*image by Ben Harubin

 

A man was sitting in his sun room, reading a magazine and periodically talking to his dog, when the following scene took place. He looked up from the pages and said to the dog, "It says here that one man said he sometimes wishes that he'd be told that he has an incurable disease that will eventually cause his death, for then he might be able to finally 'turn loose' and begin to truly live. The idea is not without intrigue in some strange way, wouldn't you say, Emerson?"

And the dog mused, "But such a thing is already extant in all men's lives -- but rather than it being called an 'incurable disease,' you guys think of it as your mind."
And the man suddenly bent down, close and curious, to the canine,
"Did you just say something?"

Ah, such a pleasant day,
the warmth of the sun room,
the stimulation of the reading,
the companionship of a good -- quiet -- friend.
The dog, you ninnie, not the mind!

In a faraway galaxy was once a planet on which were creatures who believed
that their feet could operate in ways not in their own best interest.
Jeeze! -- what a bunch of idiots!

There was once a man who dearly longed for that much lauded state
of "extraordinary, enlightened consciousness,"
but who couldn't ever get over being distractingly annoyed over the sound of
a radio that played permanently in the next room.

If it ain't gonna be one thing,
it's gonna be something else,
and you can go to the bank with that.

A Poem
There was once a crow
who swallowed a pot of glue,
and after doing this
he didn't know what to do;
'cause now he couldn't talk,
or get free of the glue,
oh, he still talked to himself,
but now he couldn't ignore it
when he wanted to.

And a serious-looking gentleman writes to the Poetry Overseer,
demanding to know when more stringent lines will be drawn and enforced determining
just what is and what is not true poetry.
...(But in their haste to fill out their uniforms properly the postal authorities,
along with the local bomb squad, exploded the gentleman's letter out in the parking lot behind the main building, and so the Overseer never got to see it over, and I guess the guidelines for qualifying legitimate poetry from the spurious remains cloudy.
So --
There was once a crow
who swallowed a pot of glue...

There was once a man who took serious-sounding matters to be serious,
in fact this man was seriously mistaken!
...But -- that's how it goes if you take anything to be anything else in par-tic-u-lar.