Along comes waddling clad in a smoke-screened air of gregarious grandiosity the corpulent, avuncular, bibulous, buxom, and ever jocular and jovial, when not bestirred to incoherent raving on the remorseless debauchery and rife imbecility of the younger generations, or the palsied impotency of the state whenever flits across its imposing mahogony desk anything but the de régle requisition of the dolorous titan’s dole, affectionately respected sage of Bunkom. The man pretended to a devout Catholicism, but really he possessed neither the discriminatory faculties nor the indurated will to decipher in the shedding of the warp through the clumsily imbricated, hopelessly entangled Gordion mass of the infinite nuance radiating out and dilating the differences to disparate shores from the arrayed denominations of Christianity which each hawked its repertoire to the perplexed and listless soporence of the laymen, who in truth care almost as little for incisive dialectics on the discernible didactics of the Bible, as torturously convoluted and laboriously confused as they may be, as they do the Constitution, for the Way, and contented himself with Pharisaic musing on the appalling devastation wrought by the Protestant schism within schisms and the unbroken pedigree the Pontificate could boast of, harkening all the way back to St. Peter. Yes, it was all very plain and neat and beatifically, salvingly instructive and commandant, and, essentially, immutably quintessential since the covenant and dule annunciation of the Nicene Creed.
The prelate manifestly did not terribly worry himself over such innocuous punctilio issuing in malfeasance so negligibly venial of picadillos as affairs of sarcedotal sartorial sensibilities, demonstrated in the prosaic habit he retained in all modalities of his life. Only on extraordinary occasions could he be found bearing any of the endemic hallmarks of his vocation, though he perhaps felt he compensated the parishioners in their customary deprivation by trotting out caparisoned in the entire panoply of habiliement, with seemingly no attention accorded as the propriety of donning any given item in any given appropriacy. Thus be it at weddings, funerals, Easter Mass, baptism, his birthday, or (if his hobbyhorse had somehow shambled through, which it seldom did) throughout the MLB post-season, he could be found sporting a giltly embossed stole, cope clasped constrictingly, about his neck such that the ribbon of fat which was given to flap violently when he was characteristically overtaken by throes of stentorion guffaws, was impressed uncomfortably into his chin like a pudgy place-setting for a rather pathetically titchy quail egg, with a steel morse, enchased with a singularly curious poem:
A dash, a dash, a dash on through
did the monied men ere the pickets’ grew.
From the parapets two eyes doth scourge
but look out for they’ve been engorged.
Streaming kraters turn down now,
battered, blistered, bruised, and how?
‘Travista’s apathy brought us low,
so be my stimuli all in a row.
Given the nature of the man whom it graces, it is doubtful whether he assayed much as to the nature of the inscription from his cursory perusal beyond that its rhythm and rhyme were mildly pleasing to recite.
* *
“A swing around the hem”
The phleb-fatale throbs, yens the tine,
auricle beating her tympani,
exciting a frisson down my spine.
Thither my heart takes the rhythmic line
(chenilles of Lap’kov’s piedic fancy),
the phleb-fatale throbs, yens the tine.
Even sumptuous prandials sans the wine
lack romance, viz. theodicy;
the phleb-fatale throbs, yens the tine.
To consummate my sanguine Valentine
when? venaelum is bribed with specie,
exciting a frisson down my spine.
But I’m sure not long can I decline,
for ‘cept I slough this lorn contumely
the phleb-fatale throbs, yens the tine,
exciting a frisson down my spine.
* *
“The Uxorite Over Against the Apostate, as perceived and recounted by the Whilom Waverer”
I did observe a fight
Now just the other night
Whereo’ the adversaries stirred themselves to heat
From a temporal triviality
In the gilt municipality
Thither, the hopeless houses of myopic sweet
The psychopomp said not,
But he’d steered us to our lot,
And we maundered through the country awful fleet.
Though the thundering thus muffled
The assailer seemed not ruffled
And she intimate’d her importunate bleat:
“Now what shall I adduce
to end this fuming truce
For I must upbraid the man who took the team.”
“The house of assignation
or the arrant resignation
of museums to all the ‘experts’ who blaspheme?”
“How is it I made thrice,
low-down hawkers who entice
the weak to where venereals do teem?”
“Such dissipation rife,
I desiderate the fife,
to sound Taps and then proselytize the mobs.”
“But with dies irae nigh
we’ll descry who gets the pie
and I’ll revel in the rectitude of rods.”
She paused here for effect
and she craned her graceful neck
to reconnoitre the damage of her lob.
This, I simply can’t efface,
gamb’ling darkness cloaked her face,
and divulged the terror of an optic mod’.
Specious’ the same
but a species of new name
did transmogrify the bon lass to seek wops,
For sanguine battle’s treats
to then lay them at His feet
as ol’ Jesus is an avaricious fop.
Though it pains me to let glean,
Scared my wits the zealot’s sheen
so I glanced about and shift’d, lactate sop!
………………………………………………………..
So I’ll see them by-and-by
in the place where they do fry
though I shan’t avouch as such with much sedulity.
I hope they’re nice and warm
That their condigns can’t be borne
For how wondrous t’envisage boundless cruelty.
Ecce, can’t you see,
Nary villains will walk free,
and we'(a)ll atrophy, ubiquitous acuity!
Though graft frankly I would fain,
native reason can’t refrain;
resigned I’m to the duty o’ ambiguity.
* *
for in
an agonizing oubliette of pant’s pocket,
the pacing beast distorts a crease and shan’t sock it;
it growls from dawn to dusk,
but t’would leave you just a husk,
if dignity arrests the vice to hock it.
* *
Of the group, before me there was Kate
Who sinned what you can’t expiate.
In the creepings of night
From which she was hight
“Crazy”, sobriquet of her noctsate.
