VolensVivarium

The melting clocks inspired me as a child. To do what? I don’t know. I didn’t even know your name at the time. But that didn’t remain a mystery. You were a madman— born from an egg dancing on a cliff adjusting your intricately-waxed mustache as if trying to help your face detect a better radio frequency. I could never figure you out. Your eccentricities, so enviable. I rely on your sixteen-foot shirt for inspiration now. But for what? I still don’t know. A magnificent menswear kite, floating through air like a wisp of an old memory. A dream, perhaps?

I never knew my appendix. He upbringing, Victorianesque— “seen and not heard,” they would say. And yet, he cheerfully completed the work proscribed to the average, Caucasian, upper-middle class, college-educated vestigial organ. A remarkable asset to Homosapien, Inc., even though no one quite knew what he did. He rebelled one day. For reasons none could ever understand, he kicked down his cubicle walls and flipped off his boss as he stormed out of the office, never to return. A doctor friend of mine managed to apprehend him. The scuffle between the two was amazing, or so he said. The appendix, so angry he

No one ever told us not to crawl underneath the tents.  No one needed to; their shadowed underbellies were cobwebbed, mildewed, disgusting.  Animals lived there.  No matter how much we wanted to become a part of nature, we were still too civilized to sleep with anything less than the thick, wooden tent floor protecting us from the beasts that roamed beneath our top-of-the-line hiking boots and deluxe goose-down sleeping bags.  Maybe that's why my fellow counselors were shocked to see my feet sticking out from underneath the tent, thinking I was the corpse of some disobedient camper who was recently ravaged by the man-eating pythons who lurk d

Life is like a parrot. Friendship is a golden cloud. An abstract idea, transformed into a vaguely-related object. The kind of poem so pretentious, anyone can write it. Just grab your favorite emotion-- love rage preteen angst and simmer on high heat, stirring occasionally, until you can philosophize it into your favorite concrete noun, simple, yet with a thinly-veiled hint of symbolism that isn't really there. So, throw on your jaunty beret and snap your fingers to the beat of the bongos in a smoky, badly-lit coffee shop. Now, everyone is a poet.