Sunday, April 13, 2008

Tomfoolery and Half Measures

Marjorie, the harridan’s sister’s friend, thought that Swiss steak was invented in Wiltshire Salisbury by a soy-chef with the whooping and an overbite. The harridan’s sister thought that Salisbury steak was invented by a lamplighter by the name of Fallowsworth in the township of Bistrita-Nasaud in the city of Bistrita. The harridan thought thinking was first thought out by a man in a too-small skullcap in Almere, a smallish town in the lowlands of Flevoland the Netherlands. The shamble leg man thought vectors and into’s were discovered in Haedo Buenos Aires by an Argentinean blacksmith with a too-hot smithy and a gimpy leg. The legless man though that the concept of leglessness was conceived of in a cowherder’s hovel in a nondescript Libyan village in Arab Jamahiriya. The Witness, who was witness to nothing, hawked pamphlets and card tricks in front of the Holy Cross Babel church behind the Waymart across from the aqueduct. All five of them were incurably imbecilic, not knowing which end of the stick had the shit on it.

The bow legged man came back for a visit, his legs bowing to beat the band. He’d been on a hiatus, revisiting the creek and reek of his earlier days, days built round tomfoolery and half-measures. The last anyone had seen of him, head or hair of him, was the day the harridan’s sister sold 27½ Pop-siècle stick placemats to a man pretending to be a horse. ‘Poor sod’ thought the man pretending to be a horse, ‘legs like calipers’. That day, the day before the bow egged man left on his hiatus, he stopped to buy a Pop-siècle stick placemat from the harridan’s sister, wanting a keepsake of the time he’d spent bowing round and round the church where the church bazaar was held (every second Sunday and the days leading up to Lent). The man pretending to be a horse, having beat the bow legged man to the harridan’s sister’s table, bought up all of the Pop-siècle stick placemats, leaving only a handful of Crepe Mache gunboats, none of which were very well made.

(Author’s aside: stand aside the aside and I promise you a bumpy ride. Stand astride the aside and I ensure you a grave full of dross and bad manners. My words are graves, graves dug out with my fingernails and a Cub Scout’s penknife, the one I won for sewing my badges on straight on my Cub Scout’s sash. Astride the aside and I will offer you a grave mistake, a Cub Scout’s meanderings sewn crookedly on a Cub Scout’s sash. I, the author of this crookedly sewn grave of words, offer you nothing, less than nothing, twice less than nothing. So beware you who think you will find anything, anything at all here, here in this graveside of words and meanderings).

1 comment:

Joanne said...

ah, but graverobbers are an uncouth bunch, neither standing on ceremony awaiting a proper invitation, nor paying much mind to the 'keep out' sign on the gate...they find what they will.

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"Poetry is the short-circuiting of meaning between words, the impetuous regeneration of primordial myth". Bruno Schulz
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