Diarrhea #341

Amen to the ameliorists, shatter their delicate honey-wrists against the rock of instransigence, your eminence your bishopric you sludge-muffin, you thick dick of a prick! Quaff enough soda and you’ll fart four hours of nothingness. No never again to the men in my dreams, I’d rather have nightmares than drink with those nimrods again. We need banjos, we need a green meadow to lay in, O the star-filled sunset.

The curvaceous Judeo-Christian antimonks with their mitres and potions, this shamanry in the skyscraper age and Jericho burglers shattering the rock of the wall and amid debris they prance and claim each ruin as their own vain victory.

Inside the maze I was comforted at least, everyone was my equal in confusion and I was the man on the outside of the wall, feeling for my escape, I was a man amid monkeys and the primates took me, left me in a cage to rot upon a cot and I filled my cage with vilest snot. Inside the dungeon was heard prayers from a priest, he at least soothed our troubled spirits with tales of heroism selflessness and the altruism - but it was folly to us villains trapped inside.

1914-2006

In that field
where your body will mix with dirt
and women in black
wipe mud off their skirts
you will lie, after seven years without
your man because
he died
but now the sweet divide
erases the dying and
moments when you cried

I saw blue skies above your tomb
cruelest month? No.
this mystery of Easter
in springtime I
envy the dead

And I’ve been dead too
but I saw blue skies and tulips
today at your funeral

Test of Faith

(does this poem have any meaning?)

Greece is a land on a lake
a fish is a trout or a hake
the auto makers are so damn many
I vacillate on Niles Crane - gay, or tranny?

lots we could learn from a donut
so much it makes us whole
a hole has a role in the cosmic casserole
let’s all burrow the mole!

gouda’s a cheese and a friend
a pigeon can never suspend
disbelief or relief at a wedding wreath
so let’s talk of pudding and plumcakes:

I wish I were uglier than Chekov
or swam a few laps like old Sulu
my cousin has twelve mahogany shelves
a pittance to dole out to me

a nun stores a gun in her hair
'tis the Morbid Miss Zelda FitzFlair
she whispered a chant
and ruckused a pedant
her smidgen did wow the White Bear

then O’Malley Vesuvius Fok was
out on a stroll round the block
with jellified knees he gathered the bees
and hornets to purchase a few midrange-calibre bootlegged DVDs

sneezing to please the Great Swami
I ranked seventeen yummy mummies
I begged the Red Baron to rent out his harem, but
was met with copyright lawsuits, stonewalls, spitting and blaring

bendy or twisted? 't'matters not
Voluptuous Vincent lies on a cot, a gut rot so heartstopping
shot up his veins with tiles and terracotta, obsessed
with quantum carousels and recollections of an ink blot.

Soapbox

I want the best for you I really do. I want everyone’s eyes to make love to you. You who sit alone crying on a bench, who shut the door and curse yourself. Secrets behind closed doors, everything bleeds.

And now you plunge into your inner blackness. And the logic of blackness is smothering. And now you’re waiting for the phoenix rising. There is an end in sight. There is an end in sight. You can’t see that end, but it is what is right.

I wish I could show you how big you are. You are a giant, an entire lake, an ocean, you have the unimaginable vastness of the universe between the trillionths of your atoms. You will outlive your contradictions. You will tame the dragon.

Never have I been so sure of an ultimate success. Oh the outcome was in doubt but I have the ace up my sleeve, and yes I’ve learned to shout. In this knife-edge uncertainty - grace is granted to those who act freely, unfettered by who suffers consequence or who gets the credit.

How often do you get a chance for newness? Each day. Every day. So take those lemons and make powerade.

There is an entire vocabulary passed down from centuries to describe your pain. You are in pain, and you believe you are alone in your pain, and the shame of being alone in pain is worse than the pain - that you are the only one with a broken heart.

(But I can’t trust you in your mood swings. When we subject others to our own problems, well, that is the source of all evil on this planet.)

Blame It On The Bubbles

(as requested by ers)

Blame It On The Bubbles

In the dark cave of Grendil by the swamp of Megamonsmaxilon in the Valley of the Orthopucky lived a man known as the Arbiter of Straight Lines. His proper name was Draco McSirius, a warlock from the Cement Swamps of Rote, who studied chemistry and was obsessed with forms. McSirius conjured all things in an iron determined manner, with his reliable chemistry that allowed for no guesswork. Until a Pixie named Brenda Bubbles arrived in the valley and made poppycock of everything.

