Rara Avis

Like all things related to screwballs and misfits I was born looking for a word inside a clock. Back then, time ticked loudly, clocks ran faster than chipmunks. Young bones were fueled by green grenades plucked from low-hanging life-lines. I needed words to save the world, I needed a clock-case to store them in, I needed speedbumps for my brain. Mother said that If I lived to be a man I would be all strewn about like a crow-pecked scarecrow. Eventually I discovered a way to make words bespoke, to give them meaning outside of the hide-bound and buckram dictionary. Naturally I had to invent my own time-machine, and had to surrender to a fanciful argot. For a long while, only blithe revenants and their little helpers could read my tenuous tidings. It was only when my pipsqueak prattle had the effrontery to call itself ‘poetry’ that some said sadly that I may be ever so slightly explicable. Alas mother was right, there is only the clock, and it runs on mechanical words, and so I remain a rare bird bamboozled by age-worn chalk-talk, a jargon that refuses to jump out of its own skin.