Mighty Fungi, the destroyer,
rending like a divorce lawyer.
There are no bonds you can’t dissolve.
It’s by your graces our world revolves.
Your rap is bad, but we all know,
the pile of stiffs would ceaseless grow,
if you weren’t breaking down the dead.
Plus, we love your work on beer and bread.
Steer into that dizzy skid.
Don’t pop the top, blow the lid.
Life happens: while making plans.
No plans? Just kick that can.
Dance, like they ain’t watchin’ you.
Buy a vowel, get a clue.
Yesterday is history,
Tomorrow is a mystery,
Today is a gift, like socks.
Which you should grab, after dropping your…*
______________________________________________________________________
[*Note: I caught “Full Metal Jacket” on TV last night.]
People once saw in it great panache,
but Hitler killed the toothbrush mustache.
Now no one would dare to wear it.
Except that groundskeeper from Magnum P.I.
who turned out to be the mysterious millionaire.
Maybe, his wealth was Nazi gold?
But that isn’t my theory of the long shadow of Hitler’s mustache.
My theory is that when the short mustache comes back in fashion,
great evil will sit upon our doorstep.
For it is more than a choice of facial hair,
it’s a barometer of remembrance
that lacks an indicator of the half-life
of evil’s stain upon our collective consciousness.
Or, maybe, it just looks stupid on your face.
As if you made a dreadful razor error
and tried to play it off as a plan
through use of symmetry.
In which case, someone should be charting
the rate of application for name change by
Hitlers, Himmlers, Goebbels, and Görings.
Please don’t take this the wrong way,
but I wish you existed fewer hours per day.
It’s not that I don’t like your company.
It’s just that I wish your dosage were smaller.
It’s not like I wish you thinner, prettier, or taller,
I just wish there were less of you — temporally speaking.
My father had a strange lexicon.
In second grade, we were playing a word-guessing game like the game show Password (if it were in a classroom of spastic 2nd graders.)
The word was: “BARN.”
I offered the clue: “HAYMOW.”
You can imagine the puzzlement in a classroom of mostly “city” kids raised on Richard Scarry vocabularies. I almost got beat up when my team — the losing team — decrypted my clue into “hayloft,” a clue that would’ve easily won the game.
Our house had a DOG-TROT. I know it was toward the middle of the house, but have no idea what its defining characteristic might have been. I do know that I never saw a single dog trot through the middle of our house because of the policy of “Outside for Animals – Inside for Humans” that reined in our household, except when a wily field mouse snuck in through the basement or a wood duck — distinctly lacking wiles — snuck its way down the chimney and into the wood stove.
I was told, with great conviction, that a “HAN-YAK” was second cousin to a “POT-LICKER.” As a child, I missed that these were terms of derision, and — I fear — I may have hung a slander upon my cousins by licking some marinara off the lip of a piece of cookware once upon a time.
Oh, speak true and from the heart,
did you hear my tiny fart?
I tried to keep it pent inside,
but sometimes farts, too, swell with pride.
Botswanans have a saying:
“only food runs”
I wonder how much that sentiment holds sway in India?
Because, as I was running in the park today
a man looked at me
and then looked back behind me
and then looked at me
and then looked back behind me
and then, smiling, he shouted something in Kananda
that could only have been:
“Whatever was chasing you is gone!”
“I remember being born.”
“No. You don’t.”
“How would you know?”
“Well, let’s start from the assumption that you’re human…”
“I’d like to think so, but what are my options?”
“I don’t know. Humans don’t have that neural machinery at birth… So nothing from Earth remembers its birth.”
“And yet, I do.”
“Mightn’t you have cobbled together the scene from your mom’s stories, the family photo album, et cetera?”
“Nah! It’s too detailed. Feels too real.”
“I find your ignorance exhausting.”
“I find your certainty perplexing — not to mention irritating and slap-worthy.”
“Let’s agree to be mutually disenchanted.”
“Agreed.”
Taken in Ahmedabad in October of 2017
… Does it “pedaling-around-a-dozen-gas-canisters”-suck?
He fancied himself a Bryan Mills
as played by Liam Neeson in “Taken”
…
only the Bizarro World version.
For he had no particular set of skills
[least-wise not as applicable to his situation]
&
instead of having had a child taken
he’d had one foisted upon him.
While this didn’t fill his every waking moment with violence
in a fight to recover the child
it did fill them all with chaos and occasional contusions
in the struggle to flee the bedlam.
And so, in that sense, they were practically twins.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 