Raw Goods

King Pan

3-person play
King Pan = Peter Pan + King Lear (Tom Sawyer)
Iago = Iago / Odysseus (McNamara Report)
Cleo = Phaedra (Lafayette Memorial) + Dido

posted by judy j @ 4:22 AM 0 comments

and all the deaths on the beach seem far away,
while he stores a hand grenade in his office desk
chary of protecting the college kids from pillow talk
of stars and garters, bar-be-que sauce dinners

you know best your secrets, your undivulged reminisces,
like the beach in the Iliad upon which the Achaens eat
uncooked spaghetti noodles when they come home from school
awake past bedtime, hungry in a huddle on floor carpet

where "I'm finally alone with you" depends on how you read
stolen heirlooms, looted armaments, or re-captured savagery
of teeth-torn paper and fire-escape entrances; like a sweet,
perfect gentleman, I'll be far away, as you read-after-read.

posted by judy j @ 12:09 PM 0 comments

the end of the story

just because. just because the sentences don't end, like the landscapes. because the mix of how she moves from thoughts to deeds, place to past, memories to wish. it doesn't have to be that way, the words we said didn't have to be the words we said, the way he carries his shoulders and head don't begin to describe the longing that resides inside, when the sound of a whisker scratches the surface of a page he's reading in the back room, where kitchen tiles stack on the paint-spattered counter and mountains peer through the cracked windows just enough to let us know that there's lots of places we haven't gone yet, so don't stop.

posted by judy j @ 1:34 PM 0 comments

God, Inc.

God, Inc. won the contract to reconstruct the Universe. Actually, you can't really say they "won" the contract, since it was it was a no-contest contract. The company hired independent contractors, avoided paying health insurance, and over-charged for second rate goods, like flesh that decomposed when not continuously provided with steady quantities of oxygen and nutrients, bones that broke at a laughable degree of torque, and flames that consumed solids on contact, rather than lending themselves to pleasurable interchanges of matter and vacuum, like the plasmoids in most Universes.

God, Inc. was already a disreputable organization, however, having botched the job on previous creations, and the Universal Regulators knew this, but looked the other way when God waved hush-money in their immortal faces. How else could you explain how they let such poor design fly? The Big Bang - come on, give me a break. Any professional chef knows that you don't start cooking before you've got your ingredients all laid out in mise-en-place; the Big Bang's just like throwing your eggs on a hot skillet before you've even sliced your onions. You can see the reprecussions of this everywhere - earthquakes, floods, massacres...even quasars, cool as they are, are just effects of an unstable gravity field.

And just try to migrate to a different universe - they've got the borders closed. Not that they'd even tell you where the borders are - whether this is an open universe, a closed universe, an expanding universe, or a shrinking universe, the results are the same: as soon as you approach a black hole, you're dead, and nobody ever hears from you again; all we're left with is the image of you, your face frozen in farewell, like from the snapshots we've dug up and cropped to copy onto "Missing" posters and plaster all over the city. This Universe sucks. And it isn't just the gravity. It's the damned nihilists on the board of directors at God, Inc., ruining it all for the rest of us.

posted by judy j @ 5:12 PM 1 comments

migraines and airplanes

i haven't told you yet about the carnival tour, that once-a-year visit to houston and sacramento, when tornados and thunderstorms shut down the midway when federal agents weren't doing it. we set up bumper boats and machine-gun games soon after twin towers crashed, and john told me that the los angeles show was completely shut down by the time september 12th dawned on the west coast. i've often suspected that he was a wanted felon, though, with the way he didn't want his picture taken, so that may not be his real name, but i trust his stories as far as he could throw his hat, which was pretty far, especially in the astrodome, where dylan played in purple velvet and hurricaine refugees sat and waited, shat and wailed, while relief went to those who could afford flood insurance. i was standing waist-deep in still waters while the skies swirled, and we weren't selling any tickets, so i quit that job, too, and went to san francisco before malnutrition emaciated me further, but that's telling too many secrets.

posted by judy j @ 4:28 PM 0 comments

oysters on the half-shell

bolt 'em - they got flavor. fire in the pit, much different than fire in the hole; one resides in half a barrel-become-barbecue, and one lives on in the shudders of night sweats and stifled shouts. i don't need to tell you that he was a grunt, and you don't need to know that oysters on the half-shell came my way once a year, when the Showfolks of America parked their trailers around the horseshoe pits and raised a ruckus to rival the primal screams of lennon and yoko, those visages left behind when he put down his glass stein and brass star and married her before she'd graduated high school. she got kicked out for being pregnant when she was sixteen, but she wasn't the same person, then, and never will be.

posted by judy j @ 4:27 PM 0 comments

quit my job

janitor's apprentice masturbates on the protestant pulpit; do they even have a pulpit in that church, or do they rely more on the mount of transfiguration? fifty pence to see the live show, and this is where we learned about betrayal, between the tunnels of broken hands and signal punches, so don't quit your job just yet, there's still a little room to breath, as long as we can smell redwood scruff when it's under our nose. we made dirt to the tune of arkansas abortions and sandy gravel shovel swipes, lost in the pace of scrape and toss, scrape and mix, so it didn't matter so much that we weren't ever going to work our way out of debt. her father thought i was trying to procure her, but he didn't know that i was already owned by an unspoken want to become a woman, to quit my job and leave behind the man that i was raised to become and disgrace. so that's dignity, for ya - if you want it.

posted by judy j @ 4:27 PM 0 comments

a vocabulary for young fathers

evelyn said, 'meet me in philadelphia next week,' so i quit my job and bought a greyhound ticket, 'cuz that's what you do when an eighty-four year old woman tells you she's going to die soon; at least, that's what you do if you're me and you've just cracked your tailbone while parking cars outside the strip club on Burnside. i fell asleep until utah and then drew pictures of distant horizons to amuse the snotty kids. 'i just rode this bus three days to get these kids from their dad,' their mother said, 'and i'm about to ride it three days more to bring them back to massachusetts,' so don't fuck with me, was the underlying message, and we didn't.

posted by judy j @ 4:03 PM 0 comments