Another Autonomous Submission

By Rote

By Toby Wrote

Mouth feel commands shelf space.

The overpass curves round the access spur, spilling HOV’s into the fast lane.

Free range homeless mimic Burning Man with fake piñatas.

The nasal hum of the power grid.

Shasta melt.

The announcement over the intercom at the BART station in the voice of Stephen Hawking.

Cross-eyed spiders can't sing.

Late middle-aged lady, attractively dressed, adroitly hops off the bottom of the escalator as the step slides under the floor beneath her.

Green parrots infest the arboretum.

Snowy white powder resembles sugar. Clean landfill covers superfund site.

Plastic windows, aluminum sash.

The Sapphic Drift. The Charles Bukowski bobblehead.

Fainting in the injection line.

Twiggy stuff, a fashion horse. Dunces of the KKK.

In our dreams, embarrassment, anxiety and regret outnumber pleasure 10 to 1.

Fate and Death, two juvenile Doberman twins.

I have arrived, but someone has stolen my identity (suitcase).

How actual experience inevitably seems "out of context."

Lazy Susan revolves smoothly on its bearings, offering up thin slabs of raw fish beside radishes ingeniously cut to resemble the Sydney Opera House.

The flightless bird is a dinosaur.

Old plastic slide-rule peeking out of his breast pocket.

The sweet flypaper of life. Stress or shock may "scar" the culture.

Iridescent green hummingbird with scarlet head needles the rosemary.

Glass steps on a glass floor.

Viruses don't "want" to kill you, but they do.

I pledge allegiance to the institution, and the exploitation for which it stands.

Before and after the starter's gun, time squeezes shut.

Laugh-track from I Love Lucy obscures voice-over announcing President’s assassination.

The anxiety of affluence.

The race is not to the swift, but to the corrupt.

The oncoming glare of blinding brights is a sedative, numbing as the fatigue motel.

Gore-tex label hanging by a thread.

The first version was so good, why spoil it with a sequel?

Is memory a search-engine?

Thought prisms.

These are the animals we'll be eating next Winter.

Rowing backwards at night in a dream.

If language decomposes at the same rate as attention, poetry might become as impatient as a video clicker.

Stray, random impulses--nervous, cynical, bland--zip across like "nigger"-particles in a cloud-chamber of semi-comatose awareness.

Whose little dog are you?

Ultimately, the self trades alienation for a cell phone.

Tow truck stranded on the bridge, we're due to flounder at three.

Maybe an "outsourced consciousness"--rented tux that doesn't fit.

The end of the book as we know it.

It's a Dada light show, punctuated by litter and glitter and four-dimensional dance bands.

Venice plaza with in-line skaters selling pink-cotton-candy to Charles Laughton.

Cocktails in the bank-vault. Breakfast at Tiffany's, Gidget's pregnant.

At the American officers' club swimming pool in Iraq, just come dressed as you are.

Dislodged a Praying Mantis clinging to my pant-leg.

Noodling to bond as father-and-son.

Sock-suspenders on prosthetic limb hanging in window of Paris atelier.

File under death threats.