As if crap couldn’t get any tighter, our dryer decided to take a shit this morning. I can’t make up my mind if this is more hobo, redneck or white trash of me. One 50-foot length of nylon rope, several heavy binder clips, a TV satellite, one truck, and a broken tree branch make for a good ‘fly-by-the-seat-of-your-britches’ temporary clothes line. Thankful for ‘adapt and overcome,’ plus having the tools to do it.

The pessimist sees a dark tunnel, the optimist sees a light at the end of that tunnel, the realist sees a train on the tracks of that tunnel, the train’s engineer sees three idiots standing on those tracks.

Winslow Dunnigan spoke to the dead.

He had done so since the age of seven, after a mule had kicked him in the head, knocking him utterly senseless. He never recovered from it and by the time he was ten, his parents had pulled him out of school.

He eventually inherited his family’s farm.

Edwin LeDoux made it a point to check on him regularly. One afternoon he found Winslow sitting at the kitchen table, pale-faced, sweating, confused and eyes wide.

“What’s the matter, Win?”

“Something dead wants to return.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“How?”

Before Winslow could speak, he stood and went rigid, eyes rolling up, and body shaking violently.

“Win?!”

A second later, the old farm house was rocked by a deafening explosion and Edwin was slammed through the kitchen wall into the side yard. From where he lay, he could see the viscous blood and bits of Winslow Dunnigan dripping from the ceiling slats, counter top, stove and what remained of the walls.

In the center of that now-vacuous kitchen stood three obscene figures, each torn, twisted and deformed, each out of phase, blinking and shivering, each covered in Winslow’s earthly gore and each shrieking like the unholy Demons that they were.

Edwin LeDoux’s mind never stood a chance.

Having a tough time deciding which is more worrisome: taking my temperature or weighing myself.

same old moon
but a new moon
in our night sky

tonight we reminisce
about the old us
and all things new

At a distance, he looked old, bent, off-balance. Up close, not much changed about him, save for what he hauled on his back: a metal lawn chair.

It was loaded with a bed roll, a cooking pan and a canteen, that swung precariously from the left corner of the chair. He had fashioned a set of shoulder straps to the frame, which made his already gaunt body seem as if he were a walking skeleton.

“‘So-very-on-the-road,’” I thought.

Once home, I pulled out a lawn chair, set it in our yard, where I relaxed, feeling kingly and it promptly collapsed.

Feds are importing beef from Namibia while American ranchers are having to destroy their herds.

If I got rid of everything made in China that is in my home, I wonder how naked would I be?

In order to create ‘herd immunity’ in sheep, they are brought together, not separated. To create ‘herd immunity’ in ‘sheeple,’ (sheep + people = sheeple) they must be separated for their ‘own good.’

A Crowned Lady
Parades sadly
Through cities,
Into hills,
And valleys,
Beyond the Southern Cross.

She prays fervently
And all I do is
Touch my forehead,
My stomach
My shoulders.
Up to down,
Left and right,
As if condemned.

Perhaps I should
Be more afraid
But strangely
I find myself calm
Or the waking dead.

All the while I joke:
Toilet paper hoarders,
People who react,
Who do not act,

Me, myself and I,
Absorbed by ‘what if,’
and
Benjamin Moore paint,
Green,
Color code 33a352.
And like blood,
It covers my hands.

Thrashing in still of night,
The overhead fan cuts
The rooms quiet darkness
Like an executioner’s ax.
But still…
there is that code
And the fact that
No fact begins with ‘if.’