05 February 2023

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.