doing it

"do it, bill." "i'm not sure i want to" ""you have to." "i'm not ready yet." "just do it, bill. it's required." "but - " "you have no choice." "oh, all right." "that's better." bill did it. "next!" "what's your name?" "bob." "what's your number?" "1-3373-7637-6598-6881" "that's a prime number." "so they tell me" "you mean you can't tell yourself?" "not really." "not very bright, are you?" "i guess." "you guess? not really? not much for explicit statements, are you, bob?" "if you say so." "you're a pretty poor excuse for an excuse, did anyone ever tell you that?' "not until you came along. you're a big meanie. " "that's all well and good, bob, but are you ready to do it? are you ready to step up?" "no." "no? just no?" "i was trying to be explicit." "good one. score one for bob." "thank you." "back to square one. seriously, all joking aside, are you ready to do it?" "not really. i would prefer not to." "let there be no misunderstanding here. you are going to do it if we have to sit here all month. but if we have to do that, if we have to sit here for a month or a year, there will be some very annoyed people, only beginning with me. do you understand?" "more or less." "are you ready to do it?" "yes." "good." bob did it. "next!" "what's your name?" "buck." "what's your number?" "2-4595-3941-7845-3674." "that's a pretty tedious number." "whatever." "i like your attitude, buck. are you ready to do it?" "absolutely. put me in, coach." "all right. did you hear that, stanley? buck is a hero. congratulations, buck, you're our first hero of the day." "let's do it." buck did it. "next!" "what's your name?" "buddy." "what's your number?"

sometimes you can't go home again even though you never left

a friendly fish named frank always stayed near the surface of the tank the vast vistas of human faces in his mind always stirred up traces of an empire that long ago sank if the comte de sade came back to earth and saw the new cosmos giving birth oceans of pornography vampire novels from sea to sea what would his dreams be worth? an unknown prophet named slim couldn't swim he was thrown in the water but old pharoan's daughter just turned up her nose at him blind potato murphy played the blues he walked the hills of ireland in his alligator shoes he drank poteen dreamt of fair kathleen and paid his union dues bob, a humble barracuda sought the path of the true buddha a dinosaur banging a big brass gong followed as he walked along and quite destroyed his mood, ah a sunfish named stagger lee lived in the depths of the sea a sea lion named bob (or was it billy?) thought his paraphilological positions were silly and never invited poor stack to tea an electric eel named ed wore a path to perdition on his head he didn't know its approximate cause so he kept it wrapped in gauze and took another med a platypus named roy was no stranger to ecstatic joy he could feel the earths heart beat beneath his wary webbed feet but his demeanor remained quite coy

demon lover

when i was a child in ages dark demons chased me through the park and angels though in charge in me laughed loudly at my misery and when i finally tripped and fell you raised me with the hand of hell angel born and demon bred you introduced me to the dead the dead whose wide and staring eyes were whiter than the winter skies who sat all night on fog wet benches sad sentinels of eternal trenches the dead whose soft and wordless lips twisted like slowly sinking ships in black and bottomless seas in unreverberating reveries

1938

let no man stand aside who has not taken his place in line and waited for the 23673rd bird to sing after the 23672nd but raindrops and grains of dust are not so appropriate as the seat covers of a 1938 packard driven by the lady in red across the canadian border all the way from laredo for a perfect indiana day in the park with a white hat snatched by a bluebird flying to alaska but landing on easter island

raindrops

there is desperation in the greenest trees a secret conflagration in the coolest breeze the kitten at the window the butterfly in the air watch the raindrops follow each other in despair and when the leaves fall yellow in the rain the sidewalk hears them call a whispered name

the unexplainable man: toward midnight

ride the bus see a million stories forget them all mocking eyes sneering lips terrifying teeth hey you don't like it why you take so long? they punch each other they kick each other they laugh at each other lincoln towncar dark and silent surrounded by mcdonalds doggie bags two hundred people pass the bag lady walking one block behind dark glasses checking out the women dreamer or killer? shine of bottles behind a bar like no other light clutching hand from a blanket in a doorway cigarettes better than words now only words death is real it is chasing me through the streets

lion tamer

twenty six miles away and i still want to be one of the class clowns, and if only i could stop the lion tamer from his sad and wandering ways and go back to the broken fence where we first escaped from uncle john and the first law of the blue roller coaster while the clown cried twenty six twenty six miles to east st louis ladies and gentlemen before the white merry go round stops forever and all the red horses run away

sad song

i woke up at dawn in total despair my baby was gone i woke up at dawn i put my hat on it just wasn't fair i woke up at dawn in total despair the sun was shining outside in the street my heart was pining the sun was shining i started whining and shuffling my feet the sun was shining outside in the street a tear from my eye dropped on the sidewalk i started to cry a tear from my eye away would not fly in a state of shock a tear from my eye dropped on the sidewalk all you sad lovers attend my sad song a rainbow covers all you sad lovers but darkness hovers to sweep you along all you sad lovers attend my sad song

this is an attempt at the triolet form.

