The Scapegoat

That Bromine mineral stench of yours

That you carry like a sacrifice on the edge of the cliffs

That you scour day after day

To the bewonderment of ill-comprehending

Witnesses who watch aghast waiting for a hoof to slip

Yet you stride in your high heels

Defying gravity

Carrying your goat skin and white fur

To a land where the most spectacular views

Are yours



Somehow in biblical times

During Yom Kippur two of you were chosen

One was sacrificed and the other

Laden with society's sins

Was let go

We know you so well because you are

The scapegoat!

That noble creature is blamed for getting away!

Are there not others who can dish the blame?

Surely the CIA was blamed in Iraq

Bush, Cheney and George Tenet discussing Iraq

Oliver North took the blame over the Iran Contra affair
The Senate committee shot him with a barrage of questions
Yet North, in his decorated uniform
Held up just fine

Bullies are always blamed from A to Z
In literature and films a fall guy is a must
In the Maltese Falcon
A tangled plot delivers a fake statuette
And who is to blame?

But if you fall too easy that makes you a Patsy

And we know that goats, goats don't fall!

Mountain goats licking salt deposits on the wall of an Italian dam

Today, 2000 years after being named a scapegoat

You have discovered the pommel horse

With inherent talent you straddle and show flares before dismounting the olympic apparatus

You show extension and lines like Kristian Berki

The judges give you soaring scores

Finally, there is nothing to run from

Nobody to blame

The judges are unanimous: with such grace not even a sheep can compete! 

Early Hashtag

The earliest human hashtag has been discovered in the Awash Valley in Ethiopia, the same area where Lucy's bones where discovered in 1974.
After several months archeologists have deciphered the tag which says,
"Cannot find mammouth eggs" #HiSpeedBerthaCookTip

Despite close analysis of this message its true meaning remains opaque. Does the "mammouth egg" refer to a giant egg, possibly that of an ostrich or was the cranial capacity of australopithecus so limited that our ancestors actually thought that mammouths laid eggs?

A conference on early hashtags will be held in Greenland on August 5th and more revelations are expected.

The Botox Vending Machine

Most of us know the Vending Machine

Some consider them intimate 

Associates

Interchanging, exchanging

Dropping your Choice without

A Thank You or

A parachute

On a daily basis

The Vending Machine

Offers a smooth, even transaction

It's a masterpiece of movement in a box

Unless your number is caught

In the Piggy's curlycue whose mission

Is to eject your choice

And leaves it hanging for Eternity!

Vending Machines are everywhere!

They reproduce in silence

Appearing in unfathomable locations:

A tunnel, a forgotten corner, next to a cash machine 

Yet we forget how long they have been with us

Remains of prehistoric Vending Machines have been found

Be it the Mammouth Meat or Sandal Dispenser 

Evidence points to how these machines

Wheeled Mankind out of darkness

Paleolithic Vending Machine circa 160,000 B.C.

Our forefathers knew that

Hot Meals could not depend on a woman 

-Or a man

Even monarchs and politicians knew

And continue to exploit these instruments

The Queen of England addressing Heads of State. This lavish dinner was 

served using only the latest Vending Machines. (2004)

But some of us remember how beautiful they were

Like elegant Cartier jewellery shops

The Vending Machine came first

Its goods second

Designers worked to build a trust

That even an expired Hershey bar would not spoil

The intellectuals 

(Always the intellectuals)

Dreamt of a way for

Books to be available in the desert or Amazon

The Book O Mat made this possible

At any hour, at any time

You could run out 

And read Heinline

And for those who think porcelain or crystal

Need to be delivered with delicate hands

You are right!

This machine, designed to be placed in households

Avoids marital abuse:

No more flinging plates at your spouse

The Love Dispenser

Breaks all tension with couples

Even those with histories of long abuse have 

Have basted this Dispenser with Merits

Today some say Vending Machines are out of mode

Yet every year sees new innovations!

This Botox dispenser has not taken a wrinkle

Available only in Doctors' waiting rooms

The lines continue to grow.

American Botox Dispenser, 1912

Young love

Never shall I

Be thrown into despair

By a network malfunction

Or honey bees buzzing in the air

I listened 

Motionless and still

Waving finger over screen

As if I had no will

Your texting mingles with the splendour

Of a youtube clip with a million hits

Your blue ray love stings my heart

A song ebbs and echoes in its chambers

Katty Perry, Dark Horse, hashatag, #never apart!

I cradle for a home with hot plums

Where a brash black crow

Eats a worm in front of Emily Dickenson

And then rows away in the sky

Today my emotions go toe to toe face-timing virtual foes

Face-timing until I'm faceless,

Over connected 

A  Teletubbie stuffed in the fast cycle of a dryer

With no wifi just whistling fi fi

And Spock who could forget the gifted Vulcan 

Tribulating with Tribbles

That purr to get stroked 

Spock ain't no dope

He never played with magic

Tribbles were hybrids 

Tribbles multiplied and got stoked

I got a trophy tweet 

From my homeboy wearing a straw hat

In the shadow of a pumpkin field

Says he’ll get me a chip and an app for my

Birthday all weighing less than a gram

And I should come as I am

I chuck my new trending 

Gaza Strip loafers

Into my River Island vintage bag

Knowing I can move faster in my sneaks

But at the door I pivot and spin

My battery is down

Down

Gotta recharge

Texting “Recharge”

My nail speeds over the keys

And it has the texture of a butterfly on it.

