After a decade Bill called. He reached a level of intoxication where lunacy required an audience. He also had a list of unforgivable people and wanted to go over it with me. Admittedly I’ve messed things up, plenty, but I was surprised to find my name on his list.
After an hour I told Bill I could hook him up with a good shrink or an exorcist if he preferred. That worked. He hung up.
A week later I called him back. Bill was sober and I was tactful. We joked some before I brought up the exorcist.
Miriam’s mother, Jennifer, answered the doorbell to find Snaky, a dragon from the Land of Wormy Delights disguised in a tailored suit, asking her if he could borrow her daughter as a sacrifice. In a loud voice Jennifer called to Miriam, “There’s a nice-looking, young man here who would like to borrow you as a sacrifice to his lord of the 33rd something-or-other (degree) degree…lucywoosi (Illuminatus) illuminatus…?… (Illuminati) latiwhati…(palm slap)”.
As soon as Miriam heard the word “sacrifice” she grabbed the can of Dra-Gone! dragon repellant, the brand with the slogan You never know when you’ll never need it, and rushed to protect her mother shaking the can to charge it for a direct strike onto Snaky’s snout. As soon as Snaky saw the can he ran.
That stuff must really work, thought Jennifer, wondering if they might squirt just an itsy-bitsy bit of it as a test in the street in spite of multiple warnings on the can to never – ever – even think of doing something like that. After the two adventurous experimenters took deep breaths and Miriam gingerly touched the sprayer to release an itsy-bitsy bit they ran back inside gagging, bolting the door, sealing the frame with duct tape while the neighborhood dogs went bananas.
The puzzle looked like confused confetti so I jumped right in to set things straight. No piece was totally benighted because each had a right side though some of them displayed their wrong sides up. I was grateful for those few that had edges.
With all pieces properly placed (except for those the dog ate) the puzzle displayed an image of white puzzle pieces scattered on a dark table waiting for someone to jump in and straighten them out.
And that’s all there is to this confused tale. I’m still wondering why I jumped into that mess of confetti.
I am grateful to Chel Owens for selecting my free verse poem as the winner of the most recent Terrible Poetry Contest. The award winning poem and my attempt to explain it are below.
I told my shrink that the cops brought me here because of my bad driving and he said I had no record of ever driving a car in my life and I told him, not car, spaceship, S-P-A-C-E-S-H-I-P, and he said I had no spaceship and wasn’t an alien because my DNA test, D-N-A, showed I’m human enough and I told him, well, then why am I in that padded cell and he said I wasn’t in any cell and I asked him if he was trying to drive me crazy and if he was he wasn’t doing a good job of it and then he said I was brought in because I was scaring the neighborhood kids and the judge assigned me to him and I told him that I had a lot of fun turning my head 360 degrees like an owl and he said I couldn’t do stuff like that and I asked him whether he ever saw me and he said no and so I asked him if he wanted to see me turn my head 360 degrees and he said, “Sure, Marvin, go ahead turn your head 360 degrees like an owl, go on show me” and so I turned my head 360 degrees like an owl and he called the exorcist.
This poem is in imitation of Gerald Stern’s American Sonnets. These “sonnets” have no rhyme nor meter (and often no sense that I could detect). They are mostly one sentence long allowing the reader to put in line breaks or not. I would call them terrible American sonnets, but he won some award for them and they are occasionally entertaining.
Busy folk in the city paid no attention to the clouds splashing through the sky. The clouds got darker. They dropped thick, beautiful snow. The busy folk couldn’t get to work. The snow was so deep the snow plow driver didn’t see the sign to raise the plow in time. That made a mess.
People blamed the politicians who promised global warming. The politicians blamed the scientists. The scientists blamed Gaia. Since Gaia doesn’t exist, she couldn’t care less.
The clouds couldn’t care less either, because that’s not what clouds do. They splash through the sky dropping rain and snow.
Lucky this or lucky that,
Luck as bad as that black cat
Cuddling, purring by my side,
Unlikely place for luck to hide.
Thirteen demons looking mean
Pretending that I haven't seen
Them cackling when they watch me frown.
Too bored to laugh, I stare them down.
It's not bad luck that made them fall.
They jumped like Humpty from the wall
And then they cracked. Oops. Breakfast time!
You're lucky. That's my final rhyme.
Linked to Chel Owens’ A Mused Poetry Contest where the theme is “bad luck” used humorously.
We didn’t care that Jim was short on brains. We all liked him.
However, a few weeks ago he must have taken the wrong turn at a bend in some alley. He stopped clubbing and fooling around with us when we chased stuff that didn’t want to be chased. He even refused to help us tip dumpsters.
We couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, but we all knew he was a certified idiot when he finally told us that he had smartened up.
Linked to the Six Sentence Story challenge at GirlieOnTheEdge where Denise offers the prompt word “bend”.
Sometimes I don’t know what I’m talking about which is why I use more words than necessary and sometimes it’s just to pound the idea in over and over and over again until you forget that it never did make any sense.
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 