Mr Portmanteau carried too much baggage,

bags and suitcases he wanted no longer,

sins and wicked deeds spilling out on the floor.

Wore striped suit in jail for Californication

because of his great love for sexercise.

Guzzled tall mixed drinks of scotchka,

suffered in winter from chilling affluenza.

Wanted bromance from his very best friend,

lost his Volvo to a friendly carjacker

people he knew were all his frenemies

wearing clothes made of plush pleather.

Holed up in his house for staycations,

fancied himself as a workaholic but

found guilty once again of spamforgery.

Just couldn’t get rid of his baggage!

port•man•teau Definition

ˌpôrtˈmantō/

noun

1.

a large trunk or suitcase, typically made of stiff leather and opening into two equal parts.

2.

a word blending the sounds and combining the meanings of two others, for example motel (from ‘motor’ and ‘hotel’) or brunch (from ‘breakfast’ and ‘lunch’).

don't you dare

mock me

for being small

when you're 

the one who 

cut me

down to size.

Unfiltered gasps of undiluted reams

Of office paper stuff my esophagus. you close your lids and staple her lips to yours I toss the draft

Aside cast my cradled

sleeve on yours-on mine

Red road kill rests on the bridge

Of my nose I stifle the sting of unaquainted smears of

Fetor spewed about along

His very amygdala. Bastard- children expel

Themselves from my lungs

And rest their ill fated apathy 

along the lines of my collar bone and carve their initials

Into the soft side of my skin

Administering irregulated injections into my veins they sing

To me and other decomposed fecal matter waiting on the stoop waiting for him to bring 

about the high

Speed internet connection that defines us. Until then our eye lids drag us down to pocket

sized screens until our pupils dilate- big black

Voodoo dolls deem your worth and mine the street lights 

flicker and the faces of the bastard children drown 

out my own miseries.

Imposter

Fraud

Misrepresenter of self

Impersonator of who I hope to be rather than who I really am.

The honest imperfections of others are the downfall of my dishonest perfections.

Slanderer

Cheater

The facade of hard work and accomplishment a mask of my true efforts

Seeker of recognition to achieve happiness, yet true pursuit of it is lost to me

Or rather, the truth of it lost and the self-centered pursuit my sole recreation

Vicious

Selfish

Unfeeling fool

I fancied myself a bearer of wisdom, of truth, yet I had no humility

No true desire of instruction, the roots of my black heart tangled in dishonesty

Prideful despiser of true understanding, slaughtered by my greedy hands in my haste for satisfaction

Liar

Sneak

Treacherous gossip

My lips that vowed to speak no evil have poisonous slanders ever dripping from them

The untruths that have no foundation have become my habitual exercise of self.

Egotist

Charlatan

Pilferer of Innocence

The faultlessness of self that I have fabricated in my corruption and that I have imposed on them

It has no root. No basis. I am but a humble creature of little worth with high expectations and little to offer.

Realization that I am little.

That my true self is so repugnant and my true convictions so terribly destitute

This is the rawness of self

The objectionable veracity prevailing despite the comfortable fallacies

Realizations that bring this unworthy soul to its humble knees

Knowing that righteousness can never be found in me

Renewal earned by the death of self

So to myself and all my corruptions each day I choose the painful death

And my gaze humbled by my own repugnance falls upon my only salvation

And I fear, and I pray, that my gaze never falters

For with each waver, Self flickers

Great is the one who saved me from myself

Evil is my inclination, but goodness prevails, for all goodness is His

This sorry fool is made better by unearned grace

I fall to my knees each day

I lower my unworthy head and I pray

And his charity surrounds me in all of its perfection

My debt. My hate. My ungratefulness. My shame.

His death. His resurrection. His love. His grace.

The moon broke loose

From it's clutter of dead trees...

...But when it fell on 

Sage's back, 

Shots of 

Moonlight regaled

Tiny white hairs 

On her reactive neck...

She was staring down 

At the bloodied wreck

Of her dog,

And wondering what

Base human

Would commit 

Such a 

Repugnant act...

...The cruel mishap

Must have happened

When she was 

Off at work,

And the bastard hadn't

Even the courtesy

Of pulling Daisy 

Out of the road...

...Daisy had been hit 

Multiple times,

And Sage could barely

Recognize her

Darling face now...

...Sage's tears 

Tumbled down

Onto the brutalized 

Heap 

Which had 

At one time been

Daisy.

With blurry eyes,

Sage stared down

Off the overpass to the 

Series of

Cars whizzing by

Like rockets

Down below...

...There was more

Cars everyday,

And with the cars 

Came a heightened

Sense of 

Cruelty.

The callous windshield

On each menacing 

Car

Cut every driver off

From his or her 

Natural world...

...In grief,

Sage let her body slip

From her spot overlooking

The overpass...

