The Continually
Embarrassing Thing They Call Reality
All the apple trees come with memories,
They’re storytellers,
Like divers and baristas;
Because there’s so little left of us here
We need the dog from the pound
To be a rescue animal,
The couch on the roadside
To be somebody’s home,
Or a mother, we need her to tell us the plot
Of her infant’s “progressive cry-it-out”
To its “baby-directed parenting” climax,
And how urgently he needs to learn sign language
To express his needs, without sunscreen,
Unboiled water, a ring for teething,
A rubber duckie, spoon feeding
Or purees (except for some heavily gar-
Licked humus to be sucked off a carrot
That only he can be permitted to hold).
- A carrot, which was purple once, til the Dutch
With their gene paints treated it orange
- Storytellers.
A Conversation Between Two Ex-Lovers That Can't Take Place
The way the waitresses’ beehive shines
when she says “hon,”
ambrosia stolen from the bees
hoving to her comb
while she drones like a queen
on her drone phone,
giving you the beeswax
how it’s all so funny now
with no cash money
and she’s up shirk’s creek
without a dipper
from the land of cigars and honey.
And you want her to say
“Do try these qumquats
they’re quite succulent”
so you can say “I’m not paid
to suck on qumquats,
but then again I don’t imagine
you are, either, are you?”
To which she replies “I’m glad to see you
back in Pasadena fighting shape,
shaking the talcum powder loose
from the deadweight,
phoning in your bets
on three-year-olds
over a steaming plate
of frosted twinkie sandwees.”
“Trouble is my monkey, Ruby.”
“Your money - if that’s what it is –
has a habit of disappearing
like a rabbit through the hands
of some rather nebulous
and it turns out often very late
fellows, a fact that I could take
or throw to the crows
without so much as a snap
of my bra-strap
but you see our friends in blue
can afford to be parsimonious
about such baubles, er, trifles
as what is true.”
“Some people don’t talk
unless a few teeth are loosened.”
“It’s an ugly city to hear some tell it.”
“Say working here must be very much like running
the alligator island at the San Diego Zoo.”
“Somewhere the dog I lost
when I ate my relatives for breakfast
howls in gratitude at the sad desperation
of your new-found compassion.”
“Hey, I’ve taken my ventriloquist act
on the road, and came in only
so’s my dummy can take a pee
but he gets recruited as a last-minute jockey
to replace one who’s been permanently
so I have to watch helplessly
the slow Del Mar third descend
on Tiny Dancer in a parade of oaty pathos
running rails around a stretch
that is a stretch
in name only.”
“It’s hard not to be phlegmatic
when expecting to see Noah
float by my window.”
“The influenza rain in my case
has turned to sweet-smelling flowers,
and washed away the old scent
of cowpies and the doomed from the urinals,
and except for some smuggled pianos
I no longer turn so quickly down
the Venetian alley blinds
in the behind-the-barkeep green room
at that certain spot of morning light
to catch a glimpse, done up like diorama,
of the honeycombed piñata tomb
of Generalissimo Santa Ana
skewered like pork swords
by miniature candied unicorns
mocking his legendary defeats
like the boulder mocking Sisyphus,
for in Xanadu a pleasure dome
of Pico de Guaco is decreed.”
“Dat were zen dish iz tao.”
“Yeah, but still my scented nights are secreted
on horse-drawn hearses by old thoughts
of how, while you and Ragtime Annie drank
Orange Cosmopolitans with shots of Grand Guignol
looking for Monsters Diogenes and Imonhotep
at Chez Remonstrance (an elongated community),
he buddah’ed the farm for real, din’ he,
with the burn still on the table, I see,
one Dunlop tire iron poor blood kidney
knocking on a lead pipe lock at dawn
in Erewhon with a cricket alarm.”
“Are you eating crab looey
or is it crab rangoober?”
“I’m having Blackened Mock Sisyphus
and a side of Creamed Cornucopia,
subverted for my protection, of course,
like the ancient gods and last week’s sea bass haul,
for you can see the best cowboys all
have elderly fisherman’s eyes.”
“The windows are open but notfurlong
and are taking bets sticky, prickly and unwise
until the pies underneath the fingerprints
are gone from the Clocker’s Corner Sip n Bet display glass.”
“Mead me in Saint Doobie, Ruby,
that’s about as imaginary
as the legendary cigar smoke
you’re blowing surrepfictitiously up my arse,
or the dreams of those poor mare denizens
fingers charcoaled with moustache-pencil grit
and sunken eyes like stripclub regulars.”
“Those stagehands are a step up from carny folk,
you know, they keep it real with a studied look
of utter alienation, from everything that is socially
acceptable and clean. That’s their charm…
They’re storytellers.”
Some Incidental Dialogue
“My Betty got the skinny from your Wilma”
“Totally”
“Epic meme creation brah”
“So new it’s old”
“Some stellar gnar gnar brosef”
“Three bagger got dursted”
“Whatevs”
“I’m not apple blocking your Betty brah”
“So I barneyed over the foamies brah? “
“Don’t be buggin brohah”
“You duding me?”
“I dude you not.”
“I should be duding you right now.”
