He Wanted a Gun
He wanted a gun that
was capable of shooting the Sun.
Something that could pump lead into this
massive star’s molten surface with enough
velocity that the steel-cased bullet
wouldn’t dissolve before it
did the desired damage.
Oh yea…
and it couldn’t kick too much;
had to be portable,
and short enough to fit on his
pickup truck’s gun rack.

He wanted a gun that could
field dress a ten point buck with
only one blazing shot.
Something of enough caliber
that it could vaporize guts and
automatically mount the head over a fireplace.

He wanted a gun with big bullets.
I mean really big bullets.
But not so big that you couldn’t get
at least a couple hundred in the magazine
without them getting claustrophobic.
Not that this was a bad thing
‘cause bullets, like sperm,
should always be rearing to go.
Git. Skedaddle.

A gun whereby each and
every bullet leaving the barrel
would progressively get bigger.

Caliber to infinity,
if you get my meaning.

But he wanted this gun to be
small enough to
conceal beneath his clothes,
yet not so compact that you
couldn’t tell it was there.
A gun that you could
shove in your pants and…
well…
you know where I’m going with this.
I mean, there’s unsightly bulges,
and then that which are
aesthetically pleasing.
He?
He wanted a sexy gun.

Strange how none of the packaging
that guns came in
stepped right out and
stated that.
That is, unless I’m
missing something.

What he truly wanted was
a gun that would make him attractive
to the opposite sex, but…
but what’s eerie here is that
men with guns
really only seem to appeal to
other men with guns.

Latent homoerotic big bored barrel fetish?
What is up with that?!

Enough!
Enough about him and what
HE wants.
Dude’s obviously got issues.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that,
if I took my gun out
right now
and slammed it down on that table
just there,
not one man
would want to look at it.
Not one man would get up,
cross the room and
take it in his hand.

And dang if this ain’t a nice gun.
Damn fine tooling.

Oh, nothing big mind you.
Although well used,
it’s still got its chrome.
Meticulously well oiled
and comes
completely.
Equipped, I should add.

Of course,
in this one rare instance,
a few women would
actually take notice.
A murmur would go through the audience.
A debate would arise.
“Just what type pistola is that?”

Indeed, though
you may have encountered this
exact same model,
some may have a hard time recalling
the particular gun’s name.

But don’t give up.
Keep trying.

Trust me.

It’s right there on the tip of your tongue.

©06 Jack Hubbell

He’s the Bomb
There must be well over a
hundred of us here
and only one of him.
And we’re watching him.
Yea… We’re watching his every move.

Him?
He’s different than us.
He’s a man of dark complexion.
He’s got this special beard.
He’s wearing a white robe.
A thobe?
A jellaba?
And what with that matching white skullcap…
“You’re not from around here, are you buddy?”

His complexion?
What’s so special about that?
Of those of us
watching him,
many are lighter;
many darker.
Some have the exact same skin tone.
So…
It ain’t that.
Rather, it’s that,
plus this,
plus that.
It’s him as the total package
which has caught our pensive attention.

If we saw him down at the local shopping mall,
would we bother to study him so closely?
Well yes,
we’d notice him,
but he wouldn’t achieve the level of critical
eye-ball
he’s got right now.

Oh yea,
I suppose I should have pointed out that all of us…
All of us, plus one…
All of us are waiting at the gate.
And on the far side of that gate…
an airplane.
You know…
One of those things you used to associate with flight,
but now you envision it as
high-rise projectile;
fireball in the sky;
a great big
lawn dart.

And what’s fascinating is that
we as a racist nation
(and don’t tell me we ain’t)…
That all of us of assorted complexions,
all standing here at this boarding gate,
wouldn’t all bond together as one big ugly bigot
just because that one other
special complexion
is sitting over there, wrapped
in his pristine white jilbab robe.

But now listen:
again,
it’s not about the color of his skin.
If there’s something we fear
(and yes, fear
is part of this equation),
it’s the ideas that are in his head.
It’s those thoughts based on
two thousand years worth of religion.

“My God! What is he thinking?!”
No. Rather,
“His God. What is he thinking?”

And there,
holding boarding pass in hand,
waiting to step through that gate,
I imagine someone walking up to
that which we fear, and asking,
“Hey!
Hey you!
Just what are you thinking?
What’s going on your mind?”

And strangely,
I can hear his response.
Something like:
“Fear.
Yes, fear.
I and my god
are afraid of you and your god.”

