5 a.m. the toddler king checks his twitter feed access denied
it’s quiet now but all last night all he could hear was the squeak and rustle of rats leaving the ship
he stares out into the murky depths Mitch McConnell swims by an oxygen tank strapped to his back, his lugubrious visage fills the porthole he removes his oxygen mask a bubble escapes from his mouth and floats upwards his wattles sway like kelp in the shifting currents he has the detached look of a man examining a museum exhibit another bubble escapes upwards he turns and kicks for the surface his sagging buttocks pale but somehow luminous
Am I dead? The toddler king wonders I can’t be dead I’m absolutely not dead If I say I’m not dead I’m not dead. Hey, what’s Ted Cruz doing out there I thought this was a Cruz ship! See, I made a joke I can’t be dead!
Taking part in Open Link Weekend over at earthweal
God is now on Zoom but his microphone is muted some would say and I don’t dispute it that his microphone has been muted for quite some time now okay, don’t have a holy cow that was a joke but honestly it’s been a while since he spoke those proxy sermons from earnest priests hardly count they can’t hold a holy candle to they don’t have the heft, the clout of his greatest hit the Sermon on the Mount yep, that’s the big one voted top sermon of all time by the folks at Rolling Stone a hard one to follow one that stands alone.
In his new television series Foraging with Farage
coming soon to The Bollocks Network
Nigel laments
the influx of foreign fungi
to the hallowed fields and forests
of the Kingdom By The Sea
and the subsequent decline
of the Great English Mushroom.
In the final episode,
under the influence of psilocybin
Nigel takes a walk in the forest
and encounters a naked Boris Johnson
sitting on a giant toad stool
in a sunlit glade. Boris, Nigel exclaims,
full of chagrin
and psilocybin, I thought you were a natural blonde! Has it all been a lie? This is dream sequence, you fool,
Boris replies The writers have run out of ideas.
He then tumbles off the toad stool
and bounds on all fours into the forest.
I tell you folks
if you miss one television series this year
make sure it’s this one!
This is, mercifully, the last poem in the Boris Trilogy. I am also responding to Brendan’s prompt over at earthweal , in which he invites us among other things to Appoint a Lord of Misrule, to conjure up a Feast of Fools. I believe this last four years will be remembered as the era in which the court jesters replaced the king, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are prime examples. Nigel Farage, on the other hand..well, the less said the better.
Chris Cuomo, a man who is so addicted to outrage that I believe he will actually miss Donald Trump when he’s gone, is talking to Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a man who defines the outer limits of ‘decent’. Adam says in relation to Covid and the rescue package that the last thing we need is another band aid, another fig leaf and I’m thinking band aids are for wounds so that kind of fits but fig leaves are for .. well let’s not beat around the bush they are for covering genitals and I’m thinking “steady there, Adam, pump the brakes” but then I think again and realize he’s right the fig leaf metaphor is appropriate because the handling of this crisis has just been one monumental cock up after another from day one from day one!.
The Neander Valley outside of Dusseldorf is named after Joachim Neander a German poet who liked to wander lonely as a German poet through this now eponymous valley unaware that beneath his feet lay the numb skull and bones of a species whose name would become synonymous with brute stupidity: Neanderthal, named after the valley which was named after Joachim Neander. That’s what we get to do, name things and judge their worth we even got to name ourselves: Homo Sapiens Wise Man and if that’s not hubris….
In the morning after the garbage truck has gone he roams the pandemic-silenced lanes putting the lids back on garbage bins all the time wondering how much fun can one man have how much fun can one man have?
I’m taking part in Sarah Connor’s Excellent Adventure also known as the Advent Calendar and my poem , Christmas Cheer, appears today on Day 13 depending on where you live in the world, it’s still Day 12 here. So please check it out, and not just Day 13 which I share with Anmol who delivers a poem of such quality that it makes my poem look like…….well…a hangover, but also all the other days for some excellent poems.
7: 30 a.m. at the corner of Main and King Edward a butcher in a white coat stands looking out from behind the empty meat trays in the window of the Windsor Packing Company. Back in the fridge, somnolent sausages, blood red sirloin, and thick pink pork chops (each with a trim icing of fat) wait patiently for their return to the public eye.
a sign urges Order your Christmas turkey now! a December wind blows.
Taking part in Brendan’s advent challenge over at earthweal
Also be sure to check out Sarah Connor”s advent calendar, a poem a day..well worth a visit!
I was going to pass on ‘profuse’
too easy to rhyme
too open to abuse
no room for the obtuse
that was my excuse
then I felt the pressure
the tightening of the noose
my face turning puce
I thought “what’s the use,
yield to the Muse
yield to the Muse”.
This is one from back in the day of the Daily Prompt, the prompt was “profuse”.
