Sunday, December 6, 2009

skit #90: the two

So you can put them into two categories. Err, I mean, there's more, but. Well, you know how rules always have gaps in their smiles.

You got the obsolete traditional types, who go around looking all regularly hideous. Really, most of those got killed way back when. You know, knights and exorcists and whoever. People can barely tolerate spiders, and even they have exterminators. No one talks about jabberwockies anymore. So don't worry about all the ugly monsters.

But, yeah. Then you got the newer-type clever monsters, who go around looking like people. Real regular-type people. Real sly. I figure there's a whole rude zoo of those monsters right under the skin of people you see every darn day. Engineers and aunts and veterinarians and clarinetists -- yeah, anyone, maybe, doesn't matter who. Sometimes the windows to their soul look all smudged up.

This ain't all bad. There's an elegance to this dichotomy. If your monster looks like a person, then you don't really have to worry about being gobbled up, because people don't have massive jaws and fangs. But if your monster looks like a monster -- well, no one's going to jail you for destroying some regularly hideous-type monster.

Huh? Yeah, a few. I've tangled with my share of monsters before. Lost these six fingers to the whorl worms of Patagonia. Went all higgledy-piggledy in my ladyparts. Yeah, I've got a few wriggled up inside me. Parasites -- the whorl worms of Patagonia. These things don't really turn me into a monster, per se. They just eat my flesh and reconstitute my likeness with wormflesh. So some whorlwormy chap will be doing wrong in my name. Or, who knows, maybe I'm doing good in his name.

Hell, even had someone spot me for a monster. They chased me down all of 32nd Street with a shotgun. No way you can really disprove it, neither. Just have to steer clear of them. But that's what I mean, I guess. The sly monsters look just like people. But, heh, maybe you're taking advice from a monster.

Well, yeah. Then there's three, technically.

Those third ones are the worst monsters. Don't look like anything. More abstract. A misplaced shadow. Awkward and protracted eye contact. A painfully trite malaise. Thoughts of aberrant geometries. Existential hangnails. The kind of monster you can never fight, can never dispel. That inauspicious happenstance that can never be confronted or defined. When something feels wrong.

But. Those have been around for a while. Best to stick to the two.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

skit #89: the moon

The night swallows desperately as the midnight express lodges in its throat like an unpalatable placebo. The coach bus slows and stops. White noise wafts from the coastline waves and the constellations make promises of stale fates. With the bus stopped, the night would be still, but acrid smoke from the engine provokes its passengers to disembark.

But not Erma. She remains on the bus. Erma is supposed to be somewhere.
She does not know where, or even that there was a particular somewhere to be, but she could have been there nonetheless. She could have undergone the latent thing was supposed to happen to her. She stays on the bus even though it will not move. The smoke makes Erma's eyes water, but that's about it.

The passengers shiver in the coastal drizzle, occupying themselves by speculating idly or raging futilely. The driver, though competent and affable, bears no hope of repairing the bus. Everyone senses this -- the passengers, the driver, the bus, the smoke, the constellations, and Erma.

The smoke dissipates as the drizzle becomes heavier rain. Everyone returns to the bus. A repair truck finally arrives, but the mechanic will have to special order the damaged component. An opportunistic motel begins ferrying passengers to its pay-per-hour rooms until its capacity fills. Erma remains on the bus. The driver announces his company will cover any bills 'within reason'. The repair truck leaves until tomorrow afternoon.

Erma can't sleep, so she stares out the plexiglas window. The garish neon cursive spelling 'No Vacancy' mutes the subtle stars, giving the vain moon a full stage. The moon shines white, then red, then white. Clouds fog the scene, snoring upsets the serenity. No one cares about a lunar eclipse, not even Erma.

The bus resumes its course tomorrow evening. The mechanic is paid. The driver is competent. The motel has vacancies. The passengers are late. The moon is white. The thing is unknowable. Erma is supposed to be somewhere.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

skit #88: ANIMAL FUN-DERSTANDING

ANIMAL FUN-DERSTANDING
with Dr. Barbara Dorber


Granddad wakes me up when I'm still tired! He calls me a lazy monkey, but monkeys don't look lazy! Which animal sleeps the most during the day?
- Peggy P., Toledo, OH

Tell your grumpy grampy humans aren't monkeys but primates. As humans get old and cranky, they tend to need fewer hours of sleep. Most humans sleep between 7 and 9 hours a day, sleeping less than any other primate. Elderly humans, like your granddad, may sleep as few as 6 hours a day. Most of our primate cousins, including chimps and baboons, sleep approximately 10 hours a day. The laziest monkey, the owl monkey, sleeps 17 hours a day, devoid of any remarkable personal responsibilities.

So which animal sleeps the most? The nostalgic koala is known to sleep up to twenty hours per day, often dreaming about how elegantly she danced when she was younger, leaving her only four hours to pout in front of her full-body mirror, her middle-age flab extruding from the limb-holes of her joeyhood leotard. Why koalas practice in that which will inevitably depress them remains a controversial question among leading animal behaviorologists.


Why is my dog is so slow! It takes forever to play fetch with him. I want a faster pet. What should I get?
- Shelton F., Tulsa, OK

Do you like polkadots? Consider getting a cheetah! The cheetah is the fastest recorded land mile, sustaining speeds up to 68 miles per hour when sprinting. This is fast enough to run alongside a car on the freeway, and certainly fast enough to catch any prey that looks yummy.

Faster still, field biologists routinely sight hoofprints created by large game traveling at an estimated 82 miles per hour. Scat analyses identify these runners as wildebeest; further, kinesiologists affirm wildebeests' musculature may potentially produce as much thrust with each leg as a junior varsity football team! Wow!

Yet this shy specimen has never been observed moving any faster than what is expected of it, a mere 50 miles per hour, a handicap merrily exploited by trailing hyenas and lions. Under midnight, away from any audience, thundering wildebeests are tracked by seismologists hoping to understand this bashfulness. Regarding the wildebeest's nature, we ask ourselves what hyenas mock us, what cheetahs best us, what of our thunder rarely rumbles, and under what midnight we are free.

Most wildebeest opt for the conventional life: grazing on the savannah, succumbing in negligible numbers to predators, rearing calves, breaking no land speed records, and other matters well-documented.


My mommy is the best mommy for people, but what is the best mommy for animals? I want to draw her being best mommies with the animal for her Mother's Day card.
- Jess M., Las Vegas, NV

There are many kinds of mommies in this world. And just because she's your mommy doesn't mean she's not an animal. Human mommies take care of their babies longer than any other animal! There are all sorts of ways to be a good mommy.

An elephant seal mommy transfers up to six hundred pounds of fatty milk to her pup, draining her of vitality. She serves only as anonymous loins within a harem, then as vessel for nourishment for the parasite she calls her child, eventually returning to the frigid sea without her fat reserves, her lover, or her child to warm her. She finds her place on a chain of existentially-contrived links.

And the kangaroo mommy stows her joey in her pouch, taking her baby wherever she goes. Imagine the weight of it. Utterly responsible in every regard to a living being that is half hers. Now she must carry out her life a time and a half over. And always embarrassing her with caterwauling and odors. Humiliating her at the gala, delaying her attendance dance recitals, thwarts her important interview, dribbling on the forms at the unemployment office, getting her evicted from the flophouses. The weight of it. At least the weight brings them both down.

