Ben Johns - detail from Self Portrait of 2003

I decoded text of tree. It suggested
Anarchy—or perhaps oligarchy.
For it was an olive tree.

I decoded text of tree with Mary,
one of my best pupils;
in fact, my left pupil, for I kept
my right eye shut.

My other pupil is called Trisha;
we aren’t speaking at the moment.

Other things that arose as we
decoded were, first, a suggestion
that my testicles might be inflamed;
second, that Thanksgiving
was near at hand.

A third thing (Mary and I disagreed
about this) might have been
that God (Satan?)
wanted us to rename Thanksgiving
“Tragic Cucumber.”
We were wincing—in a nutshell, wondering.

I had my hand down my trousers,
while Mary found herself wandering
over a pretty stranger on a bench nearby
who was muttering “glue horse.”
Trish woke up and took a fresh look at text
of tree. She thought it read
ménage à trois,
and so it did, by golly, with her awake.

“Hey, friend,” I cried out to stranger
but stopped. I saw he was crying. He cried
sharply and also grunted. He also had the hiccups.
I found myself parsing text of stranger.
Hmm... some kind of false daisy?
Perhaps a horse skull?

Let me lobotomize for a moment.
Allow me, in other words, to do dirges.
With all due diarists enshrouded in miasmal mist,
let me do this 19th-century business.
In a word, permit me to pants you.
Thank you.