In this issue, our resident royal watcher, Georgina Shallowglass talks about the moment when she realized that corgis are real dogs. She also reports on the launch of Vapid’s new clothing line, DowdyThreads. Yes, now you too can relax like the Royals in our comfortable tweed skirts, twin sets and for those cooler evenings, wooly cardigans. All our tweed skirts have been pre-stressed by English ladies of a settled disposition. All garments have been treated with our trademark fabric conditioner, DampFug, which creates an odor which can otherwise only be attained by spending time in a draughty castle. Georgina reports that, all things considered, the launch went well, although the corgis just would not keep their masks on and in retrospect she should have walked them before the event.
The Crown
Jonathan Shallowpit has been re-instated (it’s hard to find people to work for the wages we pay) and is taking over as movie and television critic while Georgina is on royal duties. He has written a poem about the Netflix series, The Crown. Here’s the first verse:
I’m watching The Crown on Netflix man, those royals are emotionally stunted all the men are pompous pricks the women can only relate to horses.
Steady there, Jonathan!
He also poses the question: Is Wolf Blitzer a robot? Jonathan has observed that Wolf’s expression hasn’t changed in four years.
Travel
We are worried about our travel correspondent, Perry Patetic. We hadn’t heard from him in six months but just recently we got this cryptic dispatch:
I’ve been to Elo I’ve been to Elko What a difference a K makes.
In Perry’s absence, Jordan Shallowditch has taken over travel duties and provides a number of useful tips for those who miss airplane food on where to find salted pretzels and chocolate puddings.
All this and more in Issue 19 of Vapid Magazine where shallow runs deep!
All submissions should be single-spaced. Please use Arial font, Arial is one of our favorite Shakespearean characters.
If your submission is of a religious nature, you may use a Baptismal font.
Please do not use semi-colons, they confuse us.
Poetry:
Please submit a maximum of 6 poems at a time.
Simon Shallowpond, our poetry editor, celebrity watcher and gossip columnist has catholic tastes, but will accept non- religious poetry. He is partial to free verse. “Free verse”, he says, “let it roam, far from all rhyme and reason!” All verse published here at Vapid Magazine is of course “free” in that we never pay for it.
Fiction:
Our main requirement is that all fiction should be totally made up. Please keep it short, our attention span is limited. Endings should be happy.
Non- Fiction:
Here at Vapid, we believe that this category no longer exists.
Visual Art:
Yes, we accept visual art. Our Art Editor, Georgina Shallowglass likes to say “if I can see it, it’s visual”.
When to Submit
Unfortunately, we are not accepting submissions at the moment, our staff is working remotely because of the pandemic which means that they are not doing anything that remotely resembles working.
In these trying times, we would like to encourage all our readers to stay safe and keep it Vapid.
Hiram likes to drink water direct from the spigot on the front wall of his house; he hasn’t had to connect a hose to that darn spigot since he converted the lawn to artificial. Good times. In the evening, he sits on his porch staring out at the Christmas tree green of the lawn drinking lite beer and polishing his assault rifle, this gives him comfort.
Not that he’s afraid, he ain’t afraid of nuthin’, he ain’t afraid of AOC he ain’t afraid of Antifa he ain’t afraid of that girl from Sweden the one that never smiles he’s vigilant, that’s all; vigilance is of the essence. He likes the sound of that, maybe get a T shirt made put that on the front, ‘G.I. – God Incarnate’ on the back.
No, he ain’t afraid of nuthin’, but sometimes in the early hours of the morning he lies awake his gut gurgling like a drain as it processes the Outback appetizer of deep fried onion rings that the waitress piled high on his plate like a jumble sale of used Olympic symbols; he lies awake stalked by a fear he will not name the fear of being left behind, left in the dust, by the twenty first century.
This week I’m hosting the weekly challenge over at Earthweal (Title “Fiction? Don’t be a Stranger”). So head on over there and prepare to be challenged.
Meaghan loved her job, the compensation was meager but that didn’t bother her what bothered her was her relationship with Edgar; she felt beleaguered. “What the hell is wrong with you”, Edgar raged, on a regular basis, and all she could think of was: Isn’t “raged” an anagram of Edgar?
This was a response to a Daily Prompt (back in the day), the prompt was “meager”.
Last night I dreamt that Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller had entered my basement through the dryer vent, maybe “entered” is the wrong word it was more an “insinuation”, a slithering, under the vent flap down the plastic vent hose and into the dryer drum where they paused briefly to cough up some lint before pushing open the dryer door and oozing out onto the basement floor.
In the morning I went down to check the basement feeling more than a little anxious. it was empty, nothing had changed. I sensed movement out of the corner of my right eye I turned, but there was no one there. I sensed movement out of the corner of my left eye I turned, again there was no one there but there was a smell not the usual one, from that sock abandoned at the bottom of my gym bag this was rancid, pungent, acrid, fetid, halitotic with a hint of damp weasel the smell of venal ambition the smell of distilled evil one hundred per cent proof.
Taking part in Open Link Weekend over at earthweal
Late at night in the White House
while Donald’s in bed asleep,
the dead presidents
one and all
leave their places
on the wall
to dance their dance
to sing their song
of presidential grief.
