DEVOLUTION IN THE FORM OF
WORDLISTS
a collage from Omni Magazine
Taking his cue, the comptroller
gestured to the Colonel as he passed him on the quay in Peiping, thus sealing
his fate. A brief stint with Taoism filled him with awe, and a belief in a tableau of the wise eye in
the sky watching over each generation.
But Grandpa wasn’t about to be
passed over so easily like a stick hiccouping a chorus line over a xylophone.
Sealing his fate like some centurion before the lion, he was more like the
Navajo with his ewes, protective, and therof stubborn beyond the line of duty.
He didn’t have time to invest in avoiding wrecks, he bulldozed his way through
the W-shaped benches attempting to render the sterile environment cozy. The
pharmacy exuded that familiar bouquet of janitorial cleanliness.
6 30 94?
I know I was twitching like a
cheap cinq-cent psychology maven during the rondezvous, incanting some mnemonic
rhyming hymn to leopard folk gods as he was bawling like some heifer abandoned
by the herd. A toast was raised to the indicted man. I doubt he took it hard,
handsome gnome that he was, but then, an island of marijuana smoke was building
in the forecastle. Often I wondered if the half-penny prayer was hidden in the
tableaux of a fivepence answer.
Where was Spock when we needed
him? His whiskey breath, more like a rank harvest of vinegar than the fine
liqueur used in zabaglione or sherry upside-down cake, was a ripener of the
first degree. People often went from pea-green to omelet-yellow before
succombing to the fumes. It was a real knocker, enough to make xenogamy a
national pastime. He offered me a Danish the color of yogurt ice cream but I’d
jacked some quiche fritters into my mouth pronto to keep some professional
distance from the seedy polisher.
At least there were no aphids on
the blossoming Tree of Eden screensaver on the Macintosh computer. Christ, as
if I didn’t have things other than breakfast on the mind. It was like devolving
into a Marx Brothers routine.
