TULLY’S IS GOING OUT OF BUSINESS
First there was one,
but the one said, let there be two.
Then the two imagined others
and a curious thing happened.
The others started reimagining the two.
And then all hell broke loose.
There were books and banks
and rings and things.
There were birds of the night
and birds that could pluck a fish
swimming fast and alone in its murky canyon.
There were dreams and visions
and people erased with the touch of a key.
One minute they were here and then they were not,
only to reappear to ask, ‘Where did I go?’
There was confusion and mystery,
There was then and there was now,
the two sliding over each other
as easily as water in a glass.
There was the incandescent smell of flowers,
of jasmine and heather,
and a fox named Agatha.
The audience, caught in the vortex
of time and impaled on its unmoored imagination,
could bear no more and promptly fainted.
Everyone now had a time problem
and did not know when they were to be
where they were supposed to be.
Everyone now worried about tomorrow,
since no one was sure if being time-stopped
would matter to tomorrow if tomorrow never came.
But they did not worry about dreams and bones
and the future since the future could be changed,
unlike tomorrow which was just an invention of the mind.
Just an silly trick to keep us from side-stepping
the whole slavish obsession with what comes next.
But what comes next did not matter
because no one knew what could possibly come next.
All these birds and flowers
and troupes of players
armed with kisses and bullets,
razor tongues and opaque ears,
flew from the moment
towards the past or the future
and upon arriving there
did not not know where they were.
They only thing they actually knew
was that none of the innocent were injured
and everyone else won the lottery
but could not collect until on their deathbed.
Then Tully’s announced it was, sadly, going out of business.
The audience fainted once again
and for the last time.
Hi Tony,
What a delightful poetic excursion through the madcap twists of imagination as elaborated in Fex & Coo. I should think, Tony, that it takes a prospective Poet Laureate, such as yourself, to do what you just did.
—Paco
Paco, the poem is a direct result of the psychic stimulation you and Russ are providing.by writing Fex and Coo. Two days ago I had a dream. I was trying to start a generator by putting in some gasoline. It started to leak and then someone came over to help. We fixed the leak and started it up to see if the lamp that was plugged in would give off light. As we were watching the light, someone else looking at us said in the background: ‘First there was one, and now there are two’. This linked up with my thoughts about Fex and Coo and I immediately started to write the attached poem. Hence the first and second lines. Tony