'Twas the night before Thanksgiving
And all through the forest
All the turkeys were gathered
From the richest to poorest

For a meeting was called
To plan their revenge
For all of their loved ones
Who were ever cooked or singed

Now this turkey rebellion
Was long overdue
How would they get even?
And what would they do?

I was there that night
When their meeting adjourned
Keep reading this poem
To see what I learned

This meeting went on
For what seemed like an hour
'Til a gobbler stepped forth
In their circle of power

Now all the turkeys agreed
To this gobbler's idea
They'd all eat some exlax
And give them diarrhea

No matter how they cooked it
Bake it or boil it
The humans would spend
All day on the toilet

So, remember this Thanksgiving
As you try to relax
Have plenty of TP
For those sudden attacks

the mystery of lawlessness is bound to the "transcendence" of phonetic application of phonetic encoding... some call it the whirlwind of confusion, but somes also call it E-près and then write Ypres... well, the confusion is all but apparent... i left that in "     " to stress the ambiguity... yes, the -s is optional... it's neither possessive or plural... that, i could have learned in prison, had i ever been a Becontree purple (bishop)... dictionary moment: cranium, crimson, cradle... cardinal... but all these positions of power are on their knees (there's me trying in vain to underline that), they gobble-quote what they quack... which ends up being a circumflex and a wanking hand, embedded with "touching" Adam. oh sure they bypassed the contemporary-of-contemporaries... it was never a grey-matter affair... it was always a gangster's drill-to-the-bone moment... wait till he squeems! i don't mind ******, given the person is dead, i just hate half-asked half-baked half-bollocked Dr. Dre attempts and then failing and then, like a whining dog with its tail between its legs going back to the mantra of mother fiction... i ******* hate it... i start looking like a ******* ******! i hate it... mutter fiktion... all i'll say of a Jew: don't ******* bring an argument against the Palatine Schting right now... i have as much abhorrence against all things Egyptian as i do about English tea, which i deemed liquidated Werther's Original... and then there's this Russian ***** i'd like to the village bicycle... she's had more spare parts done unto her than the working limbs ever gave her the tilt... feminism and the sacredness of all women... name that movie quiz show... charlize theron... aileen wuornos! woo-or-nose? never mind...
   a 1K spectacle at Hastings... that's invoking quid...
and you'll feel more tonguing mollusks than
                          touching a frightened ****** quill-thread's
worth of deer with that lingo, had you ever had one...
              MONSTER!      yes, they all dream of a breakfast
at tiffany's... and i'm john paul the 2nd, and
     henry viii was a joke nursery rhyme
  when charlie bid farewell to diana...
there was no:
         divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived...
there was only a car-crash... you can't make
    a king out of swine... well... you can... Sweyn...
                  but **** me... and i thought i was naive...
guess the ***** didn't kick in when it was supposed
to; once true journalism became the ****** of what
was once the ****** of the people...
             religion... journalism these days is rotten,
it's an Aristophanes to what's really happening
defined by Socrates... it's a schoolyard...
  journalism these days is best defined by Aristophanes;
and who's the globe-trotting-gobbler of all misfits
is not the would-be diarist of returning back to
the local, the usual, the sanctimonious mundaneness
of it all; you **** only once in your life,
you end up having a **** the rest of the time,
either with your hand, or with another body.

