She has gone shopping for chicken stock.
I miss the vichyssoise of this potpourri season.
The unexpected earliness of most happenings
are so easy to miss.
My friend will soon return with a carton of broth,
plus, a Saran wrapped pre-prepared roaster.
I miss the plucking and the slimy fingered
dressing of a fresh plump bird,
the cleaning and chopping, the spatchcock,
the ‘mise en place’.
Today I will cook only with missing ingredients.
Everything is in order,
all is a hunger surrounded
by the soft anticipation of open lips.
I do miss the mélange and medley,
the consommé of fat times.
I will miss cracking chicken bones,
scraping out their boiled gelatinous marrow,
miss the suety brewing of bouillon,
the simmering potage.
My friend returns from the store.
She miles at the look
of childish relief on my face.
If I am left alone too long, I tend to make lists,
I become a Saran wrapped emptiness -
I disappear for a while.
I never liked tomato soup -
that thick slurry of red
in a white bowl - childhood
winters, Friday nights
with a menacing dark
pressing against the window
as if trying to get in.
Tomato soup looked too much
like blood poured out
of that suffering
pictured in the vivid imagery
hung along the stations
of a child's mind no matter
if blest by grace.
When older and wiser,
I had lamb shank soup,
clumped with celery, carrots
and loads of gelatinous meat.
Each heaped spoonful
was a precious gift,
a celebration of life.
Some days I just wanted to tread muted waves
not knowing whether
what grazed my leg was a porgy,
or a Leviathan reaching out to me from the gradient depths.
The paranoia kept me afloat,
the fear drove me to swim to shore.
When I made it back to the sand,
I chose not to live as I did before.
Walking away, I looked back at the dunes, gray and dulled,
yet the sun cloaked the sky in an orange nightgown.
The ocean smiled that evening,
a pearly white grin born from the descending gleam.
From what I saw in the horizon
in the sheen, dimensions were torn from the seams.
the sea’s teeth melted away,
its dentures rotted into a violent green.
A craterous head, so alien, so organic
crowned with mesopelagic knickknacks.
Phosphorescent eyes surrounding its gelatinous skull
poked out of the boiling cauldron that was the Atlantic.
Its behemoth sized hand, with fingers gnarled and gangly
erupting so fast!
Contrasting the married sky of lavender and apricot
Levi, then gently waved me goodbye.
There are few places now
where life can find respite
on hot summer days.
Shady spaces are contested
real estate beneath trees
and in the shallow waters under
a bridge where countless
plump, pink jellyfish congregate
to hide from the heat.
Thousands gather, pulsing
in the warm brine. They look
like brains that have escaped
from skulls, their severed
spinal cords now lethal
clumps of thread hanging down
to entangle the unwary.
The species is thriving
in the warming waters.
These jellyfish have no eyes
to see ahead. To them,
all is now by nudge
and touch. No thoughts
of consequence or compassion
trouble their gelatinous will,
no desire to share
halts their inexorable spread.
To them there is only
an unquestionable need.
They have infiltrated our space,
children of our kind,
servants to a common greed.
We are of One Mind -
a tentacled,
ethereal monstrous mind,
not inherently vicious
but nevertheless
prone to random acts of terror.
One Mind swims,
slips through your time and mine.
Thought-eels mate in that gelatinous
body of I ’ness.
Legends grow into settled science,
words like krill swell
reach Brobdingnagian proportions,
become too big to fail, reach into the realms
of deniable plausibility.
Of course we must argue and differ,
debate and judiciously slaughter;
alone we are sprats and minnows
in the belly of a godly Kraken.
Of course we are One
but I do believe
that you’re all in My ocean
and I am Not in yours.
Zombie
Slide
Dance
At Shoprite
By Sy Roth
Glassy-eyed
Rubber eeking
Disobedient cart
A red-river
Slide to the condiment
Aisle.
Eyesdivergent
To the tattood
Ladies’
Birds-flying-
On gelatinous
Skin overlapping
Above her latex pants
Too tight.
His leg askew
March of zombies
Hand fighting
The cart
Steering it
In a last remnant
Of sanity.
Bird stops midflight--
He stops
Bird stretches its wings
When she bends
For pickle relish
On bottom
Shelf.
