A SHORT PLAY...ON WORDS (or "Eat Shit And Die")

Imaginary Garden With Real Toads

                       THE SCENE: A fast food drive-through somewhere in                                                                    middle America                        

                       CHARACTERS:

                      SHE: A young female order taker
                      HE: A male customer who has just pulled up to the intercom                                                  


SHE: Hello, and welcome to SHITBURGER. How may I help you?

HE: Uh... I guess I'll have a SHITBURGER with everything on it.

SHE: You want the works on that, you say?

HE: I think...what kind of shit does that come with?

SHE: Oh, there's all kinds of shit on there, sir....a real load. I think you'll     enjoy it.

HE: Okay, then, I'll give that a try. Never had a SHITBURGER before, but my girlfriend strongly recommended that I eat some...

SHE: Oh yes, we get a lot of referrals that way. Mostly men. 

HE: So these burgers are good, eh?  I admire that you are up front in your advertising about the ingredients. That seems to be rare these days.

SHE: Well, sir, that was an easy decision. Our research indicates that most people don't give a shit what's in it, as long as it tastes good. And we've devised a way to make shit absolutely DELICIOUS!

HE: No accounting for taste, as they say!

SHE: Ha ha...that's right, sir.

HE: Your prices are really good.

SHE: Yes, they are...we make shit affordable...and addictive!

HE: Right...uh, what other shit do you have to go with that?

SHE: There's our curly fries...deep fried...

HE: Sounds delicious.

SHE : Deep fried in some deep shit.

HE :All right...I'll take the curly fries too.

SHE: Guaranteed to curl your toes. Would you like something to drink with that?

HE: I see that your BIG PISS cup is a full sixteen ounces for only fifty-nine cents!

SHE: Yes... it's full of piss, but with all the high fructose corn syrup in there, you'll never notice the difference.

HE: YAHOO! Looks like I'm all set.

SHE: Please pull up to the window then, sir,  and thank you for choosing SHITBURGER. Have a crappy day!

HE: Ha ha...no doubt about it. No doubt at all!!!

THE UNBEARABLE SLIGHTNESS OF BEING

Imaginary Garden With Real Toads

Another dawn fulfills its pledge to the calendar.
Another day finds me searching for my name.
Angst must be kept at bay with constant distraction.

I wander through the crowd in a Mylar suit.
(Gotta short between the ears, I hear somebody say.)

Funny clowns--buncha balloons...
Baby lets go and WHOOSH--it's bye bye.
The first in a long string of lessons.
(A child cries in the jungle under the Jurassic sun--
Some things never change.)

Girls in poodle skirts on porch swings,
Parchesi in the parlor, and Father Knows Best.
Secretly, we replaced this couple's coffee with Sanka brand.
(Secretly, she wants to be defiled in the basement.)
TASTES LIKE SHIT! she exclaims.
That one doesn't make it on the air.

The come-hither eyes from across the room.
The radio singing: I ll never learn to be
just me first by myself.

Cruising through Memphis at midnight.
(Do I really feel the way I feel?)
She is nearly in my lap.
I said you can work the gearshift--
she made her own interpretation.

Packed my bags and headed west.
(I've left a few things out.)
West of somewhere.
East of someplace else.
A matter of perspective.

No one knows where they really are.

And when I turn to look back, 
The memory of you 
And you 
And you 
Turns to salt.

And were it not for gravity
I'd have floated clean away by now,
avoiding all the fuss
like a pink balloon
under the August moon--
or Uncle Albert dodging the pigeons
before their nightly bowel movement.

Past the screaming bullets.
Past the starving children.
Past the glaciers cascading into the sea.

Somewhere there's a reason.
Maybe I can see it from way up here.

SOME EVEN RUN

Imaginary Garden With Real Toads










Somebody asked today
what I do with my time.
I said I pay bills.

That's takes up a good chunk of it.

Oh, and lots of walking
(mainly to take out the garbage).

Other than that it's
readin' and writin'
but very little arithmetic,
cuz I put 2 + 2 together
a long time ago and observed
that nothing comes out
exactly the way you're expecting.

Used to spend a lot of my time
tryin'to figure out why that was
but people would say: Why you standin'there scratchin'yo head all the time?
And I'd say oh, lice--and that left me with
a lot of free time to myself--
but still couldn't put my finger on it
other than each of us is just a half
lookin' for the other half,
instinctively knowing we were whole
before the Great Forgetting--
but once broken it's hard
to get those Humpty Dumpty
shards perfectly aligned again.

Best I can advise is
that at some point I will betray you.
Or you will betray me.
And we will either live with it
or we won't. Those who do
put on a brave face,
refusing to be broken.

Some of them even run for president.

ULTIMATELY

Imaginary Garden With Real Toads

When I start to thinking about it
I say to myself what was wrong
With that one?
And what was wrong
With that one?
And so on down the line
Covering all the ones I
Ultimately
Found something wrong with
And then I think about
What was good
And there was always something good
And often there was a lot that was good but
Ultimately
There had to be something
that was bad
That trumped all the good, otherwise
DUH
I'd still be with that one
But often I don't recall just what it was...

And then I start to wonder if any of those who
Ultimately
Found more that was bad about me than good
Ever run through the same checklist
In their heads
Asking what was wrong with him?
Ya know
Cuz there WAS a lot of good
(At least for a while)) but
Ultimately
There had to be
Enough bad to trump all the good

But

Why do I get the feeling that THEY
Sit there shaking their heads saying,
OH SHIT--how could I forget about THAT???

And 

Gee, I wonder whatever happened
to that A-HOLE anyway!