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.

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.