jonberger

After it all went down, we asked how she did it.
“It all seemed so scary. How’d you keep it all together?”
“I didn’t see any other way,” she said, “it was either this
or just collapse. I wasn’t going to collapse, so I kept going.”

It was impressive anyway.
“You kept calm under really strained circumstances,”
someone responded, “I don’t know that I could’ve done that.” “I didn’t find much choice in the matter.” She shot back,
“It was all I could do: keep on keeping on.”

We nodded at her sage suggestion.
It was what we would all try to do
when next the going got tough.

She sent us all on our respective ways
soon after.
She never really had much time
for any of us.

In my recent travels I have discovered Duck Donuts
the kind of place which makes me despise
the existence of an active internet.

Because of the internet
I can find the answers to all the myriad questions
that had best be left alone,
questions like:
at the place named Duck Donuts, do they sell donuts in the shape of ducks or ducks that were fed a steady diet of donuts
or is it just the name of the owner, Duck?
Is the same Duck educating drivers how to circle their cars loudly in parking lots?

Perhaps it is a gaming store,
where they play something like laser tag,
where round circular dough rings are thrown at opponents
with only daring shouts of “Duck!”
hurled as warning.

Anything is possible in such a store.
Duck Donuts offered such a wealth of opportunities
but all of these are curtailed
by the curse of the web
and its promise of responses
to all the queries that might be posed
in this wondering world.

I don’t want to know the answer.
I just want to continue living
in a place of curiosity.

Quiet, please. Your old friend
has something to tell you.

You have known each other
for decades by now.
Through centuries,
at this point.
You have shared multitudes
of loves and lame stories
and lost causes and lunar passings
larks gone wrong and lives lived right.

And now there is something to say.
Could it be important?
Is it monumental
or simply some other pronouncement
about some comic books
like last time?
Who can say?

Your friend has the floor
and you respect each other
even if there might be mispronunciations,
malapropisms and meandering stories involved.
Old friendships are worth it in the long run
and this has been the long run.
So listen, please, while your friend
shares what there is to tell.

Dammit.
Investing in corn was not worthy of taking up your time.
You have a guy for this kind of shit.
Old friends are good friends,
but only they can fuck with your head like this.
Maybe now you have something to tell
to your old friend…

This one isn’t about you. Really, it never is.
I don’t know where you got it in your head
that I’ve been writing about you
because I certainly never meant
for you to be thinking that
so I apologize that someone
has been mistakenly giving you that impression.

If it was Sam,
I’ll go talk to Sam.
Sam’s been an ass these days.
Fucking Sam…
Ever since Sam’s been wary of their gender identity,
it’s been a bitch to deal with them,
but perhaps I digress.

I’ve not been writing about you.
This one isn’t about you,
and the others haven’t been about you
– but especially not this one,
and probably not the others.

Anyways, I hope everything’s
been going all right.

Let me know if you want to chat
or anything!

There are things that I will happily doand things I do begrudgingly,
like dishes.

Dishes, I take responsibility for
only on the rarest of occasions.
I hole up dishes in corners of my apartment
and wait for the right time to do them.
In some cases, the right time
has still not occurred.

Sometimes, I eat off boxes
to avoid dishes.

Washing dishes sucks.

Taking out the trash, though,
is fun.
I get to excise demons,
purge myself from what was keeping me down,
remove the waste.

There is purity in that cleansing ritual.
If I could throw out my dishes,
that would be another matter entirely.

In the bright room resides a subtle ghost
whose spirit remains
in the form of pictures left
to contain him and his memory
after his form has gone
so recently.

I really think I’m missing out on the apple train.
I discovered Honeycrisp a few years ago
and it immediately became my favorite new apple
but now, when I see a new kind of apple I’m unfamiliar with
I become afraid.

What if this is the best apple ever now?
Can it surpass the Honeycrisp?
Sometimes I try it
and I forget what it is
so if I’ve had an apple that beats my Honey C,
I’ve not noticed it yet.

I have not done a categorical study
and I am perhaps not such a rigorous taste-tester
regarding these things,
much as I delight in my Honeycrisps
when I have them.

Still, I suspect there might be other apples
out there for me.
Could somebody tell me what they are?

The big white sun
had a blazing beat
and a rhythm that could not be comprehended
by those on the road beneath it.

The heat that sizzled from the white sun
was penetrative but insignificant.
It got to you,
but it didn’t raise your temperature much anyhow.

The sun was something strange
not something you’d normally see;
something you’d certainly remember
for some time to come.

It didn’t stop folks from being pissed
at the substantial traffic
caused by the thirty-car pile-up
on Route 81, but that’s probably another tale.

When my dad still lived in the same house as us
he came home one time
drunk as a skunk with no bunk bed
(which, as you can imagine,
is pretty funking drunk),
his hand bloody from some mishap with a broken bottle,
and his face snotty with blubbering tears.

I had never seen such a thing from my father before.
I don’t know what led him to the drink
or to the crying jag
or to the shattered pieces of bottle.
Clearly my father had a rotten night.

I was too young to understand what was going on
too young to ask what happened.
Maybe I still am.

In later years,
I never followed up
to ask what that night had been about.
Perhaps I should have,
considering how it stayed with me.

The morning sun left responsibilities

for a lazy boy simply seeking to flee
all the things he knew that had to be done
so he ducked and he covered and he ditched and he run
to the bottom of the beach and the top of the hill
just in hopes of escaping the list that had filled
the day in front of him with such dread
’til he found hisself a hammock for to rest his head

where he escaped the fate of the missions of the day
til the seeping thoughts they entered and they wouldn’t go away:
"What you don’t do now will be waiting for you later;
not a silken caterpillar but a hungry alligator!"
and "the sooner tasks are done, the sooner rest is earned."
These were the thoughts, into his head were burned.
So the boy got out of hammock without being asked
and headed out to do all that, which he had been tasked.

First he did that job, and then he did this ‘un.
It was in this way, he would lay into the mission
of accomplishing all that he had set out to do
by reading every item on the list and running through
each one with a line because it was done.
Then he’d go off and have guilt-free fun.
And so the man’s plan began with his best ability
as he worked through his day-long responsibility.