curtain that hides a curtain

she pulls the veils aside, matches
intent to desire , drops them
into acid wash. one by one.
what survives is skeletal,
bones in a tinted window
seen only at dusk when the lights
inside battle a sense of time, just
before the closing of the heavy cloth.

the bombs begin at midnight. so she turns
the clock ahead, quickly. past the cease fire
into the next round of cackling hens, crackling skins.
this is how she slides the needle in.

with closed eyes. missing vein. missing veil,
ported from surgery to recovery to hospice
eventually she wraps the white plastic drapes of medicine
around her nude body and tags herself gone.





**)(**







recipe for butterfly


caterpillar hunger
safe twig, not too shady not too hot
silk threads
spit
sleep just leave
me alone
pls
?
a razor on the end of a tounge
claustrophobia
desire










***((****







haunted with past lives
the dancefloor jiggles
packed tightly with awe
and awe shucks. he's sexy
and cold, jujubees pop
in the unwritten subtexts when he looks
at you, icicles dripping from his chest.
he looks at her who is you. he looks at them
who is you, he sees his lover's eyes
in the batting of the crowd, her lashes
don't compare if you aren't listening if you want
less than to hold on to him
when you dance.
you cannot catch him
his wings are too fragile his wings
can't be pinned he must be allowed to land
upon what he desires when he tires
of the flitting, musical wind. if you want him
make an o with your mouth, breath
a puff, maybe hitch a ride
on lithe seeds rising.
















(*)&&&









your feet are caught in salmonella shoes.
i urge you to return them to sender.










*()&&()~

oh tilda, you grapple
with my strawberry hooks, the grape
umbrellas of disaster, formulation
and fermentation to keep warm.

there comes a winter then a spring
and then will be a different thing.

the persistence of this radiation is mutating me.
hand down the moss a light
green variety, add to the wet ground
of the unfreezing tundra. something
will come along and eat it. a crystal what of emptying
stained glass desert, a hunger pang, whimpering.


making a corpse
alone
is a more difficult thing than you might
imagine. it takes a certain type of breakage
and paper shredder flour. plastered in paris
on top of the seine in an exqusisite gondola
imported from spain, not one of those machievelian
venice ones, but the real spain found in disneylands
around the worls, with an h, little flat
boats, skimmers, filled with benches and big poles
to manhandle to trout embarking. slither and slide
into the jaws of the fish processing animatronic
small worlds of yesteryore.

sos , say the bots. i can't follow your direction.
did you dye your hair green again? the borg section
is stressing over that but only in a polyhedric dimension.
if it metastisizes into something more, we'll let you know.

later versions will naturally be less fuzzy, more logic.
we're working on the perfect being


when she saw that message, she knew she'd have
to hide it from the kafkaphreaks. the ones
self propheting into mob bomb matrix one.
the ones holding the button. they see themselves
in every allusion and so are mau d'ib. (sp. to confuse
the logician . !footnotes are parenthesized to save time
and shift key duty. )


she went to the group for advice.
nina, we just got this message in. tasha pulls
the text from her hand. after reading it she powers
up the brut and begins to fold the paper
in a series of triangles and points. hey, i want that
says jack, from his position on the floor
tickling the river babies feet, to make them giggle
and fart the smell of autumn and falling leaves.
come get it, says nina, her lashes are
compass points mating. she's smiling, she's folding.
jack is beside her. let me show you how it's done. the paper,
flattered to be the center of attention, flutters, uncreases
and erases the comments she'd written upon it. she grabs
the airplane from jack's hands and with an exasperated sigh
sails it toward the fire. soon chai gasps.
she walked in late. the tableau freezes as she stomps. glitch. glitch
glitch the mother hen in the other room
is heard to mutter. the interface shuts down.









**&^^



east and west were in the second wave. the rental had been extended
up till spring break. a real discount since the market collapsed
and no one real was getting the rent checks.jack wrote them out
to who ever drove out to the house once a month , as long as they showed
id and gave a receipt he could show the cops .{often it was the cops.
what the fuck did they care ? the banks were foreclosing on all the properties
and this little real estate on the side was pretty lucrative. all they had to do
ws pay the electric and water. the city inspectors got their cut. it's all good.\\\\\\\]
the grow room gave off a healthy glow, which the bots easily masked
since all data was fed into the web for processing.

is this what we've come to, asked nat,interrupting her grilling
of the river babies about their hats. or, rather,
the lack of, she corrected
mentatly, on the fifty first pass of the regulon carpets of venus.

anything but berber-- laughs lynze the orange cat takes offense
and bites it little tale off. it slithers lizardly into wishardry
and the sun and the moon bide their time
till eclipse. the next wave
was on its way.