Above all reigns the rabbit mommy, who abandons her children upon birth. She sets the precedent, freeing her children from the obligation of motherhood, ensuring no rabbits have my regrets by their age.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

skit #87: Sweet Osogovo

Shorn summer flocks saturate the Osogovan mountainside like a superfluous sweater. Their unshaven chaperons dawdle in that leisurely way that makes idylls so imperturbably idyllic. Sweet Osogovo poses her hills in rows and rows of verdant mammaries, irresistible to sheep and shepherds alike. She promises an easy day, enticing all creation to indulge.

Stojan haloos Vlatko from afar, his ebullience echoing over and over over the din of bleating. Vlatko, visibly pleased, slips his slender oak kuval from his shirtfolds and begins fluting a low droning note. Stojan approaches, quite unconcerned with whatever his headcount should be, his nibbling flock strewn a league behind him along the buffet. The shepherds all admit the sheep and shepherding are convenient excuses, accessories, only means to this music. Giddy, Stojan eagerly extracts his own kuval from his knapsack.

Like a stolid usuror, Vlatko drones that low uncompromising drone, bedrock on which Stojan gambols freely. Slowly, the players forfeit control of the ezgija's melody, which flourishes as an evocative thicket of brambles and blossoms: fusillades of Slovakian arpeggios, baying of octaval wolves, contemplative wooden textures, and all the contours of Osogovo -- Stojan's and Vlatko's and all the shepherds' insatiable mistress.

When Stojan tires, he drones and Vlatko drives the melody. Perhaps different notes, but it is the same song, for the same idyll, for the same Osogovo.
Dozens of shepherds join and leave the ezgija. They dare nothing, coddling every note, repeating this ritual. Worship tolerates no creativity. So they play until lips loosen, until fingers blister, until summer grows cranky. Sweet Osogovo hibernates and her men retreat to Baraklija until next summer awakens her.

Six months linger each year. The village becomes awkward and quiet and manly. None play music.

While their masters mope, agitated black and white wool commingles and demingles in cramped square pens, very reminiscent of the static produced by the defunct television Gjorgji procured this winter. During lucid moments, his television offers occasional glimpses of the world beyond Osogovo: Macedonian not Yugoslovia; how acting now may save 15 denari; St Petersburg not Leningrad; how all ruminants have four stomachs; and other matters inane and grave. These are all diversions from their beloved Osogovo.

The wool grows bushy. The television programming stays bland. The seasons change too slowly.

When summer returns, so does Osogovo. And so do her idylls and their sheep and their shepherds. And so do their kuvals and their ezgijas. And so do their dronings, their melodies, their blossoms, their brambles. And Stojan is there, and Vlatko and Risto are there, and all the shepherds are there.
Even Gjorgji, who everyone now calls Television-Man. The ezgijas begin. Stojan goes, then Vlatko goes, and it's just like every year. Osogovo always receives her melodies so nonchalantly that one cannot tell if she receives them at all.

During the trek to the pastures, Gjorgji had confided his mind spent its winter far from Osogovo, far from Baraklija and far from Macedonia, to whereever his crystal ball directed him. It's his turn to play atop the shepherds' drone, his angular and perplexing melodies gouge the round easiness of the pasture, polluting it with whiny traffic horns, fluttering receipts, the syncopated chatter of data computations, terse telephone niceties, the crescendoing inflation of floundering economies. Under these sounds foreign to Osogovo and rare to Baraklija, the shepherds' drones start to falter then give away completely, leaving Gjorgji playing his thin melody a solo. The misfit Gjorgji dismisses himself. The shepherds continue, trying to resume their frivolities.

Summer goes, Baraklija populates with awkward men, summer comes.

The shepherds and sheep return. So does Television-Man. He brings electric guitars, theramins, pyrotechnic rigging, subwoofers, garish costumes, personnel to webcast the ordeal, fettering record contracts. The few sheep his flock retained seem common when hoof-to-hoof with the other shepherds' flocks. But within Gjorgji's herd of ibex, cassowaries, capybara, ride-on gas mowers, and whatever else, the shepherd's sheep remain unique.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

skit #86: Zergoff the Mindmaster

Washed in spotlighting, flamboyantly attired in his trademark sapphire-sequined tuxedo, somehow Zergoff the Mindmaster appears naked when on stage during tonight's performance.

Zergoff declares monotonically:

"He should have been an obedient son.
"He should have stayed out of his mother's closet.
"He should never have searched for the shoebox of heirlooms.
"He should never have taken his grandfather's pocketwatch.
"He should have honored the dead.
"He should have returned it when mom wept.
"He should have laid awake, undone with guilt.
"He should never have stayed up all night with it.
"He should never have admired its golden shine.
"He should never have lost himself in his reflection.
"He should have believed in magic instead.
"He should have gone into rabbits and top hats and sawing lovely assistants.
"He should have stayed out of people's heads.
"He should have feared so much power.
"He should have hidden the pocketwatch for a much later age.
"He should have waited until he was old enough to appreciate it.
"He should never have watched so many cartoons.
"He should never schemed so mischievously.
"He should never have practiced on Rufus.
"He should have thought more about what it's like to be a dog.
"He should have issued his instructions in woofs and howls.
"He should have taught Rufus something benign, like a trick or two.
"He should never have put human thoughts into a dog brain.
"He should never have imposed such existential crises upon loyal Rufus.
"He should have learned how to undo it.
"He should have confessed when mom wondered why Rufus was acting so very odd.
"He should have learned from mistakes made.
"He should never have practiced on Wally.
"He should never have practiced on Samantha.
"He should never have practiced on the guy who so adamantly insisted on being called dad.
"He should never have practiced on the teacher.
"He should never have practiced on the principal.
"He should never have practiced on mom.
"He should have really learned how to undo it.
"He should have retained a few authority figures.
"He should have learned some rules before bending them, before breaking them.
"He should never have left New Orleans.
"He should have been erased by Katrina.
"He should have felt lucky.
"He should have begun again, a simple life.
"He should have learned to accomplish things the normal way.
"He should have paid for brunch-time waffles.
"He should have rented his one-bedroom studio.
"He should have met someone nice.
"He should have met Lucy.
"He should have asked where she grew up.
"He should have asked how she got that barely-noticeable scar on her wrist.
"He should have politely yet confidentely asked her for her phone number.
"He should have asked her out for gelato, her choice of flavor.
"He should never have crammed up next to her in the subway.
"He should never have swayed that pocketwatch in front of her eyes.
"He should never have left her so confused the next morning.
"He should have met Melinda.
"He should have met Else.
"He should have met Hu.
"He should have met more people.
"He should have met anybody.
"He should never have met nobody.
"He should have felt brave without his pocket watch.
"He should have been strong enough on his own.
"He should have confessed how deceptive he is.
"He should have confessed how miserable he is.
"He should have been honest all along.
"He should have hypnotized himself.
"He should have committed himself to this admission.
"He should have felt relief.
"He should have felt clean.
"He should never have learned how to do it.
"He should never have learned how to undo it.

Zergoff finishes abruptly. The mesmerized audience, his strangers, applaud in a suspiciously rigid unison. The spotlight switches off and the show concludes. Eventually, all the patrons and performers leave the venue to return to their various done and undone lives.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

skit #85: all inconspicuously

It's around afternoon, maybe even after that. Nightfall seems an impossibility. The sun holds an ominous promise like the rancid orange on my dashboard. The air conditioning exhales sticky breath drawn from the tarmac-buttered road. Traffic is stopped, or I can't tell. We commuters lurch together in inches through barren scenery devoid of the landmarks necessary to appreciate progress. Relentless tans and yellows, relentless plains: neutrality wages its effortless war of attrition. I succumb utterly. I contemplate land tortoise, the treasury bond, the graham cracker, and other matters slow and stale.

