Photo Essay: Experiments in Collage. Vol. 12.

 

Prose Poem: Snowball in Hell.

 

My team and I took a snowball to Hell.

We had to clean away centuries of

basket debris piled at the entrance,

but eventually we  managed to get

past the high water and present ourselves

to his Infernal Majesty.

He proved to be most gracious,

and curious.

"My dear mortals" he began,

"Why do you wish to bring a snowball

into my domain?"

"Well, it's this way" I told him.

"The glaciers are all melting topside.

And yet the winters get colder

while the summers get hotter.

We believe the human race no longer

has the chance of a snowball in Hell

to survive. We're here to prove that thesis,

one way or the other."

"And peppermint bushes now walk like men"

added my assistant, unhelpfully.

His Infernal Majesty appeared nonplussed.

"Please to produce the snowball" he finally requested.

I held it up for his inspection.

 It had melted into itself,

becoming a ball of ice.

It was dripping very slowly;

I calculated that at its current melt rate

it would last approximately two more days.

Mr. Scratch (if I may now be so familiar) clapped

his hands and two minions scurried over to

take the snowball from my hand to place inside a 

chest freezer in the corner.

"Funny" I mused out loud. "I didn't notice 

that freezer before . . . "

"My dear morsels" said the darkening figure on the throne, 

"I just materialized it.

 Please give your snowball no more 

thought whatsoever."

"Hey" said my assistant, "he called us 'morsels, instead of mortals."

"Indeed I did" said his Infernal Majesty (seemed like the use of his proper title was a better idea.)

"I find your ignorance and your conceit delicious, and I shall enjoy it, slowly and daintily, for eons to come" he said, sounding exactly like Frank Nelson on the old Jack Benny show while licking his glowing red lips. 

I knew we should have just stuck to drilling ice cores . . . 

Prose Poem: A Walt for All Seasons.

 

There was a man above all the seasons, when I was a youth.

He was contrary and caring at the same time.

An enigma wrapped up in brown paper soaked in

vinegar.

But it wasn't Walt Whitman, or any other Walt

you've ever heard of. 

It was Walt Greenblatt,

who owned the corner grocery.

Walt smelled like his store:

stale jawbreakers mingled with charcoal lighter.

Most people thought he would burn the place

down for the insurance any day.

But I knew he wouldn't.

Not Walt.

Good old Walt.

He hated kids.

He hated their mothers.

And he absolutely refused

to wait on men under the age of

forty.

He'd send his assistant, Shorty,

to handle customers,

while he sat in the corner 

by the Old Dutch potato chips

and kept up a continuous commentary:

"Sugar and matches, sugar and matches;

that guy's up to no good -- mark my words!

She want's milk on credit, for her baby?

I wanna see the baby first.

Rubbery carrots, she says.

Rubber's good for your eyes, toots."

For many years I dreamed of working

for Walt.

Of learning how to tell a yellow onion

from a white onion,

and how to sell Turtle Wax to 

people who didn't want to buy

 Turtle Wax.

But one night as he was closing up

the mops attacked him.

In the morning they found him

in a pool of Mr. Clean. 

So I became a watchmaker instead,

working on Native American reservations

you've never heard of.

I got a lot of government contracts. 

Prose Poem: Burning Calendars.

 

The Anti-Holiday Party swept into office this fall.

And since I was party chairperson, I got a

nice cozy sinecure.

My job was to collect all the old paper calendars

that had Halloween, Christmas, the Fourth of July,

and so on, noted on them, and incinerate them.

The bonfires were spectacular.

Some people watching them got carried away.

They threw their masks into the bonfires.

Then I had my men thrown them into the 

bonfire.

It all came about this way . . . 

No, I don't think I'll bother to explain it at all.

Why bother?

The facts of the matter are that we have no more holidays

of any kind -- national, religious, ethnic, or even silly like Ground Hog Day.

Every day is a work day.

There are no weekends.

Every day you get your temperature taken.

You have your mask inspected at a mask 

inspection station. 

You bring your six foot pole with you everywhere,

or face a thousand-dollar fine.

After all,

how are you to know if you are at least

six feet away from someone 

if you don't have a six foot pole 

with you? You're allowed to use a barge pole

if you're a citizen of Great Britain.

Birthday parties, too, are out.

So the new calendars are very sleek,

very plain affairs -- 

month names, day names, and numbers from 1 up to 31.

