he cheats on taxes
wives golf contracts real estate
then claims the dems
cheat
.
he whipped up a crowd
told them to fight like hell but
“peacefully.” yeah sure
.
sat and watched chaos
for hours and then pinned it on
nancy pelosi
.
“donald trump v.
united states” is his get
out of jail free card
.
please vote blue my friends
till you are blue in the face
be red white and blue
as olaf lindberg fell feet first/he pushed a stud on the side of the cylinder/and a nine-foot luminescent rod, pale blue/telescoped instantly/from the bottom end of the cylinder
and as the rod touched the water it bloomed/into an inverse trumpet shape/with notches that the man’s shod toes fit into
the man gripped the rod and leaned slightly forward/and as the trumpet shape clove the water/bubbles and then a wake came up beyond the lip of the trumpet/behind the man
he looked into the camera eye of his faithful drone/and raised his voice above the churning water noise to say
“With nano and jet-ski tech and beamed energy–” a slight jolt from the turbid chop/interrupted him. “…something weighing only eight pounds–” and another jolt tipped him a bit–“saved my life.”
then another chop of water/tipped the man more harshly/and a bit of the river/flowed into the trumpet/and it submerged/and the man’s feet and ankles went underwater…
cheerfully and loudly he exclaimed/”It was a hell of a fun ride while it lasted!/I shall have to abandon ship!”
chest-deep in water/and as he and the river/approached the next downstream bridge/the man brandished his now rodless cylinder/and shouted joyfully “Plan B! Monofilament tech! Batman tech!”
he thumbed the stud again/and monofilament wire shot out of the top end of the cylinder/and its adhesive end/stuck to the far-side underside/of the downstream bridge…
and just like batman and vicky vale/the wire pulled him upward/but he was so heavy with water and overcoat and gadgets/that the wire disadhered from the bridge…
and as he fell he pulled out his drone controller and yelled “Plan C! Dronefish!”
(end of part three)
…
…
epilog
to make a long story short, because we all need to get on with our lives, a fleet of little drones dropped out of the sky above him, fell into the water, and formed a sort of magic carpet raft for him. they quickly conked out but he had time to go to plan d, which was a friend of his in a nearby helicopter. but just as he reached the third to top rung of the rope ladder the friend turned rogue and hit a button, quick-releasing the ladder, and so the man switched to plan e, which was really plan a all along, and his real and ground-breaking invention, which was a giant disembodied hand that sparkled as it scooped him out of the water and lifted him slowly and gently into the sky. the man had his drone stop following him after his last recorded words, which were “Don”t you DARE call this the Hand of God! It’s just tech! Seems like magic, though, doesn’t it? And WAIT till you see the mischief it and I are going to make, Kids!” And then he was lifted away from the drone, which stopped recording and uploaded the video it had made to various social media, and the billions of views it got were a harbinger of history-changing things to come.
The End
the blue-dotted man swings his legs/and hand-traverses to near/the end of the curvature of chain-link fencing./after a warmup couple of lower-body swings/he flips
and quickly is on top of the arc of chain-link.
near one of the fence’s supporting struts/he gains his feet, standing with some wobble/and looking up at the drone.
“It is only thirty feet or so to the water,” says the man, ” but of the dozens of jumpers this bridge has seen since it was built, only four survived.
“I hope to be the fifth. This invention of mine [pulls a squat cylinder out of a pocket] will save my life…or not.”
with that the man jumps off the bridge.
(end of part 2)
the tall, tired-looking, overcoated man/walks with a slight limp up the sidewalk/on the east side of the bridge/that goes over the surging river
near its apex he stops and opens the box he has carried/and pulls out the drone it contained/along with its controller/and sets them both on the sidewalk
he puts a pale blue dot the drone will sense/in the middle of his forehead
pulls cut-resistant gloves from a pocket/and draws them on
picks up the controller/and punches and slides and joysticks the controls/and the camera-laden drone/stirs and rises and positions itself/a foot above and three feet away from his face/its bright green RECORD light gleaming
and the man says, “My name is Olaf Lindberg.
“I am a frustrated inventor. [pause]/I am about to perform a demonstration/For which I will require more strength/than I normally have.”
dr. lindberg puts his gloved hand in a pocket and pulls out a large spansule of deep green/pops it into his mouth, and swallows it.
he looks at the drone’s camera lens/and says, “I am not suicidal, but what I am about to do/ carries a moderate risk of injury,/and a slight risk of death.”
with that he jumps four feet upward/and grabs the chain-link fencing/arcing over the sidewalk/above his head.
the drone whirs upward in sync/guided by the pale blue dot.
