autonomous memetic devices

mewling absurdism after absurdism

incognito the non-sequiturs substantiate

administrative staff of the regaling suppositories

for all the good they will do you

you might as well shove them up your ****

A close read
reveals that
I am nothing
but a rough draft
riddled with
misspellings—

a work in progress
watered down by
superfluous adjectives,
non sequiturs, and
smothered verbs.

Love is an editor.

She courts me
with a pocket of
sharpened pencils,
blue and red.

She marks me
up meticulously—
dele, stet
dele, stet.

Decades punctuated
by intermittent edits.

Sunlight slanting
through an hourglass.

Her hair as white
as the final page.

When the end comes,
will she love me enough
to give me another pass?

f this.
and that.
f the soul-******* siphons.
f the **** ******* on all the things.
f the wretched that ravages souls.
f plundering the vast unknown. f the broken that breaks us apart. f the pain that can’t find the exit door. f the non sequiturs that never stop. f all the thinks I'll never get to know. f the desert that evaporates technicolor dreams. f the reams of unsung ink.

f getting up too early. f never enough sleep.
f having no focus because mind is always trying to escape.
f the architects of this unending industrialized violent puppet reality TV.

f not having patience for utmost important because basic survival in this free range slave menagerie is just too overwhelming and chips away daily at already threadbare sanity.

f the aches under these ribs always begging for more.
f the abyss that eats cravings caved in for breakfast.

f the knowing that knows how awesomely amazingly brilliant loving flipping mind-glowingly ecstatic and jovial like a MF this existence could be.

it haunts me:

iridescent reflective ascendant peacocked wings
fluttering phoenixflies burst from ill-fit cocoons
surfing air so ******* fresh
even the Lorax ain’t got **** to say - he’s dancing
with kombucha in one hand and a DMT pipe in the other
at the festival called, I dunno, Just Because it’s ******* Monday

and we could
love and make and dream and play
all day every day every year every life...

and I look over
at this giddy ******
epic little boy version of me
and I think:
****

I have to keep trying
keep believing in the things
because the thought of leaving him
in this world, as-is
without me

is the hardest thing
I’ve ever had to think

Do you believe in Science Fiction?
You can have Jedi as a religion,
Led by a guru vader,
Leading the faith traders,
Jedi swords as new excaliburs,
Or are they non-sequiturs?
Yes, Jedi to seek their grail,
May the force be with you today!

The spiders of sleep
are weaving words
in the back of her throat.

I listen to the sibilant
murmur of her dreams

unfurling.

She recites non sequiturs
to darkened walls, her bed

a stage draped in velvet
curtains of disassociation.

Incessant spinners,
spiders embroider

forsaken moonlight
into feathery pillow talk.

I am an audience of one.

When her monologue
is done, I blanket the bed sheets
with bouquets of bloodless roses.

Ashamed, I wait for more.

Her dreams scratch
at the face of the moon,
inscribing an encore.

A is not B
Being A excludes  being B
But with God all things are possible
Therefore  A and B can be One

A lonely woman meets a lonely man
In some imagined universe
They don't give a **** if they are
Right so long as they are not alone
But only if mutually exclusive.

A friend of mine said of my Magnum
Opus: Its a thought of mind.Indeed.
All Things are-at the atomic level
There is no difference between yes and no
And are not all things made up of atoms
Thoughts of mind if you will -stuff and
Nonsense as they say: A mind must be
Free What if science is filled with non-
Sequiturs, a little wee play must not be
Condemned; consistency is the bain of
Small minds so we must be the antithesis
Oh Father God would you **** your
Children; crucify them for their illogic
It is all but  but a little pretense
Wee play like the goat footed balloon
Man.  Father are

you angry that your poor
Child Science is fill of nonsense.  Someday
You may tear the universe up like a page,
A thought of mind but by then we, all
Your wee children will be home again.
Father oh Father let us love Thee
Play with us and do not be mad
We did not mean to be so bad.

Non-Sequiturs – Or Are They?

Silly me!
Quelle luxury!
I turn the tap for water      
Hot!
Royalty not long ago
Did not, could not
Have had it better!
All that labor they went through
Just to get to water!
Then a tap of radiator
And the room is warm as toast.
If wanted, I could roast
A towel, but who’d want to?
Wow,
And swell!
Quelle luxury!

          Watching A Fly

Watching a fly.
Have I matured -
Grown more compassionate?
He walks around my empty plate
On nano- crumbs I’ve eaten/ate.
He looks so cute, endearing, pretty.
What the deuce is wrong with me?
Or right with me?
Is that what happens when one’s reached
Maturity?
Cool!

