Get your RSVP (Respondez s'il vous Plait)

Your presence is cordially invited
(If you please)
To the Troll Invitational Only Ball
Come one , come all !
Only the best heed this call
Featuring the Marque band ,
"Smashing Poets"
Playing their monster hits ,
"Clip You At The Knees" and "The Killer In Me Sets Me Free"

Join in the festivities
As we debase humankind
A great time is guaranteed
For all "Troll" beings
BIG or small
So come one , come all ye Trolls
To the Invitational Ball


Comments :

The Thaumaturge : When we're we supposed to get our invites ?

Thomas A Robinson : What ? You didn't get one ? Must be some kind of oversight !

The T. : I'm sending you hate mail as we speak so that you know my address this time .

TAR. : Will do , I'll be in wait . . . not !

The T. : I don't own a car and I was reading a book literally the other day .

Craig Moore : Is the ball going to be under a bridge ?

TAR. : Of course !

The T. : I feel like I'd be shunned at a trolls only ball since I'm more of an antitroll if anything .

TAR. : Well it takes one to break one .

The T. : Nice to know my efforts don't go unnoticed .

Craig Moore : But there is only one ?

TAR. : Proxy ! ! !

The T. : Oh alright . I've got like a billion of those .

TAR. : That's proxies , not proxy !

The T. : Yeah , I've got a billion proxy .

TAR. : Proxies ! ! !

The T. : No I have a lot of proxy .

TAR. : Ha ha , that sounds moxy !

The T. : Is it just a little bit foxy ?

TAR. : Now I'm shredding your invitation !

The T. : What ! Why ? I thought that would be a perfect example of trolling . Don't make me drop the B-bomb !

TAR. : Trolling - the act of dragging a lure or bait behind a boat in the hopes of attracting a fish to bite the bait or lure becoming hooked and caught . You're troll bait .

The T. : That was the whole proxy/proxies thing ! And as for you , you are a troll incarnate TAR and not even a clever one .
Yeah Thomas ! Leave yourself alone ! Anyway I was supposed to be invited but they tore it up after I arrived .

TAR. : And you call yourself a miracle worker ?

The T. : You want a miracle ! I'll show you a miracle !

TAR. : What ? Hack my account ? Been done already .

The T. : That's not a miracle . Tell me what would impress you ?

TAR. : Simple , eliminate all trolls from here permanately . Should be only a minor miracle .

Tap . Tap . Tap .

TAR. : I see he cannot eliminate even one troll .

The T. : What are you talking about ? They're all gone !

TAR. : Smoke and mirrors . Don't gaslight me ! I'm an optimist . One who sees through fog clearly .

The T. : My only weakness .

TAR. : So put up or shut up .

The T. : Honest is the best policy .

TAR. : Honesty ! ! !

The T. : Thomas A Robinson your obscene proclamations are easily dismissed by adults . What would you do to a child in a public restroom ?

TAR. : I would call you for advice . Whoops ! No I wouldn't ! I would take the knife out of your hand .

The T. : You remove the knife from my hand only to find out that I'm actually a large swarm of bees wearing a trench coat .

TAR. : I would be the bee and tan your hive !

The T. : Maybe make a moovee out of it ?

TAR. : Bagging the killer B's . Pyrethium dreams . Your honey's run dry . You sting me I **** you .

The T. : That'd just **** me twice .

TAR. : Well good night Miracle worker . Don't let the bee mites bite .

The T. : I hate those bee mites , sweet dreams are made of bees .

TAR. : Ha Ha Ha , dear Annie Lennox is fumigating now . You're a Pox on everyone .

Mya-Angel Madden : How dare I miss the Ball of Trolls ! Whatever happened to Lucifer ? **** .

TAR. : Ah , the days of Lucy, when the definition of a troll was perfected !
All others now are just doormats in comparison .

Pintu Mahakul : Join in the festivities and this is very amazing definitely .. .

TAR. : Thank you Pintu Mahakul .

