The Doctor Not The Monster
1.
The crooked stick says, I know where the bodies are. Expunge my record while I mix and match these heroes and these villains. Think tanks run by children are the lucky ones. How many feet must centipedes have in the grave? I stop half on half off the road and wave to the impatient, Go around. As in the common room I think about what has been done to me I segue from scenario to premise and I ask, Who is the opposite of that masked man? Is that a spotless conscience on the road ahead? Is that your omniverse or are you glad to see me? The sincerest form of flattery is cut and fill. But twelve more dead-sea circuits and this bed of nails is mine. When entropy's thrown for a loop my climate science is adopted, of a lifetime it's the opportunity, so throw away that rule book, throw away that crutch. Amygdalas are running rampant. Seen not heard, the young earth grins from ear to ear to ear. A mullion squares a moon up as on Mars, it's seventeen a.m. I'm throwing chairs around so later I'll feel less than loved.
2.
Neither blot nor scribble be but patterned after. I won't say there is asymmetry but I'll live well without it. When a woman poses as a man who's posing as a woman, when the astral body's astral body takes a detour, it's a shortcut. At the quantum level clowns are funny only every now and then and you are just as likely laughing with as at. What time is it where you are? If you be my alibi I'll ask then act your age. Unanimous as is the practice that is codified by me and architectural the oversight that I inspire, each apparently incriminating statement has a context of its own.
If ants or atoms, my periphery is detailed and receding. Window in the floor or mirror on the ceiling, we're confessing even as we preen. The moral agent's take is ten percent. A magnitude and a direction and a vector, et voilà there is no cardinality between those of the rationals and reals. The ways of cake are perpendicular to flights of pies. Go over, under or around the obstacle, get no participation prize.
Accelerometers are going rogue, resisting cardiac arrest, behind each fig leaf there's a naughty bit and if largess is left I'll give it to the challenger and if largess is left I'll give it to the challenged and with ample media to dream in, three cheerleaders throw me in the air and chant, Bring out your dead, your bugaboo, your barbecue. I'll be as keen to please as that bomb-sniffing dog. If on the spectrum there's a gender I can't live with or without then will the curiosities that were amusing now repel or will the curiosities that were repulsive now amuse?
3.
Stepping off a distance, I might push a boat back, I might burn a bridge. As from an exile exiled, large is close and small is far and between stick and carrot falls the fiction. As by magic, now I see three ossicles immersed in viscous labyrinths and now I don't. With sins remembered, sins forgiven in sequential demolition of abandoned block-long buildings, although Adolph Hitler loves me, Baby Jesus loves me more. What light is isolated? I identify with lemurs equally. My loyalty to gravity, tautologies are conversation starters. Don't transition in a huff but just. Parameters through sequiturs obey Hooke's Law. In lieu of furniture dismantle oxeye daisies, drink from self-selected prequels. The vestigial tail that I've divested myself of is entertaining predators. My food includes all flying objects, objects unidentified and non-existent. Give or take a manatee, permission slips are Freudian, no two the same, no butterfly to blame. Adjacent brains are better than their neighbors. There are seven things that poets don't want you to know – click here.
4.
Not your punching bag, I forego body English and ecstatically roll gutter balls. My drunken alter ego's at the hop, adjusting to that awesome new environment and as it takes a word to know a word, your package from Alaska has arrived and I defer to those who say they're on a mission and if spots are out then stripes are in. On my watch there will be no rarefaction. Though I may malign the members of my family you may not, my other mother, and no matter what Erato says, the Axiom of Choice is yours and if you like your incandescent light bulb you can keep it.
Halve the width of human hair or multiply the length, the impulse is the same, the turning of the head commences, reason is impeded reason. Inclusive or exclusive this migraine aura or a state-of-the-heart scarred, what can I add to make the offer more attractive? Twins, stop bickering, you're both right, it's a scaffold and mirage. As boys would have been boys but some more so than others, time has endpoints only only I sleep well.
About the Author
Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest fire lookout tower. Since retiring from academia, he has published poems in numerous journals, including Pleiades, Spillway, the American Journal of Poetry and Willow Springs, and in five collections.