Is this what it comes down to?
Don’t you find it strange that two gods
of such immense power
would have us embrace fear
as opposed to that of each other’s hand?

Could there be a chance that
the slightest touch between us might negate
not only fear, but
those gods which create it?
It’s a dangerous, dangerous thing.

So, no.
He and we…
All of us about to take flight…
We take flight from fear,
and with fear,
as we will not permit one hand
to take shelter within the clasp of
that other’s.

So the moment finally comes,
and we all pass through that gate.
Our tickets have been bought, and
I’d like to think our destination was set,
but up in the cockpit,
two almighty pilots
struggle for control of the stick,
and with it,
our fate.

©06 Jack Hubbell

On Punching People in the Face
I have a confession to make.
I practice hitting people.
Have done so for years.

I imagine you’re wondering why I’m telling you this.
That you now have a reason to
fear sudden violent trauma should we
come to some disagreement.
This is simply not the case.
It’s not you people I have it out for.
It’s not those people standing
there outside that door either.
But if not you or them,
just who is it my fists yearn for?
Why all this perceived violence?

Wait a second…
Step back.
Slip that punch.
Fade away into the corner.
Call time.

I’m there in the garage,
squared off in front of a heavy bag.
And I’m wailing.
ThumpThumpThump.
A staccato ostinato of ill intent.
My gloved fists rain in upon that bag
in a persistent effort not
to go mere pitty-pat,
but penetrate,
violate,
obliterate.

I should point out that,
when I’m punching the heavy bag,
I make faces.
It’s something over which I have no control.
Id idiomatic.
A facial flaunt of
foul infliction.
---Please note that I
in no way
appear endearing.

So there,
just at the culmination of a
particularly vicious lead, cross,
uppercut tantrum of leather,
I hear the voices of my
young niece and nephew
somewhere there behind me.
One is all of seven years old;
the other five.

I turn to fully face them
and there they stand,
stark still and squarely framed
in the large garage door.
Though backlit,
I can see their eyes are wide open.
Indeed, in their pollyanna world,
I have just become a bit of an
anomaly.

After a long pause,
my nephew finally speaks.
“Uncle Jack,” he questions timidly.
“Why are you so angry?”
I drop my hands to my side,
and reply, “Well, I have to be
if I’m going to hit the bag.”
And with a pained look on his face,
he comes back with,
“By why Uncle Jack?
Why do you have to hit the bag?”
And with the expression echoed
there on my niece’s face,
I can tell she is perfectly in sync with the question.
“Well you see, I have to,
because you never know when you’ll have to…
‘Cause there are times when…
…

How do you explain to an innocent mind
the need to practice hurting another individual?
How do you qualify the transfer
of that which exists within your adult world
to a Disneyesque realm
void of atrocity?

“Well, you see, Mommy’s being raped and…”

No. No. No.
You can’t acknowledge that.

“Okay. This guy’s coming at your eye
with a broken bottle and…”

“This other nation has a thermo-nuclear bomb
which they hope to incinerate us with and…”
“And there’s Anthrax.”
“And there’s Sarin Gas.”

None of this.
None of this.

None of this exists.

And I’m forced to look at those two kids and say,
“Uncle Jack can’t explain this to you.
It’s just something…
he does.”

And with that, they
simply turn around
and walk away.
Their world now
ever so slightly tainted.

And what I want to say to them is:
“One of these days you’ll understand,
and of this, I’m sorry.
So very
sorry.”

Turning back to the bag,
I step in and deliver
my final punch.
Yes, a pretty good blow,
yet nothing so brutal as
what awaits
them.

©06 Jack Hubbell

“D.N.R.”
She enters the room and
asks my father about the
D.N.R. paperwork.
The D.N.R. that he and my mother
had signed that previous year.
“The D.N.R. paperwork?”
he repeats back to her.
And she:
“Yes. The D.N.R. paperwork
you turned in.”
Again he queries, “D.N.R.?”
She hesitates, then says,
“the Do Not Resuscitate paperwork.”
And here he parrots her remark,
“the Do Not Resuscitate paperwork.”
He says it,
but
it’s rather obvious that a
big question still hangs in the air.

The three of us stand over my mother
who lies in a hospital recovery room
and looks…
quite fragile,
ancient and
mortal.