Falling!...

...Her body 

Plunged fast

Towards the 

Wavering throng 

Of honking, and

Screeching 

Metal...

...She could almost feel

Heat rise

From the cars

That would ultimately 

Tear her to pieces...

...But for only 

A moment,

She found

Some precious

Seconds of peace,

As she hovered above

The ungodly madness

That never seemed to catch

A worrisome breath.

©

2017

Bunny Villaire 

As an adult, whose life includes experiences, I know perfectly well that there is no stack of letters idyllically accumulating beneath the threshold of my doorway. I know that there is no comforting mid-century stereotype of a mailman, cocking and shaking his head, shoving said letters into the inaugural square foot of my apartment, privately wishing me well. I am well aware that every card I’ve received that’s not from Papyrus was the result of someone who sort of knows me standing in the candy/holiday/clearance aisle of a Safeway and congratulating himself/herself on selecting a card with exactly the right amount of condolences and a trendy-but-muted envelope color without all the cursive and religious stuff for less than $6.95. I am entirely conscious of the fact that their half-baked grievances are stacked and rubber-banded at the Devon Avenue Post Office, waiting to be retrieved by yours truly from an extremely condescending postal clerk at a time and date of my choosing.

But the joke’s on them, because I am not coming. I am halfway down the gangplank of a 747 (or whatever nondescript commercial airliner) and I am knee-deep in Everclear and Welsh Corgi, the two most notable purchases I’ve made in the past six hours. The latter is masquerading as a service dog, although what service an animal with six-inch legs could possibly perform is a glaring mystery, while the former represents a strategy to end my miserable life aboard the aircraft. It bears noting that the former is strapped inside the adorable service vest of the latter, and that sloshing vials of pure alcohol are best transported under the veil of sheer fucking cuteness, which has yet to be corrupted by the assiduity of airport security.

Halfway to my seat, I am presumed to be blind. It’s an incidental but logical development, brought on by a perfect storm of general clumsiness, an indoor animal, and Ray-Bans. I wade through a sea of crime novels embossed with their half-cooked, punny titles, and locate my seat, absolutely no one perplexed that I didn’t need Braille to identify the seat number. They’re too busy congratulating themselves on the idea that they’ll speak elegantly and helpfully hand me something, should the occasion arise.

I open a bottle, cagily unscrewing and sipping, feeling the flashbacky shame of a junior high hayride, wondering if I should have sprung for first class. I find myself desperate to hold something. I pick up my dog, this heavy, warm, shivering creature. Obliviously content, he licks my hand. The damp fur around his neck suggests that I’ve been crying, silently, onto the top of his head for hours. I detach the remainder of the quarter-bottles of Everclear from my little dog’s vest - I have just now decided to name him ‘Yes,’ like the hero of a never-to-be-made festival film - and load them into the seatback pocket like ammunition.

With a rush of acute regret I realize, for the first time and with sinking dread, that someone will be seated next to me. That my endeavor to suck down grain alcohol until I convert to a corpse may not be apropos. On the heels of my anxiety, this someone presents herself in the shape of a modest, earnest-looking brunette who obliquely introduces herself via a pandering hello to my dog. “Small for a guide dog,” she says, to me. This woman - let's call her Elle - is fully on board with the impression that I am completely and definitely blind. I cannot look her in the eye; not doing so is easy - all I can think of sincerely is what happens to a dead body aboard an international flight: whether its seatmate is spared from the carnage via some rare protocol involving a stilted announcement and a well-meaning set of waifish flight attendants demurely hauling the corpse to the rear coffee station beneath a clean white sheet from the forward cabin, striving to conjure some makeshift dignity, scrambling for whatever wisdom the employee handbook might have to offer on the subject - and it is this brutish melange of panic and pity that Elle mistakes for romantic interest.

Yes in my lap, Elle stroking his paws, her fingertips trailing mock-absently to my knee, I look through my purportedly blind eyes to these objects I’ve named, feeling gut-sick. Elle is kind, ripe, oblivious - she is a sudden perfect ten, dripping with the unleashed confidence of a woman addressing a blind man, to whom all women are equally beautiful.

We converse for an hour, of which I remember virtually nothing. I register that she is a real person, obviously – someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, very likely someone’s wife. I memorize everything with rigor and forget it immediately. We are flying to Colombia for our own plausible, unremarkable reasons, which we mutually pretend to find fascinating. For my part, I am a farmer, a sudden and alacritous liar; the season has been favorable; eggplant is tricky, but rewarding.

