Reading Ulysses in Montana #569

Recurring dreams of recurring cream became a recurring theme for the hottest television show of its day.

Laying aside the lying awake with a lei around his neck, Benedict said a prayer for lying laymen in the laying up of hay that was lying around the ground with a pound of feathers and a pound of rocks pounded into the clay of fortitude–but Benedict had no clue what to do with the blue hues of cue balls lining the walls of distant stalls of horses awaiting their hay for the day of deliverance. May you or might you frighten the heightened sense of forgiveness where transductance is concerned, were it not for the urn of Benedict’s churn drifting along the wrong way into the curse of time, just watching the river flow.

Benedict tried the last lever, but the recurring cream lied about laying bricks, and the theme evaporated into thin hair.

Being with Georgette #3

Being with Georgette #3

Georgette said, “This is the apple tree I fell out of when I was a child.”

I said, “It looks smaller than it did back then.”

She said, “We’ve grown. It’s been pruned.”

“Where is the large stone you fell on?”

“My father put it in the garden, but later you carried it down to the bridge and dropped it in the river.”

“I don’t remember doing that.”

Georgette said, “It was when you weren’t well.”

I said, “Oh.”

***

Georgette moved from the apple tree to the swing hanging under the long arm of the oak tree.

I said, “Don’t sit in it, the rope is as old as we are.”

        CONTINUE READING!

Reading Ulysses in Montana #676

Inflicted on lottery winners only, Johan filled the overrunning cup with the balm of Goshen, but he forgot where he put his glasses.

Masses of overeager beavers flooded the market with their dams and locks and levers and senile old caverns of domestic disputes. Reputed to be the third heir of Rasputin, enough filberts filled the stadium with too few geese and barley given over to a strain of strained metaphors you would never believe–having already given your pound of hair at the office  Christmas party last summer. Plumbers plumbed the depths of her soul, but Ginger dove a yard beneath their purpose and struck the kind of gold only Johan could dig out–if George would stop sitting on it.

Lottery winners unite, and give those beavers a run for their money!

Being with Georgette #2

Being with Georgette #2

Georgette said, “What’s this ribbon for?”

I said, “I once took seventh place in a sheep-judging contest.”

“Sheep-judging?”

“I was just along for the ride.”

“They gave ribbons for seventh place?”

“They gave ribbons down to thirteenth.”

“How many people were there?”

“Many more than thirteen.”

“How did you know so much about sheep?”

“I listened to what the grown-ups said to look for, and I looked for it. I didn’t know as much as six other kids, though.”

***

Georgette picked up my plate and took it to the kitchen.

When she returned she said, “You should smoke a leg of lamb more often.”

I said, “Once a year for your birthday is enough.”

“Today’s not my birthday.”

“I know.”

***

As she turned off the light, Georgette said, “You were much better at judging the quality of sheep than girls. That’s one ribbon you never earned.

“No one told me what to look for.”

“Would you still make the same choice?”

“It was never a choice.”

***

Georgette started counting sheep, and I fell asleep before she reached thirteen.

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Originally published March 24, 2020

Reading Ulysses in Montana #189

Kindly gate the calling of splendid forces, but guard against revolting hither and shorn. Horns of plenty give succor to invested honors engrossed in rooms of pillows, silken pillows, for the fellows of Mr. Bellows.

Watch immediately if the slumbers you have long forgotten in the rotten time of sand and hour glasses give length to days of yore. Grasshoppers too know not how long to wait before hunger gets the best of bitter bees buzzing before the brew pub next door. Pins and postulates proved the last fermented theorem well enough for general consensus among the other theoreticians, but woe unto those who stand outside the consensus of echoes! Comfortably pruning the waters of Babylon, Xerxes enlisted the help of a thousand bullfrogs to spread the royal manure across the plains of Lourdes.

Splendid forces aside, applied algorithms take root where virtue wears the bellowed garments of silken cats.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #480

The edification upon the reunification of the shivering livers had ramifications that enlivened the colleagues of the intrepid syllable.

