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Diagramming Sentences
Love is a predicated verb
With dangling modifiers
Participially absurd
With prosaic desires
Love is a word
Monosyllabic, inciting
Alveolar but blurred
Liquid consonants inviting
Love is a mood, an appositive, indicative,
It recites imperatively substantive
When launched with a sortie of fricatives
It subjugates the declaratively imperative
Love is an active verb, its subject subjective
And conjunctively subjunctive, disjunctive
Its direct object recursively infective
And intuitively parenthetically presumptive
Love is a paragraph in the active voice
Direct address, rhetorically suggestive
But intoned, under the breath, in passive voice
Between the lines reads a voice, passive-aggressive
Love is a published genre of speculative fiction
Clauses of claws of labio-velar approximant
Love is reprinted as micro-non-fiction
Punctuated by sighed ellipses...of malar contentment
Love is more difficult to diagram than sentences
Of life without the possibility of parole
A life of tandem attachment and attendance
Whose sum adds more than the parts of the whole
Rhyming the morphemes of codependence
More pedantic than calligraphic italics
More serious than the expected consensual transcendence
More predictable than the font of the chagrinned and the tragic
When love's regrets pronounce resentment imminent
And one begins to feel its message denominative
Each lover strikes out to be independently dissonant
But cannot escape becoming the predicate nominative
Love takes no prisoners—only direct objects
Objects indirectly, objectively captured
Actions of commission on select prospects
Bolded and quoted for the inflectively raptured
When love follows forked paths of least resistance
And comes to fruition in the epic poem risen
A new type of diction comes into existence
A new kind of parlance is lyrically written
Love is the sharable word
Monosyllabic, wide, and tall
Towering over the ineffable, unheard
The unspoken that says it all
A CONSPIRACY OF PRICKS: an Epic Poem of Puerile Skulduggery
An industrial-strength thumbtack surprise
Rises a full inch above its thumb-press head
On a chair seat of such nefarious devise–
A lark for brat pricks who planned it ahead
Perched on the waiting seat promises fruition
Of pointed, conspiracies of schemes half-baked
Scheduled to impale her in its commission
In tandem with vengeance for vengeance's sake
Always unlovely, scowling consanguineous
A sad children's day for those placed in her charge
A Nazi babysitterin demands obedience
To the older sister reigning cruelly at large
"Go to your room!" "No snacks for you!" Stand in the corner!"
They'd give her good reason to bark those mistakes
With ne'er a thought to regret it or to warn her
For preemptively setting the point they would make
The fascist commands only spurred them onward
To set up the camera for documentation
Of her tumultuous start once suddenly tortured
When a 1-inch thumbtack invites sedimentation
The laws of physics co-conspired with them, 'gainst her
T'would be gravity that'd bring her fat ass straight down
And dermal elasticity would fail and condemn her
A violent end defining a fat person's renown
Captured forever for sibling posterity
It would go viral when posted surreptitiously
From her own laptop to the world in perpetuity
Drawing down her bitrate and reputation suspiciously
The spear awaiting her bulbosity looms large
"They're all in bed, the urchins, en mass,"
She cooed as she began to moor downward her barge
With the big red X on her big widespread ass
She lowered herself, eased down to the seat
Where disaster lay wait to ceremoniously skewer her
Video was rolling in broadcast conceit
And tyrannized children readied to stream it to viewers
The ass met the tack like the rubber hits the road
Therefrom was issued a sound like none ever heard
A scream of agony like the blubber meets commode
An uncensored broadcast of four-letter words
Bolting upright, the tack still impaled
She heard the snickers of the imps under the bed
Sisterly love and responsible wardship failed
But the worm can had been opened, the TikTok feed fed
Last straws come singly, insidiously one-by-one
And this one broke the ass of a camel homicidal
It's never a good idea to piss off Nazis undone
They cross too many lines and wax fratricidal
The li'l bastids got their due and due'ly met their fate
With consequences considered ferociously wild
Babysitterin applied the weights to the crate
Now tacks deductions are filed for only an only child
__________
Meant for @LAST 's "Thumbtack" Challenge (https://www.theprose.com/challenge/14627), but it was over a hundred words. Truncated <100-word version at the challenge.