“Yes. Do Not Resuscitate.”
And then
my father says it:
“Do Not Resuscitate.
What does that mean?”

And there we have a pregnant moment.
And strangely enough,
‘pregnant moment’ implies
the birth of something.

Something that transitions into something.
Something to do with life.
That which this moment does not.
And she looks at my father and says,
“The decision not to resuscitate.”
And my father,
he turns and looks at me.
His head tilts. Ever so.
“Do you know what she’s saying?”

And I look back to the nurse
and then to my dad.
A pregnant moment.

“Dad. It’s the decision that…
If the moment comes…
Say, there’s cardiac arrest and they, say,
might choose to try and resuscitate…
You know, like
with the paddles…
And you…
You make the decision to let her…
pass on.”

And I can see it click in his eyes.
And there’s a
pregnant moment.
“Oh yes,” he says with a nod.
“I mean no.
She and I…
Yes. Not to resuscitate.”

And I find myself looking at the nurse wondering,
“why?”
Why she could not say it.
How hard is it to explain what
Do Not Resuscitate means?
How hard?
How very hard, indeed.
©06 Jack Hubbell

Fire Good!
You know,
it took us a long time to figure out that whole
throwing-animals-in-the-fire thing.
Allot of you just assume that we
whipped out a cookbook
and there deduced the optimum time
to sling some creature into the flames,
but
we didn’t even have paper back then, so
no… no cookbooks.
Pretty much just cave walls and
certain arrangements of rocks on the ground.
Be that as it may,
cooking was kind of a hit and miss thing.

Oog and Grog’s wives had the whole
“yank-food-out-fire-now!” thing
down pretty good.
Lionel’s wife, on the other hand,
was about as sharp as
a piece of non-knapping flint rock.
[Okay. That was a pretty good joke back in the day.
I guess you had to be there.]
Again, Lionel’s wife Bruce…
[“Bruce” being a very popular name for
women during this time.
You know, it’s kind of odd
what’s happened to it since.]

Anyway, Bruce couldn’t cook shit.
Part of the problem was that
she often did try to cook shit.
Let’s just say there were lots of leftovers on those nights.

So yea, Lionel’s wife Bruce had
one set time period she’d throw an animal in the fire.
The bad thing was that
this time period was the same for a sparrow
as it was for a mastodon.
Her grilled sparrow was inevitably charred to ash
whereas her mastodon was
blackened on the bottom,
a touch of singe on the side
and steak tartar for the remainder.

Now,
DoDo Bird?
Man, Bruce could sear some tasty DoDo Bird,
and it wasn’t long before
Lionel came to spend all his time hunting DoDo.
The down side of this, well…
Let’s just say they ate way too much DoDo.
Okay. So again,
there was a learning curve after we
discovered fire and its use for cooking.
It took us around a year before
we discovered you should never throw a
live animal into the fire.
Generally they’d just jump up and commence
running around the cave setting things on fire.
Yea, I think the first time that happened was
the day Oog’s wife Sweet Pea discovered
the craft of weaving.
Yep, we were all on the verge of wearing
proper woven cloth
when that giant tree sloth sprang out of the fire,
lumbered right through Sweet Pea’s weaving loom
an wore it, and its flaming fur
right out into the fire drenched night.
It would take a few millennia for
the blouse and pleated skirt to make its comeback.
Until then,
the women of the cave would have to continue
wandering around naked.
So yea, beyond the act of cooking,
fire had many versatile benefits.
What with no fire for illuminating our cave,
we cavemen would not have been able to spend
those long evenings watching all them
prehistoric cave mamas
throwin’ fascinating shadows up against our
equally curvaceous walls.

Let’s face it.
Television was quite a few years away.
Until then…
Fire?

Oh yea.
Fire was good.

Yo Bruce baby!
Any more of them there
flammin’ hot DoDo wings?

©05 Jack Hubbell

Cyber-Spew
If it’s not on the Internet,
it doesn’t exist,
and for a very long time I haven’t existed.
Well, I sorta existed
before the Internet came into being,
but since the Internet makes no
reference to this proposed existence,
then that whole portion of my life is
pretty much irrelevant.

All those times in my life that I had
sexual intercourse,
no matter how good it was, well,
it’s all meaningless.
And all you out there hearing this
who I have had
“For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge”…
Now calm down.
Don’t get stressed.
It’s just a matter of time before the
video footage gets on the Internet and
you won’t feel snubbed anymore.
I know there’s been allot of
search engine activity on this subject.
For the most part it has all been me.

