Category: Abstract

Many Means

Incendiary pickled herrings
have been convinced to roost
regardless of aggregate happiness
in the face of comportment as jackal vendors
on the fourth Thursday in June (at least
the one where the werewolves play
without the convenience of a full moon).

Bobby Friday wanted more than anything else
to be looked upon with favor, that’s all.
Anything requiring more involvement
would surely end in disaster (from
where he stood, at least), so
he would only dare tread lightly
through the footpaths
mercilessly trampled for generations.
He concluded, unceremoniously, that
human interaction has many means
for existing, very few of which
actually entail anything enriching.

It was just at that moment that he noticed the bricked-in windows lining the building adjacent to his friendly neighborhood train station–the day before his birthday, of all days. This year it fell on a Thursday. What convenient bullshit, he thought.

Lil Yeller Fellers

I had quite the feisty colony of bees stored up,
only to leave them back in Georgia–
in the hands of my dingus brother, no less.
God, what kind of mess did I make of this?

I miss them lil yeller fellers, but
becoming a full-time yankee tartographer
means you need to make supreme sacrifices
for the good of the craft and its reception.

It’s bad enough
that folks have never heard of this field,
and even worse when they just shrug it off
like some kind of joke
without really stopping to think about it.

You know what? I don’t have the time
to convert the unbelievers anyway. Matter
of fact,
I’m gonna go get my bees back. Tartography
just ain’t what it used to be.

Microcosm

Belt the roast torpedo chicken espresso trepidation
between undertow scripture merriment
before tomorrow feels golf handler syndrome takers.

Upon victory garden memory quickeners
preside bacon cheerleaders,
content to scythe some grain,
unwind a bird line into chocolate cave platypuses.

Tom was a simple boy, never ventured too far away from his home because he figured home was a microcosm of the greater world, any unexplored tracts reserved for other people of existence, their place separate from his, and he was just fine with that.

Mingle amongst ribbon galoshes,
puddle champagne reed pushers beyond any barley crop–
unbeknownst to Gertrude,
widow’s fingers
trace forks and spoons
along the monument to any fallen porcupine quill,
infinitesimally uncomfortable through shadows and mean chickadees.

———-

Originally posted to WHARVED on 1/7/12,
entitled #81 (first numbered series)

No Such Luck

Journeyman centenarian, your
squadron of sheep hurlers
begged you to curdle off the cliff
while dangling circumlindrically–
as though in a play.

No such luck.

Life is a raised platform,
gawking peanut gallery
all around, over-adorned yaps
temporarily agape
toward a permanent problem.

The plight of the talented
is wasted on the non-observant.

Passenger

A charming, alarming chili bit of nonsense fried my circuits for the latest of the schnitzengruben factors, not at all unlike the sleaze you’d unravel with a long hard look at the compact disc (spectrum and all).

I helped an old lady off the bus, and ever since, people are just lumps of shit doing the bare minimum whenever possible at the expense of others. I’ve noticed that I tend to do the opposite (at the peril of tooting my own horn), where I neglect myself and only give my “authentic person” to people I don’t know a lick about. And then I turn around and neglect the needs of anyone who dared take the time to develop a rapport with this here sad sack.

All I know is this: there are ideas and there are ideals. Ideals may be met through the exploration of ideas, and ideas may only be found as a passenger of an old freight train (as it rumbles its way across the plains).

Impressionology

Facile fabrication comes with half-price wine and a half-decent idea of what it means to be a cut-rate pilgrim on the eve of the seventh tardigrade.

So now, Jimber Unfletching Libberdijibbet (that’s his stage name) has a bone to pick with the absurd nature of his very existence on this here rock orbiting a mid-grade star of no particular distinction. For one: how could his sorry-ass soul have been picked to inhabit a corporeal manifestation of this godforsaken planet? His mind simply wasn’t malleable enough to adapt to such mental calisthenics, even if said activities only constituted a sixteenth of one morning each second Thursday after waterobics.

He needed a tutor of sorts to escort him down the row of unconcerned minds, so he could become one of those most-enviable kinds of folks who look so cool that their general demeanor forces them to do everything but justify the wherewithal that led the to cultivate such a persona in the first place.

But, after all, we happen to inhabit an age of severe impressionology. I can see I may have lost you on that last one. It’s essentially a myriad of minuscule multiplicities as seen through the eyes of numerous (some would say innumerable) individuals, wherein people tend to default toward the middle of the pack so as to avoid embarrassing themselves in front of those in the know.

I know.

Readymade

I’m gonna let this here sandwich–tuna
and potato on marble rye–cool
on the windowsill for a minute (or
more likely three), just like
my little orphan auntie used to do

back when the regenerative stillborn
recollections astonished even the staunchest
followers of the occult (and lesser occult-like
activities cut from a quite-similar cloth (or suitable
cloth-like substance that may adequately demonstrate
the tensile strength of a natural fiber (cotton
would be the fairest readymade comparison))).