Ups and Downs

we all have our ups and downs enjoyed in lesser detail on the upswing and greater granularity on the corresponding and subsequent regress to various terrors the trick is to not obsess and get conned into the notion of a salvation delivered by the hand of some Babylonian phantom all you gotta do is put 2 and 2 together though finding a 2 that is worth a nickel could take you an entire youth and middle age just to get the broken pieces lined up into a mosaic resembling tomorrow minus the short circuit spitting sparks and the usual fluidity of meaning which will blind-curse your attention until all air has leaked from the safari tire until a burst of ketchup feeds the dingo chorus with a mustard happy face smiling bright down upon the tree stumps and gravestones and we all light our farts around the camp fire to keep our metabolism from turning to Jell-O allowing the completion of our assignment to exceed every limit and come back alive in my case they recovered a hand and an eye after an encounter with an interstate hauler freighting a load of maniacal rodents destined for the blasphemous inventory at mad Dr. Belknap's zoological mystery garden Belknap perpetually mourned the loss of spring funneled his urge for diemortality as he termed it into a series of undecorous vocal exercises that often and here found their way into print but his laboratory marginalia were in tatters contents time after time eroded away by betrayal a price placed by lot upon the head of justice pegged to the free fall of every banker's dollar making the shadows thick with ignorance and the tapping telegraph's tremorous alert arch culprit hopping the Cannonball Express a Wall St. carte blanche under one arm and a refrigerated carton of celestial telepathy under the other in an act of subtle befuddlement me and the banshee boys waylaid him in the struggle from birth to now and I wear his watch around my neck so he commemorates every swallow