Lost among the maundering mumbleweeds
The mangler marauds in search of every
misplaced metaphor and back-slid simile.
Into any podunk junction will he ride, Walk into
the local saloon, smack down his silver piece,
and order, “whiskey.”
He will not eye the girls, nor be cajoled into
any games of chance, being odded out long,
long ago. Too, he comes unarmed, but for his
wit, for which he is deemed a paladin. The lokels
seem to sense all this and leave him be.
But eventually some one or other will get up the
gumption and approach, asking some innocuous
question or something like, inane. To which the
stranger will, surprisingly, reply in kind—and kindly
too. Soon he has, it seems, the bar entire befriended.
Now he may sit back and listen to their strange
tongue, marvel at their capacity to yammer about any
number of inconsequentialities. How they esteem their
trivial doings, deem them worthy of intercourse. Of
course, they are, but not in the way they imagine.
Not given the gift of interpretation, he is, nevertheless,
very good at inference; Tone, tang, slang, nuance, all
those subverbal cues are his metier. He takes them
away, mines their dross, works late to painstakingly
extract some small piece of lostness which for most
would be of no worth.
But he will work to redact it, save it from the slag heap,
Find its natural facets, shine it, and set it simple,
So that if the light
Strike just right
Its truth might shine.
poetastrophy 