WHARVED

Anonymous in Chicago

Stellar calligraphy adorns a battered page
that once belonged to a fastidious girl’s journal.
The loose leaf flits about
the intersection of Halsted and Lake,
dancing above and below cars as they pass by.
I risk life and limb——
actually, I just grab it as I go through the crosswalk——
and hold it up with both hands like a scroll.

It reads: To anyone who’s reading this, don’t act like you’ve found something special. I practice calligraphy at least twice a week and scrap the page when I’m done. You are holding Calligraphy Practice Page #46. The first 45 have all met the same fate as this one. Only time will tell if this or any other of these will be read at all. This may very well be an exercise in futility, if you don’t take into account all the hours of calligraphy practice I’ve been afforded. Doesn’t this script look good? It sure is a hell of an improvement from Page #1, and almost imperceptibly better than #45. I’ve scattered these pages across the city, so good luck finding other ones for the purpose of charting the improvements in penmanship.

Yours truly,

-Anonymous

Quartz

Tenderloin scruples
dust our tenacious otter friends
all the way through the tendrils of paradise,
slipping under starved mineral formations
long enough to glimpse the hooey
etched on their facets
by a possessed quartz fragment.

Five for a dollar in this flea market,
shards of landscaping quartz
may not be used for the backyard
(at least according to the stand owner,
who had a fateful brush with the spirits
while trespassing on a millionaire’s garden property
and now prefers to leave out the horrid details).

Cycle

It’s become apparent that Gulliver lacks the drive to make things interesting, whether it’s through turtledove acquaintanceships or Ivy League aggressiveness. He’s recently put a block on all things ego-driven, and will be the first to admit that he has no goal to get anywhere at any speed.

“I do like food, ya gotta eat, but I don’t dare don the chef’s hat, likely never will unless I’ve begun to see taking actions as necessary, freeing me from my lonesome days of kibble cutting, sandwich clumping and marble roasting–all done in my head without any consequences. I reckon my days of imagined cattle prodding, plateau scraping, griffin pummeling, take-out ordering and helmet wearing are also numbered, now that I don’t care to differentiate arbitrary actions and images from one another. Sitting in meditation for the rest of my life sounds good enough for a fella like me, yessiree. That is, at least, until I tire of the whole arrangement and need to unleash my convoluted persona on the world again.”

The merciless cycle of ego-driven to ascetic and back again eats away at Gulliver at least three times a day, typically while eating processed foods.

Monument

Standing never posed a problem until it became the only option for Gilligan. Granted, this is a self-imposed problem; he could sit any time. But then he would lose his discipline and just sit all day every day until he sees no reason to stand anymore. No matter how this conundrum shakes out, he can only be certain that his all-or-nothing attitude is hereditary, and nothing he does can change that. Predisposition to heart disease, addictive behavior, snoring and the fear of dinosaurs, heights, children, open water, dandruff and old mattresses have crippled him, leaving a man with less purpose than a satiated hyena. There’s simply nothing left to be done, so Gilligan stands still under the canopy of a locust tree, a monument to the dangers of doing pretty much anything else.

Laughable

What’s the plan of attack here if we wish not to attack anyone? Can we still call it a plan of attack? We won’t even be attacking a concept or a goal, violence in all forms is laughable. On that front, I’m surprised I haven’t seen a circus where the clowns just attack each other to appease the masses of demanding attendees. There are probably circuses just like that in the big ol’ world, I just haven’t seen any of them. In fact, I haven’t seen a circus at all in the past 14 years. I haven’t been purposely avoiding them, it’s just easy to choose not to frequent that type of business if the topic’s never broached by, say, a whimsical uncle who just flew into town from Tegucigalpa, looking to blow off some steam with popcorn and clown-on-clown violence during an evening he’ll come to forget after a year or two. Wayward uncle Billy would enjoy three robust cigars before night’s end as he pines for the days before reality television, sight gag after sight gag coming to fruition before our eyes. The roughhousing clowns would visibly retain their composure with the latest sweatproof makeup, advertised to last twelve hours under even the hottest spotlights, a 100% money back guarantee if not completely satisfied.

CVIII

Fire lit by tonsillitis
stalls the candlestick vendor.
This is a flame
that must be conquered
with a knife,
non-invasive procedures
simply won’t cut it.

Go under and collect
anesthesia-fueled dreams
that won’t be remembered
until a moment
in another dreaming state
(which will also be forgotten
until consciousness melds with chaos
and uploads all of life’s raw data
to the infinite abyss, images
blurring with thoughts and emotions
while sounds and textures follow suit
in an infinitely-faceted patchwork).

CVII

Picture a rogue squadron of down-filled pencil pushers coordinating a squalid attempt at what they believe to be a most fertile salad dressing, but what we know to be a seasonal jaunt through the woods in search of pine cones shaped like Abe Lincoln. Gettysburg hasn’t been relevant for some time now, but that doesn’t stop our friends from trudging through the underbrush and raising alarms every time they see leaves in clumps of three.

They know not what makes a salad dressing more fertile than any other, and they don’t even claim to assume what constitutes your average dressing, fertile or barren. They simply know that their amalgamation has yet to be approved by any regulatory body and they’re just going by the seat of their pants and trusting that their instincts will lead them down the tastiest road, be it nutritious or otherwise.

A faction of our dressing doers have found it more pertinent to skate through the town square with cheese in their britches, convinced that dressing has no bearing on the legitimacy of a salad. Their position stokes outrage amongst their peers; how could a salad be considered legitimate in this world if it hasn’t been coated in oily goodness? The two camps are at odds with one another, and the argument won’t be settled until the blood of the innocent flows through the streets.