Almost every other time I Google,
It’s my name,
then “sex”,
then “video footage”.
All this time I’ve been looking and
I’ve yet to have a hit on anything,
but I haven’t given up.
I figure it’s just a matter of time before
some woman from my past posts some
super sordid saucy cinematics on
her personal website.


Now I must admit,
I don’t recall there ever being the presence of
video equipment at any of my
past, prodigiously vast
cornucopia of coital encounters,
but that don’t mean it wasn’t going on.
I mean in today’s day and age,
you kind of expect it, right?
“Yea, but why sex?” I hear you ask.
“Why of all things visual,
would it be
sex posted on the Internet?”
Why? Because, well…
What other options do I have?
This is what I expect, cuz
you sure as fudgiola won’t
never see my name on the web associated to
anything cerebral like, say…
poetry.
Ooo, yea. Right.
Like I got a chance in hell of achieving that!

No. I figure my only hope of
proving my existence via the Internet
is that time my buddy Nat
fixed me up with Paris Hilton.
Fingers crossed, I
should come to exist pretty soon.
Until then,
you can check out the quality of her
risque recording prowess by going to
WWW dot Boys-I’ve-Bonked dot Com.
There you can peruse her
one and only encounter with Natty.
Not to worry about the size of the file.
It’s a pretty darn
quick
download.

©05 Jack Hubbell

About a Book
The application of baby oil to skin
can be a wondrous thing.
As good for the giver
as the givee.
Yes, there’s a certain tactile delight
as one individual’s skin
comes in contact
with another.
No matter how young or old,
you will take pleasure.

And so, I find myself dwelling on this
as I stand before a dark display case
in Bury Saint Edmunds, England.
There beneath finger smudged glass
lies a book bound in
human skin.

And how do they keep that skin so supple?
Enquiring women
across the nation
really want to know.

I suppose that in this case,
baby oil is simply out of the question.
It may just be they’re using
Oil of Olay,
though that’s just a guess on my part.

Okay.
Although distracting, how ‘bout
a little aside information?
That is,
assuming you all want to know
how this museum got its hands on
a skin bound book.

It would seem
a few centuries back
this guy had a mistress,
and since she was of the troublesome
“make me an honest woman” sort,
he murdered and buried her in the Red Barn.


The Red Barn?
Oh yes, there is so much more
to this sordid story but
let’s just cut to the quick.
They found the body.
They found the killer.
And what with all them locals
being such a temperamental lot,
they hung him, and drawn and
quartered his misogynistic butt.
Took him apart.
Dismantled him as it were.

And
“Hey! You want souvenirs?
Got yer souvenirs right here.
You want thigh bones?
We got thigh bones.
You want big toes for your key chain?
We got manicured and non-manicured.
With bunion and without.
Wanna bind a book in human skin?
Today’s your lucky day.
We can do that at competitive cost.”

And so…
someone did.
And gosh golly gee willikers if you can’t
just walk right into a museum
and see it there on display.

Yup. Sitting just there next to
this fella’s skull cap.
And I mean real skull cap.
Grisly right ear and scalp.
But hey!
That’s macabre
and I don’t want to be accused of
dwelling on that too much
so let’s get back to the book.

Now what I want to know is,
is it a good read?
Did it say,
make the Opray Winfrey book list?

Did it get a plain ol’
Opray Book Club sticker
or did they splurge and
go all out for a tattoo?

And since we can assume that
this book’s been around,
does it have a little pocket in the back
for the library card?
And if so,
can you still check it out and take it home?
I mean,
what with a book of such high provenance
and overall lack of
epidermal blemish or unsightly scarring,
there’s got to be some substantial prose inside.

You just don’t go bind a book in human skin
and then fill it full of say…
you know…
the poetry of your current flavor to savor writer.
No.
You want something good
in a book of this quality binding.

Otherwise, there you are,
sitting down at the local coffee shop
when some stranger asks,
“Hey. What you reading?”
And there you’re
forced to respond,
“Oh, not much.
How ‘bout you?”

I mean,
this wouldn’t happen
with a book full of
my delightful verbosity, but
if you wanna fill a book full of
flavor savor poo-poo poems,
go right ahead.

No skin off my back.

