work – WHARVED

Roly-Poly

Endangered,
becoming radlerified by the dozens,
the pulsating schooner and
soon-to-be beer schnitzel founder matrix
has gotten one step closer to inverting
McGillicuddy’s flounder station ingress.

Something like a flower empowerment extravaganza
for the sake of all that is roly-poly
and nothing much more than that unless
you’re really looking for a tangential crime
to pin on the succulent ape tendril, chilled
(in season between September and July).

I poured myself a Laura Palmer and sprang into action,
working harder–certainly–than any chimp I’d ever seen
(though still a paltry output when compared to our founder
and glorious leader, Ubaldo: Eagle Veterinarian to the Stars).

Quackery

Edification via popular happenstance (due to improper ventilation) would not be my goal for this symposium, since occurrences related to HVAC quackery deserve their own symposia just to unpack the harm done by feckless contractors for decades in the name of frugality. “But At What Cost?” would likely be the working title before a more effective one comes along.

I’m really looking to discuss the aerodynamics of flat vs. concave disks when shot out of of a giant sloth’s rectum (damn near killed ’em). Older studies have been conducted with various megafauna from the glamorous Pleistocene Epoch, but not a single one of them exemplifies the untethered wildness of apex mammals more than Megatherium (particularly when cloned specifically to shoot laserdisc-sized projectiles from their dang bungholes).

Our work in this field is second to none, as our data will no doubt show you… some other time.

Stopgap

Chernicia and her loyal band of
roving youth choir administrators
saw no choice
other than to take up stopgap freelance work.

Due to a general malaise
and rapidly-growing apprehension
toward patronizing or participating in
the performing arts (the anti-exceptionalist
herd mentality showed absolutely no signs of
dissipation as professionals of all stripes
traversed the barren corporate landscape
(a hell to be wished upon no soul)), all hope
seemed lost on the fearful.

Interest in the once-alluring
middle and high school competitive circuit
had been waning steadily for a generation or so,
to the point where even the most stalwart
paper-shuffling masochists out there
had to admit they were licked.

In this devastating climate, Chernicia figured
that some places out there
must
still need to enlist the services
of highly-competent youth choir administrators.

They took an oath in front of the children,
for Christ’s sake!
They vowed, on bended knee,
to make themselves
available for freelance filing (and HR concerns)
at the drop of a hat, whenever duty may come calling.

So just like that, they picked up and left–
no matter what their guts happened to be
telling them (the group’s average duodenum
could paint you the idyllic picture
where they’d carved out a sort of haven
in this life of more uncertainty than trust).

Many tearful (and gut-wrenching) goodbyes
after they developed the steely resolve
to give up their past selves
(for the children, dammit),
the brave and intrepid band set out
on their first assignment: Gurnee, Illinois.

They never did look back.
And to this very day,
rental cars and hotel rooms
still serve as their only refuge
from the vast desert of abandoned office complexes.

Faux Pas

Bajillion Peregrinus started his day off right today–with a succulent cobb salad and a couple of margaritas. Slippery slope, margaritas, but as a denizen of the night, Baj has always managed to avoid that whole “too early in the day to imbibe” faux pas. However, considering the depth of his late-night cavorting, he often finds himself breaking that rule by pulling all-nighters and keeping the party rolling well past dawn.

This particular day wouldn’t normally prove to serve Baj’s personal agenda, seeing as how he needs to knock out some domestic drudgery and then immediately tuck into a full-blown work shift. Not very much time to himself at all. Just another one of those days. It’s not like he’s not used to this kind of treatment; he’s become quite accustomed to it at this point. Bills and impulsive expenditures (food delivery and designer headphones) necessitate his daily drudgery–for the most part. The remaining part of the pie chart (as far as he could figure): his intense, immense sense of self-loathing, which he quietly carries around on his shoulders like a hobo’s bindle–not too heavy, considering the unbearable lightness of being, but always noticeably uncomfortable.

As far as he sees it, he figures that the self-deception is a byproduct of his unfulfilled human potential. Well, not his own perception of failing, but the societal norm facilitating the “us vs. them” mentality that sends the vast majority of rat racers into skill corners, where they’ll proceed to bang their foreheads against brick walls for the rest of their lives, restricting whatever semblance of freedom to a 15-minute meditation session sometime between breakfast and work (otherwise known as their morning commute). The mental elasticity of previous generations is systematically eroding.

Baj is rather sensitive and internalizes most everything he comes across; most of the time he has no idea how it will surface, since the nature of the universe is that of uncertainty and chaos. In the case of human devolution, however, Baj knows for a fact that people are losing their sheen at a rapid clip.

Because of all this, Baj understands that, no matter what he does, he will always come up short in a financial sense. Just as his mother and father had, and their mothers and fathers before that, and so on and so forth. He’s recently begun to trace back his lineage on one of those newfangled ancestor websites, all the way back to a point in medieval Europe where some sort of town fool or drunk owed a debt to the local magistrate, and the interest is still accruing to this day.

(Nothing More, Nothing Less)

Let’s take a look at the specials, shall we? Ah yes, the infamous Reuben Dip! Once heralded as Middle America’s foremost club dance from 1963, a clever chef has converted it into an open-faced sandwich comprised of corned beef, Swiss, kraut——you bloody well know what comes on a Reuben. The kraut does have a tough time sticking around, which means that the Swiss is really pulling double time to blanket all of its unruly counterparts for the purposes of a successful thousand island dip (and, of course, more than just one dip, because what kind of sandwich would that be, falling apart after just one dip!?). All of this just goes to prove that you really can’t have an idea too grand to be transposed from the clear blue sky, as long as you believe in the work you’re doing. Once upon a time I——of all people——caught myself poo-pooing the idea of representing a pinto bean omelette cooking on the planks of a cruise ship’s bow as it headed to the Galapagos for some tortoise observation (nothing more, nothing less), and for what? A tedious bit of self—censorship for no purpose other than suppression of a creative pang? No thank you, Mr. Governor (if that is your real name). So I wrote it all out, the fateful egg mix congealing to form a canary semicircle of legume-y goodness and taking on life’s subtler philosophical quandaries with a bit of a sense of humor. I called it Hull of Beans, and it was universally panned.

Poignant Pen: Person of Interest

The biggest, most poignant pen
writes the antithesis of the expected,
the unadmired,
the people with lives expressed
as a

religious
or
spiritual
experience, embarked upon

out of necessity
to insulate from the severe
segregation
and
disintegration
of a marginalized people

that
fucked up our entire species,
ethically and genetically.

***

Speaking truth is necessary;
we can’t worry about
transcending race or gender,
there is only
a singular consciousness,
lived at all moments of our lives.
We are merely its witnesses.

Thank you for sharing
your visions of truth
and illuminating my perception.
You are my teacher, my ally,
my person of interest.

***

Don’t we all take for granted
the stag’s leaps or the hyena’s skips
as perpetual representations of a group
that denigrates the works of mankind?

Too many toads take too much time
to throw titillated molotov cocktails
betwixt the orthogenetic felons
of our once-forgotten past,
whistled between a shar-o-ise
and a heart.

The chamber solvent
has a triumphant shield
quite unlike the present-minded
earth warbler, unmade
as a man of science and marked
as a man of knowledge
in the community that really matters–
the one that brings us
to a crater of conscience
that may easily be sustained
if pursued in earnest.

Thin Air

When a brand new idea greets you–
out of what seems to be thin air–
it feels as though you’ve just
brought a new child into this world.
It’s an uncanny record of your existence
that has the opportunity
to be perpetuated for generations.

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