Found Humor #3: They Seemed Playful

Found Humor #2: [ed.]

After buying my ticket for a movie, I was given this advertisement for some shitty candy. However the original text used the incorrect participle in what I'm assuming was some attempt at ironic cleverness by some fresh out of keg stands marketing kid who watches too much Family Guy.

Luckily, someone at the movie theatre had been kind enough to correct the text and insert the proper participle.

Thank you, anonymous employee of Marcus Fox Theatres. You might be in high school. Maybe you're a girl. You might punch people. I don't know, but you did correct one of the immaturities of the corporate world, and you have made me believe in humanity again.

Icarus

by Hugo Carnavale

"Hi. I'm Icarus. I'm falling." He said this to me, his voice high and half breathless, in the way young people do when they are trying to overcome their nervousness about meeting someone new.

One arm was extended straight out in front of him, his hand presented for shaking. The other was held stiffly at his side. White feathers snapped up past him, spinning their orbits around him and up, a curtain of moving feathers through which I saw his sad, hopeful face. I remember those eyes filled with the purity that children have before they learn of teasing and insults, and bullies and enemies. There was some fear, some sad fear, but it was a fear of nothing in particular; of only doing something new. Wax swept up his skin like upside down tears.

Down.

He was gone. Gone bellow me, leaving a helix of feathers whirling a pillar towards the sea and ground.

I saw him again later.

It was at a house party at college. People milled around in their groups of friends, drinking and laughing because that's we did in those days. I was with some friends. Like everyone else we didn't mingle outside the people we knew and we drank "Hi, I'm Icarus. I'm falling."

He said this out of nowhere. He came out of nowhere. His hand was held out in a manner clearly displaying that he didn't care whether any of us took it or not. To enunciate this apathy he downed his beer; he didn't stop drinking, not even for social graces. That must have been his idea of displaying cool. I didn't take his hand because I didn't feel like encouraging this silly boy.

His skin was tanned. It was stretched across his lean muscles so we could see his strength bunch and stretch beneath his bronze. Wet feathers were stuck in his hair and on his limbs and torso. Dried wax dripped across that tight brown skin, defying gravity. It looked like it could either have been melted there from the sun or from some overexuberant lover.

I was interested in him. Because I remembered the child. I saw it somewhere in him. I saw its vague shape wrestling inside the ocean it had been confined to. My friends teased me for taking such an interest in a well muscled, half naked, winged boy at a party but I let them think what they wanted.

We did date for a while. But it was all the same as that introduction at the party. He put on his pretensions and his acts. I never got closer to him. He just rolled his eyes and downed his beer.

I saw him again during the war. He was an officer leaning over a table pointing at a map. I stood, behind him under the tent pitched in a crater, and waited. I listened to his strong, confident, powerful voice say, "We need the names," he nodded to his Lieutenant as he straightened and began to turn to me. "And dates, hi, I'm Icarus. I'm falling." His hand was already held out to me before he finished speaking. I could see in the way he held his arm that there was no meaning to this gesture for him. It was something someone did during introductions. It was part of a script to a play which he knew he was in. His voice had been breathless, but confidently breathless; just like a worker who puts down his hammer to speak.

He wore a smart officer's uniform and his hair was neatly cut. The only skin I could see was on his face and hands. It was weathered and I saw the tightness of where the sun had burnt deep. There were patches of skin unburnt, left healthy, where the wax had once been. The splotch and drip shapes of soft, light skin, surrounded by redness.

I shook his hand. As I did, I looked for the little boy I once met. All I saw was his skeleton, buried within the flesh of this man.

(inspired while listening to Regina Spektor's song Lacrimosa)

Ok...

Pulling myself up from rest,

as though the weight of the ocean held me down,

I rise and prepare,

like Cthulhu awoken

and ready to gobble the world.

A landscape of squiggles and squares.

There's never a map for this place, only

the instinct of your feet can tell

you where there might be a restaurant

to gobble planets.

The menus there are as clear as the air.

When blind to the color clear

there is the never-ending fear that one is wrong

and has made an ass of oneself,

and yet we persevere.

Again no maps.

The first time I heard "Maps,"

by the (Yeah^3)s she dedicated

the song to her father and thus

I've loved the song forever.

It is not always the words that mean the most

but why they are spoken

and for whom.

