5.2.23

Four Poems by Mark Young

The hills are alive with the sound of potluck

 

There is no room, but elephants graze

there, flapping their wings until the

 

lake boils over & the Reverend Charles

Dodgson is forced to come & rescue

 

them. That's the problem with summer

in the high country — little or no pre-

 

cipitation, so dry that residents live on

the edge of madness most of the time,

 

unsure if the char-à-bancs will come or if

the lobsters will be home in time for tea.

 

 

Parsing Self-Evidence

 

The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L

is to separate the grammatical sequences which are the sentences

of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L.

—        Noam Chomsky: Syntactic Structures.

 

There is such a thing as the self: the no-

self theory is not about the self at all —

both statements do not need any proof

or explanation, but together they are

somewhat contradictory. "Life, Liberty

& the pursuit of Hippyness" is fine

unless you're a Cretan, because then

you have Epimenides doing a polka

 

with Thomas Jefferson in polka dots.

But Epimenides was a Cretan & T.

Jefferson owned about 600 slaves in

his lifetime, so self-evidence here turns

into nothing but verbosity, purely subject-

ive, & definitely objectionable overall.

 

 

A political pamphlet written by the Irish

 

A vividly-detailed pirate skull

patch trapped behind the desk

 

informs me that my ham will

last the distance. Meanwhile I

 

devour an order of fries with

cheese like a post hibernation

 

bear. I'm still trying to decide if

my food fetish is part of a sister

 

trope to melodrama or caused

by a lobster being heterozygous.

 

Potatoes don't help. The Green

Mediterranean diet just might.

 

 

The Night of The Jackal

 

As lost insecticides embrace

the planet & sun-colored

 

cortèges burrow into the desert,

Anubis, funeral director &

 

puppeteer extraordinaire,

alights from his e-chariot,

 

bumps fists with the delighted

crowd of his myriad madding

 

admirers, & lights the gas jets of

the only crematorium in town.