Rest Easy

Enter Groucho Violent,
star of the nerves and streets,
a double threat if there ever was one.

His reputation precedes him as witty enough to turn a phrase and hard-knuckled enough to know when to admit defeat in the face of a petulant and pernicious foe who, in all likelihood, believes that their position of power has been handed down to them from the LORD ALMIGHTY, and any little rivulet of diarrhea that escapes their corpulence is to be rendered an earth-shattering development in the field of extrapersonal material management, now and forevermore.

Groucho is no stranger to the justice-enforcement arm of things. When his even-keel demeanor and righteous self-taught martial arts techniques combined on one fateful and blustery Flag Day eve, the Justice Jab was born. If you’re still unfamiliar with the singlemost effective crimefighting maneuver ever concocted by man or beast (in Mr. Violent’s last-ditch effort to uncover the overall reason as to our lack of humility when confronted with reasoning), you have some real catching up to do.

The Justice Jab is a miracle worker when the recipient of said jab needs to be awoken from the haze that they’ve come to accept over time, through sheer laziness and self-disrespect. The haze’s effect causes but is not limited to: depression, sluggishness, flatulence, lack of interest in things one would normally enjoy, unjustified sporadic agitation, and death. Such a disconcerting malady comes as a direct byproduct of this world we’ve inherited (through no fault of our own). Rather than face the music, the vast majority of we, the privileged few, have chosen to consume the content created specifically to manipulate our emotional and physical dependencies more efficiently and cheaply than cocaine ever could.

So the next time you see Groucho Violent
meting out swift street vengeance,
you can rest easy
knowing that he’s doing humanity a service.

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#73

Mauve steel extensions
become sky at twilight
as their tips scrape goose wings.

Feathers litter the ground around the girders,
forming small piles until whooshed away

by indigo breezes from an unknown deity
of incomplete wealth. All mortals quaver, mouths agape,

incredulous when faced with beams of such height
without visible supports.

Each post lives separately from the other,
though all rely on one another for morale

and some kind of root ball structure
that our simian species would do well to emulate.

——
First draft posted to WHARVED on 11/15/11
entitled #73

Parlance

Entombed in the cedar
Mac Rebennack-ness of it all,
I stood still with a Wisconsin
kind of appendage, the wishbone apparent
through those ill-begotten stockings
left behind that one night
when the pistons swayed
against the moon spritzers
with their glittering doom

(so transparent to everybody
save the few middling marmoset dealers
known around the district as
generally pretty good guys
in their own regard, if you insist on
getting down to their brand of parlor parlance
after a bit of tea and perhaps
a scone while we’re at it).

Alls I knows is
my black bean taquito factory
couldn’t have shut down
at a worse possible time for me
and my chicken brethren. Now,

I know what you’re thinking. Can
chickens collectively be considered
brethren, or would that be omitting
the female sex entirely?
For you see, my enlightened peers
in this common quest
for some kind of satisfaction–
if at all possible–
chicken is the lazy layman’s
blanket term, and we can’t be
bandying improper pronouns around
over here, ya dig?

Oh, and I suppose it would also mean
that my clucky compatriots will have to incur
the ultimate sacrifice (their lives)
on the company’s behalf
for the sake of avoiding
cuisine production cessation (if even
for a minute).
I can’t jeopardize our investors’ success
within this capitalistic apparatus–
especially after that botched public offering
a couple summers ago. Egg
on my face, I said to myself (I said).

“Wild West”

Slammin’ the fit-o-deena–ground lengthwise across a bawdy expanse of thneeds
(which everybody needs)–we took our serenades elsewhere, confident in our knowledge of the occult (i.e. the back-stabbery and latent overall treachery that sorts itself out over the course of dozens of generations) and its ability to stall disbelief as one would when faced with a Mel Brooks-esque (or, to a lesser extent, Mel Blanc-ish) dilemma involving the safety of an entire town, where the hapless protagonist even agonizes over the insignificant-yet-unique blood splotch patterns on each and every last hitching post (with the hopes of creating a permanent photographical installment at the Getty and cementing his status as one of the pioneers of pre-modernized main street massacre legacy documentation that would span the seldom-understood and often-demonized “Wild West” (that is, if he has anything to say about it)).

Beefeater

“Turn strange, fair beefeater,”
Curtisson mentioned on the car ride
over to the museum. “Your
toner-rich inconceivability
leaves behind the tragic old
misconception of the garlic-laden
bindling-gebaut, untold though
not unmade or unmasked, undeveloped,
penning the pennies through the portrait
of a golem in trouble with the law.”

Is that man’s law or God’s law?
I prefer to think of it as God slaw:
nice and crunchy with a musical quality
once it’s making its way back to the soil.

“We only have sevenscore paper clips
left in the entire warehouse; I said
we shouldn’t panic, but I was putting on
my brave face, hoping things would
turn themselves around. But they’ve just
turned strange, fair beefeater, and
we’d better figure out our whole
monument situation, pronto.”

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