Thinking Under Duress

One guy got so mad
he changed his name.

Upon first hearing those lines, “I, a stranger and afraid, alone and weary in a world I never made.”  One fellow fell pensive, and after a bit of inner silence thought to himself, “What poetic imagery, what pathos, what an unashamed uncovering of human emotion, what a treasure trove of cosmic pig shit.”

Thinking the same thing twice
is not so bad if you thought it the first time
under duress; everything men think is under duress.

One spring day, over near the courthouse,
one guy announced, “I’ve decided to ‘come clean,’
to ‘fess up,’ bring it out in the open, and generally
let it all hang out.”  And the City replied,
“Not on my new secondary carpet you don’t.”

To try and maintain some equitable balance between the communicative readers and myself,
I went ahead and wrote to one and said, “I hope this doesn’t come as a shock to you.”

J.