The Whole Kit ‘n’ Caboodle

Soup shouldn’t be hard to come by these days, but we all know it’s sometimes quite difficult to get a ladle and a dollop (of sour cream, usually). That’s why we’re starting the Soup for the Group Foundation, to provide adequate nutrition in hearty liquid form. What are we looking to accomplish? To be honest with you, we’re not so sure of ourselves at this juncture, but we know that providing food is one of the noblest callings. We’re hoping that one day we can rest upon our laurels, masters of our universe, sipping brandy and smoking horse-killing cigars while our manservants massage our feet and ankles–especially ankles.

The minor inconvenience here is the loss of Davis’s colostomy bag. It’s not like there are so many locations where we could have misplaced it. We only went from the house to church, then to the breakfast place, then over to the drugstore. From there, we decided to make a quick visit to the county fair for some fried butter, picked up the dry cleaning, popped into the electronics store for some hearing aid batteries and went to the park for a quick squirrel-feeding session. Oh, and there was the aquarium, WWII Memorial, Vietnam Memorial, community theater (Godspell) and miniature golf. We shouldn’t have much trouble finding it.

Sound off on the state of public housing,
whenever you’re ready. Okay,
I’ll get started. There are way too many
parrots and parakeets in these apartment buildings,
and most of them are going to outlive
their owners. Unless there’s a next of kin
or lifelong friend whose heart is big enough
to take care of their deceased loved one’s pet,
these verbose, colorful winged pets
will have to fend for themselves, something
they’d rather not do–or rather can’t do
because they’ve never been in the wild or even
outside the four walls of their modern prison box.

No time for minimalist distractions,
we need to get to the heart of the matter here.
There’s too much cheese on the train tracks,
and I worry that the next passing train
won’t even know what kind of slop
they’ll be tracking on their wheels.

Sure, it’ll probably wear off
after a few hundred yards, but
the claim of having 100%
cheeseless tracks and wheels
will fall on deaf ears–assuming
that this whole affair is disseminated
widely on social media, which
I’ll be happy to do for the sake of
train passengers and track managers everywhere.

But what of the significant boon
to our lovely colleagues across the channel?
I’d love to see what they’re doing
with the seventeen dollars we wired them
for incidentals in case they lose power
in a freak hailstorm. I hope they didn’t
go spend it on a lavish lunch of tunafish
and avocado, as I most likely would.
Even roast beef could cost a pretty penny
these days, and no emergency fund
is safe anymore from the clutches
of middle class midday cuisine.

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