oh but man was he ever a questionable character
people questioned his character
and like well-fed house-dogs bayed and wiggled in proud disdain
some even went so far as to brag to their friends that they didn’t care they would go right up to his face and tell him
no one ever actually got as far as his face though
it was enough to know
enough to roll around in his questionableness like well-fed house-dogs wiggle-triumphing on their backs through the reassuring stench of something some days dead somehow spread across the lawn
that was all good and just
him being such a questionable character and all
they said yeah he walks with a limp — but just to lull unsuspecting victims a little nearer to his badger claws and wolf teeth
they said yeah he eats cabbage stew for breakfast lunch and dinner — and that’s to hide in farts like a tigress hunts downwind to mask her cruel powers her sultry feline glands
they said yeah he thumb-pops dandelion heads — like how psychopaths start out by torturing cats, not that cats are all that great or anything, but it’s like a warmup evil and a sign
they said yeah he talks to himself while wandering these wide woods — someday some shooter’s gonna mistake him for a talking deer and we’ll all be better off
and then they laugh being heroes by doing nothing all day every day over and over again in the shade of a regulated market economy with safety nets and backed by an active central bank
they said yeah he’s a questionable character and I got these sneakers on sale what do you think?

[What is this? This is not a new literary dispensation!
We want a new art!
This feels like a grumpy old art.
Just reading it makes me sleepy and look I’m putting on an old flannel bathrobe and trusted old soft-bellied rough-leather slippers, and here I slip into the paper the coffee the cigarette the glaring yellow linoleum tiles, wallpaper, hard tabletop plush chair back — everything yellow linoleum with hints of silver, swirls of white, shades of faded hope and ashtrayed-dreams; and here my long square fingers — knotted red now at the joints — pat my wife’s round-grown rump in her yellow towel-material bathrobe, and yes we are falling asleep in the kitchen with the stove on and while cigarettes — at $0.60 a pack who can say no to another? — dangle from our lips; and we have mixed vodka into our coffee; and we are tired ]