My mind is on white white white white lilies. Beautiful, hackneyed, no-prefix standard fucking lilies. I am wondering whether they’ll use my wife’s flowers for me too, or if the timing will be off. I'm forgivably hazy on the longevity of lilies. I think of wanting to be buried inside her casket, of the way that our bodies fit - do I have any crazy allies on the ground who might pitch this idea? is there a precedent? - and feel a sudden wash of nausea and ridiculousness at being so far away from her. I wonder if I've left anything out of the will, handwritten, on the island table, the way one wonders about leaving the oven on.

Among the bright hollow sound effects communicating the urgency of fastening one’s seatbelt, I hear Elle say, “I'm going to use the ladies’ room,” her mouth fondling the words in a bout of unmistakable over-articulation.

I aurally register the metallic click of her seatbelt, like an actual blind person. Looking out the window, I feel her sympathy warm on the back of my neck, her flushed remorse for the blue sky she thinks I can’t see.

There is no romantic drinking oneself to death, only scientific drinking oneself to death.

Mentally logging my bouncing baby aphorism, I pluck a bottle from the seatback pocket, liberating it from its niche behind a neglected safety manual featuring cartoon people at an airplane crash-themed waterpark. In the 90 seconds I estimate it will take my seatmate to compose herself, I drink the entire bottle. Feeling my esophagus shed its internal fascia like a snake, I appreciate what those fellows at carnivals must feel, swallowing the sword.

With a swift kiss delivered to the top of Yes’s head, the gentle directive to ‘Stay,’ I wade through four meters of air that has become molasses. I wonder (sort of, not caring) whether this inching forward by gripping strangers’ seatbacks, alternating footsteps with the lax confidence of hoping for the best, loosely resembles the behavior of a blind person.

I knock on the bathroom door, like an amateur. And then, by magic, I am inside and hearing the door latch, Elle’s hands guiding mine the way you would pilot a blind man’s hands. Everything is pure, extravagant texture, clawing its way through eviscerating numbness.

I try to remember if this is the first time I’ve ever had sex with sunglasses on, and decide that it probably is. Elle is biting my mouth; grappling with my belt; likening me, for some indiscernible reason, to a bloodhound. I don’t understand what this means, so I stay silent. With the sensation of having swallowed a nail salon, I pick her up and shove her against the mirror, positioning her on the narrow counter beside the sink. I am forgetting everything.

And then, unlocked, she is breathing all the wetness of her lungs into my ear. She is whispering whatever name I told her was mine, her long, slender legs tangled like vines around a condemned building.

She comes in an elaborately silent scream against my neck, and I wonder, fleetingly, how such an indisputably uncomfortable thing has become a cultural phenomenon. I bite her collarbone, lift her gently from the countertop, then come in the sink, like an old pro.

Her kiss lands and evaporates on the corner of my mouth, and I hear the plastic door click open, then shut. I turn and vomit instantly: 600 milliliters of pure alcohol spill over my lips into the most translucent bodily fluid any human has ever produced. A bright, courteous ding requisitions one to return to one’s seat with one’s seatbelt fastened. I finish undoing my suicidal handiwork, flushing the short-lived attempt into oblivion. I wash my hands, shaking, staring into the streaky mirror. The ding, again, the polite command to remain in one’s seat, with one’s seatbelt fastened, until the captain has turned off the Fasten Seatbelt sign.

I take off my sunglasses, rub my temples. I begin to cry violently. My body racks and aches, primally confused. I put the sunglasses back on. To my surprise and disappointment, I look great. I look blind.

I open the door to the little bathroom, stepping back into the stiff, cagey air of the cabin. To the right, toward the coffee station, a pert flight attendant looks back at me in horror. Mentally, I gather the frayed threads of an extemporaneous defense of my bathroom tryst, but soon realize that this is not why she looks horrified. At her feet, near her uniform blue pumps, a body lies covered in a white sheet, stretched out straight, with makeshift dignity, beneath the coffee station.

I cannot believe it. I was right.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Thank you,” she says.

We look at each other, our eyes glazed with the weirdly mistaken, grateful sadness of not being this fellow beneath the sheet.

I return to my seat, stepping over Elle, making no further pretense of being blind. Yes bounds onto my knees with a kind of blithe, directionless urgency, a history of present moments coiled in his small limbs. My mind is generating names, hundreds of names, none of them permanent, none of them mine. The taste of bile and Everclear fresh in my mouth, I order a cup of coffee and survey the slick blue-green ocean, punctuated by boats like divots in glass. With the bright, doomed hope of a hundred little impending deaths, I begin to wonder what Colombia will look like.

I welcome you as a host

To an ephemeral abode

Designed for deterioration

A rose's erosion 'for another

Hear my first encounter

Of a long-drawn silent shrill

As Death's hand caressed my face

Pallid then as star lace

As was no happenstance

Nor chance disaster

Which ended my brevity

Only my innate deafness

Holding fervency bereft

The same hand's negligence

Lending a fatal forgetfulness

A muddled dream, no less

Of blessed curses and hints

An amnesic grip of timelessness

Before absconding my breath

Buoyant and weightless I watched

Time intertwine in seams of ether

And felt my heart the foible

Flutter enigmas withered 

For my forlorn candor

Profound in hollow truth 

                                                              How should I breathe?