©06 Jack Hubbell

My Yo-Yo Soul
I’ve grown concerned about this whole
sneezing thing.
The everything on the inside of your head
doing its best to get to the outside as fast as possible.
The way you have power over it, but
only to a certain point.
Indeed, soon to find that
every bit of self-control
you’ve ever accumulated
is pushed aside as you erupt outward,
spraying forth sub-sonic snot and sputum.
Yes, viral viscosity gone vaporific
and delightfully arrayed across
the face of a complete stranger.
An interpersonal venial violation to which
his immediate retort is,
“God bless you.”

Bless me?
How did we get from snot to benediction?
Should I be sitting on a bus
and the man across from me
nozzles forth toxic effluvia,
well I’d have to be a real dullard
not to know that a
call and response has been initiated.

His call?
An explosive projection of that
which was once contained in his nasal cavity.
My response?
Something arcane like “gesundheit.”
And should I fail to make this response…
his soul is in peril.
But in peril of what?
Satan? Beelzebub?
The Dark Angel himself
there waiting to pounce upon his
snot smeared soul?

Is this really all about the minions of hell
dining on your innermost being
or is there the slightest chance that
what we’re talking about here is
superstition?
Something pagan.
Something from around 440 B.C.
Indeed, around this time in ancient Greece,
the belief arose that upon death
the soul left the body through the nose.
Soon after, the connection was made between
one’s expulsion of air and that
petit mal spasm of spittle spew known of as
“the sneeze”.

I guess what I’m getting at here is,
I need some facts.
When I sneeze,
how much hang-time are we talking about?
And I’m not referencing that
fine mist of virus I’ve added to the atmosphere
but rather,
that period of time my soul
hovers there outside the body.

I mean,
does it linger?
Does it stroll over to the coffee machine for a donut,
loiter a bit, and then
gradually meander back or
does it slam back within a microsecond?
If I hold a hanky to my nose after sneezing,
am I interfering with retro-soul flow?
While I’m clearing snot from my nostrils,
is my soul there impatiently tapping its foot?
It may just be that all the violence
inherent to a sneeze
has nothing to do with
the forceful expulsion of bodily fluids,
but rather that your introverted soul
is putting up a fight in an effort to resist that
momentary yo-yo sling to the outside
and back again.

And what if you and that person
standing just to your side
happen to sneeze at exactly the same moment?
Isn’t there a chance that
while both souls are out there
swirling about in limbo,
confusion might just ensue and
in a frantic attempt to regain
corporeal entry,
mistakes might be made?

This might explain why I’ve been acting so strange
ever since that day I exchanged sneezes with
Pamela Anderson.
That and why I now spend so much time
standing in front of Victoria’s Secret,
imagining how
I would look
in all that
frilly
lingerie.

©06 Jack Hubbell

Arc Light
There in the middle of the jungle night,
a bomb falls from
thirty-eight thousand feet to
pierce the ground, explode and
violently erupt upward.

A flash of light
momentarily illuminates the darkness,
blinding all those assorted nocturnal dwellers,
but not before that rapturous split second
where they see the deep verdant green
of the surrounding foliage.
There’s the white,
then the green,
then the black,
and then they who can not see
and all that lush flora are ripped asunder.

Projected upward,
a 500 pound pyrotechnic
parts the canopy of leaves
and carries every thing
once alive upwards
to there, moment’s later, rain down.
Dead from above.

Yes, death from above
begets death from above
whilst assorted strobes of light
bounce off low hanging rain clouds,
and these illuminations in turn are
reflected in the eyes of
one man who stands
in the far distance.

A green tiger-striped man who pulls a beer tab,
chuckles aloud, turns to another at his side
and says, “That, my boy,
is a thing of beauty.”

And yet there at this same moment,
these same illuminations form
sparkling catch-lights in the eyes of
black garbed men.
Black garbed men who stand equidistant on
the far side of that which would
come to be known as
“Arc Light”.

And as this other man comes to laugh,
words spring from his lips in a language…
Let’s see…
What is it?
Vietnamese?
Laotian?
Cambodian?
He turns to someone and
the translation comes out something like,
“That, my boy,
is a thing of beauty.”

And…
Well…
he says that because he knows there’s
nobody out there
beneath that Arc Light.
A B-52 drops a few
hundred thousand dollars worth of ordinance
in the middle of nowhere,
and the only things that dies are
assorted bugs, worms,
rodents, reptiles and
that which emit multi-colored
slow motion showers of
psychedelic plumage.
I’m sure it is a thing of beauty.
I guess it’s just a matter of where you’re standing.
Sort of a matter of perspective.