It's going to work like a charm.

 Excepting I don't think any of the big brains

took into account this is Leap Year yet . . . 

Photo Essay: Experiments in collage. Vol. 11

 

Prose Poem: Tell No One.

 

I was having trouble with my remote.

It wouldn't change over from TV to Netflix.

I checked the battery and fiddled 

with buttons. No go.

So I called my boss about it.

She's a good guy

and I feel comfortable 

unloading on her.

She said to take two aspirin

and call her in the morning.

What a joker she is!

I called her back

(we had got disconnected somehow)

and said "No, seriously -- my remote

isn't functioning properly. Can

you come over for a minute to look

at it? It's really stressing me out."

She couldn't make it that night;

she said she was sorting organic allspice

and couldn't interrupt the process

without grave damage to the product.

I'm an understanding guy,

so I said sure -- come over tomorrow morning.

But strangely enough I got called 

into the office early the next morning.

and told I was downsized.

Was given only twenty minutes to 

clean out my desk.

At my next job I got along with

my new boss famously.

He was very fatherly.

He was an older man,

with a bad heart and diabetes.

So when I got a parking ticket

I waited until mid-afternoon,

after he'd had his lunch and

rested a bit, then went into

his office to ask him if he

could fix my parking ticket.

I had to go look up the word "effrontery"

after he was done talking to me.

After that it was a long time

before I found work again.

But this time I had learned my lesson.

When I got a boil on my neck

I scheduled a staff meeting to show

everyone on my team

 the problem on Zoom.

That worked out fine.

I got put in charge of charting 

everyone's daily temperatures.

Prose Poem: The suspected unwell.

 

(based on a story by Drew Harwell)

The temperature police broke down my door

at 8:30 p.m. on a Thursday.

"Are you here to burn my books?"

I asked timidly.

"What's books?" asked the youngest cop.

"Never mind that" snarled the chief officer of

the squad. "We got a report of potential risk

in this household; so we're gonna have to

search the place."

"Be my guest" I replied nervously.

I had nothing to hide. 

I hoped.

They took my temperature.

They took the temperature of

my cat.

And my goldfish.

Even the geranium in the window sill.

"Got something here, Sarge!" yelled 

the young guy from the kitchen.

They all crowded into the kitchen,

guns drawn.

I was baking cornbread in the oven.

"This device is way too hot" 

said the Sarge. "Turn it off immediately!"

So I did. No use arguing with authority

when it has a gun.

"Where's your face mask?" asked the Sarge.

"You need to be wearing it right now."

"You're not wearing one" I ventured.

That was a mistake.

"Oh, a wise guy" growled the Sarge.

"That'll cost you exactly fifty dollars, pal."

"Sorry" I said meekly.

"You're standing too close to that rubber plant"

said the young cop. I was really beginning to

hate that guy.

"Move away!" barked the Sarge.

I moved. And began to sweat.

Heavily.

"Look, Sarge! He's sweating like a pig"

said the young cop.

"He must be one of them

suspected unwell."

They hustled me into their green van.

An hour later I was in a sterilized holding cell

after the temperature police had made me

skip rope with a rubber hose.

A doctor examined me.

He found symptoms of dandruff 

and halitosis. 

That was enough to send me to Camp Fauci,

outside of Juneau Alaska.

It was actually quite pleasant.

We played cribbage with the guards

and had cooking classes from world class

chefs.

I learned to make beef bourguignon.

I especially enjoyed the yoga sessions.

When I was released two years later

they gave me a Land's End parka,

gift certificates for Walgreens,

and ten thousand dollars.

So I settled in Juneau.

A very nice place. No parking meters.

And when I came down with leprosy

they elected me mayor.

Photo Essay: Experiments in Collage. Vol. 10

 

Prose Poem: Off the grid.

 

When I decided to go off the grid,

I didn't tell a single solitary soul.

I wanted to see how long it would be

before my family and friends missed 

my sparkling presence on Twitter 

and Facebook.

I was fed up with the narcissistic malarkey and 

outright falsehoods my social media accounts

were filled with.

So I pulled the plug.

No more emails.

If people wanted to get a hold of

me they could mail me a letter.

Which is what I would do to them.

Or come over to see me.

Or call me on my Tracfone.

Of course, they'd need my new number.

So I sent out a batch of postcards with it.

I had ditched my smartphone

and got myself a Tracfone instead.

