Category: Poetry

An accomplishment can turn into
a sour rattlesnake gargler
at the drop of a seventy-five gallon hat,
and I’m not too sure if I like them apples.

What we have here is a cycle doomed to repeat itself, to shrink away and outdrink itself every night until it wonders why it drank in the first place. It’s not like life is fun or anything–we have to make the best of it while it’s hanging around, you know? There’s nothing wrong with wanting to blink and be gone, but is that realistic? Where does matter go when it’s not here? It’s there, point taken, but where is there, anyway? That’s the question.

Access the place, that place you’d been a couple times before but never decided to revisit. What’s wrong with that place? Did it offend you in some fundamental way? Did it smell like cheese, knowing full well that you exclusively visit olive-scented establishments? That’s preposterous; a restaurant can’t know why a person dislikes the smell of cheese. It takes an airship to reach that decision. A restaurant is still a few steps down on the ladder. Once it gets to the next rung of testing and certifications, a restaurant can graduate to the likes of a pigeon wing sculpture, and only then will it be able to begin musing on the reason for things as they do (or do not) exist.

There are only so many ways to count your Gretchens as they flow across the gables and valleys and spritzers and hoodwinked masses of goat children (they prefer to be called kids). No matter, your Gretchens will come to a pass and deliver what you believe to be gracious pigmentry and something of an elusive Charles-o-meter before the time you are due to go in for surgery. As occasions such as this are widely extolled for their courtesy and generous charitable donations, we mustn’t forget the reason why our money makes us so powerful. It’s the Godlike influence, right? I just wanted to be clear.

Sometimes a person must accept that a life worth living does not primarily consist of flinging feces across the room at an undeserving third party (counting said person, feces, and recipient of said feces). Sometimes compromises must be made! Sometimes a person must abstain from flinging feces, regardless of whether or not it’s their feces to fling. Understanding this simple fact can save a lot of embarrassment and undesired odors over the course of a lifetime (in captivity). I’m not saying that a little feces flying through the air here and there will kill anybody, and, let’s face it, people will succumb to their weaknesses from time to time.

I’ve got six or seven reasons not to pursue legal action, but there’s really nothing stopping me anyway. It’s not that I want to exact revenge upon an unworthy opponent, even though that’s exactly my intent. It’s just that I’ve grown so tired of these people in this world pretending to be the boss when they can’t even figure out how to properly floss their teeth. If I need to select an unlucky recipient of my random righteous fit, then so be it. I’ll go ahead and flip through the phone book. John Mendoza. Did his name really have to be John? I mean, of all people, why would I pick someone with such a typical first name? If I’m going to make somebody regret that they even met me, I want to at least make sure that the history books show a Ralph or a Denis or even a Lucian for Christ’s sake. I don’t really care if it’s a family name, or even if it’s something his parents saw on a billboard on the way to the hospital. I just want it to be classy. I mean, it’s my arbitrary lawsuit, so I can conduct this business any way I want. And I know what you’re thinking: why not sue a woman? I did briefly entertain the notion of suing a woman named Sue, but I’d have no way to know for sure that she doesn’t actually prefer being called Susan or Susy or even Sue Ellen. Once I took all that new information into account, I’d already begun to flip through the white pages for a name at random.