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Poems

Japandemonium

I crawl into a vacant cubbyhole
in my brain (I have plenty of storage space there)
and sit cross-legged on the part of my jellied
noggin that can visualize;
I am by the sea. On a Friday afternoon,
there is a rumble, a tumble, an angry grumble
somewhere, off in the distance,
beyond my sight,
some devil , cresting
some sea ulcer erupting…
and I shimmy and shake.
I want to run
away from the sea, away from the rising wave tower,
soaring like some grotesque Godzilla, some wide-winged Mothra,
some namby-pamby Bambi meeting Tsunami Gorgonzola Godzilla,
the drilla killa,
a high speed freight train doom-zooming in from the spoiled and twitchy
sea; this irradiated gorilla-whale,
this hulking nuclear devil
this tsunami-commie who has no purpose
other than to lumber in,
in all its atomic beauty,
to come juggernauting over the
people who live by the sea and have expected nothing
less since Hiroshima Nagasaki Mon Amour…
I know it is coming.
Even in my mental exercising,
my legs rubberize,
I stall,
my bones and my being freeze up.
I see myself, footsteps in front of me,
feet falling ahead of me,
helmet cam capturing the way I will
run, fearing to look back,
knowing Godzilla fella
will scoop me up and rip me
apart and drown me,
and toxify me,
and break me into a million human twig parts
and eat me and kill me.
My Ja-panic escalates
as I sit cross-legged in the crawl-space part of my jellied noggin
that visualizes;
cross-legged and marvelling at the courage

or the inertia,
that would keep millions living by the
sea knowing Godzilla is always
impatient, always ready to roll;
to roll in and crush.
And I think,
as we all likely think,
there, but for the Ace of
Spades, or better grades,
or a different air raid,
or a jug of grog,
or a bump on a log,
or the face of a
dog, or
the Grace of any old
God, go I

Bill Engleson is a retired social worker, pickleball aficionado, energetic novelist, poet, humourist, essayist, and flash fictionista. He is an engaged community volunteer, who lives on Denman Island, a small Island located between Vancouver Island and the Mainland of British Columbia.

Previous to The Life of Gronsky, he published one noir-ish novel, Like a Child to Home, which received an Honourable Mention at the inaugural 2016 Whistler Independent Book Awards. In 2016, Silver Bow Publishing released his second book, a collection of humorous literary essays entitled Confessions of an Inadvertently Gentrifying Soul.

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