Benny the Bootlicker
stepped aside once more
with humility, the only
thing he ever really had.
This time he lost a pie-eating contest
to that bozo two counties over.
After all the face-stuffing
and side-splitting, Benny gave up
another half-written dream.
Door fragments post turmoil
in twister conditions.
Wooden shrapnel
sticks out of trees–
returned to the family
in shards and chips
after losing roots
and framing ape huts.
I’m having a tricky time
pulling my thumbs
from this tangled extinction event–
I know I can use them
for the rest of my life
[if my life were to continue tomorrow].
But no matter my strategy,
I’m trapped and helpless,
my thumbs getting stiffer by the minute.
Now I know how those poor dogs feel
when they try to answer the telephone.
To the person
concerned
with my overall health
and ungainly recidivism
every Tuesday,
I offer a branch
from a pepper tree
in exchange
for your counsel
and a dozen bran muffins.
Before we begin necklace preparation, we must drain porridge strawnecks with a touch of humility. We do not possess the capacity for creating these raw materials by ourselves, so we must forage for them and reap the benefits of a world well-harvested.
We thought outside the box when it was still a triangle. We are the progenitors of unconventional thought. Every day, our ad house pumps out unique campaigns and slogans that guarantee our stability as we move forward through the 21st Century. Our mission has always been to scare up free associations and create valuable commodities through words alone. We are America’s last true cottage industry–our creative staff works at home in their boxers and does nothing but generate new combinations of letters in eye-catching tidbits. It only takes one ingenious concoction to make our agency more valuable, and we understand that the road to such lucrative products is paved with half-baked, sometimes ludicrous content. For every JeanKnees and Penergy we create, there are thousands of RhinBows and StareWells left behind. There is no known formula for marketing success–we rely on the public to weed out the bad ones. Our office downtown is set up for nothing but focus groups, 24/7. The building is rigged with more two-way glass than every police precinct in the state combined. Twenty-six floors (we use letters, not numbers), fifty suites in each one. We have more ideas from A to Z per capita than the entire country of Armenia.
Everybody look at the man on the bike with his matching green helmet and shit-eating grin. He’s working his way toward a future with others who share his passion for two-wheeled transport, but until that day comes, he’ll have to go it alone, scaring pedestrians and breaking all the laws he possibly can. He needs to cultivate a legacy of rebellion and a blatant disregard for anything safe, or he won’t manage to sell the whole reckless lifestyle to average folks who’ve been looking for placement in the echelon of amoral roustabouts and hoodlums destined for road rash.
WHARVED 