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Poetry
Fantasy
Herald Square
Hear ye, hear ye, all and sundry,
Our Lord High Fidget, Norbert Gong,
He who lives in a tower of salt
With a clear view of the nation’s logic,
Accuses Peter Pumpkin,
That useless, dreaming layabout,
Of crushing Queen Delia’s roses.
Let the evidence appear.
Wilt the Gardener
I saw his crime, how he destroyed
The flowerbeds of state:
While I was vacuuming a ditch
This boy slumped through an open gate
And dropped among the roses,
And snored there like a hunter’s horn;
I couldn’t wake him though I pinched
And shook him like a cantaloupe;
And while he slept green vines grew up
And choked Queen Delia’s roses,
Hatching barbaric pumpkins
That crushed her blossoms, red and white.
Om, the one-eyed Fortune-Teller
Oh let this poor, drowsy poet be;
Our land so lousy with roses,
Dreams like his a rarity.
Dr. Fractal
Speaking as the expert here,
I’d treat this deviant for free:
I’d rouse him by electroshock,
Then pare him by lobotomy.
Moolah Glut
What a waste! I’d build a factory
To process what his dreams produce;
I’d bake his luscious pumpkins
Into pies for common use.
Norbert Gong
No, his crime is too atrocious;
We cannot let him dream
And serve his own desires.
Come, officers, let’s carry out
The sentence sense requires.
Guard
But how shall we put this lad to death
When he is sound asleep?
Norbert Gong
Let’s toss him from the jetty’s end,
A lesson to all those
Who fail to pay attention
To the signposts of the wise.
Young Peter opened one, round eye
And closed it with a sigh
As they swung him off the jetty,
Legs loaded down with chains;
But as he sank a sinuous vine
Cupped him, curling from the deep,
And away he sailed on a golden pumpkin,
Singing in his sleep.
How dare you? cried pale Norbert.
What’s he singing? rasped the Queen;
It sounds like panglossolalia.
‘Tis better not to know, soothed Om;
For the sleep of fools is sweeter
Than the vigils of the wise.
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Copyright 2012, Anna Sykora. All rights reserved. Anna Sykora has been an attorney in New York and a teacher of English in Germany, where she resides with her patient husband and three enormous cats. To date she has placed 107 tales in the small press or on the web, and 234 poems (two nominated for the Rhysling Award). Writing is her joy... Motto: eat your rejections like pretzels.
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