Draco McSirius wasn't accustomed to visitors, and as a warlock chemist he had no idea how to flirt. He sat in his cave and thought about shadows. He thought about how great it was to have no visitors to argue with. And when the Brenda Bubbles came, he thought of how very much he wanted her to leave.

On the very first day this pixie held a dance. She called it the “Pretendo Pokeroo.” She shot bubbles from her mouth and ears, and they flew up to the sky until she climbed up on the bubbles and poked them with her eyelashes. She was the only one at the dance but she laughed the whole time.

The warlock was livid. The bubbles gave him apoplexy. He cursed in the inner part of his cave "That frivolous pixine Poof, that insubstantial trollop – her bubbles are mere dreamthings and upset my pious army of wolfhounds!"

The dogmen who served lord McSirius were an unquestioning cadre, accustomed to the Arbiter's simple plans and direct methods. Hunt a live animal, kill it till it's dead, eat the animal, chew out bones, take a dump to mark terrtitory was all in their days’ work. But the Bubbled Princess neutralized their blunt edge and made the wolfmen aware they were possessors of an insane magic. For dogmen could laugh at bubbles too! There was more to the swamp than Draco the warlock's plodding and questing. When a bubble appeared, so came with it an inspiration, feeble flickering amid a dogman's braying and barking, but welcome for its tiny roundness nonetheless.

"Don’t blame it on the bubbles,” giggled the pixie, "I have more than enough candy to make you all my friends."

But McSirius said No:

"She will turn you into a swine, my dog creatures," he pontificated; "you prefer the slop to the chase, the pen to the well-tended field?" He was high and mighty: "Go blow at bubbles then, but you'll be fuzzy, lethargic and fluffy, so oofy, goopy and soupy, and silly - like a pillowcase full of pickles in a pennypotion..."

And by the end of that sentence he was choking on sulphur from his chemical stoke ovens.

Then the Pixie sang a song:

Oh it's better to be a wizzle
And to wuzzle away the day
Than to frown like Lord McSirius
And turn grey in a cave

McSiri is obsessed with shadows
Of a land that don’t exist
My bubbles are the crystal ball
And one day he’ll do the twist!

And the wolfmen in the valley did some pretty hardass barking. Brenda Bubbles smiled. “Woof! There it is,” said the pixie. But the Arbiter of Straight lines was pissed.

McSirius tossed a thunderbolt. Well he was upset after all, and prone to fits of lightning. The wolfmen yelped and scattered, and the pixie frowned. She floated a gigantic bubble that danced from her fingertips into his cave and got oh so close to McSirius.

"Look! Something floopsy and pink," she sang.

The lip of her orb nearly kissed him; when it got close he screamed. “Oh please oh please don’t let it touch me!”

McSirius shot another bolt of lighting, but the funniest thing happened. The thunderbolt got trapped in the bubble. Like lightning, in a light bulb!

The shadows at the edge of the cave instantly disappeared. One of the wolfmen quoted Shakespeare. or was it Sophocles? “And then the scales fell from his eyes,” he said. But actually it was the Bible.

McSirius couldn’t take it. He went in his cave, slammed the door, cooked up a potion and boiled alive ten-dozen lizards. One of the wolfmen cackled, "Such a hungry little bitch!"

The rest of the wolf crew stopped barking, and started singing!

Sometime bubbles seem like trouble
Master McSirius? got a beard of stubble
lives in a cave and chews on rubble
but lookin at this pale blue bubble
from as far away in space as Hubble
and
it seems
we’re just a bunch of mopy poochies…

The pixie clapped her hands. “Yes!” she said, and pumped her fist like Wayne Gretzky. The next day she was elected mayor of Grendil. Her first act was to drain the swamp.

She boiled the bogfilth with her bubbles filled with the warlock's lightning, until the stagnant cement evaporated completely.

“Now,” she said, "let’s fill that hole with warm water, and have a nice bath.”

END

I Dare You To Read This!

