Category: Poetry

Riffing on a common trait
seems to stall
the heavy-lifting popinjays
who would otherwise flit
everywhere they see fit,
even if it’s for only a second or two.

Remark that their eyes are brown
like your own, and you’ll see
their gaudy robes and jangling chains
cease movement for a moment
as they question your motives
and likely come back with a
“you know, brown is such a mundane word
when you can use umber or sienna.”

Keep on looking for similarities.
Though you know that list is short,
you’ll be doing your part
to delay the slow decay of modernity,
one astute observation at a time.

What’s to be gained from a margarine syndicate stealing all of our top talent in the butter biz? An inside source told me that they’re working to eradicate all fatty cream-based substances, one well-placed marketing campaign at a time. It won’t be long now before even milk–the very foundation of instant nutrition in the 20th Century–loses its credibility to whey protein substitutes. Cows are under the gun to come up with a new self-sustaining product to keep their farmers from foreclosing. Hoof paintings will likely be their first foray, as the arts have proven time and again to be quite the lucrative undertaking.

A humble statistician
sets up shop in the park,
thinking the squirrels
may cheer him up
after a morning of nothing more
than menial chores, dross
that bogged him down
and had him contemplating
a life worth living–ultimately
outside of his house (or,
heaven forbid, the office).
At this point in his life, he views
work and domestic activities
to be more or less equally disturbing,
yet chooses to continue both
as a way of channelling the great
collective misery and rooting him
firmly to the soil he honestly wishes
would give way and swallow him up.

At 1:23pm, two Washingtons
and a Jefferson converge
in the change of a dime store
hipster with more common sense
than would normally be allowed
for a person who spends so much
time out and about, strutting
through campuses and chatting up
interesting individuals who cross
his path–even the unsavory ones
whom his parents warned against
when he was a smaller person–
engaging in light-hearted conversation
regarding the economy, politics,
race relations, what have you.

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.