Chet and also in this issue: Uncle Alphonse's Son and the Redemption Song.

Somewhere between his and her pillows between Chad and Chud lies Chet, and his propensity for presumed proficiency alternating with stupefication is the prevailing dirge of the world in its word:

I wandered the yard like a plastic grocery bag in the wind, and we could see, peering over the shoulder of the newly christened prow of spring, that the belated March gales had at least set upon us.

Chet the pet, as Uncle Alphonse would say after he had laid waste to the community's defenders of a gentlewoman's honor, "I got one more bullet in the gun" as he Saturday-morninged at the small engine, coming upon that last knight of decency unawares. Not even a Baptist preacher could level that kind of hurt, I tell you, as he whomped the man until he was literally too exhausted to swing on him again. His cousin Shingle held the pistol, Alphonse having said to shingle, "hold the pistol", and did the slow-walk into the weary face of the man he knew only on appearance, not a name. They may as have well have been lovers from the Mars Company Dance Hall, for all it was worth, giving each other physical examinations in the rear of a beater. "Hold the pistol", it was, "and I'll whip on this here upstanding Devil's Hat boy until I get tired."

He had urinated something the color of Fanta--reasons unknown, and it was, as we say, declining years, as if to say it was past his prime? or more aptly it was in the height of his pride, that he had no discernible prime whatsoever, only complaints that trailed the way home behind him, breadcrumbs the odd squirrel would get, such that Alphonse would never find his way back, not lost, but carving his own trail in the inexcrible light of his pride. It lit through making spider webs look like jewelry, making keyholes glow, giving a renewal in sepia to any that met its gentle beams, and kind of, as usual, f*cking with biscuits on my own pan.

And as it came to the popular line of talk, Ciclope had a son, which was just like a cake of sh*t flecking off a little piece, and it in a convenient towelette so you could pinch it, like a fallen potato chip, or hair follicle, and toss him in the garbage--I thought of the microfiber as its own after-use bag for easy disposal, sort of done-up like a mumbly of Egup. And it was, as the Baptist would have it, an emblem of one's shame; I remember counting a televangelists sexual misadventure in his pride, his enumerated offspring. What more than an illegal immigrant holding his for-sale bag of oranges for offering to motorists along Hairline Drive?

ballad of the one-legged poet

'sconce the longest reaches of a decade

rue over that lost alabaster leg of ivory

remarkable to the extent that truth be beauty,

beauty be truth, as the poet once said,

O I sing! the poet once said,

deserting the desert,

circling the lochs

marauds less upon the moors

circles less the glazing

'sang his gentle hour

strutted into the river of time

as it it was the gallant

the valiant offspring

carry that particle forward

for in much idiocy designs emerge

confusion, flux, the legend

of existence, facts in queue

of him, of his sired

sludged into the flux

din of the coffee can leg

in rue over his lost alabaster leg of ivory

and its been more than a decade,

two, in fact

slogged through deserts

compassed the lochs

circled the moors

and endlessly tries

and endlessly tries

on the sunrise side of Ostara.

My little brown cigars have a fiberglass barrier between myself, the divine, eternity, protecting each, preserving none.  It is in enmity that a complacent, peaceful oblivion fills the eternal void: a vacuum that surrounds us, compelling us, also wringing logic from the ether in order to create an artwork to be admired, and recognition not compulsory.  We admire the thing all the while though we be in frustration that it accepts no human reason: it is only an artwork to be admired. It is a thing to which we reference the term "existence".

My protagonist thusly reasoned this to himself, stupefied from the teleportation(it could be he stood to close, or yet hexed into forgetfulness) of a magician: a magician was in abeyance to his master, and that one's master in abeyance to his own master.  It was like climbing rose petals in hopes that in the nexus of those would be a central nugget.

One must be bigger than circumstances, not to outwit the whiles of existence, but to pierce the fog with the sword of the mind: inquiring realities exist congruently beneath the heavens. Ethereal effluvium that one might brush aside with the harsh glare of thought.