July 2021
Bio Note: I am a retired academic and still wanna-be musician held back from group play by pandemic. I returned to the Central Coast of California after a forty-year absence because it is a great place to be, think, write, dream.
An Offer to Assist
Oh give unto me, you whom I address, any words of wisdom set, written, or etched in stone which you may wish to unsettle, rewrite, render wretched, or otherwise remove. For I am a motivated maven, an obliging other, an active ally. I shall throw them with verve to the hardest of floors and take to them repeatedly the point of my nastiest pickaxe. I shall bring upon them unforgivingly all of the might and weight of my sturdy, trustworthy, home-proven sledgehammers. Shards that may survive to be deposited in a gargantuan grinder that will be run and spun by me until they rumble stumble crumble and remain wholly incapable of a mumble or even a mild mention. Rubble debris splinters shavings fragments flakes: none have a chance. The dust and powder left in the mixer will suffer a totalizing fixer: kneaded without mercy into a molten mud they will be personally dropped down a dark bottomless pit of a well of non-well-wishers to be utterly and totally contradicted. Count on me, oh colleagues young and old alike, for I guarantee it. I can deliver on this attractive promise of deverbative destruction.
Days off Wine and Ruses
Back in the day, some uppers in the Catholic Church deemed that it would be a nice on-going gesture toward Him who made the Ultimate Sacrifice for the faithful to abstain from meat on Fridays. Many years later, the vegetarian vector of PETA turned the tables to advocate for Meatless Mondays. Well, soon said a lean literarily-leaning lapsed lad, how about some historically ironic Fishless Fridays? Or, for good, if not necessarily godly, measure— and continuing in the all-encompassing alliterative vein of individual and collective improvement— counter-fast-food promos on Taco-free Tuesdays? communion-related anti-alcohol Non-Wine Wednesdays? plus a related stale-ale week-end of Sans-Suds Saturdays? some antidote-to-luxury-grub No-Thermidor Thursdays? and, to end on a wholly appropriate extra holy daily note, a wanton-wiener Un-Sausage or solely Soup-and-Salad or Self-Serving Soul-Food Sacrifice Sunday? Yes, what about? Your semi-semi-monthly agenda is replete, your plate is full.
©2021 Charles Perrone
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -JL