snowstorm

everybody deserves a free piece of apple pie who is dave? you decide now available: expertise on everything your arrival has been taken into account your uncle joe drove a dynamite truck for forty years and nothing ever happened to him why drive dynamite in trucks anyway? leslie put her cup of hot chocolate down outside the blizzard raged unabated that's a big word - unabated have you ever heard a person use it in conversation? a regular person i mean not someone driving a dynamite truck

jerry the human and spot the dog, part 3

for part two, click here

for part one, click here

the research librarian had her head down intent on something, and jerry stood staring at the top of her head for a while. too long a while. her yellow hair was very thick and he wondered if she was wearing a wig. jerry had never been very good at telling if a person was wearing a wig or not, and it amazed him that other people could be so confident about it. it wasn't the only thing jerry wasn't very good at. cars were another. except for volkswagen bugs, he couldn't tell one car from another. he just didn't have it in him. and architecture - that completely baffled him. a building was a building - it was either big or small and had a roof on it or it didn't. the research librarian looked up suddenly. "yes, can i help you?" she asked jerry, as if she had caught him at something. "do you have a question on something?" "yes," jerry answered. "on - on people being descended from other people." "genealogy," the librarian said. her expression relaxed. "we get a lot of questions on that - next to taxes and cars, we get the most questions on genealogy." jerry just nodded. "do you want to trace your immediate ancestors?" she looked up at him through her thick glasses. "or your descent from some famous person?" jerry looked her blankly, he started to speak, but she went on. "jesus christ and mary magdalen, we get people almost every day who think they're descended from one or the other or both of them. cleopatra is another, and mary queen of scots." "that wasn't what i had in mind," jerry finally said. "you want to trace your immediate family then. did they go to ellis island?" "i wasn't thinking along those lines either." "no?" the librarian looked suspicious. another librarian, who had been sitting with her back to the first one on the other side of a square enclosure, finished talking to another patron and turned around. she was about twenty years older but better looking than the yellow haired one. to jerry she looked like she belonged to some "ethnic" group but he wasn't very perspicacious in that regard either - black and white was the best he could do, and maybe chinese if they were just off the boat. "maybe you are interested in some sort of racial theories?" she asked jerry a little sharply. "or - " her voice softened - " perhaps debunking racial theories?" "i'm not sure," jerry answered. he recognized her now. "you helped me before," he told her - "i was researching a special sauce for hot dogs. about a year ago." "yes of course," she answered, but it was obvious even to jerry that she didn't remember him. "how did that turn out?" "pretty good for a while. then the economy collapsed. you might have noticed." this was jerry's attempt at humor. "yes." another patron came up to her side of the square. "well, good luck in whatever you are pursuing now. excuse me." "so what do you want?" the first librarian asked jerry. "if you can't be more specific we can't help you." 'i want to trace my ancestry. but way back." "you mean to adam and eve or lucy." "not that far." "how far?" "how about - tiglath pileser iii." "who?" "he was king or emperor of assyria or something like that " "something like that. you're not even sure who he was but you want to trace your ancestry back to him." "i was just using him for an example." "are you sure he wasn't just a character in a book by tolkien or somebody?" "he's in the outline of history by h g wells." "this is so bizarre. i can understand people wanting to be descended from cleopatra or mary magdalen but tiglath pileser iii?" "no, let me explain." she had jerry totally flustered now. "i never even heard of tiglath pileser iii. i wonder how many people have." "i'm interested in percentages. in numbers." "tiglath pileser iii." "i don't really care about tiglath pileser iii, i want to know how many people - total - i am descended from." "lots. i can tell you that much." the older librarian had quickly dispatched her other patron and was tapping at her keyboard. she turned to jerry again. "i think i have something here that might help you." "thank you." "let me write this down. http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol10/7/10-7.pdf. that should do to get you started." "thank you," jerry said again. "you're the greatest." part 4