Then I sat back and quietly waited.

After a week I began to worry;

didn't anybody miss me?

Was I so insignificant that

not a person on earth cared

I was gone from the internet?

After a month of no responses

I went over to

Crazy Henry's house.

He's my oldest friend.

He answered the door 

and invited me in for 

cornbread and iced tea.

"Miss me much?" I asked him

finally.

"Nope" he said. "Did you go someplace?"

"I'm off the grid" I told him impatiently.

"Have been off it for months!"

Crazy Henry squeezed more lemon

into his iced tea.

"Can't say I noticed" said Crazy Henry.

"I spend all my online time with 

Project Gutenberg, reading old Argosy

stories."

"Well, that's a stupid waste of time" I told him.

He shrugged his shoulders and began

peeling a quince. 

That's when the revelation hit me;

all my friends, all my family,

had been corrupted and maimed

by social media.

Not a one of them could hold up

their end of an intelligent conversation

anymore.

So I said goodbye to Crazy Henry 

and went back home.

And waited.

Waited for intelligence to contact me.

From anywhere. From outer space, even.

I never heard any voices; I never got any postcards.

My phone never buzzed.

I walked down to the drugstore

every day to pick up a newspaper.

You can trust newspapers.

They never get an obituary 

or crossword puzzle wrong.

Finally, a year later, I got a letter

from the National Security Administration.

They wanted to know why I was off the grid.

They were, they wrote, concerned I might

die alone in my house and no one would 

know about it for months.

The letter was personally signed by 

J. Edgar Hoover.

That's when I grew a beard

and began to wear nothing but moccasins.

I moved onto a derelict barge

on the Mississippi.

When The New Yorker writer came by

that winter to do a profile

on me

as "The Last Holdout," 

I told her I was starving and

had rickets. Beri-beri, too.

She bought me food and tried

to get me to drink a bottle of wine

with her.

That's when I knew she was 

a government agent, not a writer

from The New Yorker.

If she were with The New Yorker

she'd get a bottle of cheap gin instead.

I threw a moccasin at her and dove

into the icy Mississippi.

And haven't been heard from since.

Prose Poem: Ready to be myself.

 

At long last, I am ready to be myself.

For the first seventeen years of my life

I played the part of a waif.

Even though I had good parents,

plenty to eat, and

a nice big house 

with a huge backyard.

I sat on curbs near bridges

over the river in the downtown

section of a Midwestern city,

making wistful eyes at

passersby.

Some gave me money.

Some gave me used clothing.

Some gave me candy.

All of which I threw in the river.

When I turned eighteen

I became a genius.

I got a scholarship to Harvard.

Where I smoked a pipe

and constructed complex

algorithms.

I shunned the girls

and schmoozed the professors.

And became the youngest tenured

faculty member in history.

At twenty-five I grew weary of the

academic rat race,

so I stowed away on a 

schooner headed for the

South China Sea.

My mistake.

It was only a ride at Diseneyland.

So I sold popcorn from a bright red

wagon on Main Street.

Until I got caught eating the popcorn.

Then it was Sing Sing.

A hardened recidivist,

I crashed out of the joint

several times

but was always caught

and thrown into solitary.

Where I bounced a rubber ball

endlessly against the damp wall,

and composed a reply to Oscar Wilde's

'De Profundis.'

Which got me an early parole.

But none of those roles were me.

At heart, I'm just a swineherd.

Watching over my Lincolnshire Curly Coats 

as they snuffle for mast in the autumn leaves.

That's what I thought I wanted.

But never achieved.

Instead, I was caught up 

in the mad whirl of 

North Dakota's literary scene

during the 1990's.

I married the governor's daughter,

then went completely vegan.

When the dust settled,

I was on my own in Thailand.

Unfriended, unknown, and undernourished.

A tribe of Huguenots took me in

and made me their mascot.

But that was only to fatten me up

for a sacrifice to their volcano god --

Mugwump.

I escaped by the skin of my teeth.

Stayed with an aunt in New Jersey.

And suddenly grew old and mossy 

and smelly.

That's when the pigs started following

me around.

Now I live in a cabin on a pond

next to the railroad tracks,

where I butcher the pigs that

seek me out, so I can feed

itinerant hoboes on their way

to the wildfires out West.

It's who I really truly am:

A murderous carnivore

who battens off the miseries

of the lumpenproletariat.