October Masks Are Marching

Today the refrigerators hum. The price of milk matches the price at the pump. New ice cubes clunk in all the freezers. Yesterday a man got out of prison after serving three years for throwing his black worker in a lion cage to be eaten.

Sirens wail. The limos drive candidates for froth and crowd management to the latest condo, to hoot the fervent backyard BBQs, the fallow rooms, deer heads nailed to old wood, their glass eyes witness from coonskin cap to tipping one for Jesus. The band thumps in time to the ever matching, clanking tanks rolling the sands, the hills, along the rivers from Georgia, Palestine, Darfur and Pakistan, the latter, another perpetual shrug, cash passed under the table, fists around the oil pipes from Venezuela to Afghanistan.

What does the day mean? Who will be the Vice of Whom? Not enough clout to the left. The obvious napkin and fork, the plate on the table in the house of discontent. A man of great honor refuses to bark at the door, a slick clearing of the throat to his right. Clusters, mumbles, wistfulness, the lost soldier, a blight, broken knight wanders backrooms, far from seven house splendor, a man of the people, who might have heard about the boy shot to death in the Knoxville cafeteria, now cold, stiff, the morgues of America filling with the disenchanted, the lost, the raging, addicted clots, a three winged duck in Fort Lauderdale seeking a home…but….but..

The cluttered week scatters and subsides the clap trap-the unwizardry of politics fading in quiz shows, crime repeats and soft porn until dawn. When the Summer Triangle fades the Northeast Sky, it will be Saturday and the roads, the parking lots, the giant warehouses stuffed with must-have 10 pound packs of chicken wings, wide screen TVs, Martha Stewart bedding specials, millions of chemically ripened tomatoes, Georgia peaches from New Jersey, entire mountains of cell phone possibilities, eight pound Gorgonzolas, one a day Cialus for a daily crack at the prize, will be on tap for a simple swipe of the card.

Unnamed Swiss consortium endorses Uncle Remus for sugar-free cereal ad. Federal investigators in Syracuse New York seek proof that terrorist chimpanzee was released on South Salina Street by Al Qaida. The unidentified chimp, who seems to pose no threat, and responds favorably to energy drinks and mild head stroking, appeared on an earlier video, obviously shot along the shores of Onondaga Lake near the now abandoned steel mill. A small group of protesters lined the Northeastern corners of East Genesee Street and Salina during rush hour waving banners that read, APES ENOUGH.

Hurricane Paula misses Texas. She blows a kiss from Merida. Northern Oregon thinks twice about Low Flow toilets. Amazon rain forest deforestation rises 67% and the U.S. Mint boasts an Alaskan State quarter portraying a grizzly with salmon in mouth. VP Candidate Palin disavows need to preserve polar bear as endangered species. Palin buys a whale..

Soon to be released film, “Manure” invites field of reviewers. San Antonio, Texas Independent book publisher in serious condition at local hospital after choking on a live squirrel while promoting memoir, IT BEATS ME by latecomer San Francisco poet, Lucifer, Stantmaker. Credit card debt soars. Bird seed distributor offers in-flight toilet paper dispensers for parakeets.

Bomb explodes in Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad. Heads line roadways in protest. Putin snickers at the World ATM. Condoleezza Lice sells Arab Cookie Jars to Israel entrepreneurs.
Boiled egg in Hollywood, Florida is said to possess a shadow of Jesus Christ in its yolk. A neighborhood hen is caged suspect. Local church claiming virgin birth seeks to preserve shell as historical evidence.

It’s Sunday, a sodomy of icons stamped on baseball caps, TV shows and panties, T-shirts, shampoo, whatever you need to be owned by. Slip on the Bible of your dreams. Get real. The organ plays and for a few short minutes, perhaps America fakes attentiveness, somewhere between the wafer and the wine, the signs, the blessings, perhaps a sacred universe, a digression to quieter times, of ruthless crucifixions, promises of renewal, awakening, sitting in the pews, restless, for something beyond the weekend off, and the howling, drooling, speculating, electrically magnified news, that wheedles, and gnaws at the remotes, the hearts, the very strings of the soul.