Great Job

What the hell am I even typing here?
Is the synthesis of words through keyboard activity
more significant than penning them by hand?
How would one method be preferable to any other
when composing original products of human imagination?

The answer involves an inordinate amount
of wobbling and waffling
between the ideal state of the human being
and the universe we’ve inherited
through no fault of our own.

How many times have you heard that
“through no fault of our own” nonsense
and actually bought it for a second?
What a modern convenience it must be
to forget the struggle of our forbears
while annihilating the only home we were ever given.
Great job, guys.

Public or Private

Pudgy pigeons
pluck plinko players
from plaid plundering,
piracy never preferred
over pragmatic pilgrimages
(purchased with privilege
and pursued with primeval
predilections). Predictions
produce practically no pressure
in this prideful pageant, Professor–
public or private.

Society’s Fault

Hello, I’m Barnaman Bailey.
You may remember me
from such mishearings as:
“hey, aren’t you that ‘ ‘scuze me
while I kiss this guy’ guy?”
People always know
I have one of those type of names,
but I haven’t reached the level of notoriety yet
where people just know it for certain.
I blame society.
It’s society’s fault.

Perfectibillies

Sometimes you just need to keep rattling out random strings of words until you hit that one vein of gold ore that you wouldn’t mind blasting and smelting for the cost of three chicken sandwiches a day–though the price of those chicken sandwiches would be in direct opposition to the idea of one’s own self-worth, which tends to be inherently problematic.

On the one hand, I know that chicken sandwiches are really only worth about a few bucks a pop, but if I feel emotionally bankrupt, a double-digit dollar figure may be too hefty a price tag to tack onto my floundering ego (even if imposed as a thought exercise and nothing else).

Some folks prefer to invent misfortunes due to the dearth of such impediments in their naturally-occurring existence. The culmination of all human experience has led us to quarrel with our inner Perfectibillies (those naïve mind-dwellers with the sole objective to get the point across that we used to be a much more resilient bunch in the midst of chaos). We’ve lost our litheness, and it shows.

Long Story Short

In a world with a strange lack of plate garnishes:
parsley extermination has been instigated
by the good folks at fennel, those
champion-types who mainly prefer
to have their competition six feet under.

As children, every person
at the fennel advisory board
was cruelly mocked and made to feel
like nobody gave an ounce of effort
to help them fit in.

So! Long story short,
fennel and parsley don’t exactly get along.
Don’t get me wrong, the actual herbs
hold absolutely no animosity toward one other,
it’s just those shallot capitalists
who make this absurd narrative
even possible in the first place.

Amalgam

What does one type when one has no idea what one should be typing? Also, what kind of work must be made on a normal basis if one is to be considered a writer, or even a basic typist? The answer is likely more rhetorical than actual, but I believe that it exists within a kind of continuum much too subtle for human observation. Now why would I be addressing such a scenario anyway? Seems to be some kind of joke, like this guy just can’t string more than two sentences together without some kind of complaint or existential crisis. And perhaps that’s the point of it; do any of us have the ability to jump into a narrative and string more than two interesting sentences together, keeping in mind that this is right off the bat when the brain still has to get adjusted to some kind of critical thinking for once? I would say the answer to that is a definite probably, which means that we may have an identifiable protagonist without even introducing them to the reader (or at the very least, some kind of character worth tracking in snippets throughout their day). And we would suppose that an audience needs a familiar protagonist in order to soldier on through otherwise incomprehensibly dense prose. But what would make this protagonist compelling? I’d say some kind of scraped knee or questioning of an authority figure would immediately port the audience into the realm of empathy; you really gotta hook them into caring about an amalgam of letters and syntax.

Robust

Miranda sold me this veranda one fine Sunday morning, while we were traipsing through the park (minding our own business like it was nobody’s business). She casually broached the subject in between more salient topics–chili mongers and termite hobbyism–as though she hadn’t really been thinking about it that much. Turns out that she’d been waiting in the wings for me to shut up so she could drop her latest deal bombshell on me: a 3/4-size veranda for the price of a small turkey (12 lbs. or less) down at the Froger.

Pancetta salesmen are not too common these days–in contrast to our robust ecosystem of chili mongers–but Miranda and I walked past one that same afternoon just as we happened to be discussing the virtues of veggies. He played it cool like he didn’t hear us, but I know he did (from the twitch in his left eyebrow).