Non-Sequiturs 10.22.2016
A Sense Of The Ridiculous II;
Arlene Corwin

It's not what's said, it's how its said
Not the word on page, but what's not written
Space itself has never mattered more
Silent voids moving energy to and fro

So refuse the urge to use every color
Be kind, leave some white on the ****** sheet
Rewind, reweave and excite with shortened glee
Non sequiturs bonded, entwined to truths
They hold secrets, just tease it softly
From ear to mind to eye and back...
Enjoy the subtle voyage
From pen to page to volumes and back...

He was, to be sure, very impressive indeed,
His bearing and carriage not of someone on his way
As much as one who had truly arrived:
Sleek, self-assured, possessing the calm of one
Who fully understands just how powerful he is,
One who has not embraced the company culture
As much as self-immersed in it,
To the point where it has so permeated his structure
That is hard to tell where he begins and it ends.
And yet, there is something unsettling there,
The odd non sequiturs, disturbing enough
In their utter and unconscious wrong-headedness,
But even more so
In the motorized, perfunctory method of their delivery,
As if it were obvious that it is we who are clearly incorrect.

Some three hours of drive time away,
Past any number of Holiday Inn Expresses,
Past numerous faded and shuttered Catskill resorts,
A handful of people carrying standard-issue banker’s boxes
Containing the detritus of twenty or thirty years of work
Exit the vestigial office the company maintains in its birthplace
(Only there as a nod to history, a sop to the locals and legislators.)
We hate to lose good people,
The HR person who drove up for the occasion
Intones solemnly to a handful of reporters
Who slouch nonchalantly in folding chairs
Scattered about a small, Seventies-wood-paneled conference room,
But there are certain market inefficiencies at work,
International incidents, kinks in the supply chain,
Other anomalies the forecasting tools
And business models couldn’t have foreseen.
And as he speaks, one of the newly superfluous
Wordlessly enters her car, pointing it homeward,
Across the sluggish, ice-clogged Susquehanna traversing  a bridge Commemorating a giant of cash registers and calculators.

I lost a beloved friend a few years back...
The big 'C' got him, thankfully it took him fast.
He died around this time four years passed,
it truly feels like yesterday that his spirit was here,
blessing the ground we both walked upon.

He was a real funny ****, always with the quips.
He'd send me texts and call them e-quips.

Once while shopping at The Great Canadian Tire Store,
we bantered about how it came to pass that the black culture in the western world used slang terms to denigrate the white. Calling them ****** and *******. The latter referring to the slave master's whip braking the speed of sound on the back of a family man stopped from even a pleasure of a good read.

My friend said to me "*******": I prefer "saltines". To our surprise we had come to understand the term '******' derived when white 'John's' would cruse black neighbourhoods to solicit prostitutes.

They would signal they were prospective clients by honking their horns. For they feared leaving their vehicles under an assumed threat of physical violence.

These days I feel I am channeling my dear friend. For me, it's always with the quips and puns and non sequiturs. Some end up as titles for this work I produce. Like, for an example: Are Plastic Surgeons Recyclable.

Although you may not, I just have to laugh at my self. Some say my jokes aren't funny, they are an irritation. To which I state, that is the optimal effect, my true aim.

                                      Pat Two

At his funeral, his brother delivered his eulogy. Telling the childhood story of the family pet, a housecat had gone to the basement and Dave stood at the top of the stairs coaxing "Here Kitty kitty, come here kitty".
His father says, "Call him louder", and without missing a beat or changing his tone or volume Dave says "Here louder louder, come here kitty".

We shared puns and jokes that in this day-and-age, some would deem offensive. To be honest about the matter, some were. But... to qualify, maybe to justify. The jokes were always in jest, never meant to harm. It could be me, in the attempt to excuse poor behavior. Perhaps it's so, that is to say I don't know for sure. I've yet to make up my mind.

                                         Part Three

The point being, for I have strayed and I digress. The love I have for my friend still lives on and perhaps will never end. If it is David that I channel, so be it! I feel blessed.

Although I have, I never had to say good-bye to my dear friend Dave. For he never really left. He lives on in the hearts and minds of his chosen friends. And will continue to long after the day of my demise.

For the life of me, as I sit in the corner on a crooked chair, flanked by a lamp and a potted plant on an end-table. The end of this year approaches quickly and I wonder to myself, when will I again meet-up with my old friend.