“Chillax.”
“Consider yourself properly duded.”
“Dude.”
“Dude.”
Meanwhile in
Sports News
The Toronto Raptors are thinking of changing their name.
It’s such a bad name nobody ever really could be sure they even existed. Maybe
it’s time for the Toronto Sasquatches.
Squatches lock it with seconds on the clock. Squatches called for
tripping, kicking the ball, banging their limbs together to rally the team.
They say the point guard’s superior eyesight is from a diet of inner city wino
livers. No squatchflopping rule in effect. Careful with the Croatian caveman
slurs and the Basque Neanderthal slurs. Due to the shockingly high number of
opposing player deaths since the Squatchers came into the league, the
Commissioner has agreed to consider a Commission to recommend changes (or not).
He has to be sensitive to charges of speciesism. Chicken wire across the backboards
in all away cities. No more night games. No flash photography. A three-day
suspension for dismembering limbs. This isn’t an aquatic exposition, the
Commissioner says, to have primordial forest cred you have to break a few
dinosaur eggs. While opposing teams quietly arm themselves with guns, Sting
wearing a Hornets jacket does an Amazonian rain forest theme song (sponsored by
Exxon) as the new anthem of the league. The Primordial Forest Division will be
the most exciting development in professional sports since the disco strobe
light and florescent puck experiment of the NHL. Cornrows and full body tattoos
give way to semi-automatic pistols stitched into foreheads, full-body
phosphorescent rug fur rigs, steel-toed sneakers and toad (the wet squatchit) venom
dreadlock activators. Skins vs. Furs. Cages will be introduced. Dr. Naismith
will spin again like a Smith and Wesson in his peach basket grave. At the end
of home games with Toronto protecting a lead fans will chant “squatch it
squatch it” in an insistent deafening tribal manner. The Commissioner will be
outraged there’s any controversy at all. Marv Alpert will start dating primates
again. The Commissioner will finally relent and allow stoppage of play for
pooling of blood on the floor, and from that point it’s only a short distance
til the whole thing is exposed as too craven and nakedly corrupt for even the
NBA and the Toronto franchise will be quietly renamed the Biogeneticists, with
no record it ever happened except for Sting’s odious theme song. The Squatches
will wind up like the Harlem Globetrotters playing exhibition games at circus
venues. Against teams like the Iron City Oafs, Duluth Leprechauns and Casper
Friendly Ghosts. And of course the poor hapless Washington Generals. Who will
have the world’s last bearded lady as their power forward. At halftime
there will be a mock (?) wedding ceremony between her and Nez Piercings, the
charismatic two guard of the Squatches at center court. Officiated by Key Rock the
Unfrozen Cave Man Lawyer (“…Your modern game frightens and confuses me: I don’t
know of any Lakes in Los Angeles, or Jazz in Utah, or Grizzlies in Memphis and
believe me I would know, there were no Grizzlies in Memphis long before I froze
and your scientists thawed me out. I’m a caveman.
I don’t know the difference between charging and traveling violations, I can’t even enter
the paint without child supervision, but I do know this, that
this manbeast and womanbeast should be legitimately married by the state of
reciprocation for as long as the icefloes hold back..."). As the crowd sprinkles
them with talcum powder, the groom says “I’m not an anomaly I’m a humanoid
being.” Player-coach ape-man Dennis Rodman looks on in his wedding dress,
beaming (It’s okay to say that, you know, we’re on the “we hunt, you gather”
fur but balanced network so everything’s dank). Hey which way’s the main stem
cell? Our chemtrail weatherman Hugh Jennix will tell that story but first
cue cavemen with tennis sweaters…
Spontaneous Haiku
A book at the nursing home:
Bob Hope: My
Lifelong Love Affair with Golf
Where’s my book? My
Lifelong Love Affair
With the Dangerous
and Criminal Insanity of Bob Hope
Play the Blues
There are no storytellers
Sadder than Muddy Waters.
It’s so wrong he even has to talk.
There’s no show, just weary disillusionment
That no one understands the blues,
Though everyone can see in him
The world of trouble on his heart.
There’s no formula just the art of falling apart
For it always always must be must be real.
You literally can’t touch him.
He points like a king
And barely dances, barely moves,
Perspires without breaking a sweat,
He can’t sing better than any other licorice twister,
Can’t play guitar like no straight church’s business.
The good man is at the wheel
Soothing and provoking, saying only
That nothing is ever really there, just him
– And you. You want
to make him laugh,
This tragic, mud-bedappled titan,
And he seems almost pleased you would do that for him
But the thought doesn’t last, as the emperor
Of ice cream has to say “turn your lamp down low”
One more time way too many, the cold and bright
Diamond who shows the night’s dark
Without ever getting in the way.
And it’s somehow reassuring that he’s got enough pain
For everyone, he’s got nothing to prove
And nothing to say – he makes it triumphant
And we look at him with awe, at how he turns just so
The joint at the end of each perfectly delivered
line,
With no ash, no soggy pants, just the seriousness
That you need to know how it is – on the muddy
Waters of oblivion sinking without jettisoning
His pride to the reverb of the reivers.
Hove on, big river, hove on.