He stares
Hoping the bird
Would bear him
Aloft
Where he could
Select a cart
That squeals
Names of prophets
Could shop right
He had a story
And demanded to be heard
His words were whispered
Do to his hoarsed throat
He suffered from the flu
A byproduct of what he
Wished me to know
"They have created a monster,
Mankind is doomed"
He told me as I recorded
His conversation
"They used stem cells from
Toads, a fossiled dodo egg, a hippopotmus
An ape, bear and a puma, it created a fume that
Became a cloud
It rained and they all feel to the floor
We didn't know why until one
Of the professors mentioned
They" fused the stem cells
With the organisms found in
A meteorite we develop a vaccine for
The flu like symptoms but it only worked
On a few of us
We spent days in the lab trying to remove the Misty cloud, one day it dropped
To the floor and started to become a
Gelatinous material
We took samples of it
And it , it was a virus it is a one organismicist
Creature that creates a mist to infect people
Than it creates and spews an acid
That dissolves the flesh and swallows you whole
It roars while it swallows"
birth(&)
death(&)
aftercare
the obvious crunch
of a discontented
shell refurbished
in white
gelatinous membrane
to the fire straight (&)
spilled
only not until
all invitations
all announcements
all wills/bills
are made/paid
will the cast-iron skillet
be worn as
a sledge-hammer hat
(dunce) (&)
holy guacamole?
then god’s speed! you
myopic avocado!
(brunch)
Frozen rain eats away at my morning energy, a soft malaise coating my tongue, maligning my words, reducing me to gelatinous failure.
Unburdened by mass,
star born
photons
hurtle
through vacuum voids.
They reach a planet
where green continents swim
in blue oceans.
It is night. A woman
looks up at the sky.
The photons travel
through the gelatinous matter
of her eye and die
on her retina,
sparking electric pulses
that race
along the optic nerve,
and her miraculous brain
translates:
I see a star.
In the spring rain,
the cedars bear alien fruit:
gelatinous growth
like orange sea anemones,
slimy creatures whose
slippery tendrils quiver
sporeful
revolting and fascinating
life
fills all niches
4/22/2018
I remember the day I ate a whelk,
A day I'll not forget.
Like chewing on a leather belt,
I broke into a sweat.
Sticky bits and slimy stuff
Were clinging to my teeth.
Nearby was an empty sink,
Much to my relief.
Over I went, spat it out
And could scarce believe my eyes,
That gelatinous mess made me puke,
It's whelks that I despise.
Entry for My Blue Cheese is contest
Sponsored By Kevin Shaw
6/1/18. Placed 3rd.
I am a photon
a tiny bundle of energy.
My brothers and I
oscillate in synchronized breath;
as a wave,
we hurtle
through black voids,
three hundred thousand kilometers
each second,
a dizzying ride.
Four years ago,
we were flung
from the fire of a star.
A long journey,
but not a lonely one,
for there are many of us.
We are nearing
a beautiful planet
where green continents swim
in blue oceans.
I hope we arrive
in deep darkness
when their star
is on the other side.
Perhaps one of their beings,
gazing at the sky,
receives us.
We will slow down
as we travel
through the gelatinous matter
of her eye
and die
on her retina.
I will no longer be,
but her miraculous brain
will decode our message:
there was a star.
1/19/16
That is it
After this
No matter if
The road ahead is hazardous
Beside many establishments
Waters with or without halibuts
And areas where the ground and air has traces of contaminants
Bought her a lot of amethyst
And garnets that were called mandarins
So that whenever she wanted too, she could dress up and feel glamorous
In the liquor cabinet
Was bottles, some of which were extravagant
And they typically had either a cork or twist cap on it
Others showing their true colors
Fussing over nothing
Then being animus
Because they are desperate and ravenous
I told you you're soft and gelatinous
Stop trying to talk blasphemous
Or you'll get burned like a lot of cannabis
Bought some amulets
And found a box of talismans
What it said and meant, caused me to conduct my own analysis
I collected my fears in a jar,
set them on the window sill
and watched as the sun melted them
into a mass of gelatinous doubt
Spread them on my toast
and consumed them -
before they consumed me
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