My hooded head casts a shadow
across the overflowing ashtray.
My exhaled smoke is silhouetted on the
handcrafted clay.
In the shape of an oyster,
painted with the colors of
rebellious 21st century youth:
Red. Gold. Green.
With a flare of "originality."
Breeze, light, cold
escorts winter across my
aged face and I see all that my life is:
Tar. Work. Tar. Tar. Sleep.
Work. Tar. Eat. Work. Tar.
Tar. Work. Eat. Work.
Drink coffee.
Tar.
Sleep.
Die.
Is this equation what I am
reduced to?
Simple formula, obsessive compulsive
DREAM.
The exponents of my life,
variables and names:
Tar. to the power of X.
Tar. to the power of M.
But exponents and powers
mean little to drowning men.
Can a man suffocate on
his own routine?
Can a man fashion a noose
from the fibers of his
"adult life?"
Look, Ma!
I'm all growed-up.
I have murdered adventure
and the youth that lives
inside it.
I snapped one too many thin branches,
fell through the thin ice,
and now I am addicted to solid ground.
I will stand on the banks,
watching the children
ice-skate around my ashtray
that overflows with
every "yesterday" and
half-smoked "this one time"
that comprise my
former life.
I am a grown-up now.

The first settlers to the area called the Lumber River Drowning Creek. The river got its name for its dark, swift-moving waters. In 1809, the North Carolina state legislature changed the name of Drowning Creek to the Lumber River. The headwaters are still referred to as Drowning Creek.

Three p.m. on a Sunday.
Anxiously hungry, I stay dry, out of the pool’s cold water,
taking the light, dripping into my pages.
A city with a white face blank as a bust
peers over my shoulder.
Wildflowers on the roads. Planes circle from west,
come down steeply and out of sight.
A pinkness rises in my breast and arms:
wet as the drowned, my eyes sting with sweat.
Over the useless chimneys a bank of cloud piles up.
There is something terrible in the sky, but it keeps breaking.
Another is dead. Fentanyl. Sister of a friend, rarely seen.
A hand reaches everywhere to pass over eyes and mouths.
A glowing wound opens in heaven.
A mirror out of doors draws a gyre of oak seeds no one watches,
in the clear pool now sunless and black.

Bitter water freezes the muscles and I am far from shore.
I paddle in the shallows, near the wooden jail.
The water reflects a taut rope,
feet hanging in the breeze singing mercy
at the site of the last public hanging in the state.
A part-white fugitive with an extorted confession,
loved by the poor, dumb enough to get himself captured,
lonely on this side of authority: a world he has never lived in
foisting itself on the world he has -
only now, to steal his drunken life, then gone again.

1871 - Henderson Oxendine, one of the notorious gang of outlaws who for some time have infested Robeson County, N. C., committing ****** and robbery, and otherwise setting defiance to the laws, was hung at Lumberton, on Friday last in the presence of a large assemblage. His execution took place a very few days after his conviction, and his death occurred almost without a struggle.

Today, the town square collapses as if scorched
by the whiskey he drank that morning to still himself,
folds itself up like Amazing Grace is finished.
A plinth is laid
in the shadow of his feet, sticky with pine,
here where the water sickens with roots.
Where the canoe overturned. Where the broken oar floated and fell.
Where the snake lives, and teethes on bark,
waiting for another uncle.

Where the tobacco waves near drying barns rusted like horseshoes
and cotton studs the ground like the cropped hair of the buried.
Where schoolchildren take the afternoon
to trim the kudzu growing between the bodies of slaves.
Where appetite is met with flood and fat
and a clinic for the heart.
Where barges took chips of tar to port,
for money that no one ever saw.

Tar sticks the heel but isn’t courage.
Tar seals the hulls -
binds the planks -
builds the road.
Tar, fiery on the tongue, heavy as bad blood in the family -
dead to glue the dead together to secure the living.
Tar on the roofs, pouring heat.
Tar is a dark brown or black viscous liquid of hydrocarbons and free carbon,
obtained from a wide variety of organic materials
through destructive distillation.
Tar in the lungs will one day go as hard as a five-cent candy.

