The Whole Kit ‘n’ Caboodle

Stretch into oblivion, carpenter ants
treading on you like a bridge. Know
when the chicken brains freeze
in the root cellar below your chin;
make a noise to show you understand.

Dig through your belly button lint
to uncover an ancient tome–often
misused and represented falsely
as a case study in human husbandry.

Read a popular passage that teaches,
“Never eat a stalk of wheat fresh
from the ground, rather make twine
from it and tie together your emotions
before you lose them entirely.”

Eager to toss down a bone or seven,
Champ quickened his pace on the way
to the recently-disrupted Indian burial ground,
his satchel weighed down
by clacking carpals and tarsals.

More bones should equal more peace
amongst the dead; the bones in Champ’s bag
were carelessly pilfered from less-volatile graveyards–
lands that won’t necessarily curse you
for doing a bit of harvesting here and there.

With a bone surplus approaching, the burial ground
may cease its treacherous hauntings
of the surrounding area (if the vigilant spirits
accept the new acquisitions as their own).

Then perhaps, finally, no more headless cow specters
mooing free jazz through their necks.
No more transparent locusts rustling around
with their sound magnified by all surfaces touched.
No more six-legged pumas with chainsaw growls,
stalking behind trees in the shadows.

Some locals swear they’ve heard an eerie chant
popping up over air waves and through plain thin air,
repeating itself, “Put us back where we belong or suffer,
put us back where we belong or suffer.”

In my effort
to be a good sport
about it all,
I forgot to take
the badgers into account.
I remembered the partridges,
jaguars and stoats,
the turkeys, oxen
and hamburger rats.
Even those mythical denizens
that I’d never thought
would spend their time
loafing around–
languid chipmunks, carnivorous deer,
handyman’s companion woodland porpoises.
I spent so much time
coming up with beasts
that I lost the line
between natural occurrence
and fairy tale claptrap.
I was up to my neck
in creatures both seen
and unseen when a platypus
splashed my face
with lukewarm water,
growling like a feral cat
and formally reminding me
that the badgers had started
gnawing at my ankle.

Excavated from under
the crust of civilization:
a common spearhead
with markings showing
its connection to a Pre-Colombian shaft
of certain aerodynamic worth.
It belonged to a shaman
who never used it
for anything more
than target practice;
he let his underlings
do the dirty work
while he contemplated
the universe’s tendency
to give humans more
than they can handle
at any given time,
for reasons unknown
to ancient and modern science.

In transit around town
is a yellow pigeon’s beak,
filled with licorice
and about to lose its positioning
upon said bird’s face.

Where it wants to go is a question
for a different time and place,
like, say, a cathedral
on the Wednesday following Easter.
We mustn’t worry about such details
before we see where the pigeon ends up
and how long its beak stays attached.

The licorice is the original black
that aficionados swear by,
but casual eaters poo-poo.
A store of this candy has recently
been made accessible to midsize
sugar-craving urban birds.

There’s a fresh hole in the roof
of a local confectioner’s shop,
a hole the size of a catcher’s mitt
which nobody can explain.

I entered a rainy rendezvous, a bleary and running coup. The pickles were rancid from negligence; I stood in the corner, pinching my nose and waiting for the act to begin.

Slowly but surely the widget farmers came out to till the soil, checking the ripeness of their pocket calculators to see if the nines had filled in yet (they’re always the last digit to mature). Unsatisfied with the progress, they began to slink away.

I stomped and they froze. I got a good look at them. This particular shift of agrarian laborers numbered about twenty-three. Mostly human with odd rat snouts, they seemed to be miniaturized versions of the farmers I’d known from my disavowed youth.

The tallest one stood head and shoulders above the rest and wore a decorative sash that read “MAYOR”. I didn’t know whether this one had been elected or simply bullied his way to the top.

——

Originally featured as a draft on Wharved in August of 2013, published in issue 87 of Crack the Spine, October 30, 2013.