The Remainder: All That’s Left — Excerpt 1

Well and so I say to myself, and to myself I say,
that the greatest impediment to the thing that we call life

happens to be the calm mother rearing casualty
socked against a mitten’s worth of snake skin
for what we’d say is the majority
of our public strict seniority
or the face of the ever-stitching grin.

To the ever sticking gin,
to the floor it wants to fall
as the bottle shatters by itself
no intervener’s call
can ever save that glass from smithereens.

We enter to a saloon, drenched in bourbon, rye and spit
to overhear a conversation held out of sheer boredom.
Is it the western kind of sentiment? Well, what have these men ever known? Can you blame them for their arrogance or siphoning of time through their wide-brimmed attitude and cavalier pistol pittance?

I’d say not, and they wouldn’t even know what you’re talking about, anyway. They’d say son, why do you have to go on and do something that foolish? My associate and I were simply discussing the nature of livestock in commerce, as our mutual acquaintance had recently put us into contact for a business deal. Now why in the name of God did you have to go on and make such a dadburn fool of yourself?

It’s at this time we see the protagonist spit into the spittoon (where else) clear across the bar, traveling something like thirty feet and smacking square on. PTING.

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Author: Aidan Badinger

Wharved.com I am a poet. I write poems. Titles and subjects and subsequent readership are all part of one fragmented figment of our universe, and it's nice that we take it so seriously. Hopefully the craft remains and grows stronger for our children.

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