You know, however, what my opinion is worth: My opinion and two dollars will buy you a latte at Starbucks.
The thought of that latte was so appetizing, so fully realized with my free and supple imagination, that even though I did not, in fact, consume the beverage, I am now required to floss and proceed to the carriage master’s cottage.
Be not afraid for me. The robotic monkeys have been repaired.
And Now the Text of the Cursed Book…
THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS
An Inevitable Doom Press Publication
All rights vigorously reserved and viciously defended.
© 1928 by ” ”
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means
without permission in writing, in blood, from the publisher. Any
violation of this copyright will result in the violator being tracked
down by packs of spectacularly well-trained and utterly savage pigs
that will find you as easily as they would locate truffles if that
happened to be what they were trained to find.
These pigs will bite you on the ankles, kneecaps, and genitals until
you have been subdued, whereupon you will be conveyed to the proper
authorities to be executed, convicted, and put on trial, in that order.
PUBLISHER’S DISCLAIMER:
Inevitable Doom Press hereby warns all readers of the possibility of
insanity or violent death resulting from the reading of these verses.
You may also suffer headaches, halitosis, hoof-and-mouth disease,
dizziness, failure to achieve dizziness when dizziness is desired,
bleeding from hair follicles, the unexplained cancellation of
subscriptions that are dear to you, hives, rashes, boils, inflamed
earlobes, the sudden growth of a second head, bad weather, colossal
flatulence, the compulsion to insist that your name is Igor when you
know perfectly well this isn’t true, the unwanted romantic attention
of cats, blisters, and the growth of eye hair.
Table of Contents
One Door Away From Heaven
Neither Do They Fade Away
In the Fields of Life
The Weight
The Train Leaves the Station
A Delicious Walk
Habit Makes Destiny
Pedal to the Metal
Remembering When We Didn’t Expect to Live Forever
A Roundness
Remembered Dreams
Academic and Novelist as Abbott and Costello
The Chain
Short Story
The Modern Age
Wee Wisdom
This Old Honkytonk of Fools
Cold Fire
Whom You Might Trust
1992
Men on White Horses
Crossing Nevada
Melodrama
Busy Humanity
Kiss
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Winter Moon
The Mask
Reality
The Answer Comes After the Funeral
Drummer
Potboiler
Saving Graces Politics
Ten Years Old, Reading in Bed
Fallen Yet Not Lacking in Virtue
February, 1969
We Are All So Modern Here
All Those Snappy Epigrams on the Theme of Night
Anthem
A Thought While Reading Rex Stout
Cry Doom
Dragon Tears
Cold Questions
Mary Shelley, No One Listens
A Job May Not Be Enough
The Root of All Mystery
Haiku
Where God Goes on Vacation
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening with Exploding Heads: A Tribute in Verse to Robert Frost
About The Author
Dedication
To the doomed. To the forgotten. To the misunderstood. To the misbegotten.
To the doomed and forgotten misbegotten who have been frequently
misunderstood. To the melancholy, the lonely, the lost, the weary, the
hopelessly anguished, the bitterly distraught, the terminally
cranky, the ferociously depressed, and the seethingly disinterested.
Also to Uncle Mort and Aunt Clara: Thanks for the homemade muffins.
One Door Away From Heaven
One door away from Heaven,
We live each day and hour.
One door away from Heaven,
But it lies beyond our power
To open the door to Heaven,
And enter when we choose.
One door away from Heaven,
And the key is ours to lose.
One door away from Heaven,
But, oh, the entry dues.
One door away from Heaven,
And yet we sing the blues.
One door away from Heaven,
We live each day and night.
One door away from Heaven
Is such a perilous height,
A long fall from the doorstep,
If we can’t tell wrong from right.
Neither Do They Fade Away
Elvis is dead but spotted in Biloxi,
In Nashville, Corpus Christi. He’s got moxie
To be dead vet movie-going at the Roxie,
Still sticking to this world as if epoxied.
Glimpsed in a pink Caddy there in Biloxi,