Tag: absurd

To and Fro

Suppose you start stammering
at these shimmering jewels
on your nightstand, as though
you’ve established some
sort of language connection
in the realm of Greater Jewelese.

You do innately understand
that jewels possess no mental capacities,
but that seems only to fuel your curiosity
as you divulge your deepest secrets
to their faceted surfaces

(eg. the state
of your psyche, regardless of stymying
ethics preventing your profits, etc.).

It beats talking to a therapist,
you tell yourself
as you realize
that a counselor would only cost
a fraction of what your precious stones
just ran you at the jeweler’s stand

(and then it dawns on you
that you never left home this morning,
and you’ve been hallucinating
those jewels all this time).

You take the opportunity to sit up in bed,
wishing
that you could at least have some kind of
shiny bauble
to stare at

(cursing
the day that you broke your bedroom window
while throwing your weight
to and fro,
resulting in a cardboard and
duct-taped mess).

———-

First draft posted to WHARVED in 2014

Not Uncommon

Jemblatrons squeeze through the tetrahedra
as though mall cops have some kind of a stake
in all of this.
It’s not uncommon
to see such a prairie-headed analogy
encompassing the flight of the larcenous
concord penguin, be the bird yella or gold,
kite-running or otherwise.
Whether or not we align ourselves
to this illustrious ancient practice
has little to do with our blood sugar content,
though many shallow-ended participants
profess prediabetic plight.

All of a Sudden

He’s resurrected!
it’s truly a marigold.
But you know what?
It’s this very kind of
garden-variety entendre
that I’ve been meaning to avoid here,
amongst all the sordid
ne’er-do-well activity
that seems to define our times
all of a sudden.

Wasn’t integrity of character
ever something to strive toward?
Maybe not in this system of
checks [cashed] and balances [slashed].

Though perhaps I’m as guilty
as any other layabout milquetoast out there,
lounging around the house
sipping my pink lemonade martinis
(my live-in mixologist’s proprietary recipe)
and grousing like one of my commoner counterparts.

Consideration

I have come to more thoroughly understand
being a man in the context of the great
regret machinations of our time
[a sensation not unlike finishing
the stinking shawarma you left out
that one time then decided to eat
because your fatigue caused a lack of interest
in unwritten expiration date consideration],
and have chosen to fish away my days
in lakes, rivers, ponds and streams, where

you absorb
the skeletons all around you,

croon
to the bluegills
while they inspect your lure

[the sun
grinning at your little boat],

your red
ears naturally aglow.

Water
striders dot the scene,
checking for proper surface tension
(it’s like they don’t know about physics
and the evolution that specifically adapted them
to traveling in a manner that will never not be useful
in our particular iteration of the universe).

Levity

Levity slices through to the heart of an artichoke much more effectively than any knife.

That’s at least what my uncle Gilfroy told me one time over whiskey sours. I couldn’t partake with him, seeing as I was just a wee lad at the time, but he certainly enjoyed at least a handful of those particular beverages that afternoon. I couldn’t be sure if he was yanking my chain or just drunk enough to start seeing metaphors as literal occurrences. He had a funny way of abandoning our family’s sensibilities from time to time (usually with the aid of drink), and we still haven’t pieced together whether or not we should have ever been taking him seriously.

I for one enjoyed his antics, all the way up until his disappearance.

Now, the grey-hairs in my family clan have all unequivocally declared that he died at sea promptly after concocting a hair-brained scheme to sail around the world. I think they were just coming up with a convenient excuse to bookend his misunderstood life and wrap it up neatly with a cute little (morbid) bow. Personally, I have a sneaking suspicion that he’s alive and well, coming up with different vegetable-related remarks every time he meets a new person he likes.

Ducksnort

Why do we always gravitate toward senseless tragedy when we should already know how that train wreck’s going to play out? Seems like quite the schematic for failure, and I want no part in it unless you’re wrapping something in bacon on my behalf.
You’ve known my price for some time, okay? Don’t act so surprised.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah!
So Captain Chilango gave me his cure-all recipe once he’d heard my ducksnort of a chili cook-off success story. He looked me right in the eye and said
“kid, you’ve got potential, but you need to set your sights a little higher than some two-bit cook-off in a two horse town. Go see a movie or two–you’ll get to see the world through a different lens, and maybe learn a thing or two while you’re at it.”
Well, he was certainly right about that. I went and saw my first moving picture, and haven’t looked back ever since. Now I get all my valuable worldly information from the silver screen, to which my wife can attest.

Another Question

Considering how rampant–and frequent–they are elsewhere throughout the universe, I know you’re not really surprised that the chance for any number of phantasmagoric happenstances to play out at this pediatric-leaning syndrome symposium would remain slim to none (as one might say when pressed), right? As we usually observe, the only guarantee at one of these gatherings would be that at least one poor soul is coming away with a scraped knee (left or right is another question).

Hey, haven’t you been here just as long as I have?! I’m having a hard time getting over the bald complacency responsible for such a critical misinterpretation of our most sacred pemmican rulebook! It’s been nigh on six years since that last grand gesture in semantics peppered our idealized fields of vision, and I won’t have this unqualified jabber jockey over here just go on and on about 21st Century-specific chesterfield modulation practices (his favorite spotlight-stealing topic) more than once per full moon, no matter how persuasive he happens to be when the stars come alignin’.