(a limited offer: comment on this grotesque story and you may get a 1000 word short-story written just for you. leave your literary criticism and your story request below)

*ahem*

Beavers in my Kitchen

A crash in the garage alerted me to the invasion. The toppled recycled pop cans meant a beaver army would soon be at the inner citadel that was the kitchen. I sounded the alarm. “Alert! Alert!" it sounded, "we are all about to be hurt!” I clutched some fabric near a window; it was the curtain, I ripped it to pieces and chewed on the ragged morsels. It was December and I needed more fibre in my diet. The curtainy bits were delicious and I belched Fur Elise. But the chewing beavers would be equally ravenous.

For 15 years I had been attacked in my home by beavers. The loathsome critters had chewed the outer walls to the foundations, despite my resolve not to suffer such repeated humiliation. To that effect I had instituted a tyrannical regime in my kitchen. All shipments of wood or wood-based products such as napkins, papertowels and even inky dinky juice cups had to pass approval by my purchasing department, of which I was sole chair and acting supervisor. This would quell the invasive disaster to a certain degree, but no bureaucratic measures could guarantee 100% security, especially after the harrowing events of March 4.

* * * * * * *

On March 4 1990 the security of my life, my homeland had turned all topsy-turvy. I was out walking my pet coelacanth Znoosle; he was rolling along the walk in his porto-seaquarium and sucking at his oxygenated bubbles like a happy pig of a fish. When suddenly he spoke! Znoosle spoke out loud and in English. He spoke despite being a fish, and I nearly dropped his thermo-rheostat into the tank. Znoosle was a curmudgeonly coelacanth, and his verbalizations were grouchy. “Carson,” he cried at me; that was me, Carson McCullers – “you have never given me enough oxygen! Why this isn’t a seaquarium fit for a goldfish!”

I was dumbfounded. “I must scold you,” railed Znoosle, “so be shamed at my grievance!” In this way he chided, and in truth I felt a sting. I saw my digital watch’s electro-calendar: the date was March the 4^th - my first encounter with an anthropomorphized fish.

Not much later I would be dealing with beavers who also spoke, were grouchy and made grievances like so many plaintive elderly voters. Beavers would plague my house, and not even my precautionary ‘Beavers Beware’ signs could sway them from such noxious sorties into my sacred innerspace. Instead they razed my home and left me exposed to winter cruelty.

Many hours I sat on the toilet, tracing in vain the connection between my crank of a talking fish, and the talking beavers who robbed my house of all load-bearing supports; beavers who chewed things apart for their atavistic lustplay, damming up the arteries of nearby creeks with beams of my hallowed house - my house, the physical representation of my hopes and dreams. I lived in Canada, truly a land of tolerance, but this national symbol was out to get me.

Flash-forward 15 years and four World Cups of Soccer later – Italy still in a drought after Roberto Baggio’s missed penalty kick, and me still attacked relentlessly in my kitchen. I was banging nails in the door to create a barricade. My alert sounded shrilly as ever: “Alert! Alert! We are all about to be hurt!” But my friends were all out playing golf; I cursed their putters and irons. The beaver were lustily chewing at my defences, and my phone calls to the fire department and Humane Society went unanswered.

Then, an inspiration: I had a blowtorch in my kitchen, a device I used to glaze over my delicious crème brulés. I lit the torch and poked it through a hole the lead beaver had by now chewed into the kitchen. Zzzzp! Flooom! Fffft! A miracle: the lead beaver burst into flames! He rolled around, aglow with flame and light and shrieking in his halting rodent’s dialect: “My folly was my eagerness; my own teeth turned against me!” And he flamed until he was a black mass of ashes. The beavers had oiled themselves with lubricant to squeeze into my kitchen more easily. But this beaver paid the price: the lubricant was a most flammable one, and my blowtorch meant his fiery combustion and agonizing death.

I cried in a voice hot with vengeance – “I singed your lead critter, you eager beavers, and I can torch the rest of you too!” The words quelled the assault for the moment. I yelled a few more incoherent syllables, hoping to scare the piss out of them. Then, a voice from the beaver troop; it was their second-in-command. “Halt your remonstrances, oh human we like to chew on,” and I bent forward to hear more – “we have long chewed at your walls, yes. But your latest show of force leads us to compromise.” By golly - I was dumbfounded at their crumbling resolve. The beaver lieutenant continued, “May I enter your home and can we have some tea, Mr McCullers?”

