hold self-medicating non-commercial powers
depended upon in a life-or-death importance by

our country which meant everyone of all colors
it was on the way up here we didn't stop but
passed through what we've always wanted: a
moment you can only wait to spin back around?



by Ken
"I got my bell-bottoms for seven dollars."

Vehicle of delivery

When everything is broken or buried
or a scheme for immediate pleasure
or both, is indicated a vehicle of
delivery. Who will defend this

household? you can bake cookies to
sell a house, not a family. But who's
home? At among screens within
screens or the moment between.

Inside that glance is a sea-legged
focus dilation, perhaps a micro-
sleep or brief wakefulness. Or
a real-time racing windshield.



Peg [before she knew]
"Connie, please come home girl."

All crap

all these small jobs
to manage the kids and
car, maintain yard and
dogs, their needs
it can build up on a girl

and you don't own
anything, your auto
house, music, phone
is all payments and
clouds, magic password

product is brand and
brands products, brand
via corporate and pro-
ducts from Chinese
sweatshops, all crap.



by Donna [Dr. Donna Thong, Reinstatement Imminent]
Poetry Table, Hobby Hour
Rehabilitative Meta-Talk Therapy Trial Participant [embedded control subject]
Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

Tragi-comic road rage

Mind you, I don't have any idea what empty nest syndrome means or what it is, but I've heard the term, and maybe you're having that.

Sure you experience me outside of you. I experience you outside of me. That doesn't make either one of us more of an outsider.

What I can do and you prolly can't do is rock the glutes around one of your sit bones so as to make you catatonic circularly.

Look, I've got this and it's worth something. You can't take it away, so just take it in. I may be famous some day or maybe now.

It's your responsibility to praise the Lord because the singing and dancing up upon to Him will make you glad, and this enforcement

Of glad acts will create pheromones which will create a desire in you to act in ways that benefit society and prevent suicide.

Start with a one point something,  add another one point something, and then before you know it you're skipping over two and right into three or three point something.

Connie [posthumously]
Chalk Chank Press

violent tic

 

Farts as nameable events

You could stack up all the name-your-baby supermarket checkout books in the world, the Bible, Koran, Torah, all the Star Wars and Trek movies, Upanishads... other sacred texts that tend to spawn names and not have enough names for all the nameable farts if farts were named. The library at St. John's would inspire a great stink. Archives of all existing public school K-12 student records. Check that, birth certificates. Then you could start on all nouns, for any noun can be a name. You could start on syllabic combinations cannibalized from old names to create new names which alone would of course create an infinite number of combinations. That would probably be enough names for all the nameable farts if farts in fact were named, though of course they normally aren't. Vlad.

Affective Mask Training

[from: Daybook Near Daybed, by Donna]

Consulted with Hon. Reptily "La Chama" Mlaf re: [long story] on the couches in my living room with some big pillows and drinks, Persian cats.

SUMMARY: Rev. La Chama suspects (not psychotic/ hallucinatory) that she is being called to another world. It's not so much that she wants to go, but she feels it's a consensus of parties and interests beyond her control. More than ever, there is disregard, impatience, suspicion. She believes she is misunderstood by friends from California who keep telling her it's what she puts out into the universe. She tells them she must be a pretty shitty person then. They do not disagree. The Reverend concludes that she is responding to a real social phenomenon, not necessarily the supernatural decision of a supreme being, but she also understands how many parishioners conflate God and mob. I do not disagree.

RECOMMENDATION: Invent AMT, Affective Mask Training. Co-habitators of La Chama's environment not only resent her status as a goddess but are also off put by her ability to mirror exactly their emotions and sometimes secrets. This is because La Chama's emotional reaction to others is essentially sympathetic, and having at least one parent from the reptilian genus rhynchoedura ornata, even her color could change depending on a lunch companion's skirt/sweater set. Is she trying to gain intimacy with her freaked-out interlocutors? Does she seek to intimidate? We think particularly not, maybe secondary. Her principal aim, though a struggle, is understanding, to categorize and label. But when she senses hostility or fear, they are amplified by a natural flaring hormone common to her father's species. Hyperbolic mimesia can spiral into mutual hostility and mistrust. AMT, mounted in the eyeglass lens, could be the next Biofeedback, but through the use of emerging facial recognition technologies, and for a very specific purpose: cosmetic psychology, which could conceivably branch into studies of Forensic Cosmetology, but most importantly, save lives.


Dr. Donna Thong [Reinstatement Imminent]
Editorial Board Member
Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement

Errata Omne Quod Scitur

Dear Jan and Ken:

Ever since you brought me back through The Crack to get help with your "pterodactyl problem" and in exchange kindly explained the spiritual tenets of the movement that I now control and oversee, I have pictured my own zen-like golden center, the other, the real Chama, as a man, the eternal me, on a throne floating in psychic space outside of matter and time. The man/ God/ thing/ horror who has always been peace itself in that seat, the objective yet sympathetic observer, the hub, fulcrum, axis, last word, arbiter of all, has now collapsed in place like one of those Disney characters on a little plastic pedestal with the button on the bottom connected to rubber bands inside that release the tension and make Goofy, for example, go limp when you press it with your thumb. He hangs his head between his knees like Urizen as if trying to keep sight of a universe plummeting ever further into a distance that is, relative to his position, directly below, sobbing into a sea, which is everything.

I'm faced, then, with a paradox; my understanding of the world, which I also gained from Mthyuh Mkidza Mlaf and her secret husband, our founder, is that there is always a benevolent body, always imminent and anxious to precipitate understanding, to soak and to dissolve invasive anti-meanings into waste, carrot peelings, menses, unnamed storms, farts, tics, blinks. Is this a singularity, apex of a static arc, the feet of which cannot be found? I don't understand why today, why that, or how. My three-dimensional omniscience, or my faith in that concept, or the signal that keeps us all together-- I'm getting flat. Issue of a fax machine. A report, front and back, bad news: your powers are waves without receptors. The gifts you stored and dispensed to so much urgent desperation of a starving planet now instead are only dust and they are blown.

If I can find my brother Ilyn I will follow him to the volcano and take his hand when next he hurls his broken figure into Her molten bath. If I can keep my open palms pressed tight to the extraordinary and inexplicable substance we think of as his flesh, he may let me continue on with him to other times and peoples, but as a lowly passenger, to share his miserable comfort in the cart with wooden wheels hewn square, his surrender to the passive voyage, the unknowable trajectory of Shab, of he who is a red-eyed beast of burden and a beast by manufacture; and a magic, unforgiving beast and a common house pet. When I can hear Shab's toenails scratching across the surface rock of my new life of total ascetic withdrawal, I will sprout this time rent and unwelcome and unfamiliar from the beginning with no illusions and nothing to bring along but the blood of birthing from stone.


Please file under: Errata Omne Quod Scitur
Reptily

nappy

it's not sustainable, girl

believe

Joe

Hank

redo: love pumping cancer

Chang K. Chang Chank Tank Chain Gang Grain Bank

On behalf of the Chang K. Chang Chank Tank Chain Gang Grain Bank, we grant you passage through our bowel. You have bled your Ked's in the bed for some bread and accepted a towelette, Jim. Now it's time to liven up to your debt and swim.