The freeway insists forward we go. Dotted lines divide the lanes, outside of which we swerve as the heat warps our senses. The traffic flows so slowly that mortal accidents are rare. Death's Buick taps my bumper and by hand I limply waive the guilt of his second offense having learned the futility of honking years ago. Commuters of this freeway strive for civility, even in this traffic and heat.

My legs fall asleep from non-use. I can't tell if my foot covers the gas or brake. The billboards are large and colorful, mercilessly legible. They are my only stimulation, otherwise I'd slip underneath the dogged weight of this dog day. I can read these words, but my fatigue yields only sun-curdled thoughts. The car dealers on the billboards don't sweat, don't look human. They grin flat grins, ignorant of the suffering they've dispensed upon the traffic. Barbara Buckleys and Red Coulters and Joey Petronis gloat from above as we slog along under their serene faces.

I watch the cars, unending processions, cars, cars, cars. We drive forward. Forward, going. Behind, coming. The rear view mirror frames the Buick, still tailgating me. Draped over the steering wheel, I see Death subdued by the same malaise afflicting all us commuters. He looks peacefully still when he slouches, as though he is a spring unsprung. I too wish to be unsprung so. For a moment, we share our misery. But Death taps my bumper a third time, startling him from his laze. He raises his hand in flustered apology. My patience spent, I whip my head around, and glare darkly at Death's ineptitude.

Ahead, tail lights wink. My windshield allows a brief sense of freedom, shattering completely.

An inadequate dose of anesthesia renders me mute and numb as I watch my surgeon earn her paycheck. Her paper mask nullifies her identity, but I know who is in her body, still recklessly tailgating me.

I heal over some years and resume life as normal. Both my accident and brush with Death, mostly forgotten.

Pickles are half off, so I buy two jars. A clumsy skeletal hand reaches for the kalamatas, elbowing my rib during the grab. In that flustered apologetic way, Death's open palms beg a forgiveness, presumptuously accepting that which I do not grant. He rattles my shopping cart as he tries to scoot by, sending my vitamin-enriched Wonderbread to the polished floor. Nonchalant and unaware, he continues to nix collected items from his shopping list in other aisles.

I doubt he even recognizes me, though we've met before.
Even Death hates to wait; I position myself two patrons behind him in the Express Line. I count the items in his basket: 14, counting dubious multiples as singles. He remains oblivious as I cleverly spy from behind a tabloid. I notice my two fellow patrons also spying. Dozens of patrons, most of the cashiers, and two managers also spy. Perhaps Death adopted his oblivion so not to face all those he's acquainted professionally.

I hastily load my groceries into my car and manage to follow Death's Buick as he exits the parking lot. I trail him by a full city-block of space; I congratulate my inconspicuousness. I notice the entire grocery store, the entire neighborhood, the entire city trails him; all inconspicuously.


Death drives home in the traffic we once created. Ahead of him, drivers nervously watch their rear view mirrors, congesting matters in their wake, resulting in this elegantly necessary traffic.
The dog days chase their tails and summer persists.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

skit #84: Wriggly Hookins

No, nuh uh. No fishes today. But look what else I got. In the old farmers pond out back I found him. Right there mixed in with the rest of the bait. Fattest one of em all. Knew he was lucky. See, look at all his luck oozing right out.

I wash the dishes. My son's rambling bothers me.

Mama, yer not listening. Wh--

Today is a weekday. Why did he not attend school?

W, w, well, I was fishing for all day long with Drew instead. School dont miss me. Social studies dont miss me. See, you could look it in the book! Presidents ago still got elect if I were there or werent. Nothing changed. Heck, you barely miss me.

He caught insufficient fish. His excursion was of no use.

But there werent barely no fishes, mama. That aint my fault. I did get this fattyfatty, by the grace of Wriggly Hookins. Fry him, mama. Im hungry.

He holds up a small box. His puny fish shall not satisfy me. He has a worm left. He must explain.

Used up all the other worms, because they don't mean nothing. I told you, Wriggly Hookin's lucky. You can't waste lucky worms. Dont you know nothing, mama? Haw, you probably never had a lucky worm in your whole life. I bet daddy had a million.

My son is foolish. Worms do not posses luck. Roy left us long ago. I mother poorly.

No, no, no. No. I used up all the littler worms and caught nothing but wet. Those littler worms are a penny a piece, nothing. Wriggly Hookins got us this fish. He caught the one all the other boys were after. Pete, Johnny, Tommy, all the rest, and even Drew tried. But they only had little worms too.

I had Wriggly Hookins. I cast him way deep in the pond. And sure enough my line tugs like I caught a mutt with pork chops. The boys all started hooting and clapping, yelling how I caught the fish, I caught the fish, I caught gnarly old Bubbubb! Some big old evil fish from back from before whenever, they gossip. Well, he aint all that big. But big for pond fodder. For dinner.

The boys kept cheering. But I didnt want some ugly fish. I wanted my lucky worm. And right when I get blue, when I reckon what trade Id just made, I see Wriggly Hookins squirming out of Bubbubb's gills. See, lucky as he is fat. And look at the bounty he brung.

The fish is absent. I wash more dishes.

Wait. Whered the fish go? It
was right there, right in the box. Dont move. We have to find Bubbubb. He probably snuck back into the pond through the toilet tubes.

His nonsense must end. My son will attend school tomorrow.

No, mama! I have to catch it again! You dont have no sense. You cant let no wicked fish swim around your own backyard! Doubt youd martyr for hump diddlysquat.
Wriggly Hookins wou--

I wallop the insolent boy. He sobs and flees to the fishing hole. He never attends school again.

Behold: Wriggly Hookins. He died for our dinner. Up on the hook. He unlocks the badness in Bubbubb like a key, sets it free. Well I can't remember all of it, but it's something like that.

My son and his make-believers look solemn by the pond shore at sunrise:
Pete, Johnny, Tommy, all the rest, and even Drew. I sense they secretly hope never to catch their wicked fish.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

skit #83: hue from her heyday

She nibbled with gumflesh at the balustrade then pouted. Her rotting porch no longer tasted sweet enough to lure even the chubbiest of prey. Yyrja was growing thin and left to eat her unpalatable bait. She swept away the stale gingerbread crumbs with her expired, inanimate broom.

A wooden sliver roused a bud of blood from her pinky fingertip, whose pain she inspected as a curiosity of such things physical; such minutia which, as she aged and her sorceressliness waned, littered the floor of the confines of her life. Yyrja considered the vermilion, a familiar hue from her heyday: ink for infernal pacts, potions from virginal menses, steaming mounds of sacrificial goat offals, but never something she had bled; she never knew she contained that same rich hue.

Yyrja watched the neighborhood girls stroll the street with their sweethearts, squandering all that fervid blood.

Oh, how
she longed for her sordid youth. She missed the sunless sinning. She missed sleeping with the Antichrist. Though they hadn't spoken in a millennium, she still remembered him as her malevolent little Beezeypie. They lost themselves, babbling the things romantics do, slurring sweet nothings, entwining their profane tongues. Her Beezeypie ditched her to stud for another of his vast and infernal harem.

Her love seemed antiquated and misplaced.
The suburbs held no arboreal orgies. The streetlamps kept things too well lit and the shrubs were shorn too low.

Much of her twilight was spent observing the time, wallowing in the end of her days of witchery. She moped through her condo, impeccably tidy as a result of ample time rather than a hatred of filth. All her magic spent. Her wand lay limp. Her incantations merely malarkey. Her mirror mirror on the wall would not answer her at all. In it, Yyrja saw herself: utterly benign.


