INCUR a hefty fine for getting
DRUNK with a witches’
COVEN and waking up
THERE in the dairy aisle of the Piggly Wiggly.
Month: April 2023
Disenchantment is Camouflage
INCUR the last bit of medieval fright:
DRUNK as it were, on ergot, the village imagines a
COVEN, where there is only bad rye.
THERE is now the opposite problem: demons are invisible and hide in plain sight.
2023-04-12 words
INCUR, DRUNK, COVEN, THERE
Not a Boxer
CHIME sounds. Other guy darts in and clocks him. Consciousness circles the
DRAIN. Blackness. 3 minutes later, or a day, he comes to.
WHOSE body is he in? Who could have so much pain?
BOXER decides then and there: he’s not a boxer.
2023-04-11 words
CHIME, DRAIN, WHOSE, BOXER
First lesson
If I hadn’t been under my father’s THUMB
I’d never have known the complexity of CHESS.
It started when we stayed at a hothouse HOTEL –
I was given a dank green drink, like SYRUP.
When I surreptitiously stuck my THUMB
In the stubby smoke-shaded glass of SYRUP
It came out green, my father wondering later at CHESS
At the significance of his green-thumbed son in a gardened HOTEL.
Schachnovelle
THUMB inky, Zweig pauses from feverish writing about feverish
CHESS, tale of a man whose body slipped the Gestapo’s clutches, whose mind did not.
SYRUPy Fios de Ovos is brought to his table. The
HOTEL staff quietly fusses over Zweig. Perhaps the care of staff may yet ground an unquiet mind.
Note: I’m imaging Stefan Zweig in 1941 writing his Chess Story, or Royal Game, in a hotel in Petrópolis, Brazil (though I think he actually wrote in his own house there). His life was shadowed by the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the end of World War I. He wrote of the passing of the Austrian culture and way of life he had known in the The World of Yesterday. Zweig, like Dr. B in the Schachnovelle (the German title of Chess Story) was able to escape Nazism. As a Jew, he wisely fled Austria in 1934, when Hitler came to full power in Germany. Yet, his sense of loss was too great. Within a year of writing the Schachnovelle, Zweig committed suicide.
2023-04-10 words
THUMB, CHESS, SYRUP, HOTEL
All this Sand
VERGE of sand, bordering on sand, looking out on sand.
CAMEL stands there with a camel smile,
PUTTY lips chewing away on a tuft of saltbush.
GRASS would be juicier, but grass is not to be had, here in all this sand.
Parking place
I parked my camel on the grass VERGE
while I went off to buy some PUTTY.
When I returned someone had pasted an irate sign on the CAMEL, handwritten, in large, red letters: Camels Are Not Permitted on the GRASS!
