Category: Numbered

Nothing added to the mix lately,
our scotch salesman has lost his will
to peddle single malts to tourists
in the town square. Everybody
he comes across seems to be
a carbon copy of the people he’s already
met there, which begs the question:
are people all more or less the same?
A purveyor of fine peated spirits
may only see half of the equation,
as he’s not coming across the conscientious ones
who decided to stay home and save their money
for more useful domestic purposes (often going
to the liquor store and blindly picking
a whisky from the shelf while the store clerk
doesn’t even feign interest).

“Meep,” says the sterling squirrel,
well aware of what its noises
would do in a neighborhood dominated
by angry devil dogs, the sort
whose bark and bite match perfectly.
They gnash and chomp at the air,
gruesome lil’ suckers bent on biting
whatever it is they can find
on a sunny afternoon.

But at sunset, they take on
a timid disposition, retreating
back into their grisly hidey-holes
to snip at their tails in frustration
as brutal pan-species vampires
begin their sanguinary trawl.

You can’t overdo something of this magnitude–a poem, a thoughtful greeting card, a pinky in the eye of your oppressor–or you’ll stick out like a sore thumb on the hand of a timid librarian perusing the stacks and suffering several paper cuts. Overachieving can only lead to disappointment later on, when you can barely stick your head out from under the covers long enough to change the song blaring from your computer (which has been running for 138 consecutive hours without so much as a break). Face it. Take on challenges with a half-assed spin and you’ll pleasantly surprise yourself when something worthwhile happens–a novel covering the basis of yarn harvesting, an apparition of the Dalai Lama in your homemade soup, the opening day lineup of the 1938 Chicago Cubs etched onto the back of your hand.

Until we’ve all taken siestas
on each of the seven continents,
nobody will have the authority
to say what should and shouldn’t
be called opera. Just try to take
a nap in Antarctica without any
shelter, I dare you. About midway
through attempting to drift off,
you’ll lose function in your extremities,
with your limbs not too far behind.

Only at that moment will you say
to yourself that an opera can be
anything that involves conflict and
some sort of singing. The language
doesn’t even have to be grandiose!
You admit to yourself that this
proposition on the origin of art
is silly anyway, and you die
a cold, enlightened individual.

Twizzling little tickling twinkles
splash individual fare on the clowns
falling all over 18th street,
Sunday after the hourless
Friday-Saturday conundrum
where teeth gnashed in pleasure
and trumpets blared
the anthem of the Bohemian state of mind.
Forty-eight ticks left the weekend
scratching its head and biding its time
until the wrecks emerge from the wainscoting
to lap up the Billy Baroo kind of obsolescence
planned for the children they’ll only have
once this planet has been assured of its safety.

Give me that impression of a youth in trouble with a decision to make that will shape her life and the lives of innumerable voting persons, and try telling me that the swamp of egregious warfare has a purpose. You know–as well as I–that a natural feature has no business existing if its very nature is one of violence and the quashing of dissenting voices. If, however, you sample from the rug of burnt mango offerings, nothing could please me more than the redemption you’ve always sought–when standing in direct opposition to the kernel of putty-nosed scoundrels, no less.