Inspiration for the words below (Daniil Kharms, Russian writer)
Baby
There once was a baby. He was 8 years
old. Or was he 40, or perhaps 64? Why am I asking you, reader? Maybe I am
asking you because not even I am sure of the answer. This young man thought he
knew more than the younger man, but he did not. He sought the answer to life in
this thing and that, but ignored the sage advice of the youngest man, the baby.
The baby was wise but did not know he was wise, cocooned in the innocence of a
lack of desire.
The oldest man looked into the mirror
and saw the trials of his life reflected in the wrinkles of his skin, wrinkles
that reflected the moments when the man put the less fortunate to work for his
own gain. Little did the man know that the baby was looking back through the
mirror at the reflection of a broken man, defeated by the trials of time and by
a loss of innocence.
When the baby took his first steps, the
baby thought to himself, “Life is beautiful, life is good”, and all he needed
to be happy was the biscuit laying on a table in his family’s home. Yet when
the man took his 124,728,200th step, he knew nothing of his 1st
step, though each step was taken with the same leg. And the man thought to
himself, “Life is money, money is good,” and all he needed to be happy he
couldn’t have. He had forgotten what it was like to feel good.
And suddenly, the baby was born into the
world, with no idea what his future self held. And suddenly, the baby died at
64, innocence dying off as well, with no idea what his past self knew. The baby
had lived and died, the man had lived and died, but they shared little in
common experience despite living the same life. Little did the man know that he
and the baby were the same person. Their faces were different, but only because
of the wrinkles. The baby tried to get through to the man, but the man was
blind to the past, a monster created by the trials of time. This monster grew
and grew until the man finally realized, “Aha! Life is good!” as the baby came
into view on the side of the mirror, a reminder of what the man could live
as. After this moment, the man was no
more. The man was the baby and the baby was the man, 64 minus 64 is 0. He
ceased to exist.
Banana
Yellow crescent on the floor
Mushed like Jell-O into the tiles
Peel lackadaisically lying
Next to the stranded pile of nutrients
Earlier, flew in on from a factory
In the most distant corner of the world
The banana on a palette
Only an idea in the mind of the head of
Chiquita
And then suddenly
Hemingway slipped on the pile that was
once a fruit
The fall only an idea in a head of ideas
Until it happened
The result of an unfortunate series of
events
That originated in a mind
Outside of this set of pages
Who has nothing to do with what has just
been discussed
But made something new happen
A series of characters
Strung together like music
To create a new meaning
Hemingway slipping on a banana peel
Ha!
Ha!
Sausage
Man
There once was a sausage man, a man
greater than his title, a man named Oliver, who had two children and a
faithful, loving wife. Every day this man went to the park and enjoyed the sun.
Or did the sun enjoy him? The sun feasted at his exposed skin, creating small
patches of infected meat, the kind you see in cancer commercials. It was
cancer. The man was over, but still laughed and joked. Death had come to the
doorstep, but the man did not extend his hand. The grim reaper was no friend of
his, and the man only loved as he was taught by his father, and his mother, and
their father and mother, and so on and so on down the line of infinity, to the
beginning of eternity. Love is contagious, and love is a gene, but most of all,
love is a friend that extends her hand more merrily than death. Cupid defeated
the grim reaper in a battle of the ages, and the man was happy despite the most
intense of trials.
This man toiled all day and all night,
not unsettled by his lack of wages or his insufficient working conditions.
Crack went the sound of the bat, the 10 million dollar man causing a sound so
loud it could be heard round the world. How could a game so simple mean so much
to a nation? Because it means so much, it causes just the littlest bit of pain
to the sausage man, but he pays no heed to his toils. There is so much business
in baseball that the sausage man is often forgotten, This man knows the end is
in his future but decides to fall heedlessly to cupid, who caresses him gently
as he falls towards his beautiful end. The sausage man makes sure he is
remembered as a lover, not as a complainer, and brings joy to all those around
him. Thank you, sausage man.
The
Pen
1. A
letter was written to a one Mary Anigold Douglas of 547 Tooksbury Lane. She was
a small lass, a woman with sass, but she did not outlast the pen.
2. A
draft was written of 100 pages for a dissertation in a rather bland corner of
the world, let’s call it Dayton, Ohio. Dayton was a mundane town in a mundane
place but the pen visited there too, its ink injecting itself onto paper like
an overzealous virus.
3. A
book was written by that famous man Nikolai Gogol, that fellow who talked about
a nose and some other bodily parts some 100 years ago. Those pages called on
the pen for lots of ink, and the inkwell depleted as the pen did its duty.
4. A
less famous woman used the pen to write a 67 page journal documenting her
pilgrimage to Mecca during the hajj of her Muslim faith. Her mind combined with
the pen to create a beautiful recollection of a meaningful journey, a journey
that began and ended with the pen, sandwiched between two bindings and numerous
pages. The pen is the reason this recollection lives on.
5. A
slightly more famous man was born in 1 B.C., and 12 loyal followers paid heed
to his story with the pen. The pen was not present then but the spirit of the
pen was, and the ink flowed onto the pages for millions to see. The work done by
the pen still shines on today, bound between two covers, living on despite the
history of nations trying to destroy what the pen had created.
6.
Across the waters in a small town on the Cliffside of Italy, a man used the pen
to make a sign to tell his patrons that his shop was closed. The man returned
home to his family and told them of his day, and reopened the shop on the next
day with the same pen.
7.
Across the universe on the planet Yuhassa Titanicus, a pen writes with no
writer behind it, gliding across the pages like skis through powdery snow on a
brisk winter day. If a pen can glide on a planet with no history and no
inhabitants and no minds, why can’t it continue to glide today? Is it not
gliding now?
8.
Today, in fact, the pen still exerts its powerful influence, helping facilitate
what has been created here today. It has created many moments – it created the
moments above, and created this moment. Whatever this is called or means only
you can decide, but that does not change the words that the pen has brought to
these pages.