Yyrja wondered if she were still a witch at all.
She felt listless, impotent, irrelevant. The forgettable and ephemeral magic of her youth was gone, so instead substituted what life presented her with memories: the jostle of public transit for madcap broom flights, the inanity of television for her nights as a gibbering mooncalf, pork butts for curious kinderfolk. She knew what it was to be a witch, and that perhaps that was enough. Her fingertip had clotted.

Some pudgy girls from next door ring the bell. Grandmotherly Yyrja invites them to relax on her porch, offering them scrumptious cookies.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

skit #82: your ruckus

The miserly jungle minds what she misspends, calmly reclaiming her bitterest fruits, her clumsiest birds, her laziest hogs, and her unfittest mothers; conserving her losses by the ways of worms and mulch. You were born by these jungly notions. Shortly after birth, the ants redistributed both your unfit mother and your limp placenta accordingly. Yet they spared you, abiding by some unknown etiquette.

When you neither stood nor stirred, I feared you too may decay. When you finally cried, I feared the tigers may near. Standing, you rose too high, out-of-arms-reach to rout up a meal of grubs and tubers, and I feared you may starve. I feared the many fears the jungle instilled in her denizens. You were my kin but hardly my kind. I did not yet know you were fashioned for survival.

Cradled by haphazardly thatched palm fronds, you gurgled and warbled so curiously.
Your ruckus attracted no predators, only witnesses: the bears and lions, subdued by awe; the parrots and cicadas, quietly confused; the centipedes and snakes, neutralized; the apes, agape: My perplexed brothers hung from branches above, dolloping upon me gobs of dubious silence in place of the congratulations and condolences respectively due to a new father and widower. They were ominously still, very wary, sensate to the supernatural: of the jungle's many gambles, you were a rare yet portent cast, as enigmatic as six pips for six dice.

Your debut elapsed that night; and the jungle, but not your father, forgot about you.

Among the treetops, I introduced you to the ways of me, your father, of your passed mother, of my perplexed brothers, and soon, of you. You never felt at ease. Your furless body shivered itself to sleep, sending the canopy boughs fluttering all through the night. When the troop meant to migrate, you desperately moored yourself to the sturdiest branches, distrusting your agility and gravity's stern reputation.

I offered my hand to help you down and I noticed our digits did not interleave. In fact, you hadn't digits at all, but fine fingers and a stubbornly misplaced thumb, attached all wrong. Certainly from your mother's side, the defuncts of baboonery. I considered wrenching the deformity into its proper place, but it made sweet memento of your mother and the peculiar love we shared. So the two thumbs remained.

I knew you would leave us soon. You lost interest in ripe mangoes, in male bonding by brawling,
in sharpened sticks, in hooting to claim domains, in courtship and in copulation, in peeling bark, in territorial scents, in lice, in the jungle's etiquette. At all this, you observed us simple creatures, twiddling your peculiar thumbs.

Friday, June 12, 2009

skit #81: Dwayne-Boy

I.
Lo! Appetite-men of the Iowa, of the Kansas, of the Dakotas.
Sated on maize-whiskers, on soya and bran-meats,
Barbed by cockleburrs, and wooled by heavenly cotton.
Lo! Appetite-men made grown from fed appetite-boys,
From bulbous wombs bequeathed children and calves,
And from teats all suckled on copious dairy-wine.

Know that fertility abundanced the Midwest of yore,
With manly and herbly and meatly plentitude.
Farmer-Mother whose loins some Farmer-Father took,
Sprouted the heroic child-crop Dwayne-Boy,
Heightened by bovine milk left pure by nature,
Sipped unquenchedly, by hands and stones did grow,
Nourished to bull-strength -- by whose udder!
By the bosoms of the mooing prairie-angels!

Rumors make Dwayne-Boy's innocent life undone,
Tavern lore tells of Farmer-Father, merely a sire,
His nine sons by nine virginal Farmer-Mothers,
Numbering eight known by leveraged hedge-funds,
Numbering one known by keeping milk-faith and crops.

Of the one half-brother who dreamed little,
He lived humbly, and loved his wife, and his nine childs,
And sought only sustenance and perhaps a minivan,
Whose simple life his eight half-brothers dismissed.

Of the eight brothers did lust in excess of farmer-wives,
Tantalized by dreams of sating all men by their nutrition,
And tantalized by dreams of owning many of diesel tractors.
They with Modo bargained fiercely and shrewdly,
Without sleep for four days and five nights negotiated,
And the eight brothers brayed with glee, 'Hie!' and 'Ho!'
When wily Modo agreed under eight blood-scribed contracts,
To a business conglomerate by their greed and his sorcery,
So was signed their certificate of incorporation,
Whence born the golem known by name of the Monsanto,
The engine necromantic! The human un-being!
The fist of alchemy! The gene-muddler!
Borne with maw whose appetite consumes indiscriminately,
And borne with malice which schemes unscruplingly.
From one sire derived both Dwayne-Boy and the Monsanto.

II.
Never days passed when the Monsanto left farms unravaged,
Leaving hine and hands no fields to plow, no teats to pull,
Come each autumn, more farmers rallied at the harvest fete,
Where more to commiserate over pastures made fen,
Where more to starve, desperate for mutton and millet,
Where more to join militias, so futile against the Monsanto.

And among them arrived the minivan of Dwayne-Boy,
Who had no need to come to the Autumn Festival,
With his fecund wife, with his hardy boys nine,
With his hearty maize, with his pure milk,
With his peace, with his industry, with his bull-strength,
Farmer-Mother took her toddling son here afore,
But Dwayne-Boy grown found nothing remembered,
No honky-tonk played, and no sour-mash quaffed and,
No courters danced squares, and no rope-wars tugged and,
Dwayne-Boy found welcome as one of few farmers,
To endure the Mosanto! To preserve the Midwest!
Thus, the starved farmers championed Dwayne-Boy.
Huddled hundreds around the Hero-Propitious,
Of the Monsanto, they spake of their trials in turn.

By Waldo: 'My crops! My crops! Left to twist as weeds!
Oh, how the Monsanto transmogrified my livelihood!
Left with morsels first unpalatable and second scant!
My family left as scarcely fed as my granary is full!

By Yttrius: 'What the woman churns does not yield butter!
From the congealed sick-sap emanates an odor, an odor!
My two gluttons for sons consumed much and died,
And I see the cows graze, brewing toxic potions within.

By Mortimer: 'Mine crops grow so tall only to fall,
And plagues curdle the soil, making none else grow,
The sweet soya and bran-meat forfeit their fallow-home,
Left limp and dead for smug weeds to dance upon!

By
Hullup: On fish my family always have dined,
But the Lakes bearing Greatness have tasted PCB,
And the trout-fleisch festers with a vile sheen,
Bringing rashes and runty kin and miscarriages upon us.

By Boggo: Our cattle now lurch like snails through pastures,
Leaving a trail of residue like a snail that wilted grass,
Their udders bloated with by insidious hex of rBST,
Like a moored zeppelin, their milk-sacs blistering with pus.

By Paltrow: The crops brought no longer cotton soft,
But wisps impalpable and dream-puffs useless,
No better than the promises advertised in pamphlets,
In droves, in thousands, farmers suicide themselves,
For debtors knock and the Monsanto has left nothing.
At the festival remained those few prideful and alive.

