The 31st Strange Land Measurement of Grunt

The 31^st Strange Land Measurement of Grunt

 

my head is a patched-in-chunks land mass and the thoughts

of this girl are an endangered species which has taken up residence

there and these thoughts, (oh! aka who the hell came up with

the idea of thoughts?!), they’re dangerous because they demand attention

 

and run a small carnival along the thick edges of town

dedicated to the novelization that my heart may be broken

but broken maybe doesn’t have to share definitions with forever

or non-repairable

 

or something like that

I’d grown used to the idea that the two things

were, if not the same thing, that at the greatest least

they were not exactly different

broken and forever

 

shellacked in room temperature turpentine

and then lashed together and left flopping around

but it turns out forever is a long sketch of spaceships

vs dinosaurs maybe and if I know anything now, I know

 

thoughts like these thoughts of her are rare like first edition

copies of Lovecraft or butterflies that speak Latin

and thus to the bone graves demand our trust that we’ll

protect them and even if I wanted to deny this protection

 

(because I’ve totally tried to deny, I tried to deny it protection)

I can’t just evict them because these thoughts are their own species

and this species, it’s endangered and should be protected

by me, probably

and if I fail, then by bigger things like cosmic law/moral codes,

 

the everyday strivings of civil decency, and outer spaced armadas

 

helmed by a cadre of relocated prairie dogs

screaming for justice or sometimes: grunting

 

but what is that?               what the hell is a grunt?

 

1. a grunt is something people exhale during sex

or when they’re thinking about sex; as in their not-having-had-of-it

in a particularly long time

 

2. grunt = one of them poor bastards who’s job is collecting bullets

inside bits of their upper torsos or various limbs during all those wars

 

3. A grunt is also maybe: a fish.

 

Really?

 

I can’t believe that’s a real thing

Does Russell Crowe own Wikipedia?

because that last bit about fish,

I totally Wikipedia-looked-up

 

the point is

the world seams mad a billion times over

and it’s been going on for so long

and I have no idea how anything ends really

 

especially:

 

1. this poem
2. the numbering of strange land measurements
3. grunts