I was shocked at the beavers’ sudden cordiality. I immediately opened the door. In walked the lieutenant with a few of his peltsmen and I started to boil a pot. They had ruined my casa with their decade-and-a-half of determined chewing, but the second-in-command was a true gentleman and I was never one to hold a grudge. An air of forgiveness came over us and some of the beavers even started to weep, which set me off too and soon I was thinking of the sweet warm breezes of my childhood summers at Lake Eternity.

Lieutenant Beaver Von Beaversmith (they all took the first name ‘Beaver’ and their surname often was beaver-related too) crawled upon the chair I set for him and lapped at the bowl of tea I made for him. “Thanks,” he said, “the physiognomy of our forepaws doesn’t allow us to use proper mugs so I appreciate the lapping dish.” So he lapped and he lapped - his appetite for hot brewed tea was monumental. This Beaversmith was a mountain; had we schooled together we might have been lifelong friends, but evolution and the delicious timbers of my house had set our people at loggerheads. The rift was wide; I only hoped the healing could coalesce everything into a breezy loveliness. I also hoped the insurance company would believe my story and validate my claims about the beavers. But insurance adjusters could be feisty, and I was ready to turn my blowtorch against them too.

Lt. Beaversmith looked at the paintings hanging from the remaining walls of my kitchen citadel. “Ah, Linard - a favourite of mine...” he said; “The French had colours to shame the rainbow itself.” I wondered at his words while refilling his lapping dish, for this beaver was a gentleman and clearly a connoisseur. “You know I once dabbled in art myself, useless forepaw and all,” he added. I grinned and hummed. “You know McCullers,” he sniffed at me approvingly, “had we both grown up beavers, or both men, we might have been great allies.” The psychic coincidence was compelling – this was more than a mountain-to-man connection, this was an intimate telepathic kinship. “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I said staring in awe. I’d be a fool not to have Lt. Beaversmith state my case to the insurance adjusters.

We drank enough tea to undo that famous Boston get-together of 1773. “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” he explained to me with a wink. The lieutenant sniffed and I giggled. And so a man befriended an angry horde of beaver.

[unfinished of course... now request your story via the comment box!]

They killed my girl

Poor Peaches, my dear Peaches. I never loved a girl as much.

They snapped your spokes and punched your tires; they rusted your axles into dust. They laughed at you, said you couldn't make it. I spit to think they were right. You were beat down but never defeated. O the asphalt is a fickle hellcat, and the automobiles like destructive mammoths - but I will have my satisfaction. Your daughter will avenge you.

RIP Peaches: June 2005-March 2006. Peaches gave till it hurt, then gave some more, til she collapsed finally of faulty brakes, broken spokes and terminally flat tires. A hearty steed, a roadworthy companion and a friend.

• Kilometres traveled: 3,000+
• Bike-a-thons: 2
• Flat tires: 5
• Unreliable kickstands: 1
• Warped wheels: 2
• Busted spokes: 1
• Rear-basket malfunctions: 2
• Bike computers destroyed: 1
• Water-bottle-holders destroyed: 1
• Spontaneous chain derailments (on lowest gear): ~50
• Collisions with autos: 2
• Collisions with pedestrians: 3
• Rear-brake failures: >20 (any time the temperature was below -10C)
• Near-fatal wipeouts on College Street: 1

Made for a woman, but strong enough for 10 men: Peaches defied the laws of physics and common sense. She was born a 1980s Free Spirit, reincarnated in 2005 as a 'FrankenBike', recycled with the wrong brakes and handlebars. She had a 50-lb lady's steel frame and no apparent virtues - aside from enough butt-rusted-ugliness to deter the urban thieves. Yet she did me right when I needed her - got me a job even - and I loved her true.

I bought her for $80 in a Kensington alleyway... She may as well have been born in a manger.

You will ride again, and we shall pedal the boulevards of paradise - when the roadway is righteous once more.

limitless

I'm on the
verge of saying
something absolutely
beautiful.
And the
suspense is
killing me.



(in the meantime, something stupid...)

