All at Once, It Happens
This time
the universal fortune cookie
reads, curiously enough,
things are not as they seem.
One might even
be tempted to, matter-of-factly state,
that, as of late, things have been
mildly discombobulated or
slightly de-centered or, at best
precariously balanced.
Words are shifting in their moorings,
people mistake you for long-lost cousins
and your contract with reality
is up for re-negotiation.
For example, one minute
you’re standing on a street corner
in downtown sturgeon bay,
waiting for the light to change,
a rare, out-of-print Carl Perkins album
tucked up under your arm
and a twelve-pack of Stag in your hand,
when a guy with a Walt Whitman beard
leans out from the window
of a passing van and says,
with genuine universal unconditional love
how’s it goin’, man?
the next,
you’re suddenly plunging,
headlong, through all the wayward
and wildly rioting leaves of late October.
All at once, it happens—
on a winding tree-lined road
somewhere on the fringes of Sonoma county,
they tumble and whirl,
surge and seize and sweep their way
across the continent like massive,
skittish schools of tropical fish,
a flurious and irradiant carousel
of chaos and insane color
washing over the car, the road,
blocking out the sky and the world
like a roving hybrid dream
of starfish and exotic jungle butterflies:
maples, lindens and cedars, pin oaks and box elders,
cottonwoods and sycamores, white birches and elms,
black cherries, ashes and osage oranges …
a nebulous and amorphous tide
rushing deep inland
to gather you up in its grand scheme
and carry you out
to the still breathing,
still with us,
still very much alive and kicking
Great Unknown.
.
The Story, So Far
— with apologies to Arthur Tress
It all starts with a young Adam West and Eva Gabor
(having been cast, here, as a sort of flawlessly wholesome
American Hansel and Gretel) gathering up sheaves of wheat
in the purple-orange after-glow of a setting sun,
the whole thing set to a lush accompaniment of angels with
Chinese eyes playing strange, other-worldly instruments.
And now a tongue-less dwarf (with a bright-feathered bird
perched on his shoulder) is standing by the side of the road,
holding, in one hand, the keys to a Chevy van (with a
valkyrie / viking princess air-brushed on the sides)
and a stained and tattered road atlas in the other.
And Johnny Socko and Giant Robot are finally done
with their daring-do adventuring for another day
(having saved the day, once again, from the clutches
of the evil Professor Hex and the Dragon Lady from Mars)
and are now slowly spiraling down into a deep
and dreamless sleep.
And Caruso, reviving his most famous role of Pagliaccio,
is giving voice lessons to Anne Boleyn (or is it Jane
Mansfield?) while some bit-part player (you know you’ve
seen her a million times, before) done-up in cliché
antebellum slave-girl garb is grinning a near-rictus grin
and beating out a jungle beat on an old washtub
and a tambourine.
And all the while an (as yet) unidentified goddess
or muse waits, anxiously, in the wings for her cue.
And it’s hotter than a Mexican sidewalk.
And Time is slouching, leisurely,
like some rough, lazy beast towards
the capitol city-state of The Self.
And that crazy sumbitch Sisyphus
has had his sentence re-commuted (once again)
to splitting hairs with Ockham’s razor
for all eternity (or just the foreseeable duration).
And all the while,
a butterfly sits dreaming on a railroad spike:
a dream of suddenly waking from a dream
and finding oneself to be nothing less
than The Great American Everyman,
who (it will eventually be revealed
through a succession of wildly improbable events)
has somehow come into possession
(one could very easily name it either a curse
or a blessing) of a magical toy chicken
that lays chocolate eggs covered in 14K gold leaf.
No one could possibly predict what happens next
or how the whole thing
finally ends.
Stink Eye Magazine 