III.
These sad words brought Dwayne-Boy to weep openly,
And remember the impossible legends of the Monsanto,
And the recall rumors of his kinship to the Brothers Eight,
Who did partner by unsavory pacts with the CEO Modo.
The brave farmers of the Midwest asked not for sorrow!
But nor for sympathy! But nor for salvation!
All souls human and bovine and botanical would succumb,
To the Monsanto's devastation lest one intervened,
So went Dwayne-Boy to beseech his brothers unmet.

Traveling many days and nights by the coach bus Greyhound,
Subsisting on grilled cheese and corn flakes of greasy spoons,
Tasting foul, and Dwayne-Boy knew the Monsanto was near,
And nearer, until inside was he the corporate headquarters.

Past security desk and by elevator rose the One-Brother,
To the highest of ninety-nine floors which had no number,
In the executive penthouse laid the brothers eight in wait.
He, garbed in overalls with hay clamped tween his teeth,
They, garbed in suits pieced thrice and ties of power. But!
Dwayne-Boy nary trembled under evidence of class-disparity,
And so regaled the lamentations of the Midwesterners,
Telling of the weeds ubiquitous! Of the weeping salt-grain!
Of the misery-lowing kine! Of the purulent milchers!
Of the suicided farmers! Of the fatherless families!
Of all the misfortune and malady dispensed by the Monsanto!
Tearful Dwayne-Boy wept for the fate of the Midwest,
To which the brothers eight kept stoic and unmoved,
Dismissing all claims of harm brought by the One-Brother,
And unfurled charts and graphs and figures incomprehensible,
And calculated p-values singing statistical insignificance,
Citing research-evidence and statutes of the High Judges,
Proving the brothers eight and Modo and the Monsanto,
Unrelated to any adversity unto the Midwest beyond doubt,
Which did confound the humble-brains of Dwayne-Boy,
Who left defeated, not knowing why he went at all.


IV.
It was decided then-there by his insidious fraternity,
That Dwayne-Boy was no brother of needful keeping,
And did not represent the kind of Farmer-Father's guile.
The brothers eight invoked the sanguine-chant,
And drew the blood-icon. Thus summoned the CEO Modo!
Puppeteer of the Monsanto! The Stomachless One!
The wretched Modo paged the Monsanto only once,
Then informed by phone how Dwayne-Boy must end,
To which the Monsanto obediently complied and went.

Sullen Dwayne-Boy plowed his fields with dull sticks,
He irrigated his ditches with tears and plumbic-water,
And no crops did grow with vitamins or calories,
Leaving his crops dormant or wee, his draft horse brittle,
And himself pale and atrophied and lesion-spotted,
His family dead by disease, with his cough his only friend,
With wistful eyes, he briefly considers to suicide himself,
But instead resolves to triumph through diligence. When!
Afar upon the horizon, what invades his acreage? Behold!
The Agricultural-Giant, the Monsanto, razes the lands!
With minivan and pitchfork and blunderbuss goes Dwayne-Boy,
To end the Monsanto, with perish in mind for himself or it.

Never had Dwayne-Boy seen the Monsanto so close:
Under leather-hide writhed sinews sprung for predation,
Eyes which see germs, and ears which hear stars,
With eight arms and eight taloned hands to rend things living,
The perfect-mutant of no beast or tree known to the Midwest,
Towering above all moral responsibility stands the Monsanto.
And against him, the earthly Dwayne-Boy, the Bull-Child,
Who among men fared many hands high and stones heavy,
But still only a single man battling the Ever-Million Gened.
Whose pitchfork bent against the Monsanto's ferric-bone!
Whose pellets as useless as seeds upon the Monsanto's skin!
Whose minivan crumpled under the hoof of the Monsanto's fury!
The Monsanto battered Dwayne-Boy, ignorant of mercy,
Pulverizing his toes into jelly, his bones splintered to many,
His ribs imploded to stab the throne of soul-being, his heart!
Beaten, awaiting death, Dwayne-Boy coughed blood in rivers,
Which puddled about the Monsanto's feet unsuspectingly.
Contrived in the laboratory, Modo crafted the Monsanto,
By a design blind to all inventions natural to the earth,
To surpass them all by fortitude and cunning -- Alas!
The virulent cough of Dwayne-Boy spread by haste,
Infecting the Monsanto thoroughly and fatally,
Who went from sniffles to splotches to irreversible death.
And collapsed under the weight of its own engineering.

V.

The triumphant sought retribution upon the brothers eight,
Violently quartered to make thirty-two punishable portions,
With twenty-four quarters to fertilize the new crops of the Midwest!
On oats, on triticale! On barley, vetch, red clover!
On cotton, flax, and rye. On sorghum, maize, and spinach!
On buckwheat, rapeseed. Kale and marigolds! On cowpeas!
And mustard, canola, and turnips! And soya, hemp!
On horse beans, field peas, and mung beans!
On alfalfa and on millet! And the crops grew high and rich!
With four quarters sacrificed to the deities to protect the dairies!
To protect the eggs, the milk, the beef, the poultry!
And with four quarters sent North and South, East and West,
As warnings to those business-farmers who dabble,
In the black witchcraftery kept secret as GMOs and pesticides,
And displayed forever for all entering the Midwest to see.

Dwayne-Boy healed, nursed by the fruits of the farmlands,
And when he stood, became the Farmer-King of the Midwest.
All farmers prosper, and the harvest returned to the familiar,
Where honky-tonk played, and where sour-mash quaffed and,
Where courters danced squares, and where rope-wars tugged.
So peace again found the farmlands of the Midwest,
As before the Hunger Age of Modo and the Mosanto.

But with great prejudice, foods deemed impure were eradicated,
And only in old age did Dwayne-Boy understand the legend,
That the Farmer-King and the Monsanto were intolerant alike,
And starved the people by the pursuit of ideals without reason,
With that, Dwayne-Boy left the Midwest, never returning.
Ending the Hunger Age forever upon this world and his people.

Monday, June 1, 2009

skit #80: the manor

You traveled too far. You promised to return with peach preserves and candied pecans, but you accumulated only an irreversible distance.

Upon your return, gossip of your presumptuous repatriation reached the queen. As prescribed for any ant, she denounced you as a defector from the colony. The
anthill predictably aligned itself with her vapid propaganda. What punishment the queen invented was none but a formulaic product of the royal whim; The queen only sought obedience from the loyal ants, not harm upon the disloyal. Your sorority concurred to make you unwelcome, and I was part of that sorority. You remained unperturbed while your only family shunned you. At that time did I both admire and pity you.

The queen insisted we each are capable of, and in fact destined for, treason against the hive. Even the queen may betray the hive, whereupon all truly loyal citizens shall demand a new queen.

Curled in a cozy nook off the path in a tunnel wall, you held staid and supine. You fasted and slept for days. We sisters took turns pestering for answers, but you explained nothing. Even when I visited you apart from the factory hours and alone from the queen's cohorts, you would not divulge your new demeanor. Whatever epiphany spurred your reticence remained a mystery to your sisters. Behind black and chitin-curtained eyes, you safely stowed your secret. I told you how your silence served no purpose unless the hive understood your vow, my stubborn sister.

As we passed you on work days, some of the snider sisters passed judgments, threatening your expulsion, your excommunication, your execution. Unprovoked by these insults, you remained in that cozy nook, idle and aloof. They had been right, and I could not defend how you abstained from our very livelihood which sheltered and nurtured you so. Dismissive of you, we continued with our labors.

Your scandalous return did not rile the older sisters. They had seen many sisters come and go. Departing the hive changes each lady incurably, they noted; Some joked with uncertainty whether it was something to cure at all. They brewed their stagnant wisdom from complacent homesteadiness. And they promised that one day I, should I never defect, may drink their bland ambrosia too.

