Dude X wept, confessing his egregious violation.
A bold strategy, but Mrs. Dude X
remained quite pissed off.
He pled to a mistake, a momentary moral spasm.
Oh, more evidence? Okay. He owned a series of mistakes.
Don’t rip a human being in two over a straight edge
to make a ragged seam. See?
She turned on the consequence machine.
It made one hell of a racket,
sucked up half a household’s stuff, compressed it
into a suitcase of historic density.
Not worthwhile, he would tell you
from his hot-plate studio at the hobo hotel
for bumblers and failing husbands.
That purloined somethin’-somethin’,
impressionistic details half-hazy,
not worth the net effect.
Given reprieve Dude X would religiously
avoid committing deal-breakers,
swear off catastrophic guilty thrills.
TODD MERCER won the first Woodstock Writers Festival’s Flash Fiction contest. His chapbook, Box of Echoes, won the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press contest and his digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, is forthcoming from Right Hand Pointing. Mercer’s poetry and fiction appear in journals such as The Legendary, Main Street Rag Anthologies and theNewer York.
Categories: New Year's resolution, Poetry, Themed
Tags: e-zine, ezine, hyperbole, longing, melancholy, melancholy hyperbole, new, New Year's resolution, poem, poet, poetry, poets, submit, The Consequence Machine, Todd Mercer, writing
Melancholy Hyperbole 