end

a web without the print of a creator but instead diagrammatic self evident unfurling stretches in omnidirectional transcendent space crosshatching perpetual fall buoyed by synthetic leaves which provide penultimate impact fluxes to the brain surplusing centripetal stirring while acidic gut indicates the mind has been hijacked by racing network graphics smuggling a chromatic spectrum of strict empiricism that manifests hieroglyphs with junk dna and superfluous deep web code revealing repetition indistinguishable from the loaded traces phase injected to give an illusion of random chance luring emaciated counter adepts to insert all ten fingers in this muck and gaze in its vacant form with eyes now containing double lizard lid seamlessly surgically added while anesthetized in computer god robot operating cabinet hidden behind the gut film of all womb corrals by overlords crowding the sky with shadow mask while will beaming psywaves and psyops to the planet held frozen asserting infinity a zero sum game or infinity a desire sink atomizing discipline to dust blown till even dispersal that settles as the desert of us where ancient cathedral rubble can be picked up without knowing though covering it is graffiti in slang that too is long outdated yet untouched immaculate stands the pyramid where atop the eye burns as infernal chaser back of darkness our primordial creeping from we forget due to whippings under omnipresent dominion as our birth origin and impious realm of ambiguous nondual reciprocity which angered the envious great liar who then swindled the good will of man for instantiation of a fake godhead as virus from infinite space beyond the punched out skyshell by saying “this is everything” signaling intuitors who lack the bandwidth necessary for computing a safe closed circuit to boot load non sequiturs corrupting their internal hall of mirrors by neutralizing all quotients with zero triggering an attempt to apotheose by the lobotomy spike wielding free radical poised to strike once the asymptotically approaching monad of dark energy has arrived and the mantra of hologram reality is hammered into zygote protoconsciousness through fritolay derived nutrients with de as prefix marking eschaton having cropped up like small flames across the plain of man reducing form to powdered grey concentrated potential.

Orbited amongst supraorbited. Predetermined variance is your’s for refusal. Expression is accessible beyond the sense approved surface. Inevitable as it may seem. Vested physicality is greater. Remember the joy of your body, and smirk in the light.

Somebody burned the house
she said.
Frying steak.

Long live smoky kitchens
and those who are
called to the cause.

We are all molecules
in motion riding a
colossally failed experiment.

Non sequiturs abound in
my world.

Smokey kitchens.  
Metaphors.

I hang my head.
Slowly clear my
thoughts.

The kitchen remains.
the Abode.

There is nowhere

else

to go



Caroline Shank
9.26.2022

Plenty of them out there, forced rhymes,
non sequiturs, contradictory lines,
mixed metaphors, just plain nonsense.

But the music catches you up
and, sooner or later, you're snapping
your fingers and singing along,
mouthing those ****** lyrics
as if they were the finest poetry.

Come sit by me
I’ve got tea and if you’re nice, sympathy
There are so many things to talk about
Let’s start with me, then we’ll head into you
Is this any way to start a romance?

I’ve had it with non-sequiturs
Stay on point if you know what’s good for you
I don’t like being the underdog
How did you get on top of me?
You’re all I think about, when I’m not thinking about me

To split a universal truth
Through the prism of poetry.
To write with mercurial mystery,
Employing cryptic non-sequiturs
After succinct statements of staggering profundity,
Is what I dream of as I contemplate
The enormity of my mediocrity.

Let us bear witness to arm and blindfold...
each candidate for president of United States
and therefore witness a duel (to the death)
between Biden and Trump to determine
who occupies Oval Office as forty seventh
Chief executive of the federal government.

Since both the Democratic and Republican contenders
for prospective commander in chief offer pathetic odds
evening the prospect of the latter or former winning an
unequivocal fair and four square bilateral contest firing
a gun after being positioned back to back, then counting
of so many paces before turning around and facing off.

Neither combatant could be identified, cuz head to toe
bullet proof vests would encapsulate every square inch
of vulnerable flesh rendering incognito dead giveaway
characteristics, and a wig would don their numbskull
at a given signal communicated thru bluetooth headset
high powered firearm cocked and raised ready to aim
at opponent instantaneously caught in the crosshairs

premature ejaculations punctuated sound of silence, a
mortally wounded wimp versus over stuffed ego freezer
also suffering a fatal shot as madding crowds roar with
deafening frenzied ballistic approval atavistic gone ape
primal screaming decreeing spoken explosion of anarchy.

All hell broke loose likened to burst dam where humanity
witnessed annihilation into balkanization into capitulation,
disintegration into evisceration, into factionalization, into
horrification into insubordination into jubilation, liquidation
into militarization into nullification into obliteration into
promulgation, radicalization, tribulation, and veneration.

Suddenly out of bedlam deft ferocious hoodlum jump/kick
started linkedin nationalistic predation rebranded travesty
vocalizing xenophobia zealously attracting craven egocentric
gambling inimitably kleptomaniacal, mercurial, opportunistic
quixotic, sensational uber wordsmiths reductio absurdum
expostulating non-sequiturs endowed with hidden wisdom.

Though ordinarily a non violent (unrepentent punster to boot)
amazingly graceful aging hippie even while in utero I played
role of embryonic peace monger – marching within the womb
despite the cramped quarters, especially as I got closer to term
and occupied avast area of the ******, my mother participated
in numerous rallies exposing me to socially progressive events
no surprise when yours truly babbled on about revolutionaries.