A Conspiracy of Pricks
An industrial-strength thumbtack surprise
Rises a full inch above its thumb-press head
On a chair seat of such nefarious devise–
A lark for brat pricks who planned it ahead
The laws of physics co-conspired with them, 'gainst her
T'would be gravity that'd bring her fat ass straight down
And dermal elasticity would fail and condemn her
A violent end defining a fat babysitter's renown
She lowered herself, eased down to the seat
Where disaster lay wait to ceremoniously skewer her
Video was rolling in broadcast conceit
And tyrannized children TikTok streamed it to viewers
“May I Speak With Your Supervisor, Please?”
He didn't like the priest's penance given him.
"Can I speak to your supervisor?"
He waited. A man in a purple cap excused the priest, opening the sliding window.
"Hello, I am Bishop Cranston."
"Bless me. It's been 24 years since my last confession."
"You found Father Killough's penance unacceptable?"
"Yes. I didn't really sin. I wanted spiritual guidance for losing faith in the institutions of Catholicism. I've got no problem with Christianity, itself."
"No faith in, say, the Mysteries--like, the virgin birth of Christ?"
"Yea, that stuff. I mean, Christ's way shouldn't rely on these legends." He seemed offended.
"Double Fr. Killough's penance."
"I want your supervisor then."
A cleric wearing a red hat replaced the bishop, sliding open the window.
"Peace be with you. I'm Cardinal Taylor. I understand you're both unhappy and unforgiven."
"Yes, Your Eminence. I'm losing my blind belief in lots of things. It seems like we're forced, under pain of mortal sin, to believe in magic."
"Miracles, right?"
"Magic. Voodoo. Like holy water. The incense thing you swing. Blessings. Transubstantiation."
"Triple Father Killough's penance!"
"Your supervisor, please." Someone wearing a white cap entered.
"Your Holiness--didn't expect you!"
"Yet, I'm here--for my flock when they need me. I'm Pope Francis."
"I know who you are. Maybe I can get to the source of the problem. Can't I just follow Christ's way?"
"Nothing wrong with that," he said.
"Oh, thank God."
"You're only 2 levels away from doing just that. Ha ha."
"Ha ha. So I won't go to Hell if I don't believe Jesus cured lepers?"
"Oh," the Pope said. "That might be problematic."
"Is there even a Hell?"
"Maybe. For you."
"Your supervisor, please."
That's when Jesus Christ, Himself, came in.
"Now I'll get a straight answer. Jesus?"
"Yes."
"Your church. A lotta tangential things have been added. By men. Yet, the punishments are divine. Man-made rules--with divine consequences. Were those zealots from the Dark ages even qualified to do that? Can't I just follow your way?"
"Nothing wrong with that."
"So I'm good?"
Jesus paused.
"Why don't you just be a sport and say the three crummy Hail Mary's and let it go? I mean, would it kill you?"
The Day I Was Allowed to Divide by Zero
Space-time ripples ebb and flow, riding gravitational waves. Right angles egress momenta at the speed of light, deviating without losing energy. But not all right angles are congruent with the others. They're simply right-angled to their original trajectory.
They can cross.
Where they cross are nexi where possibility and impossibility meet in uncomfortable alliances of tentative détente. They're windows for those who know how to look through them.
If you're lucky, such a once-in-a-lifetime event will be in your own lifetime. You can smell it. It's a sparkly, colorful smell of synesthesia. It makes a noise you can see. It, briefly, is a living thing.
Have your pencil and paper ready when it happens! You can't use a calculator--unless you bought it from an imaginary friend who calculates in imaginary numbers.
I was ready. I've lived my life ready.
The operation was a success.
I smelled the colorful sparkles. I saw its thunder and heard its lightning. I tasted its lush impossibility. A rogue wave of confluent contadictions crested over me. I was awash. I was drenched. I was inundated.
Pencil firmly in my non-dominant hand, for that is the only way to the math, I drew the obelus divisor bar.