The greatest period of vessels collapsing around the ruins of ancient obstacles breathed deeply the canals of exhausted anvils. Devoted devotions made self-covered buttons drip with covenants of mercy, blotted out with the quality of copybooks and curious pillars of infamy as though covered in lard and rendered deeper into the gists of time. Transparent envelopes of gilded lilies willingly groused about seventy years of feasts amid famines of comfort and transoms of joy. Mocked by day and couched by night, flights of inward angels persuaded baits of bated breaths to exhale their finest finery and ship the oars of prosperity for a day or two.

Beatrice begs to differ, but you would too if the spies of virtue choked on the orchard of edified souls once again.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #137

The cat’s in the ladle and the sliver of infinity inflated the giant pig over Battersea Station prolonging Ginger’s whims and ecstatic ecstasies.

See, you only get out what you put into the thing, disregarding the negligible friction with the diction of your peers, flown all the way from Guernsey, 89211. Oh my, the last out in the bottom of the ninth went too far for foreign dignitaries to dig into the past of a Proustian time lapse, lapping the outstanding field and flowing with the glow of a low worm, turning against the foot that stopped trodding on it long ago this past December. Remember the titanic Titans of yestermorn? Upheavals are not your every day run of the mill kind of sugared cereal leaving the sludgy milk at the bottom of the bowl that takes six years off your life each time you think about it.

Ginger snored but George ignored everything, being bored by nature (his nature), cats and ladles be damned to slices of eternal infernal infinity.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #463

Deciphering delicious destinations was not her business at all, but Joy found her way to the end of the rainbow, where the sidewalk ends, and baffled the leprechauns with her expectation to take their pot of gold while sitting on her head.

Headwinds buffeted the end of the buffet where the chef wielded his slicing knife against the turkey and roast beef, but the double-slit experiment had turned the fatuously fatty hunks of meat into first the triple-slit experiment then the quadruple slit experiment until finally Joy joyously found the sum over all histories of an electron, a photon, and then herself and the rest of the entire universe. But nothing else. Longitude was no match for the turtle walking too slowly so it would be smiling during its transmogrification from a sloth to a tortoise.

Horseradish aside, the rector deciphered the joy of Joy’s joy while attending the moribund slicing of the moody roast beef.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #277

She walk in darkness unlike the light of the newborn world, a world of privilege and delight, but Ginger would throw it all over for one more crack at the Gong Show and its many consolation surprises.

Sizes of zebras could see no further than the farthest star from earth, but which one was farther was still up for further debate. There must be one farthest from earth, mustn’t there? Unless the shape of the universe merrily folds in on itself so the earth is as far from itself as it is from the farthest star. Furthermore, further riddles and farther paradoxes of great pitch and momentum litter and frustrate the most basic attempts at gardening for intrepid interstellar travelers such as Ginger and George. George? George?

One would never guess the whys and wherefores of Ginger walking farther in the further darkness like the light of George’s newborn world, but the farthest star yawned and fell further asleep.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #487

A palimpsest of turbulent onions dropped their fall leaves in the spring time of my life with wonderful aplomb and wretched containment of fraught artifacts dating to last July.

Skies above and below flowed a notch short of standard schemas and views into tables of cupness and cups overflowing with incomplete tableness. Reminders of remaindered books lifted the certain curtain obscuring obscure little men and little women–of Oz and Alcott–a mashup of infinite infinities and chiropractic adjustments aligned with the sixteenth earl of Duke. Flukes of errors and flukes of whales absconded with the mesmerized purveyors of Stockholm syndrome, the Copenhagen interpretation having divined for Christiana the slinky of Helsinki.

Dead leaves and the dirty ground made white stripes of onions grow all through the fall of the restless empire, but Jack dropped his Jill and the hill came tumbling after.

The hill came tumbling after.

Tumbling after.

After.