Hatchet Job

 

 Hatchet Job

 

 

Tricks and teases made a hatchet for the autopsy. 

 

You couldn't

just say it was over, oh no. Too many cows

wanted gingerbread. Too many women

in the cellar wanted more time...

Tesla's ghost was on the radio for years

while the black nightingale sang but hardly

anyone listened. 

 

Too much static fuzzing. Too much 

imitation current clogging the waves...

I swear you gave my ear a permanent scar

with all that dizzy disarray, tricks and teases,

bluffs that bragged with musky electric tusks...

 

Put the body

on the table and have done, I said. I'm through

discussing second grade and your mother's

lonesome eyebrows.You don't care about

the cause of death anyway...

 

just the wonderful way

you can chop. 

 

Bravo!

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Shay's Word List # 8: 

Russell Edson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images :Hatchet, via internet. Fair Use

Moon and Cow, 1963 © Alex Colville   Fair Use

 

The Brain Expert

The Brain Expert

The brain expert came

when the buzzer stopped ringing.

I watched him pound

my motherboard to dust,

hand-saw through my word-files,

chipping off  lines

with a quick cold-chiseling,

wipe the hard drive stark blank to a giggle-bite,

mechanically masticating
 out

all the memory.

Safe now, he said.

Now no one

can steal

your identity

again.

~October 2013

55 bytes of the non-Apple for      the g-man



Process notes: Most of you know I lost communications with my hard drive about ten days ago, and my old pc had to be put down, which resulted in me losing a great number of my poetry files. This may not seem scary enough for Halloween, but the process of getting rid of the old and on with the new, especially the abysmal Windows 8, was pretty terrifying for a Luddite like me.

My advice--BACK UP YOUR DATA!

HAPPY ALL HALLOWS TO ALL
and may you not be haunted by the ghosts of computers passed.

Hover mouse for top image credit, or click to go to the photographer's flick'r page.

Shared under a creative commons license.

Bottom Image: Devil takes a Head, by Odilon Redon, Public domain, via wikipaintings.org

Amor Ex Machina

Modern Rhapsody~Salvador Dali

Amor Ex Machina

I look at these rigid fingers

with their metallic sheen of

imbricated scales, once supple, articulate 

now so resistlessly futile
tapping out my obsolescence

not an antique

not an artifact

only a throwaway construct wearing out

for which parts are no longer available.

When my clanging gears
manage to change up and wheeze 
into a facsimile of engagement,

I make a soft slipping murmur

to you in the infinite dark

into the empty parking space,

the crackling void's blue box

beneath my fused wires.

Your name's evensong, I whisper it 

into the loop of a no longer

optimally functioning receiver

and on the flickering screen of

my headset, your face flashes on off

off on impossibly still close

though that must be an error.

There’s no answer in the
whistle and squeak night

because you do not speak

or I no longer hear. 
Yet should such a random soundbyte
force an auditory response to

somehow occur, and should 
the machine record it,

data at hand indicates

it  might be discovered that
a great many remaining parts

are still in working order.

May 2012

Posted for   Meeting the Bar   at dVerse Poets Pub
Charles Miller hosts today and his theme is Machine Dreams.

Header Image: Modern Rhapsody, 1957 by Salvador Dali

Copyright may still apply.
Footer Image: Anatomical Drawing of the Bicep Function, Leonardo da Vinci
both  via wikipaintings.org