T.S. Eliot said “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”
Me, I steal, demand ransom, and threaten to cut off toes and fingers if my demands aren’t met!
He’s been tied to a chair in my kitchen for 3 days.
“My life is measured out with coffee spoons,” he says, and smiles.
I dump out the silverware drawer over his head.
“Let’s not be narrow, nasty, and negative!” He whines.
“Time’s up,” I say, pulling out my gun… and…
The damn thing misfires.
So, I pull a knife from the butcher’s block and I killed him.
Boy, did he did whimper.
Tag: tragedy
Gene
Every time I read about a road fatality, I check to see if the people in the car were wearing seatbelts or the motorcyclist was wearing a helmet.
Oh, and if they were drinking.
Despite decades of education and laws, people still do shit like that, and they die or occasionally kill people.
I wonder if it’s a set of genes. The “Don’t Wear Seatbelts” gene or the “Drink While Driving” gene.
Sadly, they’re not linked, so sometimes a drunk driver wears a seatbelt, crashes, and lives.
It’ll take a few more generations to weed those genes out, I think.
Haunted
Call them Ghosts.
Collecting up all the papers of someone’s who’s died, processing them into an AI personality engine, and plugging it into a hologram might make sense for historical figures like Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln, but doing that with the Facebook and Twitter and blog and email archives of my son…
He stood there. Right by the coffin, delivering his own eulogy.
He can say he loves me and thanks me for everything, how much he misses his mother, but this is torture.
It’s 2AM. The bottle is empty.
Standing there. By the bed. Staring.
Turn it off!
More Circles
The world is a mess. And Hell is filling up quickly.
So, The Devil is adding circles to it to handle new sins.
For instance, there will be a circle for Spammers. They’ll be force-fed herbal supplements and smeared with noxious creams, giving them painfully massive erections and swollen breasts.
The rest of the damned will need to be moved to make use of the new space.
Diverting the river of fire.
Replanting the suicide wood.
Changing harpy flight paths.
And that’ll be a nightmare in logistics.
But then, it’s Hell. That’ll be a punishment for condemned change management consultants.
Seen Or Spoken
Today is my brother’s birthday.
I have not seen or spoken to him in years.
We fought a lot when we were growing up, and it never stopped.
Mom kept trying to get us not to fight and to bury the hatchet, but Dad never got along with his brother, so he totally understood and respected our decision to stay the hell away from each other.
So, when one day my brother shows up, yeah, I buried the hatchet.
Into his chest.
I buried the body in the back yard.
So, yeah, I haven’t seen or spoken to him.
Satisfied?
Watching the snow fall
Old Bert looks out the window.
Green. Brown.
The first of his ninety Winters without snow.
He shakes his head. “This won’t do.”
His hand trembles as he reaches for the phone.
There are no buttons. No dial.
He picks it up, brings it up to his ear, and gently whispers “Snow.”
Looking out the window, he watches snowflakes appear, slowly at first, then more… and more…
He smiles. “Thank you,” he whispers, putting the receiver down.
His heart will give out tomorrow morning. They’ll find him in his chair, looking out the window.
Watching the snow fall. And smiling.
Worn Out
Some people don’t like it when you say their name.
So, they say: “Yeah, that’s my name, don’t wear it out.”
How do you wear out a name by saying it?
I went up to Steve and said “Steve” a hundred times, and it came out the same every time, although I did need to sip my glass of water halfway through the hundred Steves.
When I was done, he was still Steve.
So I did it a thousand times. Ten thousand times.
No difference.
When Steve died, his name was on his headstone.
Cheap stone. It’ll wear out eventually.
Seven of Swords
I knew a warrior who carried seven swords.
They were the finest blades I had ever seen, each more magnificent than the last, and each had its purpose.
One to thrust.
One to swing.
One to parry.
One to stab.
One to riposte.
One to chop.
And with that, he lumbered off into battle.
“What is the seventh sword for?” I shouted after him.
But it’s too late. The weight of the heavy swords left him defenseless, and he’s killed before he can answer.
We buried him, and stuck the most magnificent seventh sword at the head of his grave.
Gift Giving
Back in the Seventies and Eighties, the Russians were known to put explosives in toys, scatter them over Afghanistan hotspots, and let kids bring those toys back to their homes where they’d blow up.
Sometimes, their mujahedeen fathers and brothers would be at home, and the explosion would take them out.
Other times, it would just kill the kid out there in the field of rocks.
So when NATO troops thought to dress up as Santa and hand out gifts to the locals, yeah, that explains why they opened fire on them.
Thank goodness the Santa costume belly-padding was Kevlar.
A Loss Of Wax
The museum has a very large collection of wax cylinder recordings, but the ones they display in the museum are all replicas.
The real ones are restricted to researchers like me, and after years of testing, my laser-reader is ready to finish digitizing them all.
I showed up with my equipment, and was quickly escorted to the stairway down.
“There was an electrical fire in a storage room,” says the facilities manager. “The sprinklers weren’t enough. Whatever didn’t burn, warped and melted.”
We slosh through the basement and pull aside a charred door.
Looking upon the ugly ruin, I wept.