oh i'm not bothered about the "perverts"
(funny how only men are concerned with
being named that) -
                               that are watching you,
those third party incisors of
             the bony-**** (hey, you
could be yodeling **** by now) -
                          what i'm
worried about are the perverts that provide
the "perverts" with material,
it's all very much a Turning test...
               that robotics testing ground
of: i can't keep eye contact...
   the lesser privy of psychiatry?
eye contact and biting your nails...
if that can be engaged with and subsequently
avoided:
you're as chirp as chips! honey b.
          can anyone white
feel glamorous using language in order
to tell a joke?
   that's not the question, the question is:
why call it witty comedy...
     but still employ canned laughter?
it's discouraging, i don't know when the joke comes,
all i know is that the editor finds it funny
as that particular time,
                    and that's when he inserts canned
laughter... you can get it with the most
"witty" comedies there are...
  a bit like black girls trying to be white without
the frizz of afro curbing the afro with vaseline...
i've seen catfights over this "third limb"
scenario... afro is no go in catholic schools...
you have to... yum... cow lick that ****
into place... use vaseline...
      and that's an advert-and-a-half.
but you know what really ****** me off?
philosophers... they attacked poetry because
they couldn't care two-****'s worth about
whether language could be musical
or simply communicative... they're the ones
that wrote books without using
grammatical words such as verb, or noun,
because they made them excuses to
their muddles when hoarding from poetry
words of equivalent categorical weight
such as metaphor... so attacking the practice
of poetry, but then encouraging
the categorisation of the spoke
with poetic categories rather than grammatical
categories? can i see Hegel use a noun?
no... but i can see Heidegger using
  the metaphor with two labourers utilising
a hammer... that's the thing concerning
a building site: you either pass the time
tellings jokes... or you don't work
on a building site and hold a hammer
  and question whether someone else might need it...
philosophy is not about the existential dittoing
of the i...
    it's a book, but there's a new category of pronoun
due to universal bewilderment once childhood
finishes... ? opened the door, in stepped !
and said:
     shouldn't we make the stillness of the lake
into a mirror to banish but at the same time
          domesticate narcissus -
yes, replied ?, i'm glad you thought of it...
               domesticating demigods...
                    narcissus was a stillness of a lake,
sisyphus was a stone,
    hercules was bicep,
              achilles was a tendon...
                                       our current affairs are far
from democratic, but at least our history is,
  you get ******... you get protractor...
you get mona lisa... you get 'let 'em eat croissant!',
       too many points of divergence
  in a democracy to craft a convergent "democracy",
what the politics says is that we are all
slaves to what's called a *status quo,
  i hate the fact that western "democracies" are
no longer tagged as merely status quo...
abuse of nouns... or how philosophy attacked poetry
and never spoke a theory concerned with
language per se being evidently categorised...
     how status quo is actually a -nomer without a mis-
of democracy...
  funny, the spanish... i have no idea
why can i have some ice-cream?
      has to become ?can i have some ice-cream¿
           i guess it's like the english " and '...
  who said what, and who said what for whom?
    is there a narrator?
      is that " + 1 people speaking, or quoting a quote?
or is that direct convo... '   ',
later retelling the tale "     ",
and after that it's all but an urban myth
akin to the kentucky fried mouse...
                the French that blè blé blé blé....
and somewhere in between was the Transylvanian comma...
hmm...
                             i mean... the perverts...
   thanks for the invitation, r.s.v.p.; of sure, great mixtape...
funny thing is... i never filmed myself jerking off...
        i do a 3-in-1... take a ****, take a ****... and
clean the ****-talk ducts of banal sprechen while
      watching a monkey strutting down memory lane
of when i had a girlfriend... and had to juggle,
and go for lunch, and this that and the other,
and a dalmation... or the reflection: but i had a mother...
huh?     i never felt this much ingratitude
for occupying the premises of the oval chamber
as i did creating a signature or inserting
  myself into the least convenient space to have
later come out off using only one digit's worth of
accountability... but hey... that's life.
          are you feeling the guilt trip drug pushed
by your mother from Syria, or Somalia?
     you owe her! you parasite... makes easier argument
for the billion Blue Indians and Chinese to get on
with it and eradicate the over-sensitive ivory dodo;
or at least in Siberia with the mongols...
              so i'm guessing eskimo is the new
                        squint to what's butchery ethics in Kosovo
as: look away... nothing to see.
               still... why call it a witty comedy when
you nonetheless have to utilise canned laughter?
             and that's a novel in itself...
? went up the stairs and ? met ! questioning <
whether ? should be questioning <... instead ! suggested
that ? should be questioned by >, since ? was already
on the 1st floor, having ascended the stairs from
the ground floor...         can you write me
     a novel... replacing all the correct pronoun usage
with mathematical ambivalence structured toward
a mostly unread existential dogmatism using
  mathematical punctuation?
no one will read it...but hey... either you do something
like that... or own a dog or a cat...
           and yes, they call them diacritical marks
when they're within letters... but in between letters?
they call them punctuation marks within words...
or the microcosm of punctuation: syllabification...
          the French just gobble down a lot of
  deviation... mon fhhhhhhhhhhhhré!
don't ask me how they do it... ask Nápŏlyon,
yes, the half-wit from Li-ą... oh no... not
                                               Monsieur Dynamite.

