Thoughts, in chapters

Word Count: 943

Chapter 1:
The heat beats me relentlessly. I sigh a hymn of defeat in a gravel street. No shade, no trees. I heed the advice of those who wrote before me.
I woke up in a pile of change today wondering where home was. I concluded home is a fleeting concept. It keeps moving through space with time.
Hello, wake up call. Hello, firm grasp of the temporary. A little late, I think. Therefore, I am metaphorically homeless. Baffles like time travel, rips like tornado, stings like soapy eyes.
O, the healing properties of game night, self medicating with Yahtzee parties. Woe, the dark, the absence of light. No more Scrabble, Uno, Mancala, or Sorry.
A man in full control is his own cough suppressant. A woman in full control used to be a man. We can argue about what that is or isn’t. It was written not with a plan.

Chapter 2:
The world is an intriguing place
Where your status depends on your race,
Where any Joe
With light skin tone
Can get by with a smiling face.

Everyone’s a poet
Whether they know it, bestow it,
Or blow it right off.
Address it or suppress it,
Or show it right off.

Just don’t forget it.
Everyone’s a poet.

Chapter 3:
Whitman must not have had allergies.

Chapter 4:
You will not find me underneath the porchlight
Carefully hidden in the quiet part of midnight.
A brisk rush of wind blows the leaves into the air.
I sit, I listen, I stare.
I’m not sure what I’m waiting for
I’ll know it when I see.
I met an eight ball of an oracle
High up in a tree.
She was shaken up and desperate,
Naked through and through.
I told her my life story,
For I thought that she was you.
She told me I was going to die like everybody else.
I told her I knew that, and she nudged me, and I fell.
I saw a white light and a staircase with a sign.
I grabbed myself a number and I began to climb.
I reached the peak in time and met a man holding a gun.
He said to go back down, that I was not His son.
I said, “I am too young to die,” and pocketed my pride.
I waited and waited but the man did not reply.
Whatever, I fell.
Wasn’t in heaven, wasn’t in hell.

Chapter 5:
OCDiction. Rhyme.
ADDoodle. Pills.

Chapter 6:
Here is a list of races that I hate:
Four-legged race
Potato sack race
Anything Nascar
The race against time

You and I are slaves to clocks. It’s always a race against time. What could be more unforgiving? A second chance? Not a chance. A clock’s got the only hands that aren’t handy.

Chapter 7:
A man in a restaurant looks down at his meal, and then around the restaurant. “There’s something fishy about this place,” he observes. It was a Long John Silvers.
A man visits a shooting range with his son. On the way out, the son claims that “shooting was a blast.”

I write Alanis Morrisette one letter a week. Each letter contains, simply, the definition of “irony.” Nothing more. I sign a different name every time.

Poetry is what it is.

Chapter 8:
shed elitist
detective hiding again
spread conviction
exclusive control aids moving undertones
Another scum lurks beneath the image!
An expired detective, swamped and buried, lies murdered undiscovered.
A witch reacts, unsuccessfully.
Witchcraft is dead.
The detective is dead.
The robot has had its revenge.
and begins to breed
and learns to breathe.
Evolution.

Chapter 9:
The Earth is 6000 years old.
Carbon dating ain’t shit.
Evolution never happened.
Have an abortion,
Or be gay,
And get excommunicated, sucka!
Approach the alter with a blind eye,
Or approach and be a midget,
Death by stoning, sucka!
Sell your female slaves into slavery
And they shall not go free the way male slaves do.
Should you buy slaves,
They must be from nations around you.
Trim your beard or cut the hair on your temple,
Prepare for a hellish afterlife, sucka!
The crusades!
The children’s crusades!

Suddenly, science. Smart, self-aware sentients no longer sick with stupidity.

A woman finally released from a 30 year life in a basement sees the outside for the first time. She is horrified by everything that moves because of wind.

Chapter 10:
Women’s basketball: shirts versus skins

Chapter 11:
I release energy
in brute force of irony.
There's no structure to
my rhyme or reason.

Believe you me, when you sleep,
I’m up twisting in the sheets
trying to wrap my head around
time and being.

They said that the massacres were frightening,
that young people were dying,
that someone had to do something.

I arose with my noble sword a'shining.
I marched and began swinging.
I was a beacon of hope for a battered army.

I swear to god I met a saint
who had a way with words and a way with pain.

I found out the hard way.

She sang "I’ll lead you as far as I can."
She would’ve led farther if it weren’t for one man:
the king of the country, a tyrant of sin.
I promised myself that one day I’d be him
and I’d change this land for the better.

But I was locked up in the tower
like some prisoner princess.

It must’ve been fate.
I snatched the key to the gate.

Look what you’ve built
and what you’ve destroyed
by tearing down walls
and having armies deployed.
what was once grand
will fall again and again
and there's no one to blame but me.

MIKE MEMMESHEIMER