Shifting through grass chaff for seeds, a sister in my platoon described how she found you.
She found you deep within the manor as she searched for honey. You were in a deplorable state: not working, not moving, not eating; incapacitated, dried and dessicated; an empty husk like the chaff we tread on. She carried you from the pantry, down the cupboards, out of the kitchen, under the window jamb, through the garden, back to our formicary. She could have returned with gobs of honey, but instead we regained you and your ingratitude.

No matter how we wish vitality upon your thorax, my stubborn sister, you refuse it. No matter how we set morsels in your mandibles, my stubborn sister, you release it. You show no remorse as you let it all spill to waste.

All ants must bring fertility to the colony, actively or passively. Looking to gain favor, the younger sisters enacted the royal punishment. They buried you into the food store to compost, and you did not resist. Only the antly would struggle against such lethargy. Some of the older sisters attended your burial, recounting among themselves all the times they'd each seen this ceremony, tallying their sadness by means of morbid arithmetic. The hive lost a sister.

I recalled how the nursery raised all of us sisters in the same manner. The matrons diverted all the nymphs with the same fables honey-lakes effervescing deep in the manor. The legends made exclusive promises with you and not with me. The colonial life satisfied me, but you looked afar for peach preserves and candied pecans.

Weeks later, my daily duties determined me to feed your lifeless body to our nymphs in the nursery.

Now I am an older sister, brimming with stagnant wisdom. All the nymphs I raised on legends of honey-lakes have grown. I see you have returned, reborn among the young. I show you which door jamb allows your entrance to the splendors of the manor.


Tuesday, May 26, 2009

skit #79: the racehorse

Riley mopes about the grandstand, burdened by the inverted levity of having nothing. Congruent with the bookie's odds, for every ebullient face unlike his, he finds ten dismal twins. In name and notion, the Downs makes no pretense of how Riley shall collapse. His uniform buries him beneath denims and dungarees. Only does the Downs provide a slit through which he may peep upon his dream.

The stadium sets him far away from the spectacle. In the center of the racetrack, wee mammals run useless circles, saddled with even weer mammals. Over the chatter of his fellow losers, he can not hear the giddiups or whinnies of jockeys or ponies; At this distance, the racers seem to move at such a lazy pace that even he could outtrot them, though Riley forgoes this feat.

His fingers grope for change in the abyss of is pocket. The few coins he retrieves are rigid in form and petty in value. He reverses and re-reverses his nickel from no to yes to no. Far too predictable for gambling, so instead he invests the coin in the predictable sort of dream. Riley clicks the coin against the bar to buy a golden draught, not caring which face shows.

The plight of the racehorse inspires Riley to ask no one, 'Gawd. Who's on my back.'

'That's why you're here, isn't it? For a little freedom? Let them go, let them all go,' replies the clean-shaven man to his right.

'Ha, can't go nowhere without a ticket.'

'A ticket doesn't win money, it buys a fantasy. Might as well imagine yourself a ticket.'

'Hell, spent all my imagination on this beer.'

The clean-shaven man chuckles wisely, “Don't get down on yourself, brother. Money means nothing, what does – '

...
AND HURTLING FIRST THROUGH THE GATE IS BLUE COLLAR BOBBY
FOLLOWED BY STRANGE BOON
WITH INEVITABLE ALLEGORY PLACING THIRD
FOR THE NEXT RACE FRESH FROM THE HAYSTACK WE HAVE
...

' – yaaaaahooooooo!'

The clean-shaven man returns with generosity to match his mirth. He does not mind when his full billfold molts a few notes onto Riley's lap. After the clean-shaven man bids farewell and departs the Downs, Riley bets his spoils on Entry #56. Riley sits in the bleachers besides the thousands else, each with their own wishes and their own betting slips. Riley's slip reads:

MONEY TALKS
Louis Bragnan

Over the loudspeaker, an announcer's tongue frantically speeds in league with the horses' legs.

...
THERES THE PISTOL MARK
AND THEYRE OFF OUT OF THE GATE
HOME SWEET HOME SEIZES THE LEAD
TRAILING COME MY FAIR LADY AND A LITTLE SUGAR ON THE SIDE
YAHWEHS FAVE CLOSES THE GAP AND CUTS INTO THIRD
PUTTING CORNUCOPIA OUT OF THE TOP RUNNERS
A LITTLE SUGAR ON THE SIDE DRIVES THE INSIDE
PASSES HOME SWEET HOME IN A WIDE SWEEP
AND THE QUARTER MARK
HARMLESS FUN AND MONEY TALKS MAKE THEIR WAY
THUNDERING PAST YAHWEHS FAVE AND MY FAIR LADY
A LITTLE SUGAR ON THE SIDE STILL UNSHAKABLE
MONEY TALKS AND YOU OBEY
YOUR HEART BEATS TO THEIR HOOVES ON THE TRACK
THIS IS WHERE YOU SPENT THE WEEK
THIS IS WHERE YOU BELONG
UP TO THE HALF MARK
SHE LEFT YOU ALL OVER SOME HARMLESS FUN
BUT SHELL COME BACK ONE DAY
THEN YOU CAN TELL HER SHE HAD HER CHANCE
SOON YOULL BE TANNING IN THE SUN
DRINKING TOP SHELF MAI TAIS WITH NUBILE TAHITIANS
YOU DREAM HARD ENOUGH AND ITLL COME TRUE RILEY
THREE QUARTERS
MONEY TALKS USURPS FIRST PLACE
UPSETTING A LITTLE SUGAR ON THE SIDE
FOLLOWED BY HOME SWEET HOME AND CORNUCOPIA
MONEY TALKS SETS A STRONG LEAD
SHES FLYING LIKE SHE BUSTED OUT OF A GLUE FACTORY
LOUIS BRAGNAN TAKES MONEY TALKS TWO LENGTHS AHEAD
FIVE LENGTHS AHEAD
SIX LENGTHS AHEAD
THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE
NINE LENGTHS AHEAD
OH NO
WHAT IN THE HECK IS LOUIS BRAGNAN
NOW FIFTEEN LENGTHS AHEAD
OH LORDY
OH MY
THIS AINT GOOD
SIXTEEN LENGTHS AHEAD
MONEY TALKS SETS THE FIRST LAP
...

Louis Bragnan stands as tall as he can stand. So does Riley. His arms rise to the sky victoriously. So do Riley's. The rest of the crowd remains seated; Riley scoffs at those who dared not vote for the underdog, #56. Money Talks slows from gallop to canter to walk. The remaining racers thunder past the mistaken champions, considering them competitors no longer, only irrelevant obstacles. As Riley sprints to collect on #56, the race continues without his attention.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

skit #78: MAKING YOU DESIRABLE

Her badge read:

MS. LARA F.
MAKING YOU DESIRABLE
BEAUTICIAN

Perfunctorily, she smiled. Fissures cracked around her mouth and eyelids; a make-up mask caked with desperate thickness betrayed her appearance of natural beauty. Mrs Hampson did not judge, for she knew she was far older and far uglier. She noticed Ms Lara F's lipstick perfectly matched the stain's shade.

'Good morning, miss. How may I help you?' chirped Ms Lara F.

'I want to look young,' admitted Mrs Hampson.


'Gosh, maybe we can knock off a year or two. How does nineteen sound?' Ms Lara F laughed a facetious laugh.


Mrs Hampson brushed off the vapid compliment. 'Your lipstick. What kind is it?'


Ms Lara F shuffled for the applicator, 'Furtive Flirt. Here, try.'


