Reading Ulysses in Montana #265

Julia set her fractals out in the sun to dry overnight, over the rainbow and over the artist at Auvers.

Vincent had less to work with, but Mandelbrot set his teacup on the sunflower pot and zoomed in on the spiral seeds of the yellow plant and wondered what they might taste like. Vincent said they taste like chicken. Mandelbrot said how do chickens taste. Vincent said with their tongues. Julia set her nose patch on the end of the pumpkin and said now were cooking with gaseous substances that even Schrödinger would never imagine. Erwin waved at Julia, set among sunflowers in her reading garden, and admired her functional knack for understanding how Mandelbrot set his watch following his second cardioid attack.

Vincent said but I don’t have a set or a wave function named after me. Julia said how else can my fractals stay out in the sun overnight without the starry night in the night cafe while I eat potatoes during the collapse of my sleep function.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #680

Ruses of triangular aberrations gathered shampoo for the great hot tub race down the slopes of Mauna Kea all the way to the sea, shouting, “Here’s champagne to all our real friends and real pain to all our sham friends!”

Twinkling fingers of peasants linger in vessels of foreign courts and vassals of domestic tranquility–lightly breaded. The Duke of Frederick had an audience measured in circumstances of quarrels and swords appearing as confused ruses and nominated for the second Duke of Juno’s crown converted from the muffler of a ’77 Ford Pinto station wagon. Potent spirits of furcated mincemeat bifurcated into a quasi-orchestra playing instruments of great satisfaction and respect. Patient merit and quaffs of median incomes quantified the quants of the next Quonset hutch over the rabbit warren reveling in multiplication and integral differentiation without one iota of churlish reason.

Arise, ye filbert ruses, and know the strange wonders of these slight events.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #254

Harbingers of ecstasy precluded a build-up of piles, but the automotive juice, deprived of fixation, depleted the thimbles of Mercury.

Syncopated maladies, inlaid with corroborations with beauteous teakettles, corroborated against the dying of the light–without rage and not in August. Hemispheres in bloom told Judy where to find the pot of petunias for her mother’s begonia garden, upsides being downsized and rightsides being wrong along the long axis toward the given proverbial proverb.

Dendrites K, F, and G understood the nature at the heart of Judy’s world, unfurled like the flag of permanent popsicles. Fraught with peril, the loon dancers danced to the light of the new moon where even Judy feared to tread, although not her mother nor her mother’s other daughter from another mother.

Harbingers and maladies alike raged into July where Judy piled pots and flags for all to see in ecstatic repose.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #133

Except when the filter, against all odds, gives Ginger fits of frivolous fountains, unplumbed by beasts or magic.

Ginger told George what she thought of the paleolithic. George didn’t hear her clearly and said the monolithic was the age of the great ones. Ginger said but the neolithic. George said I heard you the first time, and you can keep your polylithic jeans and fabulous hats. Ginger knew what George meant, so she entered the realm of possibilities and resisted the pull of anything actual, actuating actually being foreign to Ginger’s constitution, ratified by thirty years of service and fifty years of breath. The monolithic tree in the backyard beckoned to George, so he left Ginger to her realm of the possible and transported himself to the land of the impossible.

Ginger looked into the empty llama and saw it was full of faithful wildebeests, but only the magicians heard her, which was enough for them and the unplumbed llamas.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #402

Sophia watched as the clever storefronts broke enteral news of good spells in groves of plaited, pleated, and placid pants, yesterday.

Newer news comes suddenly tomorrow before the brigade of prototypes gave Sophia a fright, the likes of which she could only have dreamed of after rendering Tannhäuser on the magical flute under a modest semblance of ambulatory disorder. Counting the wise, Sophia said where have all the flours gone, long hours passing? Connor said the huge deluge passed the hour of flour in the bakery of earthly delights, calories and related restrictions notwithoutstanding. Sophia said I had no intention of doing anything so just. Connor said more flower power and flour pour to you! I wouldn’t put it past you or anyone else as well-tempered as your clavier.

Clever claviers aside, the storefronts closed at the end of the eternal day and cast their lovely spells into the grove of exalted night.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #112

A candle, a file, and a cup, informed by the malformed vacuum energy of a lost universe, among the trees behind the station, walked into a bar.