Trying to speak in squiggles and squares,

something will undoubtedly be lost

in translation, here and there.

Later, later,

the color clear can be consumed

until it is clear.

But lost among abstracts, wandering warm,

mapless and friendfull, it is wonderful,

this serendipitous momentous

Glee

A wanderer in a desert
robed and sword
hanging from his belt,
hooded and scarved.
They walk along and she
says she is a storm.
He pulls aside the cloth of
his robe to show the screaming
lightning and rain, shot like bullets
by the wind, that swirls within him.
His teeth grin
since that is the god that watches him
from the looming body.
His god has four faces.
His god is named Rampancy.
Its faces are named
Rage, Sorrow, Jealousy, Euphoria.

They listen to a bard in an oasis
tavern, his god turns to hear the bard
better and a new face looks down.
Whispering to each other,
he hears the surf
of sorrow crashing against
his heartbeats. He will share the bard's
fate some day, a secret
he keeps folded on a paper
near his chest. He does
not reveal it often.
She whispers to him but
he is silent.

In the desert, the sun turns about
the earth and the god turns its head again.
He throws his head and laughs his saber out,
slashing poetry into the sands, and she
joins him with a rapier whisking rhythms
from the dust flying in the air.

She whispers to him
and his words are not an answer
since a different face heard and a different face spoke.
In the valley of the heroes
he screams against the statues of great men
lining the walls of cliffs,
cutting gashes into his flesh with the sword.

He walks, dragging his robe and sword
through sand, his god sleeps, eight eyes
closing, head atop a looming body, lolling.
In the twilight colors comes an imp,
an elf, a sprite, a giggler, a not-a-god,
a child of Rampancy.
Small and smiling it skips nearby
on cool rocks with moss,
panning pipes.
He dances, laughing high
and lightly as he throws off robe and sword
and hops.
His robes gone, it can be seen
within him is a storm of spring blossoms
and autumn leaves. He spins and kicks,
his eyes are closed, his grin brighter
than the daylight sun.
She whispers to him and he can only respond
by joying a smile at her
their footsteps running into future forests,
lost and wine sodden.

The Happy Lords: #58-64

Meander

"Hugo, my poet and fool,
tell me what message you spy,
you've sat long enough on that stool
beneath the tower so high."

"Then my lord I tell you of hair,
it falls from high up above."

"Is it hair then, or her, that your stare
has caught like a hawk caught a dove."

"A fool I assuredly am,
but cannot be fooled by my eyes,
it's her as surely it's ham,
this stuff that falls from the skies."

"Well shout to the top of the tower,
we search for a Hero, by name,"

"I hate to cause such a row, sir,
is it for hero, or Hero, or Hiro, we came?"

"My fool, do not fool with phonetics,
they sound all identical, spoken,
(oh look, a book on genetics,)
now, smooth out your communiqué, broken."

"A hero 'tis valiant and brave
who rescues princesses and pets.
Hero hid in a tower-like cave
whom with Leander did have her some sex.
And Hiro is a time traveling fellow,
from Heroes a show that runs on TV,
he's asian and therefore quite yellow,
go watch it on tonight's NBC."

"Desist with this nonsense you yammering poet,
you know which is the one that I seek,
if you've skill then this is the moment to show it,
raise your voice and to the tower now speak."

"I would, lord, but now I hear from the top
the name Tadzio coming right down."

"That sounds like a name to be said by a mop,
but what could it mean and how?"

"Wikipedia, not I, lord, would know,
perhaps you should ask there."

"Encyclo-democrato, what can you show,
the mystery I cannot today bear."

"Tis I wikipedia! for whom many are smitten,
I base this entry on a book that was written,
and after brief deliberation my study's completed,
Tadzio represents perverse sexual obsession, citation needed."

"What a strange conclusion
to draw from that name."

"That digital book's in delusion,
I do not conclude the same.
But, oh! how to continue
when petals and leaves tumble down!"

"My poet, is this the right venue?
Am I overdressed in my gown?"

"My lord, I know not,
if this tower be right,
I threw in with your lot
because I was drunk that one night."

"Perhaps this place is for us
perhaps it is not."

"Perhaps we should just,
slow down or stop.
Whatever you yearn,
enough for now."

"Poet and fool, I concur,
whatever the case, enough for now."