Mrs Hampson painted sloppy and sensuous colors around her lips. 'What do you think? How does it work on husbands?'


'Well, I've never been married. One day!' She knocked on wood with an naive eagerness that irritated Mrs Hampson. It reminded her of herself before marrying Arthur. 'You look beautiful!'

Mrs Hampson inspected herself in the mirror. She pouted her lips, imagining staining her husband's dress shirt with a pigment of her own.

Ms Lara F regurgitated the slogan, '
Making you desirable!'

Mrs Hampson paid the balance with her husband's credit card. Ms Lara F's inexperience prolonged the transaction, granting Mrs Hampson ample time to admire the familiar faces on the cosmetics magazines. The receipt printed. Mrs Hampson left, her echoing heels incising through the hollows of the cosmetics department, her lips a predatory pink under the fluorescent lighting, a new woman.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

skit #77: Calamity Jane

Neither of us have left her room for some days. Pneumonia incapacitates her. Worry immobilizes me. My breath trails hers warily, as her last leads my last.

Calamity Jane coughs violently, and though she never liked pretty things, she inadvertantly decorates her bedsheets with the floral pattern of a portentous funerary bouquet:
verdurous phlegm flecked with crimson buds. The brutess does not notice, continues to cough until empty, then spits. To her violence, I flinch and squeal and wail, just as her ongoing regimens of daily abuse had conditioned me to react. My histrionics, which normally elicits her boastful guffaw, fail to fruit even a smirk. She slips into a defeated sleep, and I contemplate the brief life that may await me without her protection.

Nervously, I watch through the window slats. Her illness advertises an opportunity to all the prairie's marauders: the coyotes and the desperados. Now Calamity Jane cannot protect Deadwood or, more selfishly, me.
With its heroine fallen, they come to exact retribution upon all which abides by that very society which shuns them. Man and beast alike run Main Street amok, gobbling the vittles off still-clucking chickens, urinating to claim property like conquistadors, nipping up skirts at feminine softnesses, howling with the seductive madness that makes one join in; But I resist their call. How they meet my eyes through the window slats, I know they know I am a gentleman, and so I too shall bear retribution.

Two years ago, Marsh & Coe, Co. declared their intent to establish the first and only bank in Deadwood, South Dakota. As an apprentice, the firm paid me a meager stipend, affording me scarcely enough to rent the lowliest flat in all Dorchester. Like a peacock among pigeons, I failed to blend in with Dorchester's denizens. No one likes an outsider. Daily, I drudged through the mires of Dorchester's worst. And every day I arrived, my suit disheveled, my complexion bruised blue, my pockets picked. So every day Marsh & Coe, Co. found the degraded gentleman that remained of me. Of their staff, the executive management estimated me to be their rowdiest employee. They shuttled me off to orchestrate the construction of their bank, the First Deadwood Bank.

I arrived and Deadwood knew. One posse procured my luggage set; another posse procured Marsh & Coe Co.'s realty payment; a third posse procured my accouterments momentarily; Calamity Jane procured me as her chattel, clobbered the thieves, reclaimed the clothing that was now hers (by extension of me), left me undressed and sinful, and checked us into a single room with a matrimonial bed at the Loose Dove's Roost.

No one disturbed Calamity Jane or her belongings. Though she slew many men during our courtship, she remained a sensitive lover. But as a partner, she lacked the eloquence needed to garner my respect, so she domesticated me by whip.
Once I thought I might grow old with Calamity Jane, forever: she, my man, and I, her dude. But our romance best suited brevity. All her sweet nothings smell of sour mash. She wears other men's blood like mascara and other men's sweat like perfume; She does not disclose how she becomes stained so. She has reprimanded the impudence of my mouth so many times my words wear the swollen drawl of one who fears speech.

Now I see the First Deadwood Bank, its scaffolded skeleton, half-built, without a blueprint or plan, unsound.

Now I see my beloved Calamity Jane, half-dead, half-loved, her eyes on her bottle and her gun.


I step outside to renounce my life as a gentleman, to become one of the Calamity Johns, to ravage the Dakotas from south to north. But they shoot me. I think hear her muster the strength to guffaw.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

skit #76: nothing unnatural

Reeds waft and mosquitoes croon, ripening us. Many broadcast their midnight sentiments in the lagoon. The barrage of trilling frogsongs sets every amphibian gonad aquiver, either to activity or to anticipation. Their slick vocal sacs balloon and unballoon, seducing us volumetrically. We all wade eye-deep in the very same soup, wanting nothing more than to relieve our bodies of impatient eggs. I find a song for me.

You and I grope one another pheromonally at pond-length through porous skins; Skin has no stomach so we are never sated. As I paddle coyly towards you, my webbing unavoidably swats the jellied eggs and pollywogs that already fill the basin underwater. I may crush some, but we will soon make more. We care not of who, but how.

A carnal mantra truncates all my thoughts. Hormones manage my marionette strings, conducting me masterfully. I am out of control. You, my tiny suitor, clamber atop me like a fertile island. I find an archipelago of conquistador-newfoundlands shuddering about me. The innumerable babies below indent my belly, and I cannot help but expel my eggs into the pond.

We all do. Eggs are everywhere. A reproductive diagram somewhere outlines our life cycle, and we fulfill its prophecy.

As foreign as icebergs in our Mississippi bayou, quality-rejected pills quietly buoy from the pharmaceutical company upstream: anti-depressants, contraceptives, fertility meds. They mandate my exhausted body must copulate again, so I do. Again, so I do, so do we all. Nothing unnatural makes us suspicious. Our amplified hormones bring only clarity. If anything, according to the diagram, we are too alive.

A pickup truck parks at the muddy shore. We cannot and shall not disentangle. Compulsion paralyzes us all. Again, so do we all.

brrrrEEEEEEEEEEP.

Trudy's back depresses the car horn as Micky fumbles unhooking her bra.
The highbeams of her pickup truck illuminate the eyes of the mating frogs. Their nictations twinkle cosmically among the black bog-formed firmament. Her FM radio drones love ballads, setting the mood. Trudy finds a song for her.

Things with Micky were going well. They had been going steady for three weeks. Micky had a job and bought her ice cream after school.
They neck ineptly, like teething vampires. Her gynecologist had taught her the responsibilities of womanhood. She had showed Trudy pictures of a female ovum and of a male sperm, the latter seeming nothing more than little parasitic tadpoles. The gynecologist then gave Trudy the Pill.

But Trudy still didn't feel ready. Micky's hand got only as far as her breast despite his exaggerated claims. Trudy kept him at bay until week six. Then she ran the first leg through the reproductive cycle, perhaps limping, perhaps sprinting, not yet knowing if it felt natural.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

skit #75: whatever he respired

Percy's personal moon wasted no time on the in-betweens: always full, a shoulder-width aperture to uncontained skies; or new, the covered manhole; or eclipsed, the downtown traffic racing over his subterranean kingdom. The Sanitation Department did not doubt Percy's self-proclaimed passion for sewage treatment, nor did they refuse his volunteered time. At the end of some workdays, he would return above ground and wait for public transit to deliver him to the discomfort of his apartment where he spent the evening resenting the moon's regular faces under which continent men slept.

But most nights he slept in the sewers, swaddled in his municipally-provided uniform.
He could leave whenever he wanted to -- the sewer or the job or Manhattan or anything else. He was free from everything except his bowels. He thought these thoughts as he delayed dreaming, his head heavy against the concrete precipice. The fetid stench of sewer muck wafted from the river, burbling with what New York's stomachs could not use; The handkerchief he held to his nose was doused with his auntie's perfume, a scent so dense nothing noisome could penetrate it.

