Mythical colored inkpen memoirs

Short and sweet has never worked for me but mostly because I never tried it
This is the time of year we only paint in Kansas colors and only speak in haiku
The shrapnel of your blown car speakers litters my lawn like plastic Easter eggs run over by the headless horseman the time he escaped the city fairgrounds on a riding mower
Each cigarette you don’t smoke is a birthday candle Death doesn’t get to blow out
said my Grandmother even though I found it hard to imagine her baking a cake for anyone of that reputation. I preferred Funfetti.
Our family pet was a rainbow-colored basset hound named Stanislove, an Americanization of papa’s rottweiler which used to hunt rabbits through both old and new world slum yards
If times had been different he might have just been a shade-tree butcher. Like his father.
In Roanoke and Görlitzer Parks I continue to detect the presence of a fox. I do not understand its message, I just know I am to follow.
Knowing when to admit the illusions are working against you. That the past hasn’t ended. That you were better off. That you can return.
I swear I saw a field of grazing camel in the southern reaches of Douglas County, KS.
But I can’t be sure. We lost our medical supplies trying to ford the Wakarusa, which should not have been so difficult. We were delirious.
Dance with the one that brung ya, she said. But she was hopelessly behind the times. We went to prom in a covered wagon, which I can’t say for sure wasn’t stolen. It caught on fire at the filling station when one of us lit a cigarette. She refused to get out. Now all I get are voicemails from beyond the grave, garbled and full of Midwestern platitudes.
My head is spinning and it hasn’t stopped since last Tuesday.
Lunatics are by definition drawn to the moon but the city obscures the object of their search.
This is why they stray toward railroad tracks, harbors, quarries, embankments. Picnicking in silence on mountains of chad.
Count yourself lucky you’ve even come this far. About to begin a new life in the plains.
I can keep this candle burning for as long as it takes you to sleep and then wake up again.
I know a good turn of phrase when I hear one but I can’t prioritize to save my soul. Saving my soul is my top priority.
Compañero I can give you a high five but I can’t change your mind.
Pay next months rent in sand dollars, sell your winged sandals at the Schwarzflohmarkt.
The night we rode WWI-era military motorbikes single file across the Flint Hills at first frost.
The furthest west I ever played harmonica was Kanorado, but the most memorable sit-in was in Vinland, Kansas, where I believe there is an airstrip as well as a barn-like church blackened if not structurally compromised by fire. The place has good bones but no known relics.
My friends had set up a studio of sorts in what used to be a smithy. It was deepest winter and I was charged with tending to the smaller furnace, standing up now and then to take a solo.
I thought I had heard everything until a ghost accused me of a lack of transparency. But if you want to talk specteroscopy you’ll have to take a number.
The fact that we ever decided to populate these hills still baffles me. Now the outside world adores us for our garage sales and specialized methods of cooking meat. Our healthy ratio of on/off ramps. The fatalism of our leading ladies.
Have you ever been to the West Bottoms and walked down a street called Seldom Seen?
If you’ve come this far you’ve come too far.
He described the river as a fallen princess. She blew a kiss as she sailed away on the tramp steamer but no one was left to receive it. The cursive of the Kaw the coursing currents of the Big Muddy. Everyone drowned at the launch party and yet no one was injured.
A flock of Carolina Parakeets divebombed the atrium when we least expected. We protected our heads with styrofoam salad trays, our faces streaked with vinaigrette.
The journeyman poetry teacher said your whole universe rests on an unsteady and shifting system of symbols. Long on shortcuts, short on safe passage. Leaves of absence, fields of bluegrass.
The curved stem of the pumpkin looks like a petrified green thumbs-up. In a final salute to summer all the screen doors in the neighborhood are slammed.
The trains running through these floodplains are so long you can barely hear the whistle of the engine if you’re riding in the very last car. They don’t call them cabooses anymore, and I know this because I made my home in a decommissioned BNSF car.
I planted a garden and spent long hours at the picnic table with my set of colored pens. I’ve done my best to find a common thread, to keep you entertained. I am signing off at 12:12 on this first night of November.
I remain, most decidedly,
Lucas Freiherr von Wetzel