Lisping along  in the bravado nights
of banquet halls bursting with chandeliers
red carpets and butterfly maidens
serving delicacies of ordered neatness
tested in kitchens of manicured chefs
waiting in breathless expectation
of acceptance from a guest list
of the countrys best men and women

the chief gobbler looked at the lovely wife
of the chief guest
and gently slurped his birds nest soup
as the waitresses on wings flitted by
watching in delight
as his ******* showed clearly at the thoughts
raging in his bald head.

He wanted this woman?

and they all approved willingly
that someone must lose his head
to the heavyweights lust
and for the upkeep of the national pride

before he picked up his chopsticks
and gold embossed napkin
he flicked it twice
and the chief gobbler was whisked
behind a red bleeding curtain

and his wife was taken
on a candlewick bedspread
of green and gold
draped with the crescent moon
and scimitar.

ask no more questions
on where we are
or lose your tongue forever!

Author Notes
Despotic and dangerous.
© Marshall Gass. All rights reserved, 2 months ago

Fifty years ago today

A half century. Yes--seems like a long time when we say it that way, sublimely forgetting time is a dimension we chop cheaply for convenience. In earth time, in galaxy time, the vast blue stretch since the cosmos’ first coding coughing of carbon, that five decades has been but a clipped comma in a thousand page tome, with a single stout capital letter being the history of a country, and a verbose sentence or two being the tale of our two legged species. For me, the 50 years since that day has been most of my book--nearly all that has been written since the dawn of light.

I was on the Kanto plains of Japan, so it was already Christmas--though I guess my world has always spun faster than most. During the night, my father had assembled my new black three speed 26 inch Raleigh English racer, a serious upgrade from my red 24 inch Schwinn, my first bike, long lost to spinning memory, and likely the property of some dump in the heartland.

The new bike stood beside the table in our large combination kitchen/dining room of our temporary officer quarters. I can’t recall if it was too cold to ride that day, but I probably ventured out, either in the real rays of the sun or in the land of imagination, the two being of equal measure in the realm of memory.

A month before, my father woke me with the news of Kennedy’s assassination. Like others who were old enough to remember, the events of that November day have much crisper edges than any other, including the Raleigh racer Christmas or any Christmas I can recollect.

Tomorrow is another Christmas. I won’t look at that day too much when I am walking in the park this afternoon, for tomorrow is not waiting for me at all. It will be there even if I am again dancing with stardust. More likely, I will be here, on the same rolling rock, eating the flesh of a fallen gobbler and making new memories I will recall only hazily in fifty hours. And if I were promised another fifty marching years, I might lament their passing before they arrived, knowing full well they too would be filled with forgetting.

Career politicians, who cluck
as they strut with an impotent pluck
make me sick with the season
befouling all reason:
they're less of a **** than a cuck.

That gobbler and turkey-neck Mitch
makes me furious—so mad that I twitch.
He obstructs every battle
while jiggling his wattle;
unpardoned, unworthy (but rich).

The patrician political class
is a party that speaks through its ***.
They are lacking in guts
with no ifs, ands, or buts
but I swear: they produce enough gas.



HAPPY THANXGIVING, Fellow Poets☺

Tight ride over uneven roads, long distance.
Defaulting poor folk kicked off by greedy banks.
The egg broken, the cocoon breached.
The warmth of family tested, cracks a little.

Why do we all play into sickness this way, holding up
the machine?
Nothin' but a greedy gobbler with zits on its face, holding us
over steam, turning our sweat to coins.

Highways passed and road stops by a strange camp.
No, none too friendly.
Into tiny blocks bundled, and foremen huddle sheep
to the fields.

Open slaughter of work. March us back to the confines.
A sad day. Bits of paper and forms to fill, is all we become.

Omelettes today, some meat in the tent later. Come happy, children.
Come lick at the cauldron on the dusty floor.

Beyond the golden fields, the sun bursts to final red.
A small walk denied. ****, dreams in the hot tea curls.

MOTECUHZOMA
            I stand here, lords, a humbled man, to bow
            Before divine arbitrament with you.
            Tell me the damage of my botchery,
            And do not let my title tie your tongue.
            Unfold his ballot, and unveil my doom.

