Timeshifted

When the time machine exploded, the research team told you I was dead, my atoms scattered throughout history.
I was badly hurt, sure, but there’s great medical care in the future. All kinds of advanced Star Trek stuff here.
You can hardly see the scars from where they regrew my arm, and this new eye is as good as the old one… even better, with the anti-aging treatments.
If only you’d have held on. They could have cured that cancer.
Instead, I wasn’t there to help you though it.
You killed yourself, and I’m laying a flower on your grave.

Charity Begins Somewhere Else

Every year, we set up a tent in the middle of the city.
The smell of freshly-roasted turkey, baked stuffing, and sweet potatoes fills the air.
This brings out the homeless, lonely, and poor in droves.
We invite them in and they sit down.
We make them wait for a while.
When they’re good and hungry, we ask them to bow their heads and then we feed them…
Into massive circus cannons.
We launch them everywhere… into the river, out into the dump.
Pretty much anywhere but here.
Good riddance.
Then, we sit down and eat our own Thanksgiving meal.

Look In The Mirror

I pour the white dust out on to the mirror and quickly chop it into lines.
One by one, they vanish up my nose.
I let the rush carry me for a minute and then sniff whatever I can off of the mirror before putting it away.
That’s when I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror.
My eyes are bloodshot.
My face is thin and gray.
I barely recognize myself. What have I done?
That’s the moment where I make the promise never to do it again.
I’ll never look at myself in the mirror after doing cocaine.

Uncle Artie

Uncle Artie was a man of the carnival. He traveled the country from coast to coast so many times, and there wasn’t a sucker’s dollar he couldn’t take.
When he died, his body was cremated and the ashes put into one of three urns.
His lawyer shuffled the urns around, and we chose.
Aunt Gladys came up empty.
Shuffle again. My dad thought he had it. Nope.
Unlike those two, Artie taught me all his tricks. I had the winner, and walked away with ten million dollars.
And his ashes.
(Don’t flush them all at once. They’ll clog the drain.)

The Missing Story

I read a bedtime story to Lisa every night.
It’s always a new story. She never wants to hear the same story twice.
She cries when I box up the story books to take to the used bookstore. She wants to keep them all.
Her bookshelf filled up quickly.
And three more I bought her.
The books are in piles from floor to ceiling, filling every closet and room.
I can’t get down the stairs to the basement anymore. It’s also full of books.
So, we switched to eBooks.
I read a story from the Kindle, and she falls asleep.

The Council

The Emergency Council of Hedgehogs was convened under the giant oak tree in the deepest part of the woods.
Panic ran rampant as teddy bears were stumbling around drunkenly after their picnic, grabbing hedgehogs and tossing them around.
It was decided that an emissary would approach the mommies and daddies of the teddy bears, pleading for help.
But instead of putting the teddy bears to bed to sleep off their stupor, the mommies and daddies got drunk and threw the hedgehog emissary around, too.
Angered, the hedgehogs burrowed deep under the giant oak tree and set the woods on fire.

The Angry Birds

I use my iPhone to play Words With Friends, but all my friends have given up on this Scrabble variant for a game called Angry Birds.
Apparently, these birds are angry because a bunch of evil pigs have stolen their eggs, so they attack various structures built by the pigs trying to kill them and take all the eggs back.
I loaded the game and tried to negotiate a settlement between the birds and the pigs.
And then I killed them all.
I smiled, had a huge plate of bacon and eggs for breakfast, and sat on a feather-filled pillow.

Where did the turkeys go?

Strange things are happening these days.
The strangest?
Where did all the turkeys go?
That’s the question everybody’s asking.
All of the grocery stores are out of turkeys.
There isn’t a turkey to be seen at any farm.
And if you bought a turkey already and put it in your freezer, you’re probably wondering why there’s a huge empty space in there now.
Even pictures of turkeys have vanished from everywhere. There’s no entry for it in the dictionary.
Oh well. I didn’t like turkey anyway. Forget it.
Pass the mashed potatoes and gravy, please. That roasted eagle smells wonderful.

Poetry In Motion

After watching girls roll around the track and beat the crap out of each other in what was billed as “Poetry In Motion”, we walked out of the roller derby and put together our own sport:
Rollerpoetry.
Instead of helmets and pads, we handed out berets and copies of Allen Ginsberg’s book “Howl.”
Poets would circle the track, sharing the verse in ways that teachers and Kindles couldn’t.
Opening night, the crowds gathered around the track and booed the circling poets.
One bumped into another. They started throwing punches.
My friends, there’s no avoiding the truth: Culture truly is dead.

The Balloon

There was once a balloon in Balloon Land who was unlike the others.
He was filled with mustard.
They all floated around and laughed at him.
So he rolled away, far away, until he reached the Kingdom of Hot Dogs.
Frightened, the balloon began to cry, and mustard dribbled on to a hot dog.
It made a pretty yellow squiggle.
Another hot dog saw this. “Put one on me!” it said.
All the hot dogs wanted squiggles, and eventually the balloon ran out of mustard.
“What good am I now?” it cried.
The hot dogs sacrificed it to their god.