August is the coldest month, breathing
Air conditioning out to shadow rooms, adding
Ice cream and hurricane, ripening
Hard squash and sour apple.
Summer kept us in comfort, filling
Home in biting flies, spreading
Icy salve on rash raised from poison ivy leaves.
T. S. (Tough Shit) Eliot moved from his native New York City to a permanent residence in London, England, and changed citizen, all due to his unrequited love for Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Consider his Lovesong"
“better etherized than euthanized,” as e.e. cummings would say (and did, in his 1977 poetic masterpiece “all the things i’d really rather not be, if it’s all the same to you, thanks bunches sweetie xoxo e.e.”).
So little depends
upon
bunches of short
words
quotation
marks
beside letters
randomized.
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess,
Brought to you by Nabisco!
e.e. cummings wrote the preceding poem during a visit to blawnox with his wife, three children and latvian masseuse in june 1977. he never returned to the city, writing in his journal, “too many lombardy pudding elk roam the streets for my peace of mind or even sanity.”
The Lombardy pudding elk is not, as popular legend would have us believe, I repeat not, really really just NOT, from the Lombardy region of Scotland. The name comes instead from “l’om pardee”, anglicized French meaning “By God, it’s a man!” This derivation belies its true origin on the Isle of Wight (wiht = man), referring to inhabitants of the Isle of Man (man = man, for a’ that an’ a’ that) who, dressed as very small elk, distributed puddings in their native Milan (Milan = man who is secretly il, a cryptic nod to the Rosicrucian Swamp Boys, who are not officially involved in this story, hence the cryptic reference to their feeling a bit il at the time. Il est mort.)
And, concomitantly, the Isle of Manners brought the leftovers to the Isle of Wight due to a translation error by an American cartographer who called both of them “Dude Island” (his Manners had obviously escaped him).
The actual Dude Island is located five miles west of Los Angeles; its primary city is Lebowski. Smaller towns include Sobchak, Kerabatsos, Brandt, Treehorn and Quintana. The island’s economy is largely driven by bowling, the mixing of White Russians, surrogate parenthood and the weaving of small rugs.
(Ahhh, thee beeg Lebowski. I hhave hheard thees place befor. Ees - hhow you say - beeg deel, no?)
Dude Island really brings the sea together. It is there that the Dude abides.
There’s a* vibrio vulnificus* bacteria on the speck on the flea on the tail on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea. An urgent warning for swimmers has been issued in ink on the paper on the report on the desk in the office in the building in the complex of the Center for Disease Control in the Department of Health and Human Services of the U.S. Government.
The * vibrio vulnificu*s bacteria that’s found on the speck on the flea on the tail on the frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea is believed to have originated in the digestive system of an old lady who swallowed a fly, a spider, a bird, a cat, a dog, a goat, a cow, and a horse. She’s dead, of course.
Well, a horse is a horse, of course. Of course. Although once it was an Eohippus.
Eohippus “Clem” Phartuccio-Horseface taught math to third graders in the Blawnox Elementary School for over eighty years before being nibbled to death by a roving pack of Latvian stoats.
Horseface Gymnasium was named after him. (It could hardly have been named before him). The old HG was the site of no epic athletic events in its long history. It is scheduled for demolition in November 2019.
Eohippus “Clem” Phartuccio-Horseface was also a two-sport athlete at the University of Blawnox competing in track and football. He is also known for popularizing the once evolutionary “Reverse forward pass” play that took the country by storm in 1918. Horseface’s number 005 is now retired at the University of Blawnox, well more accurately after he quit playing, nobody else really wanted to take it.
Eohippus “Clem” Phartuccio-Horseface was actually deathly afraid of horses, and never rode, petted or ate one in his entire life. He loved zebras, however, and thus often wore black and white clothing.
In an act of historical revisionism, the paleontology department of the University of Blawnox is calling for all references to Phartuccio-Horseface to give his first name as “Hyracotherium”
Phartuccio-Horseface had only one legitimate daughter who he named Hulda. Hulda married a man by the name of Jake Thrombosis Pigg-Sarse, which made her Hulda Phartuccio-Horseface Pigg-Sarse. On her 30th birthday, she decided she couldn’t take the ridicule any longer and had her name legally changed to Brunhilda Phartuccio-Horseface Pigg-Sarse.
The coat of arms of the House of Pigg-Sarse depicts three golden pigs with their posteriors directed towards the viewer, on a crimson field, surrounded by a border of bright pink calla lilies. No one at the College of Heralds will take responsibility for the arms, even under threat of torture.