For all at once the breeze blew into a storm and collapsed the tent around her shoulders, over his head.

He lifted the bank of blankets along the banks of the river Jordan while she swung low her sweet chariot to the rumble of the clarinets rising from the fourth-grade band serenading the monkeys along the sequestered vale, benighted subterrain, and the lax hillocks in the low country. The bridge or someplace earlier if only we had a standing schedule of trains, melancholy would join us for a game of poker on the windlass goldbugs in the bitter beignets of northern Italy. Longing for the revelation, the filched pennies breezed along the avenue with nothing but lint in their pockets, growing older and wiser day by day.

The monkeys gave him the key to Davy Jones’s locker, and the animals gave her the key to the house of their fairy godmother. The rising sun gave nothing to everyone because the tea was only at the top two, not three.

Originally published January 1, 2024

Scintillating scallions of purebred breeding flew low over the lake at eventide. Grasped and hollowed, Sarah forgave the belligerent sufferers along the bleak night of total destruction in the garden of saintsberry bushes and cholia foreseen.

Alas, the buddenbrook babbled by a little too slowly for her liking, so she leapt in up to her waist and helped things along. Pet marmots were all the rage a year ago, but now they gather in riots of laughter and pillage the likeliest town in the valley. Hopscotch would be more suitable for their riots, but Aunt Josephine forgot where she left her car keys, so the marmots walked all the way to Sarah’s capitol with torches and pitchforks and toothpicks, but the capitol building was closed for repairs.

Sarah served her severed scintillating scallions to Aunt Josephine anyway and pieces rained on the likeliest valley for thirteen days.

Originally published December 31, 2023

Futility reigned across the lugubrious funicular, bestride a melting series of rotund instigators.

Farther and further the young women ran along the songs of distant kites. While Margaret emptied the soul of a Volkswagen beetle, the Beatles played on a turntable half again too fast, being high on betel leaves of grass, battling fathers of the ripened corn a few fields over. Futility rained on the rainy day parade down minor street to the sound of a calliope mating with a hurdy gurdy as the induced thirteenth labor of Hercules.

“I’m sure something happens next,” Cyrus said, half aloud to the half of the audience still listening. A rhyme, a rhythm, and a riddle walk into a bar. “I’m sure something happens next,” Cyrus said again. The cold moon shuddered in silence behind the third lunar eclipse of the month. Whereupon the transformation from river to soul lifted the gross beauty to heights unknown to anyone loving the last hundred years.

She said, “The butter is better in bitter button holes, but that goes without saying.”

Originally published December 29, 2023

The charm of the hippodrome took some time to sink in over the valley of the shadow of death, long before there will be peace in the valley for you.

Quantized syllables of steel and death and humans who were only too glad to serve their country cold, with revenge against the fantasies that had betrayed them from the beginning of the end of the era. Fortunes rise and fall, but your all-in-all is never enough–nor will be ever again. Up the valley of the dolls rode the six hundred, now there is peace in the valley for them on this side of the debased coinage where Diogenes said he forgot what he was going to say, when in fact it (what he was going to say) was not sufficiently excellent an aphorism to last two thousand or more years, so he’d rather hold his tongue, bide his time, whistle his dixie–as it weren’t.

He hurried along to the potluck at the senior citizens hall, today serving lobster bisque.

Originally published December 28, 2023

“The lake looks nice today,” Regina said. The reflections reflected off the reflective surface of the teeth by the water’s edge under the sword of Damoclese through the Gordian knot, not the wisdom of noughts and crosses, but eating a nugat donought in the flesh.

Candi says there are two ways to go about it, but the bread was still rising, so Regina quivered three semi-quavers of elephantine bales of barley, and the buttered rum slipped out the back door and made a beeline for the coast with the father, sun, and wholly guacamole, the ghost having the millennium off for good behavior. Granted, Ibsen tried but could not garner the support of the gardeners and lilac wranglers, so Regina took a spoonful of leeks and summed things up with a whistle and a waver.

The sun set over the hills leaving dusk to tidy up and prepare things for the coming dawn when Regina would wake once more and say, “The lake looks nice today.”

Originally published December 26, 2023