Liberty Food Mart
Cheapest Prices on Cigarettes
Parliament $22.50/carton
Marlboro $27.50/carton

The white-bibbed slaughterhouse Hmong hunch down the steps
of an old school bus with no air conditioner,
rush into the cool of the supermarket.
They pick clean the vegetables, flee with woven bags bulging.
What were they promised?
Air conditioning.
And what did they receive?
Chickenshit on the wind; a dead river they can't understand
with a name it gained from killing.

Truth:
A man was flung onto a fencepost and died in a front yard down the street.
A girl with a grudge in her eyes slipped a razorblade from her teeth and ended recess.
I once saw an Indian murdered for stealing a twelve-foot ladder.
The red line indicating heart disease grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating cardiovascular mortality grows higher and higher.
The red line indicating motor vehicle deaths grows higher and higher.
I burn with the desire to leave.

The stories make us full baskets of dark. No death troubles me.
Not the girl's blood, inert, tickled by opiates,
not the masked arson of the law;
not the smell of drywall as it rots,
or the door of the safe falling from its hinges,
or the chassis of cars, airborne over the rise by the planetarium,
three classmates plunging wide-eyed in the river’s icy arc –
absent from prom, still struggling to free themselves from their seatbelts -
the gunsmoke at the home invasion,
the tenement bisected by flood,
the cattle lowing, gelded
by agriculture students on a field trip.

The air contains skin and mud.
The galvanized barns, long empty, cough up
their dust of rotten feed, dry tobacco.
Men kneel in the tilled rows,
to pick up nails off the ground
still splashed with the blood of their makers.

You Never Sausage a Place
(You’re Always a ****** at Pedro’s!)
South of the Border – Fireworks, Motel & Rides
Exit 9: 10mi.

Drunkards in Dickies will tell you the roads are straight enough
that the drive home will not bend away from them.
Look in the woods to see by lamplight
two girls filling each other's mouths with smoke.
Hear a friendly command:
boys loosening a tire, stuck in the gut of a dog.
Turn on the radio between towns of two thousand
and hear the tiny voice of an AM preacher,
sharing the airwaves of country dark
with some chords plucked from a guitar.
Taste this water thick with tannin
and tell me that trees do not feel pain.
I would be a mausoleum for these thousands
if I only had the room.

I sealed myself against the flood.
Bodies knock against my eaves:
a clutch of cats drowned in a crawlspace,
an old woman bereft with a vase of pennies,
her dead son in her living room costumed as the black Jesus,
the ***** oil of a Chinese restaurant
dancing on top of black water.
A flow gauge spins its tin wheel
endlessly above the bloated dead,
and I will pretend not to be sick at dinner.

Misery now, a struggle ahead for Robeson County after flooding from Hurricane Matthew
LUMBERTON
After years of things leaving Robeson County – manufacturing plants, jobs, payrolls, people – something finally came in, and what was it but more misery?

I said a prayer to the city:
make me a figure in a figure,
solvent, owed and owing.
Take my jute sacks of wristbones,
my sheaves and sheaves of fealty,
the smell of the forest from my feet.
Weigh me only by my purse.
A slim woman with a college degree,
a rented room without the black wings
of palmetto roaches fleeing the damp:
I saw the calm white towers and subscribed.
No ingrate, I saved a space for the lost.
They filled it once, twice, and kept on,
eating greasy flesh straight from the bone,
craning their heads to ask a prayer for them instead.

Downtown later in the easy dark,
three college boys in foam cowboy hats shout in poor Spanish.
They press into the night and the night presses into them.
They will go home when they have to.
Under the bridge lit in violet,
a folding chair is draped in a ***** blanket.
A grubby pair of tennis shoes lay beneath, no feet inside.
Iced tea seeps from a chewed cup.
I pass a bar lit like Christmas.
A mute and pretty face full of indoor light
makes a promise I see through a window.
I pay obscene rents to find out if it is true,
in this nation tied together with gallows-rope,
thumbing its codex of virtues.