The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Kafka Blocs

Methamorphosis		Roger awoke from nagging dreams
to find he’d grown into a whopper,	a hairy human swarmed in vermin.
“Don’t break bad on me,” his mother	yelled at the door. “Bugs don’t dream,	asleep or awake. You’re late for work.”
	But he hardly knew how to work his new	legs and arms. How would he get about
on so few? His hands and fingers he found		fascinating, and he lay in bed studying
their shapes and twists and movement.	His father banged on the door: “Get up!”
He felt his skin – soft! His two eyes saw	only one thing at a time, yet he knew	his skin was covered with insects so
	various how or where was he to begin	eating breakfast? Even the hands (but
he was not quite sure why he called		them hands) on the clock moved like
the arms of a slow moving cockroach,	around and around and up and down.
What seemed absurdly a bad eternity,	(after all why would time break bad?)	three roaches slipped under the rug.
	Roger watched the roaches dissipate,	his body wasted with bedsores, as if
he’d come to the roundabout of a pier.		The Viral
	Dude J. had few followers and those	probably bots, and he rarely if ever
tweeted, so when the POG knocked	on his door to ask about something
gone viral, Dude assumed some hack	had infiltrated his computer system,	spreading multi-vile messages about
him with perhaps a pic in his briefs.		Dude’s habits were simple and hardly
worth the effort of tweets, of looking	words up in a dictionary, as if a dog’s	wag in a side street was any different
	in Tijuana than in Timbuktu or Paris,	Texas, where Dude had often visited,
enjoying an escargot with a Beaujolais,	taking in jazz in the Business Quarter.
None of this of course reached home,	and Dude’s annual review relied solely	on ratios of quotas to sales, of clicks
that stuck to worrisome dead links.		The Condo
	Outside beneath the colossal condo	K. camped with the peasants just in
from working the streets with their	signs but he was in no mood for noir
poetry. He curled up on the margin	of a broad sidewalk away from the	bird stoppers placed all around the
condo and out of earshot from the		sounds also designed to discourage
one from coming too close because	the spacious steel walls were warm	to the touch like a rubber hot water
	bottle his mother used to sleep with	after his father left them in the cold
house to go work a shift in the town	factory owned by the rich Mr. Rook.
In the morning there was hot coffee	and a young woman recruiting men	to join her crew of window washers
and dressed and harnessed K. arose.

May 14, 2015

Categories: Reading, Writing

Tags: Concrete Poetry, Discuss, Kafka, Writing

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