Pink, picking himself up from his slip
in the drizzle, he said: “Well, at least
I didn’t fall into the mud over there.
That happened to me just last week.
Believe that? Right before clocking in!”
“You see, that’s my point!”, she said.
“Distancing yourself from yourself
yet again. From the person who fell,
in this case—trying to comfort him
by pointing out it was worse before.”
M. A. Istvan Jr., PhD, is a hunk of jade who has been abraded (but into an arrowhead) by the circumambient assaults on academic and artistic freedom. Istvan is drawn to poetry, especially aphoristic poetry, more than to fiction because he lacks the patience for the respectable craft of baiting readers with illusionist techniques (like opening with a pet in peril or having the narrator say things the reader knows to be false).
