April 23, 2009

Dear Everybody,

I'm trimming this journal a bit, taking out dead pieces of my writing, and leaving ones that may still have a pulse.  I'm also going to be removing (1) pieces that have become full-fledged poems, and (2) most past commentary by others, especially if the pieces the comments relate to have been deleted or have flown the nest.  I hope this will make what remains easier to navigate through.

Rick

"We'll treat you like human beings
when you start acting like human beings!"
they said.

"We'll act like human beings
when you start treating us like human beings!"
they said.

No wonder the madman
thought the Beatles were singing just to him.
They were.
“Let’s write anuther one fa Chahlie,
see what he duz this time.”

To keep us all sane,
God invented the but.

 “I’m a Christian,” he said,
“but not the beat-up-on-gays,
George-Bush-is-the-anointed-one-of-God
kind of Christian.”

He was the only kid in town with an office.
In the middle drawer of his desk he kept
his pheasant feather, squirrel tail, horse shoe
and a couple of champion buckeyes.

The little boy didn’t want the cookie
so he threw it in the trash.

“Some day you’ll wish you
had that cookie!” Said the nun.

For fifty years after that,
what the nun said to him remained

the weirdest thing.

When the nun
picked him up by the front of his shirt
and tore a button off,
he expected his mom to go insane
but her nonreaction was even worse.

Because he had eaten lamb
he didn’t take being one of the Father's flock
the way the Father probably meant it.
Or maybe he did.

The First Law of Weirdodynamics:

There exists a Maximum Relative Weirdness,
beyond which a thing is either obliterated by its
less-weird surroundings, or imparts an Equalizing
Percentage of Weirdness to those surroundings.

“You think you’re so smart,”
the kids used to say to him.
But he never thought he was smart enough.

The basement was his laboratory
the porch roof his observatory.
Had his parents known the thought that way,
they’d have put a stop to it, you bet!
 

It was a narrow door
and it kept blinking on and off.
He never knew how he got through it
but he always did.
And when he got there
they took his old memory coat
and gave him a new one
so that the only thing he ever remembered
was that he had gone through
the blinking door many times.

They made a bomb
and left it in an old grey sweatshirt.
In the paper, the cops said
it would have worked had they lit the fuse.
That’s what they wanted to find out.

For generations the school
was surrounded by barbed wire.
Now it needed to be.