The Man Rock
A man is a rock in a garden of chairs and waits a longtime to be over.
It is easier for a rock in a garden than a man inside his mother. He decided to be a rock when he got outside.
A rock asks only what is a rock.
A rock waits to be a [...]
Ape
You haven’t finished your ape, said mother to father, who had monkey hair and blood on his whiskers.
I’ve had enough monkey, cried father.
You didn’t eat the hands, and I went to all the trouble to make onion rings for its fingers, said mother.
I’ll just nibble on its forehead, and then I’ve had enough, said father.
I [...]
© 1997 by Peter Johnson.
from Pretty Happy! White Pine Press, New York, 1997.
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Hell
“If you want to understand the social and political history of modern man, study hell.” - Thomas Merton
It’s probably like the excitement of your first cigarette, but it lasts forever, that dizzying nausea — the Unknown: with imitation human heads on their [...]
The Absent One
This brutal brother but whose word was true, steadfast in the face of sacrifice, diamond and wild boar, ingenious and helpful, held himself in the center of all misunderstandings like a resinous tree in the cold admitting of no alloy. Against the bestiary of lies tormenting him with its goblins and its whirlwinds, [...]
The Family Monkey
We bought an electric monkey, experimenting rather recklessly with funds carefully gathered since grandfather’s time for the purchase of a steam monkey.
We had either, by this time, the choice of an electric or gas monkey.
The steam monkey is no longer being made, said the monkey merchant.
But the family always planned on a steam [...]