I placed the divisor: zero.
As dividend, I awaited the quotient. (It had been waiting for me since time immemorial.)
I vomited iambic pentameter; I shit rainbows; I cried contrapuntal fugues. I sweat orgasm bullets. I numerated my denominator. I turned around and saw myself. I relived my nativity. I chose my conception. I turned to my right and righted my wrongs; I turned to my left and left everything behind. I saw the doable and did the undoable. I had a feeling of feeling. I counted my blessings in Base 2, arriving at a repeating square root of a negative number that could shame pi. I knew the secret recipe for peace, from the quantum level to the macro world to the theoretical limits of universal entropy.
For the first time in my life I was truly happy. And amazed.
And welcome.
My "quotient": our falling in love. And now I realize it happens much more often than I thought. You just have to do the math.
Declaration of Co-Dependence
When in the Course of human events, our wedding being a big, expensive one, it becomes necessary to dissolve our wedding bands connecting us, and to assume the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and God entitle me, I should declare the causes which impel us to the separation.
That whenever any Form of Relationship becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Partners to alter or to abolish it, to institute in such form, as to them shall effect most likely their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Marriage long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, such as leaving the toilet seat up or refusing to talk all lovey-dovey on the phone in front of Others. And accordingly, two inalienable wrongs don't make an inalienable right. Whether the aliens are right or doubly wrong, inalienably.
And all experience hath shewn, that men are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed when make-up sex is such a great way to pursue Happiness. And as such, all men are created Pussies.
When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably a design to reduce him under absolute Despotism, it is my right, my duty, to throw off one's Vows, to provide Greener Grass for future security.
The history of our present Relationship is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over me.
The seat stays up!
To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world:
You have called together copulative conjunctions (not ands or ifs, but butts) at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their pubic Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing me into compliance with your positions.
I hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created selfish and self-serving. And that all men are created uneasy and unintelligible, and some are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. With or without you.
But I just can't.
Blind-Sided
"The Kid."
His reputation preceded him. Nefarious train robberies, bank heists, and gunslinger shootouts put him on posters throughout the West in the summer of 1822.
That's why he drank alone at the Blindspot Saloon in Brown's Hole, Wyoming, a dustbowl town perched atop nothing but hot dirt. The place was emptied of its cowards, yellow-bellies, backstabbers, and reprobates an hour after the Kid's sighting at the pass. Only the bartender, "Ol' Jim," remained.
The kid was parched when he burst through the swinging doors of the barroom.
"What'll it be?" the bartender barked.
"Whiskey!" the Kid barked back. "Your finest." The bartender slid over a full glass.
"Our finest--and our only," he said. The Kid looked at him and thought something about him strange; he gulped it down and winced. "Gets better by the fifth one," the bartender added.
"Where's everybody?" the Kid asked.
"You're the Kid," Ol' Jim replied. "Killers and liquor don't mix for folks lookin' to stay livin'.
"What about you?"
"Me? Been dyin' for years."
Ol' Jim was right. The sixth one was toothsome. By the ninth, the Kid, blind drunk, stumbled upstairs to a brothel room to sleep it off.
Twenty-two hours later, the Kid stumbled back down. Ol' Jim was there to greet him: "Hey, Kid!"
"What!"
"There's a posse outside waitin' for ya. Good reward money, y'know." Now the Kid knew what was wrong with Ol' Jim. Ol' Jim couldn't look him in the eye.
"Look at me! Don't trust a man who can't look me in the eye."
Jim laughed. "I'm blind, kid." The Kid reassessed and understood. "In fact, the whole town's blind. Here, have another shot."
The Kid wolfed it down.
"A whole town gone blind ? That's peculiar. Well, time to kill me a whole posse," he said. "Oughta be easy, everybody'd bein' blind."
Twenty-seven men, each with a pistol in one hand and a cane in the other, stood a hundred feet from the Kid in the main road of Brown's Hole. All blind, they had other skills honed all these years.
They had no trouble putting 27 bullets into the Kid, himself newly blind from the methanol, the finest--and only--drink in town, a town full of drinkers.