I asked timorously 

Syllables strung taught in throat

To the Keeper of the Quiet

Whom then unbound the knot

And replied in kind:

A soul-siphoning fracture with

an irreverent"Master or Master."

Split panes and cracked eyes

Divined the piteous sight

Of two human hands

Severed yet entwined

                                                                 By what means?

And timidly the question rings

To her motionless countenance

Shattering shivers of gold

And so payed my fate's pittance

A debt we all withhold

And"Master or Master." 

She still told

                                                                     And why?

Came the final question in intrigue

Tempting her tongue forked of fate

And eyes of Hadean trace 

She held me, or I held her,

In something not unlike an embrace

Here I felt the uncanny inkling

Of the Quiet Keeper's air

And saw by her onyx visage

That twofold destiny branded

Upon all flesh damned to share

Her mute violence struck me

An impending punishment's glare

And so"Master or Master."

Was all I dared

Thus slipped my soul thereafter

Returned my heart's dull patter

Back muttering to that same desk

Where dreams first made kinships

And "Master or Master."

Was the first transcription

Bled from the pen's lips

I was little when I found you,

you were tiny too;

I feared your big beak,

so I didn't hold you.

I watched you as you grew,

you were ready to fly,

again.

But I kept you,

you were still in pain

and I was still lonely.

So I didn't free you.

I told you honest lies about me...

I remember now,

tried to help you fly,

I would teach you how!

Though: "My little ladybird,

'fly' is but a word.

Just watch, and follow what's heard."

I had no wings to teach you,

So, I let them teach thee,

made you, poor bird, see others in the sky.

Then, from my window,

I held you and freed you...

"Let's put a smile on!

Your little bird flew like a cannon,

now, clean the blood on the lawn,

my little broken bird."

Trumpeting Trump, The Top Terrorist, terrorizes! Towering things temporal. Trump Taunts. Trump takes the time to test the tempers, Trump teases, Trump trumpets tortuous threats, these things tantalize. Taxxing times this Trumpeting Trump takes to tenaciously. This thug Trump?

Trump, Trump, Trump, Trumpeting Trump The Top Terrorist! Trump Tweezes them, Trump the Tweezer taking things to the temporal. Think this thru Trump! The theology to tempt things, this thinking takes the toll. Therefore, think thru these Tzardoms that thwacks the temperamental.

Trumpeting Trump? Trumpet Trumpeting Trump? Trumps Trumpet? Trump The Top Terrorist? Think thickly! Think translucently! Think truthfully! The total terrene to triumph. Total territories, total townships, total tracts, total turfs, they're tantamount! They're tantamount! Think totally taken together Trump.

This Trumpeting Trump! That Trumpeting Trump! The Trump! Trump thunderously tizzies the Tadzhik, then Trump tramples the Taliban, this thinking Trump they're Twin to the Tzetzes. This thought template takes timeworn theory. These theists torpedo, terminate, trash temporal things. 

Think Trump Think! Trumpeting Trump Think! Think! Then, Trumpet Trump! The times they're trifling. These times they're trite. The transformation torpid textureless truth teeming tales. Therefore then, the tunnel that tents truth terminates. Trump? Train thoughts to titillate to togetherness, to tag to togetherness, teach togetherness.

The thought that Trump thinks Togetherness! Trump Trumpeting togetherness! Title Trumps Trumpet togetherness! Togetherness this, togetherness that, together, together, together. The thought that Trump turnout togetherness. This thought teases temptation to the truth that their thinking then thickens.

Telefax Truth Trumpeting Trump! Transmit Truth Thru Trumps Trumpet! Touch Temples Trump! Trapeze, Takeoff, Twinjet, Then Tampax the total touching truth Trump. These things take then transmission to the total temporal. Tarzan Trump? Taxman Trump? Togetherness Trump?

Trump! Trump! Trump! Tackle Terrorism Trump! Trumpeting Truth! Then the times turn to the thing that togetherness therapeutically turnout. Then the temporal thinks, thank the Trumpeting Trump that Trumpeted Truth, Togetherness, Totality.

natural pearl illuminating

its bewitchment-

      a habit - cast sailing lines.

in secret glances; un-remorsefully,

  beings awaken inching

in fluid movements

unifying. bowed frames play

        within the thirsty shadows.

unstable beams flaring-

    humanity slopes and with

knotted disappointment

utters-

            "if only".

© Meg. July 2, 2017.

Photo credit- unknown. Antique postcard with T. Moore quote.