Nuts and bolts embezzled the sleepy Tremeraire against wicker oars woven from the dozen dozing doyens of Maple Moor. Heather filled the cup to the brim with candle wax and then filed the wick to nothing but awe and wonder at the size of the unknown canopy, covered with a panoply of stars and planets with an infinity of partitas and partitions of cantatas contrary to what you might have heard in the words of the last salamander. Ginger.

A file, a candle, and a cup walked out of a bar, laden with ladles of limping kangaroos, hopping the butterscotch waltzes and giving pause to the plausible flaws inherent in the systematic destruction of the ropes of the sleeping Tremeraire, turned too far for Constable Heather to care two whits.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #534

A cataract full of cabbage embers flitted across the tender sky, Flevoland and regolith eating menemen for breakfast with Eminem (M&M’s for dessert) in the key of D-sharp minor.

Bach conjectured weakly about the twelve-tone scale of snails in a pump organ, befitting the empty leg of a horse-bound moose–on the loose, to get out of the rain boom, broom, shroom. One-by-one, leaves of blown glass sounded their barbaric yawp against the witness of a sweaty-tooth madman, awakened too soon–a dozen too soon. Units be damned, chap. Guanciale smiled the smile of the sleep of a wink of a bucket full of banquets seized a dozen too late. Units still be damned, chap. Straw mermaids struck the shepherd with his own pipe like the lad a century ago hoist on his own petard in a leopard-skin leotard.

The regolith of Flevoland bestrode the tender sky and buried for a dozen the cataract full of cabbage embers, chap.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #261

Exotic moss neglected the tongues of vain voices like the syringe of monstrous roots.

Ginger insisted once more that she had nothing to do with the solemn affairs of exhausted bounties betrayed by the king of absence. Absinthe was another story altogether–and sometimes all apart, but the cinnamon rolls were still warm and dripping with guile and butter, and frosted with rendered consequences of feline pride. Peter found the lox box in the throes of the wood stack, under three cords of next winter’s warmth, but the lox box was locked and Peter had no key, so he looked to the sky and wondered what the light was that approached from the northern horizon. Floating above his own body, Peter heard Paul admonish him to not run toward the light, and he flashed a key to catch Peter’s attention.

Ginger said with a tongue of vain voices there is no such thing as alien abductions, but where have Peter and Paul run off to, and where is my locked lox box full of keys.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #371

Obsequious oligarchs confess their pins and needles to the cat on the mat in the hatter’s paradise at noon.

Amanda entered the blind alley and asked which way was the kind chemist. Receiving no answer, she fled to the shedding station, three blocks from home. Rome, having been born in a day, found Amanda kind as a blind battalion of bats in the attic of Atticus Sparrow, straight as an arrow in the cuckoo’s nest of the dodo on mocking bird lane. Nurse Sprocket put Amanda in her pocket, but whether ‘her’ referred to Amanda or Nurse Sprocket, no one ever decided, so whose pocket Amanda found herself in–either her own or Nurse Sprocket’s–no one ever found out–including Amanda.

So Rome filed for rights to right the wrong of other places and stayed in one spot while Amanda appeared as happy as a goose out of the bottle of everyone’s pocket in the hatter’s paradise at noon.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #464 (revisited)

The empress opened her suitcase and declared I have no clothes! The port authority said at least you are aware of it.

The mixing engineer was infatuated with her most royal attitude, and he asked which of the cocktails the empress would like him to mix first. The empress said mix me a Truffles of Trieste. How many times must we mention Trieste? It appears almost as often as Ginger does. The mixing engineer said at least Ginger has been left out of this story. The empress said my name’s Ginger. She sipped her Truffles of Trieste and said this tastes more like a Guanciale of Genoa. At least we haven’t mentioned Genoa before, although guanciale has made a previous appearance. The mixing engineer said who’s making these silly editorial comments. Ginger said what do you mean?

The port authority slipped some gingham dresses into the suitcase of the empress, and the adoration of the Magus was complete.

Originally published March 9, 2024