Wearing Leonardo da Vinci’s Hat

This weekend I went to the Santa Maria dell Grazie to see Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

What an amazing work: such colour, balance, all the characters seem to be joined and working together. On my train ride home, as I ate my garlic stuffed snails from my light green tupperware, I couldn’t help but think about their antennae, shells and longevity. So I wrote a poem about it.

When I measured the 

2.2006 microns that straddle

The peering tentacles of a Roman Snail

And multiply that distance by 100

You get the same distance between

2 horse ears

And upon further observation

The visual memory of a snail

In captivity or in jail

Could last a good 10 years or

The same as any Ecquus Caballus trotter.

Surely snails' snail view few mountaintops

Rather the paths it slimes over

with scoops of  home blend mucus
Are part of it visual highway of information

As I pulled an antennae delicately out from my teeth

It dawned on me how when I was 6 years old

A row of snails ran into a srteam where I used to play

Making olives bounce off the water 

And I saw the water swirl over their shells in

The same manner that 

Years later in Med school I witnessed 

Blood in the left ventricle valve of a giraffe

Swirl and gush before reaching the lungs.

(Lazzaro Spallanzani the father of Gastric Juice
and chemical digestion, also uncovered the mystery of
Skipping stones, in Italian,
Rimbalzello or in Chinese, frog jumps 
The record today by
Kurt Mountain Man stands at a jumpy 88 which 
exceeded my skipping olives by 22)

Fascinating how just like the heart valves,
The snails would not recede 
On their mucus bed they rule
even upside down albeit some drool

The Roman Snail that I am eating
Sails at 2.5 inches per minute
Yet a Red Hook Snail 
Trucks at 9.2 inches per minute
And though snails can hibernate
And live long 
A hermaphrodite Roman snail 
Surpasses the Red Hook by 3 decades!

In my simple train compartment
The mountain pass offered unexpected jiggles
With my special fork I pulled then

Placed my lips over its shell and
Sucked and aspirated the chewy mollusk
Its body arrived in my mouth at
80 feet per second
Meaning that if I or it or
We together in a car
Travelling at present
Would be flashed by radar at a speed 
Most objects would fly
I need now to calculate the quantity of 
Ooze that need be emitted to reach such

Prodigious speed.

The Cuban Drain

A drain is like a big city

It takes everything coming it's way

From the pure water of glaciers to oily

Grease mixed with hair balls

From the suds of bars of soap

To shaved whiskers and nail bits

It is an organic freeway without tolls

Broadway taps "Anything Goes"

On the eve of a full moon

And a New Year's Ball
That I have sumptuously put together

The conduit discharger of my kitchen sink

Is obstructed

Relunctantly the guests are sent home

As the dishes cannot be washed
And champagne flutes lay idle with fruit flies spinning around them.

I concoct a feast of sodium hydroxide and aluminium oxide

that is poured to dislodge the stubborn clog

Yet except for a few agitated bubbles that

Exit the dark furrow

(The sink is now over half full and malodorous)

The water level is stagnant

The following day a handheld auger is summoned

Shiny blue with a

Curly cue pigs tail to grab grime

Holding it like the Penguin's machine gun in an old Batman TV series

The plumber

Plunges the cable and spins it with verve

Hypnotic rings of water ring the sink

The plumber insists with clenched teeth

But there seems to be a Grendel in the pipes

A beastly beast

Holding back slime and grit
One would think

In this sink lies the Emperor of Obstruction!

Or rather a Cowgirl holding her own

Not giving an inch

No matter what Plumber plunges the plunge
She will stand her ground.

Yet more days, then weeks pass

The drain is still clogged

Experts from near an far are summoned

All try their art

The wire hanger, the plunger the air burster to name a few

But to no avail.

Then a prodigious whale of a plumber from Geatland appears at the door

Named "Plumber-Wolf" he insists on visiting the kitchen

Strips of all his clothes and tools except for a sledgehammer

At midnight he starts to slam the walls of the sink

The entire house trembles

The beams start to crack

A few bubbles come to the surface

But the clog holds fast!

The heroic plumber leaves defeated.

Finally the doorbell rings with an unusual chime,
My smoke extractor coughs sending a plume of smoke wafting
to the upstairs bedrooms
It is Pope Francis, he beckons to come in

He floats the Cuban flag on the murky, lifeless lake

The water starts to shake

An audience of dignitaries gather around the sink

And within an instant the drain delivers its load to the sewer
It is empty!

Restored to drain for years to come!

All in the name a  50 year diplomatic thaw that ended an

entrenched embargo.

The mountain slippers

This was the house of my father-in-law
A house he built on his own
Perched in a lost village in the French Alps
That once housed a school, a store and two hotels
It became a solitary place

Yet the man busied himself
An avid vegetarian when few knew the name
He flirted with rice and tomatoes
Unlike most who flirt with fat and grease

And in his house there was no tool
No machine that could go unfixed
The repair became such an engagement
That a dialogue sprouted, ensued
Often degenerating into radiant derision

I remember my first visit
He proudly demonstrated the fireplace
Whereby he contrived a radiator to hold the flames
The house came to life with the heat that was pumped throughout it
He told me, manipulating hot coals with his hands

All the while my children watched stoically
Fire was a danger, "interdit"
"Surtout ne pas toucher avec les mains"
And Grandpere defied all of that!
While sitting comfortably in his slippers.