Maintenance schedule for a muted exit

https://almostmeaningful.com | Reading Ulysses in Montana #670 | Oil painting in the style of Hammershoi of a girl in a black dress sitting on a brown horse, holding a small owl, surrounded by swirling flower petals and a bright blue sky with fluffy clouds.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #670

Heavy hands make empty works of Shakespeare and Marlowe (with and without the “e”), capitalized and uninspired eyes with civilized perspectives not included.

Imbued with the kind of ink made by kind hands, Holly hitched a ride to the edge of town and, standing on the corner, she lifted the hood and tinkered with the solenoid and said try it now. Click. Zoom. Room for improvement notwithoutstanding, the next room down the hall was free for some jai alai practice, the fronton of her heart being occupied a dozen more days for extensive remodel. Or was it the way the red settled into black into nothing? Nothing would do for an hour each day, but the flowers of followers consumed their tidy toast in due course. Overdue, of course.

Horses for courses and chicks with fleas were fleeing the falling skies–the weltering skies.

Silhouette of an elephant walking, depicted in a solid black color.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #343

Oil painting in the style of Paul Cezanne of a three bags of groceries with smiles dangling from the Moyie River bridge with a battleship churning upriver.

Fibs in the forecast proved too daunting for Darlene to carry through the back door while carrying three bags of groceries, smothered in southern gravy.

Navies of Davies shipped the whorled peas into seas of infinite regress without redress to the commander in leaves of grassy knolls, John having been sequestered in questions of fruit of parlays since the incident of the tree branch and broken legs. Separate peas were all the rage with pages of pages requesting higher wages in ages gone by when sages corrupted the cages of gold upon stones untold when Vegas was but a train stop on the highway to greater destinies.

The matinee was over before Darlene had discovered John hadn’t written about Ginger and George since the bridge over the Moyie Gorge had assembled into a fraud of a million little pieces, all told.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #209

Forbidden wings gathered in collective vacancies to dispel the myth of the mists of purple time, reluctantly.

Beguiled in their feathers and heathers, the Venerable Ones achieved the notoriety only Dionysus had intended–masked for a dearth of deaths unencumbered, like the cucumbers in cummerbunds at a Chippendale’s Christmas party–minus Alvin, having taken Alf to the famous Lady Lovelace who, despite her reputation, was in fact the first to say her father could have his poems–and eat them too. Delving into Delphi, what reasons blew with the untamed pride of passion, gilded these thirty-seven years–not counting every-other leap year.

The sacrament of wired songs exploded with the gravity of forbidden wings dispelled reluctantly. Reluctantly.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #211

Or among the wholesalers, possessed by her anguish, enlightened by his charm, and dappled by their chromaticism, Angel flew out the window and up the street.

The street had been paved these past ten years, having been a gravel road for three generations and a century-old two-track before that. Hogs fed on the rapier weed in the meridian at precisely one-o’clock post meridian, as it were, or sometimes weren’t. Songbirds fed on the chains of daisies going their own way along the landslide of silver tulips sliding up the land, landing on the slide, fleeting, in their own manner, absolved by the rain that forgot no one’s name. Cathedrals of roses let it be known how far the zinnias could go, but little did they know, they knew new flights of Angels winging them to their rest.

And the rest was silence. Or was it history? Or both?

Reading Ulysses in Montana #16

Ahoy! The joy of one arm waving entirely out the window at sixty-seven miles-per-hour on a summer day in Sumner.

Summer said if she could only return to Sumer then she would really know how to write with a stick and clay tablets, damp clay tablets–and if only there were places to dry those damp tablets–where it was hot for days on end to bake the living words into the annals of permanent history. Rosetta said what would you do with all the ink and papyrus left over after the fire in the library of Alexandria consumed the ins and outs of recorded history. Summer said but information is conserved across massive conflagrations, and that will be proven in two millennia.

Rosetta said roll that window up, the AC just turned on. Summer smiled the smile of righteous entropy with glowing enthusiasm and watched the wayside flowers fade.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #608

The memory began to stir, the cattails along the lake shore.

The memory unfurled, Papa’s flag of permanent defeat. The memory began to sag, to sag under the weight of a hundred loves, a hundred deaths. The memory faltered, choked with the sludge at the heart of a dying archer (Cupid), diseased and then deceased. The memory was already forgotten by the time the lime trees see the dismantled image of an altar to the god of cloak and daggers, time better spent shivering from the cold of a forgotten memory remembered too late to save the way of all flesh-eating tigers of the fly-garnished scaffolding holding up the facade of the face that lunched with a hundred shipping clerks.

The cattails became coattails in the moment Harold dreamed them, and he lay awake dreaming forevermore.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #31

Mingled foxes agreed to bear giddy bears, feeling the mutable consumption wilt with glad bacon and lousy loafs.

Numbers and letters, numbers of letters, numbed the lettuce and blood between the horse and the giddy whale, with unstable, birdlike form and function. But that’s not what she meant. Room for Bertram to roam warranted cultured treasures of awakening, fortified by chambered regions and spontaneous spontaneity–striking with strife. But that’s still not what she meant. Pledge-bound citizens and prudent fleets of sunken rags pilled the fleece with contrary motion, but sometimes parallel fifths of her favorite whiskey come lately.

Bitter experience on the quay gave three quid to the giddy status quo. And that was exactly what she meant.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #268

Taking legs against a seer of tranquility, the captain called for the flan to be served like his religion: lukewarm. Billy’s second cousin, Biff (not yet removed), said, “Long live Captain Veer!”

Ezra Veer’s father had misspelled the family name after absconding with the poker club funds and finding a new country in the bosom of Philadelphia. He who veers from the appointed path, the locals said, approving of the edit; and his wife, Vera, noticed the improvement. Biff, on the other hand, lost his marbles while traversing the Boudica Traverse, just outside Princeton, near the Institute for Adequate Studies. Having failed a final, filial time, Bartleby said join me on Wall Street as a hot dog vendor!

Biff soon found out he had a heart of lime. Lime soda, that is. Green River. Pennsylvania Tea.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #157

Playing head games with derelict cabbages and fortuitous kings, Richie took a particularly tender bloom of a tuning fork and stuffed the turkey with a lemon pineapple.

Royal flutes fluted the kidney pies, lost in the hawthorn valley these plaintive three years, pills and programs of sweet powder notwithstanding. Rosalinde had other ideas, concave ideas, vexing the excellent colors of forceful swoons upon busy actors and flouted scorns while the editor slowly turned them into scones. Traversals of love and reversals of stronger goblets seeped across the passages of time like an open book, opened to the last page, giving away all secrets.

Rosalinde and Richie bore no grudges against the smudges to their reputation, for shame was capable of more than inquiring into the ins and outs of head games on the rocks.

Reading Ulysses in Montana #245

Ear muffins sat on a taffeta of laughing mushrooms disguised as a clever professor wielding the cleaver of Solomon.

Salamanders reassembled their tails with a nail from the final coffin of the professor of ancient literature, three weeks shy of his third anniversary of receiving tenure. Inured to the throes of all things entailing and encumbering thereupon, the udon noodles oozed over a dozen dozing doyens, straight from the pages of the Shakespearean pilot Amelia of Amsterdam–an adolescent effort to be sure, but all’s well, as they say, that ends. Ending was not always so hard as the rest of the union of other onions thought.

George thought twice and gave Ginger the rest of the vacation money to make a mockery of the monkeys singing lullabies on Hamster Islet. Softly.