(end of part one)
in 1958 a family of five/one infant two toddlers/and a heart-tuggingly young couple/moved from the Los Angeles megalopolis/to arizona’s valley of the sun/and bought a house that hadn’t quite been built yet/with saplings in front yard and back/and a floor plan identical or mirror-imaged/to thousands of those that would surround them
dirt roads got graded/old barns torn down/and concrete and asphalt were poured across an expanse/of former farmland
it was called the baby boom/and it made housing developer john f. long his fortune
aerial photography over midvalley over this fervent time/showed the valley residences spreading like a fungus/or an aboveground ant colony/growing everywhere but especially west
phoenix population more than doubled/glendale’s went up by an order of magnitude/and peoria and buckeye and avondale and points west o my
and we made stuff up as we went along/not as blazingly as the pioneers of a century back/but valiantly enough here and there
it doesn’t quite feel like history when you live it/but looking back/at all the violence and miracle and new language/wow
I grabbed a ball-point pen/And then untied a shoe/Unclad my foot and then/Inked up my archeroo.
“Step lively,” I affirmed/Near nail and metatarsal/In cursive supradermed/”If Wit won’t do, a Farce’ll,”
I wrote behind the heel,/And then be-ringed the ankle/”Brace. Let.” And then “Pig deal”/And asked, “Foot Odor rankle?”
Reshod, I walked untrippingly/And grinned, O Me-O, My-O,/I’d added, sanity-tippingly,/Some Footnotes to my bio.
fedoraku
headwear for gumshoes/impractical and stylish/some banded some plain
fedoraku2
on redondo pier/my then love fedora’d me/so adorably
capku
seed corn politics/ball teams philosophies all/on billboard foreheads
roundwearku
oliver hardy/wore a derby but patrick/macnee a bowler
tangentialechoku
a bowling champ goes/to the kentucky derby/and says “whoops–wrong hat”
Money stuffs a wallet,
Pizza stuffs a face.
Most downtowns are overstuffed
With hurting human race.
Pillows have their eiderdown
Turkeys breaded sausage.
Bonnie had her Clyde. A frown
Is stuffed with soured tossage.
Alveoli plump with oxy,
Peppers, Spanish rice.
Is this Stuff and Nonsense?
Maybe. Ain’t it nice?
**
Questions for the reader:
Do lines 3 and 4 serve the poem, even though their tone is more serious? Why not or why?
Is Line 7 necessarily lascivious? Does a sympathetic yet prudish reader tend to perform mental gymnastics to un-lasciviize it!
Did the reader see the “punchline” final lines coming? Are they off-putting in their self-servitude?
Do these questions themselves become a second poem?
Please feel free to use the Comments section to post your answers.
as is common in the primordial early morning/i was draining an old man’s bladder/after having blown my nose
there was a sensation of my nose starting to run on the left side/but what fell from my nostril and into the bowl/was a fat wobbly raindrop/of blood
then there was another one
so I pulled up my underwear/flushed and unrolled a few squares of tp/tilted my head back/and staunched
it took a while/but the toilet paper squares finished their job/spotted but unsoaked
and now a video loop plays over and over in my head/of that first fat blooddrop going from my nostril/in super-slow motion/and splashing into the bowl water
see it wobble/mildly elongate/touching down with a splash like a space capsule/with three parachutes
a little, nay, micro, ocean filled with corpuscles and plasma/platelets/and all kinds of information/about my recent drug and alcohol use/(zero, he says smugly)/and cholesterol level/glucose and blood gases/forecast for probability of survival five years hence/(guessing 40% plus-or-minus ten)
and then it splashes into the already-splashed-into water/and is flushed away
and the city’s sewage is further enhanced/with a geezer poet’s blood and urine
you want a piece of me, phoenix, Arizona, usa?
here ’tis/with my best regards
at work/handshaking and high-fiving are rare/but hugs amongst females/and knuckles amongst all/are common
the modern knuckles greeting/also known as bumping fists/will also involve the adjacent forearms/if the greeters are extra friendly
there is more of an energy exchange
camaraderie is a nice part of the work experience/and the technology exists/for the user interface to enable knuckles/even unto the forearms/to be administered remotely/in the augmented reality of modern computing
which leads to a sneaky question…
will ai entities/do knuckles/to fool humans/or each other?
One with Clay, Image and Text 