ICR
Why do clowns frown?
They’re funny being sullen and glum.
I like Eeyore. His dark humor and
saturnine persona are both spot-on.
His anti-supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
attitude, taken too literally, can be sad,
but why be so literal? He’s not Russian,
not a nihilist. He’s just an old jackass.
Look both ways for the humor in the ridiculousness of life.
Mind the gaps, but not too closely, they can be downers, too.
I had to look it up. Jejune means devoid of significance and dull. Its many synonyms include stodgy, insipid, vapid, banal, and boring.
Jerkoff
I don’t care
what you think
about
long dead
bukowski.
I read/re-read
(either way)
his non-stuffy
prose or poems.
why do I care?
he’s not jejune.
his paradigm
or mine?
Look both ways for truth and reality.
Mind your gaps but admit not your secret pleasures.
Privileged Judging
Some cite unfairness, injustices of inequality
when others are born into better but another into less.
Yet both pride and shame rise from elite or proletariat hearts,
be it random common birth, natural placement, or bad seed.
No artist must suffer a lowly soul, in pain from cursed reality or chemical dependence, haunted, as snotty critics bestow their judgement of ironic reverse snobbishness and scorn upon the cleanly washed.
Let demure honestly determine the good in all forms of art and beauty
as critical opine speaks well of all mankind. Let art stand as art.
May wonderous life arise from ashes just as bleak and evil fall from the heavens, the source of rain or shine is not the matter.
Look both ways. Is the artist the art?
Vice-versa?
Do we choose birth circumstances?
Mind the gaps but judge wisely and care deeply.
Whispering Cuts
Lost in a familiar sea of grave reality, my dysfunctional heart not yet surrendered, something of which none are certain. Worry descended like a pall over my will. Sadness has taken control of my soul. Well-intentioned, high-riding key influencers are wheedling me into their delusional corner. Life, lies, and what matters: shut down before I hit the ground. I ponder death, or better, conceivably, never to have been born at all.
Look both ways, but in the end, it is just the end.
Nothing more.
Mind the gaps of life’s traps.
Sometimes it’s your fault. Sometimes it’s not.
They called him Tom—not his real name.
This guy was no head-hanging Tom Dooley.
Tom liked to watch. A voyeur. A peeking peeper.
A people watcher of the lowest and riskiest form.
Yet, old Tom was submissive. Not dangerous. But who knew?
Night was his time—windows framed his fantasies.
One day Tom saw something that made him
stop peeping—almost. “Now I’ve seen everything.
My life is complete. And I need to go to confession,
but not with that priest.” Tom, confided in himself.
Then, late one warm summer night, there was a scream.
Someone else yelled.
Dogs barked.
Tom ran.
He heard a gunshot.
Maybe Tom had seen everything. But he never made it
to confession. He died doing what he loved.
What he needed.
And he died running,
just not fast enough. Peeping Tom was no more.
“And another one gone” and
“Another one bites the dust.”
Look both ways.
Exhibitionists and watchers can work together,
each according to his, her, or their wants and needs.
Absurd Salt
Nothing is forever,
yet, the only thing that can never really be
is exactly nothing, that which never was,
and we can never really see.
We are here—together
only for a moment.
Then, the moment’s gone—forever!
Never to be again.
Everything
changes.
Our world is what was not before
and what will never be again.
We cannot capture time’s illusion.
There is no perpetual, everlasting life.
There is only this brief fleeting moment,
good or bad as life’s delusion would have it.
Look both ways all you want, but here and now, fear Sartre’s authentic freedom.
Mind the gaps for answers, but there is no objective truth.
Rochelle, our dear dancing diva with big black boots and broken toes, has punted a Friday Fictioneers photo from Starsinclayjars to us, twice actually. Her intent is for us to score goals by netting our 100-word (or fewer) stories for mid-November. We are to look and see the picture, big or small, and then write a story from our mused inspiration. Thence, to blog post said fibs for all the world to admire and love.
Be bold and click on the boot by the bush for a fast flash over to Mistress Rochelle’s rockin’ blog to kick up some fun with micro fiction. Post your story in one of the squares thingies and jump in on others to tell them what you think, even if you don’t know who they are.
Genre: Historical Fiction
Title: Canned English
Word Count: 100
***
The young Englishman intended to stand against the obstinate, award-winning poet, and sardonic senior citizen.
“You must wear the standard green uniform, Sir, or face the boot.”
Peter glared, “Unsatisfactory. I’ve done this vapid work well-enough for twenty-two years. I want the job. Not uniforms.”
“Sir, the National Agribusiness empowered me to inform you that you are suspended. Agree to our terms, the job is still yours.”
Peter watched a bird and sipped his wine, “You’re a callow, grotesquely inadequate twit. I’d rather live in Marfa bloody Texas than work for you jackasses.”
The young man was beet-red, “Where’s Marfan?”
***
Look both ways and be true to your conscience.
Mind the gaps, especially if your day job is on the proverbial line.
English poet Peter Reading and I were born an ocean apart on the same day, 27 July 1946. He was “one of Britan’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious, and heartbreaking. His scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, and cultural impoverishment” captured this Bokowski-lover’s mind, heart, and imagination.
He was fired for refusing to wear a uniform, lived in Marfa, Texas, for a time, and titled the book about that experience Marfan. Peter died about 11 years ago, but his attitude and poetry live on.
Love Matters
You suffer loss
Heart breaks,
My love means
Tears of mourning,
Our common sadness rules
Two lives.
Look both ways.
There is a time to cry and a time to laugh, a time to be sad and a time to dance.
Mind the gaps for the lessons of both sorrow and joy.
Small Battles: Big Wars
We
would rather f-bomb
or recite angry litanies
of forbidden witchery
than speak the word: cancer.
It’s when few of one’s
trillions of cells run amok,
it’s a war fought with
knives, rads, and poisons.
Look both ways to see your own beginning and end.
Mind the gaps, fight the battle, die with dignity.
John Updike, best known, perhaps, as a novelist, was a poet. This short poem of his is one of my favorites regarding life and death. He died of lung cancer in 2009.
This poem was rendered to meet today’s dVerse challenge offered by Paeansunplugged from Delhi. We are to write about the good and evil in mere mortals, the good in evil and/or the evil in good. For me, at no time is that enigma more profound than in times of war and battle.
Conundrum War
One story I’ve never told,
a confession…
if evil were evil enough,
if good were good enough,
I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage…
but courage, too, has finite quantities,
yet it offers hope and grace to the repetitive coward.
I can’t fix my mistakes.
Once people are dead, I can’t make them undead…
killing and dying are not my special province.
Am I too good for this war?
Too smart, too compassionate, too everything?
I’m above it. It’s a mistake, maybe.
Look both ways at good and evil or take Hamlet’s advice and think it so.
Mind the gaps between and within our perceptions of what is better and what is truth.
Our Literary Journey 