A Touchdown is Attainment of a Goal.
There are many ways to describe the gaits we have used in the course of a long lifetime. No single word can capture how a marathoner whose calves cramped up at the seventeen-and-a-quarter point of the race and who wrestled with despair and dehydration the other nine-plus miles of the footrace at last crosses the finish line, but the invented word Trudgedown is a fair approximation.
A Trudgedown is Redemption of the Soul.
a baby sobs uncontrollably after unrequited hunger or hurtful startlement smite her.
a young lover sobs unrelievedly in the face of permanent, preventable, hormone-driven loss.
a soldier sobs for the rest of his life, haunted by the phantasms of life-changing mayhem.
ah, but the ocean throbs and sobs with the orphaning of her children and the unsustainable slaughterhouse her depths have become, and she weeps more tears than ever humanity has.
let us not sob for that. let us atone.
two genies walk into a bar. they look like father and son but are in fact twin brothers. the one who looked older had had a callous, uncaring master, whose wishes involved interference in the laws of nature and whose wish-fulfillment took its toll on his genie’s very essence. the other genie, the one in the thousand-dollar business suit, had for a master an investment banker who required only personal training and insider knowledge.
they had both been recently freed by a celestial equivalent of an ethics committee, who granted them amnesty from thralldom but also reduced their reality-shifting powers to a mere trickle. they were going to the bar to discuss what they ought to do.
“”what’ll it be, fellas?” the busty, intricately-tattooed bar lady asked them.
“do you know how to make a cloaked scarab?” inquired the genie who looked older.
“i don’t yet…” she said, but then scrunched her eyes, and a boingy sound straight out of I Dream of Jeannie accompanied the eye-scrunching, “but now i do. sorry, i don’t have all the ingredients. a Scorpion with a dash of worcestershire sauce would be close.”
“that, then,” said the “father.”
“make it two,” said the “son.”
in an hour they were half-drunk, professing their love for each other, weepy-eyed. the “younger” grabbed his brother by the back of his neck while looking deeply into his eyes. “share and share a like.” there was a flash and suddenly they were truly identical twins again, splitting the wealth and the age disparity, so that they both had salt-and-pepper hair and well-cut but off-the-rack suits.
“time for grand adventures,” said the bar lady. she pulled out a lamp from under the bar and rubbed it.
HER identical twin came out of the lamp, conserva.tivrly dressed and u tattooed.
sparks flew. the two pairs of twins paired up. the bar lady flipped the neon OPEN switch off, drew the blind, locked the door, and whistled. a rolled-up carpet in a corner went aloft, scooped them all up, and took them through the skylight to their Destiny
four-eff means unfit/for military service./hannibal lecter.
(If closed captioning transcribes the bone-chilling sound Anthony Hopkins improvised in Silence of the Lambs, I suspect it would read “F-f-f-f.”)
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fluff a pillow/to enable attainment/of its potential.
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festival vestments/and their divestiture/invest foofoorah.
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freelance fred free-falls/fleeing felonious/fierce flighty fighters.
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compassionate giant/hesitates whilst Jack escapes:/”fee, fie..foe….fumfuh…….”
(one nifty aspect of the use of lowercase in poetry is that when you throw in something uppercase it becomes oddly emphatic. Since Jack is the star of the fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk” it’s appropriate to emphasize him.)
(Grateful acknowledgment to the late author Harlan Ellison for using the Yiddish-derived “fumfuh” in one of his talking-to-the-reader introductions. It is more commonly spelled “fumfer” but I like Ellison’s variant better.)
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“fini” means The End./”Finito Mussolini”/may well describe…
(The ending of the final ‘ku is left as an exercise for the reader. [smiley face])
O Yippee-Kai-Yo, Sis/We’re here in the fray
Because of Mitosis/And split DNA.
Go tell it on mountains/In whimsical rhyme
Our fountainhead fountains/One strand at a time.
Started typing Day.
Sneezed before I typed the Y.
Day interrupted.
.
Some refer to Dad
As Da. But it could well be
Dad interrupted.
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Da means Yes in Omsk.
Pravda? Truth. Prav and Da make
DePRAVed BaldeDAsh.
(Inspired by Robert A. Heinlein’s account of his visit to the Soviet Union in the early 60s entitled “PRAVDA Means TRUTH.”)
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District Attorney
Deleterious Apple
Darwin Awardee
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Dah dit dit dit: B.
Da next letter is a Y;
Da last, dit/E. Bye!
hey there–
don’t you hate catchy titles that just bait to switch? we get roped in again by some son of a bitch who knows our curiosity’s worse than a cat’s so they lay down a briar of thisses and thats.
but this right jolly fellow with gray hair and wrinkles with a grin that is crooked and a left eye that twinkles now ceases the nonsense and staves off attack having baited and switched why he switches right back.
there was a calm scientist aaron by name who sought not only knowledge but fortune and fame and his pigeon chest swelled even more with the pride that his asthma was cured and he’d taken a bride.
they lived well off his royalties and truest love and they searched here and yon and below and above for the best installations of magic and light that would make perfect rainbows by day dusk and night.
so we now close the curtain on aaron and djenn the pragmatic asthmatic and his sacred wren and imagine prismatics that let our eyes feast on genetic æsthetics that soothe savage beasts.
my christmas begins w/a jaunt in the street
over asphalt & g r a v e l and concrete & tar
one w/midtown & stars & a calm so complete
near celestial bliss & h o s a n n a s — o hark
ESSO is one of my two go-to coffeehouses in the Valley of the Sun, and today I’m treating myself to a peppermint latte and a molasses-based cookie, in the spirit of the Holiday season. The one-man-band on staff, an engaging fellow named Jacob, instantly handed back one of my 20s when I mistakenly gave him two stuck together. He also has superb taste in energetic contemporary music.
In the spirit of Holiday Fun I’m going to have a little fun with this photo I took outside the entrance, specifically with the statue/sculpture of a man who to my negligent gaze looks like he’s in Colonial garb; and you can’t spell Colonial without Colon, am I right?
Dedicated to the memory of Nathan Hellyeah, inventor of the colonoscopic barstool, who famously said “I regret that I have but one lower GI tract to give to the cause of Science.”
‘Tis the season to be Silly, Friends, and at Esso, I feel free to be as silly as I want to be. Kudos and thanks to proprietor Sharon Koger for providing this special place for people like you and me!
thanks to the hershey folks
even an old mateless man
can get a kiss on christmas eve
.
and he can pour himself christmas cheer
into a lovely goblet of his own making
and with the seagram’s v o in the cupboard
he can toast the spirit of his deceased father
with the spiritous liquor
that was his father’s favorite
.
by now you may be feeling sorry
for this lonely old codger
having been emotionally manipulated
by said codger
but you need not be
all he needs for all the unloneliness he wants
is to get off his fat ass
and go out into the world
call a pal or a gal or a gal pal
and see if a christmas movie is viewable
go to the dive bar across the street
or better yet a coffeehouse
with a cheerful barista
who knows him by name
and ask for the usual
shoot a text to a faraway loved one
or a joke to a nearby old friend
.
but before this old myself does any of this
i’ll have another so delightful kiss
and kiss you, my cherished reader, as well
in a way appropriate to the both of us
and urge you to celebrate in your way
what you find most fittingly celebratory
and i raise my goblet to you
and wish you the best
One with Clay, Image and Text 