Many years later,
I’m watching a broadcast of Fox News with
live television footage depicting
the bombing of a place called Bagdad.
The camera spins around
and films what appears to be
lightning on the horizon.
Somewhere out there,
thousands of Iraqi Royal Guard are standing.
Well, perhaps not standing.
I think we have now passed into past tense.
Were standing.

I hear a voice reporting all that’s going on in real time.
Yes folks. This is real time, right before your eyes.
I hear words like “decisive” and
“precision”.
Words like “Shock and Awe”.
Yes, Fox News is saying one thing but
I’m pretty sure the translation comes through as,
“That, my boy,
is a thing of beauty.”

Yea, well…
I guess it’s all a matter of interpretation.
They may be humans.
They may be bugs.
They may be irrelevant.
Again, it all comes down to a matter of
where you’re standing.

©05 Jack Hubbell

Will Not Fly
Pigs will not fly.
There’s an element of
truth in this statement.
The fact that they will not fly
has less to do with their
porcine corpulence
and more to do with a certain
lack in mental capacity to
believe they can.

Take two large boxes
and place them on the ground.
Across them put a sheet of glass.
Now take a small piglet,
place it on the glassine surface of
one of the boxes and
lead it to that gap between the two.
There on the far side,
place an ear of corn.
Point to that ear of corn.
Let the piglet know it’s there.
What happens?

Absolutely nothing.
The piglet will not cross.

This pig has never experienced height;
has never experienced the fall.
And yet it knows.
Or rather, it
un-knows.

Which is it?
Though never having encountered it,
the piglet knows that if it steps over the edge,
it will fall.
At the same time,
it un-knows the concept of glass.
This and the fact that plate of glass
has more than enough tensile strength
to support a small pig.

Now replace that piglet with
a human baby of the same equivalent age.
That and exchange the ear of corn
with a bottle of milk.

What do you suppose happens now?
Yes. Where the piglet
would not cross the gap,
the infant has already bridged it,
and has that bottle
half empty.

So… What is at play here?
Does the child know something the piglet does not,
or adversely,
is that little pig enlightened?
Why do we assume the pig is stupid for
not seeing what is
not there?
Inversely,
why do we attribute intelligence to the child for
assuming supernatural powers and
the ability to defy gravity by
crossing that gap?

Again, no one told that child
about the properties of glass, so… what?
Is that child absolutely ignorant
or are humans in mass
inherently born with an element of
faith instilled in them?
Blind faith that they will indeed cross
from this side to the far beyond.

And as I stand there with the pig,
both of us surveying the chasm from
this edge to the next,
I wonder at that one special gene missing
from my chromosome string.
That gene for the suspension of
disbelief.
How all these years have past,
and I still will not step out
onto glass.

Will I ever?
I don’t know.
Perhaps when I see small pigs defy gravity.
Yes indeed…

When I see them fly.

©06 Jack Hubbell

Formica
Sitting there at the counter,
her appearance is
just about as stunning
as the Formica counter
upon which she rests her elbows.
Everything is utilitarian about her
and yet
one can only imagine that
this wasn’t always the case.

Just how do you get from a life of glamour
to that of
Formica?

And as she huddles up
to the counter’s square edge,
I can see that there on her lap,
she covets a gold faux leather handbag
aglitter with
studded accents.
An out of place elegance
in an otherwise
cafeterian life.

Sitting there beneath a hum of florescent light,
the greenish cast of
all that gaseous illumination
renders everything about her
a garish monochrome
and yet,
the gold of that bag
perseveres.

It is a scintillating oasis
in an otherwise beige existence.
Without that handbag’s iridescence,
would she not blend into all that
subdued concrete cityscape which
pours out from this diner’s door?

Though homogenized against her will,
there upon lap she brandishes
the slightest hint of
exotic
transcendence.
All while the world insists
on serving
vanilla obliteration.

And there,
as she continues her
slow motion melt to obscurity,
it occurs to me that I might rise,
go to her side and tell her
how special she is.
That that beauty she carries with her
has not gone
unnoticed.

I think this.
Yes, I…
I truly think
this.

And… you know I would say
all these words
were it not for the fact that

I myself
am already at one
with my own table top of
pre-destined
Formica

obscurity.

©06 Jack Hubbell