Message in a… mentholated lozenge?

I threw away all the fortune-cookie-slips when I purged my desk, except for one that says "Action is nothing without the Motive". I almost discarded a cough-drop wrapper with them, except that I noticed something I overlooked: words in tiny font. "Be resilient"; "Go for it"; "Get back in there, champ!" All are excellent phrases…

Advertisements

A Discount Muffin

first draft "A Discount Muffin" is the poem I eat tonight. I am ravenous to find nourishment with meaning and its empty calories (so-called?) are filling a visceral space. The mental debt owed to me is the coffer I constructed, empty, to fill for myself from my self, extorting my self in proficient, endless anachronisms.…

The Great Fortune Cookie Spiral

"The Szechuan Pepper Daddies" were the improvising-troupe who threw fortune cookies at random as they entered, inviting an audience member to open one as a prompt for their show. I saw the 'Pepper Daddies' in the second-round of the Fighting-Improv-Smackdown-Tournament (b.k.a. "FIST") that Washington Improv Theater hosts every year. They lost to "The Prosecution" in…

Conflux #1

Vocabulary.com offers conflux as a synonym for confluence, as "a flowing together" or "the act of blending together components thoroughly"; its connotations are slightly different from the riparian 'confluence', which is the name of a nascent entry that I never wrote because I could not get it perfectly in-mind.  After browsing an entry by a…

Mind-Trip: Visiting Past Selves

The morning after my graduate coursework was complete, and with no more school assignments to write, I sat in dim quiet. A restlessness stirred in my core but fatigue lingered-on. I decided to try a self-compassion exercise I found on the Internet. It told me to think of an uncomplicated love and I tried to…

Finding Balls on my Walk (another fragment)

I needed to go walking. How I knew I needed to walk can be the subject of a longer reflection, some other time. I varied my pace as I meandered through my Northeast D.C. neighborhood casting glances into obscure alleys or across the surface of familiar houses in order to hook something new with my…

Chirp Chirp Chirp

My keyboard chirps at me. It does NOT ‘cheep cheep’ endearingly like a goldfinch. If I bang very hard on my oak desk, defiant ‘twerk’ noises spit at me. I want to tomahawk my keyboard with a meat-cleaver. It may annoy my musical sensibilities because the chirp comes too late, not in tempo with my…