The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #120586 Message #2626348
Posted By: wysiwyg
07-May-09 - 12:20 PM
Thread Name: Nothing happened while you were gone, Amos!
Subject: RE: BS: Mudcat Tavern commences @ Amos' house
Here's a note from a good contractor to help Amos recover his property values post-Tavern. Don;t fall for that doom and gloom talk at the end-- if the bid is high enough, he might just do it:
~S~
===
In Order To
by Kenneth Patchen
Apply for the position (I've forgotten now for what) I had
to marry the Second Mayor's daughter by twelve noon. The
order arrived three minutes of.
I already had a wife; the Second Mayor was childless: but I
did it.
Next they told me to shave off my father's beard. All right.
No matter that he'd been a eunuch, and had succumbed in
early childhood: I did it, I shaved him.
Then they told me to burn a village; next, a fair-sized town;
then, a city; a bigger city; a small, down-at-heels country;
then one of "the great powers"; then another (another, an-
other)—In fact, they went right on until they'd told me to
burn up every man-made thing on the face of the earth! And
I did it, I burned away every last trace, I left nothing, nothing
of any kind whatever.
Then they told me to blow it all to hell and gone! And I blew
it all to hell and gone (oh, didn't I). . .
Now, they said, put it back together again; put it all back the
way it was when you started.
Well. . . it was my turn then to tell them something! Shucks,
I didn't want any job that bad.
Kenneth Patchen, "In Order To" from Collected Poems. Copyright 1954 by Kenneth Patchen. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Source: Selected Poems (1957)