Stout caricatures
come to life
on the boardwalk of natural pleasantry,
stretched foreheads
and foreshortened torsos
gleaming with impish security.
One day they’d be worth millions,
but they won’t survive that long.
Nobody will care for them,
they’re child’s play in the eyes of sensibility.
Venture a guess as to the formalities
contained within your average disco music,
and you may become enraptured
by its simplicity of form while retaining
a semblance of impracticality that all people
may understand when given proper parameters.
Barriers formed by popular assent break regulation
to garnish spectacular emotion, often wagering
the impartial stoicism contained by our pedagogical
monetary system of rare surplus and surprising
resilience when faced with extreme obstacles.
Any keen observer must conclude after an encounter
of archaic and asinine proportions that tomorrow
takes stage fright’s assumptions and rebrands at will,
tarnishing hope for a stalemate of conscience and temerity.
Extraction requires astute willingness to change abstraction
into benign products reserved for the paying public,
outrageous to the average jack-of-all-trades, expected
by large hordes of collective consciousness to come to life
before their eyes in swarms of instant gratification,
hitherto supplied by chants and jingles formulated by hacks.
———
Original draft written and posted to WHARVED on Halloween, 2011
Great Outdoors Tradeshow Spokesperson: “This tomato in my hand has forty percent more oxygen inside its flesh and seeds than the average tomato!”
“Yeah right,” you say in disgust, kicking the pea gravel and crying silently to yourself as you contemplate just why you found reasons for everything you ever did, just to be shown up by a city slicker garden enthusiast right before the only day of the year that you can possibly get any kind of alone time for yourself to unwind and watch TV while a whole pack of hot dogs boils on the stove and the buns are on top of the toaster to get a culinary tan.
The fridge would sit closed, entertaining thoughts of potato salad and a cheese platter dancing through its circuits directly to its frosty belly for your convenience, because after all, you’re the one who shelled out hundreds of dollars for a box that keeps stuff cold and frozen–and perhaps give you ice and water if you shop around for a good one.
Awful miscommunication–
tear apart sandwich halves
see how you feel after
obey primal thought
lift fingers violently
clasp chambered pumps
throw whole chickens
maul dunes, rove
past mongrel tendencies
waive discounted junk
settle accordingly–
move on.
The key
to
successfully
lighting
a cigarette
in the wind
is the same
as winning
a bike race.
With
your back
to the wind,
lower
your head
and kick it up.
While the last birds
of Autumn fly in sparse flocks,
a semi-load of hundreds
of pallets heads south,
followed by a gravel truck,
a Chevy sedan, a Dodge minivan,
a Jeep and two red Toyota pickups.
WHARVED 