Dogs Playing Poker Within a Frame

Back to that cave where

I belong—

Sylvia was waiting for

me with the others—

humanitarian U.N.

Sylvia felt each brag

of my heart from across

the table. Ted recognized

my blue uniform, blue

flannel, so similar to

Sylvia's. Thurber's

cigarette smoke—

suspended in mid air

reminded me of the

firing squad. The look

in Ayn's eyes solidified

my own personal happiness.

She knows the objectivism

that molests my mind.

Bronte sits so elegantly

with a cup of tea—

and Bukowski,

ole Bukowski,

with each coming

and going from the table

stares at my ass as if

it were somehow attached

to Betty's

fine

legs.

Psychological Diagnosis of a Writer

I belong to a club—

a dynamic church family

all dead amongst the

shelves of Goodwill Industries.

I see beyond the dust.

I have become that simple

dust hovering on abandoned

dog-eared pages.

I belong beneath piles and piles

of literature—struggling

to the top—occasionally

swimming to the side of the

pile for air,

wading through Leaves of Grass,

Birthday Letters, Perks,

Ryes, Slaughterhouses,

and Bell Jars.

I belong within the solitary

minds of all writers deemed

oddly addicted.

Psychology calls them

victims of the "effect"

education calls them "gifted"

artists call them "creative"

I call them synonymous—

synonymous with my own mind.

We're all agnostic,

all once atheists

exhuming our way out

of the misery of

nonexistence after death.

I'm no different

from the Christians.

I search for life in literature.

I look to the past for knowledge.

Yet, I've found

nothing in your Bible

nothing in your Kuran

in your Nostradamus quatrains

in your Sumerian tablets

in your Eightfold Path

nothing but merely more nothing.

So, I'll stay with my kind

at the bottom of the

literature swamp searching

amongst the fiction because

there truly is no nonfiction—

there's only nonreality.

published in Bewildering Stories