Percy peeked over his handkerchief. He held the tincture of his auntie's perfume against the utility lights. He rotated it between his forefinger and thumb and in each facet it appeared equally pale, where his history remained imprisoned behind a millimeter of brittle glass. Deeper he looked into the perfume and deeper he huffed his handkerchief. Olfactory memories whisked him away.

His mother and her sister clucked as they made way through garden
, trimming hedges into pleasing geometries and weeding anything ugly. They gossiped and sipped beers. He was old enough, maybe twelve years, and he had accidentally shat himself again. But he knew this time wasn't his fault. The rose thorns hooked his overalls. He bleated for help for hours, but the adults had left for indoors long ago. A little one slipped out as he wept -- just one little one. But his mother's pittance of patience had been spent. She walloped him. Then she sent him to a behaviorist. Then she sent him to disciplinary school. His auntie was the one who wept as she saw him off.

His mother wore the same scent as his auntie. Or maybe his auntie wore the same scent as his mother. Yet they smelled differently: sometimes the perfume smelled like composting soil, like bleach, like suffocating shame; and sometimes it smelled like baby wipes, like bubble baths, like bedtime stories; but always like roses.

Remembrance left Percy too bleary to see the tincture any longer.
He watched the sewage come only to go inconsequentially. It drifted freely throughout the labyrinths of the sewer. He goes where ever he likes and his mother will never know. Between the velvety must of the rose perfume and the blighted tunnel air, whatever he respired sickened him.

The Central Office transmitted Percy's orders over the walkie-talkie: SEPTIC BLOCKAGE, ROUTE 44-7JW-B. But they weren't paying him so Percy ignored them. It was six in the morning. He stood beneath his mother's apartmental facilities, listening. He can hear her squeak meekly and moments later the plumbing produced her stool. He smiled forgivingly like a good son could.


His personal moon reflected on the sewage. Though his mother does not watch the same moon, she may witness the same reflection.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

skit #74: like the rest of the animals

Pappy worked twelve-hour days, six days a week. He would get all kinds of money. One day he bought something and he called it his baby. He let it sleep underneath a blanket in the big red barn in a stable like the rest of the animals. Alby said its probably a newborn elephant.

Before she went to bed, Mammy opened the bedroom windows for summertime. Me and Alby had contests to see who could stay up latest and after ten o'clock we could see and hear Pappy over in the barn. He talked to his baby and his baby talked back. It talked like chittering sounds and low grumbling sounds. Alby is smarter than me and she thought it was how a humpback whale talks. But it made angry sounds or maybe hungry sounds. Alby said some animals are basically monsters.

Once me and Alby were up real late and we snuck into the big red barn. Pappy dint know of it and we dint want him to know of it so we were quiet and in the dark. There was his baby but it was awake. It was out from its blanket. Me an Alby seen lots of animals before being both farm childs, but Alby knew more from books. But Pappy's baby wernt like any cows or dogs. Alby thought it looked more like an anglerfish but they breathe water. It had a face with too many shapes on it and all the shapes were in wrong places.

It stayed still like when the cats wait for mice so we dint get too close to it. We knew it was watching us because it had two big eyes. They dint blink not once the whole time. We dint see how many claws it had or how fast it was and we dint see if the mouth had fangs or maybe it was a beak or where it could eat something. It was real dark. Alby said maybe an kodiak bear or a komodo dragon but she said they dont live near big cities like Topeka so probably not either one.

Pappy's baby was being so quiet, so we got scared.

Quicker than Alby could stop me, I picked up a rock and threw it to make sure Pappy's baby knew we wernt for eating, that it knew we were Pappy's kin. The rock hit its shell and it went PANG! then it made a low moan. Alby said maybe it sleeps with its eyes open like great white sharks do. We thought about this a few seconds and hoped it would blink but then we got scared even more and ran.

Pappy must have knew what we did, but he never scolded us or whupped us for it. He just put a lock on the doors. That was the only time we saw his baby. Alby thought it was definitely a monster that wanted revenge and Pappy begged for mercy on us as long as we make sure we never bothered it again. Mammy heard Alby and said all sweetly that we were such imaginative little children. Mammy said she thought it was some kind of milk machine but me and Alby knew better.

Summertime was gone and Mammy dint open the windows anymore before bed. We couldnt hear Pappy anymore but we could see his tracks when we woke up. Winter got real cold. Pappy was working more hours and Alby said she saw the barn lights on all night. We only saw him when we all at breakfast but he dint want to talk to me and Alby and Mammy.

There was one Sunday where we came out in the morning. The barn doors were open. Mammy was crying because Pappy was nowhere. Alby says she saw when Pappy went in to feed his baby last night. There was a fight and his baby went and ate Pappy up whole. There were Pappy's footprints going in and his baby's slither tracks coming out, two tracks side- by-side like wagon wheels. Alby thinks it was probably two gigantic snakes, like anacondas or maybe boa constrictors.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

skit #73: His select reserve

Sunshine happens upon the world in halves, and none know whether days precede or follow twilight. Each eve in Bordeaux, nocturnal pitch pours down alleyways, varnishing the city with the venereal film peculiar to sinfulness. Sticky seepage trickles out into boulevards where lamps light the filth for all to see; Everyone sees the muck and simply steps over it. Schoolboys play hopscotch and policemen walk beats.

Cardinal Mourlot walks his ingrained diurnal walk down these alleyways after every evening mass. Uneven cobblestones make his steps falter, and he exerts himself to maintain his balance and poise, grunting low among the fornicators; Their sordid chorus bellows from quarter-hourly hotel rooms. Groping for the palpable comfort spirituality lacks, the cardinal fidgets with his rosary beads. Safely tethered to his trusty anchor, he whiffs deeply the curious musts: the smell of his congregates conjugating; and he hears the solicitations of sirens: sweet Virginia de Clugny-Twat selling herself by the pound like ham hocks.

After one of her brief arrests for prostitution, Virginia confessed to Mourlot how God speaks to her. His recollection went so:

God confided in Virginia that a great flood would wash over Man, not unlike the Great Flood. It was Man's dabbling
in penicillin and pasteurization that would wage such carnage. So Man would survive, which was satisfactory, but God's most esteemed creature would perish. God had bestowed upon Virginia the honor to serve as a sanctuary for His select reserve: the animalcules by His ridiculous naming. Everything else on the planet was, as He put it, 'superfluous in number and complexity.' God's cargo had migrated to Noah; God asked Virginia to obtain the cargo herself, for traveling distances was difficult for His bitty animalcules.

She swore on God's ordination to infect herself with all of His favored children.
Last month she had inducted consumption, the clap, and a zoo of stomach flora. She was collecting French disease when Mourlot finds her.

The two holy folks judge each other in so many ways. A few:

He approaches her, and she knows he never used his body: the cardinal's black robe is utterly negated by the darkness, so Mourlot appears disembodied, as nothing but the pale grimace of a scarlet-capped cherub.

He approaches her, and he knows she has fallen from grace: the lips that fouled the cardinal's ring, the lips that slobbered over the Eucharist, the lips that lied in confessional, decorated with resplendent ruby sores.

He approaches her, and she knows he is but a man underneath that costume: sweat wets his temples, his pupils keen as predators' do, the smoothness of his cardinal robe is betrayed by a bulge.

He approaches her, and he knows she is clean under her grime: the little girl he baptised as Virginia, frocked with a patina of unwarranted abuse, her innocence salvageable by his abundant piety.

'I can rescue you from this farce you live,' both say in awkward simultaneity.