TLACAELEL
            Great Speaker of the state of Mexico,
            It is my solemn duty to report
            That, by the power vested to my role
            In this most sacred trial by tournament,
            Your bounty due unto this king shall be . . .
                                                           [Opens the second wager.]
            Three turkey *****, of prime and grade-A stock.

MOTECUHZOMA
            You staked your kingdom on three gobbling birds?
            Why did you shy to wager higher, man?

HUNGRY PRINCE
            My father always warned me, never bet
            For more than what you know you might receive.

MOTECUHZOMA
            But- grinning simpleton- what will you do
            With burlap sacks of poultry for a prize?

HUNGRY PRINCE
            Why, I’ll farm out a new triumvirate.
            The old one closed from lack of membership.

MOTECUHZOMA
            Not hamstrung by a certain turkey’s qualms?

HUNGRY PRINCE
            But poachered by the greater gobbler.

MOTECUHZOMA
            So you shall never gain my kingdom now.

HUNGRY PRINCE
            And you can never keep your kingdom now.

MOTECUHZOMA
            That fails to follow. Who could rival me?

HUNGRY PRINCE
            You’ll follow my allusion soon enough,
            Once your own subjects fail to follow you.

MOTECUHZOMA
            Fool! What I banked on was your fantasy.

HUNGRY PRINCE
            Friend, what you staked on was my prophecy,
            And what I prophesied, the gods confirm
            By our ill-tilting trial in this field.
            I have foretold your empire shall be lost,
            And lost it shall be, to my heart’s dismay.
            And therefore, farewell Mexico! Or else,
            Farewell, Motecuhzoma. I’m afraid
            One must be sacrificed to speed the other.

MOTECUHZOMA
            Why know you not, straw man, I am the empire.
            My doctrines are her laws; her braves, my brawn.
            It is my veins her riches run through, sir,
            And when she prays, it is my vows she breathes.

HUNGRY PRINCE
            But when she suffers, you repose and dream,
            And when she starves, her rumblings go unheard,
            As you crack crab shells at the groaning board.
            A pretty study, then, in symbiosis.

MOTECUHZOMA
            Why bandy taunts with this malingerer?
            Let’s penitently tender sacrifice,
            And leave this dreamer to his reveries.
            It seems such visions reign these days.

Gobbler turkey thrums
Red throat, feathers spread, he struts
Another spring dance

Mary’s Mother is from Georgia, her Father from Pennsylvania.
A steelers flag hangs on Mary’s front porch, and every Sunday night in the fall means eating chicken wings while adorned in black and gold.

Mary’s Father has an office.
Inside of it lay a few rusting guitars, but the walls of the room are what truly catch your eye.
The paint itself, a dull muted gray is immaterial when compared to the dozens of plaques that enhance it.
Each frame carries a different piece of Groundhog’s Day memorabilia, many house pictures of Punxsutawney Phil, one is a certificate declaring Mary’s Father an “official Groundhog ambassador”, another an autographed photo from a Groundhog handler.

Mary’s Father claims that Groundhog’s day is America’s second greatest holiday.

Mary’s parents were married at Gobbler's ****.
Punxsutawney Phil attended the wedding.
Mary and her little sister stayed home from school every Groundhog’s day in elementary school, and in middle school they attended but came to school in matching Groundhog hats.

Mary’s kitchen counter has a small black speaker.
Each Sunday morning, Mary’s Father blasts the Polka Party Radio Show hours into the afternoon.
The whole family knows all of the polka songs by heart.
Each Sunday morning they came together to listen to the “Waltz of The Angels”, a Polka special dedicated to various passed loved ones.
Even the turntable in Mary’s dining room only plays Pennsylvania Polka vinyls.

Mary’s incredibly familiar with Hershey Park.
She and her sister have brought home various souvenirs from Pennsylvania’s notorious “Chocolate Town”.

Mary’s family knows Gettysburg like the back of their hand.

I’ve known Mary for over a decade.
I never knew her mother was from Georgia.
“The Southerner’s Handbook” sits in Mary’s living room, the only true mark of Mary’s Mother’s life before she surrendered her maiden name.

I think it is a beautiful thing to give up your culture for somebody else.
I think it is a beautiful thing to sing Pennsylvania Dutch folk music with your Husband on late weekend nights because you know it makes your children happy.