No Help for the Whelp

(OK here’s another try:)

No Help for the Whelp

In came a Whelp, a wee whippersnapper, and the auditorium choked on their hors d’oeuvres (which was seaweed and smelts). He let out a yelp, this Whelp, and a man by the door with a pregnant wife and macrobiotic diet puked out half a pound of kelp. El Puko could not breathe, his wife cried ‘help – he can’t swallow that much kelp!’ The ambulance came, took his pulse and led the man away, the pregnant lady had to drive herself home. It was simply not her day.

The Whelp’s surname was Cyrus; he etched his name on papyrus. He was Egyptian in descent, following after Isis and Osiris. He was a bit of a rebel, a small smoochie, a lovey dovey, a hoochie-kootchie. He had a friend, whose name was Franz Barbican, half-Mexican and part-time bishop. Franz proselytized at the cathedral; he traded baseball cards with street urchins as a way to save their souls. If you ever need a baseball card, search the alleyways around St. Paul’s. But you might have to pray the rosary.

The Whelp and Franz were pious troublemakers, Catholic but deadly, gay and smiling but potent in all the wrong poisonery. Not poissonery, which is fishiness, but poison, the deadly kind, which Cleopatras of old used to ensure their continual queendoms. Poison, as in cyanide, lead pipes, asbestos, Taco Bell; all the worst stuff in nature and science combined. And so it was with the Whelp.

The Whelp had a first name too: Koko. And a middle name: Caligula. Koko Caligula Cyrus. Koko was nicknamed ‘The Whelp’ by a local blacksmith, a man keen on branding, not just with the forge but with nomenclature, who took one look at Koko Cyrus and labelled him dangerous. “You’re a whelp if you’re in front of me at all – if my eyes can see right,” said the blacksmith. “You’re a wee whelp, yes Koko Caligula Cyrus - a whelp!” What a strange but proud day. Koko was overjoyed. He was whelplashed.

From then on the Whelp terrorized the townsfolk and made out like a scurrilous bandit. Then Franz Barbican came along and their little bubble went from trouble to double. The Whelp and Franz took to each other like crab and shell, like sniff and smell, like schoolteacher and brazen bell; like Sporty Spice and Scary Spice – you know, the two Mels...

(ok that’s it)

Llama it down their throats (or... alpaca some heat?)

(read aloud or not at all)

In a democratic fracas we spray citizen seeds, over the net that casts the dark shadow beneath the populists and palm trees. When once I was a mild mogul I curtsied like a japester; my oven mitts had holes so my fingers got the burn. How much and how little we speak of lice and loathing! We smile like a mulch wagon in a sanctuary of gristle. Everlong lotus liars vexate my step aunt. Until poor peanuts consider the Quigley, donate dromedaries and dilate pupils on the papaya-citrus salesmen. Serialize every beating of your heart, sell it like it’s wine and opine for a fermentation seminar! My hermeneutical half-brother Hans has hands so hooflike, of a hairless horse on a canter course, the body of a horse, yes, but the spirit of a dwarf. My liege, your donut conglomeration will thirst you in time; so drink milk, it is healthy for the swine! Understand your haberdasher, his is a hateful stand, of hats and man, his fedoras betray the age; his derby bowlers bowdlerize the language, and berets don’t make him sage. Into every pocket lint must crumble, into every sprocket so slick the gasket does a widget trick, click and I laugh, as midgets scrape the ground addicted to a salt lick; insinuation splayed out like sledgehammer-and-roustabout, with black eyes and an ice pack on a man who is a motormouth.

by gar yiminy!

In a bit I’ll quit and thin minks will shuffle in and rinse my mouth in this the shouting month; that loutish trout I went out with, I called it quits with him and went for someone slimmer. She cultivates her smirk, an alleyway lurk and parkinsonian lurch, a dreamer and a crutchmaking standalone, halfway between angel and jerk.

Mulberry meadows are best to tread in, dressed in yellows and sighing southern hellos and obsessed with St. Mary Magdalene’s halo, a harlot turned saint; her fever is one hundred and five - two degrees from not being alive - but everyone she knows is having a baby and she's allergic to unrequited love and the dancefloor is shiny but empty because she hasn’t learned to jive.