Thomas Bottle was thinking of all the things he hated: hair down his back when he got a haircut; his Aunt Fern’s kitty litter; ringworm; the loud women in baseball caps who came every summer to paint the ocean below his house; and Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to sell him Awake! and The Watchtower. 

It begins in the back of the head,
gathering force like the strangler’s
mop in Slam sweeping across the floor.

None of the townspeople raise their voice for, naturally, they make up the bulk of the payroll.

The country was therefore sealed off, all foreigners were expelled, and the cities were emptied.

‘Today, I finally met God’, he says as he enters the Oracle’s alleged chamber

After a while he reaches the sea, parts the waters thru the blowing of his nostrils

epistemological doubt gave way to tailwinds of laughter, the strangeness of things to the consolations of philosophy, the bottom lines to butterflies chasing little dragons.

“I like making jam.”

After a brief vacation, his next effort will be to find the most effective method of voiding waste products from the body.

three wars ago, pleading for her bambino,
expecting to see him young and warm