THREE WORKS FROM CRISPY'S YOUNGER BUT NOT EVIL COMPLETELY TWIN BROTHER, AL DENTE de la FLOTILLA

A COMFORT ZONE

I am dozing off on the couch. That sounds like a dream, I know, but it fills me with fear. And when I awake, the Buddha is attending to a wounded swan. That’s because I left the television on. It’s set to the Buddha Channel. And the swan is very grateful, but Buddha’s friend, Devadatta, is angry. “I shot it and it’s mine!” he says. The Buddha laughs in the way that only one who has achieved perfect spiritual enlightenment can laugh, and then, with one deft motion, smacks the swan with a big stick, dead. “That will show him,” he says, and I think that he means the swan. The swan, a smart swan, just pretends to be dead. He knows there is no safe harbor here. He opens one eye slightly to see if the coast is clear, and it makes him look as though he is winking at me. Far from it. The next thing I know, I doze off again. I dream I am on my couch, flying in place.

**

I LIKE MY NEW JOB

Someday I will be a sweaty old fat man with my big ol’ pants hiked up to here and wearing suspenders with little stars on them and saying things like ‘hokum’ and winking at the young lady cashiers who smile because I am so harmless. While they turn their backs to me and whisper to each other and giggle, I steal a big handful of candy and put it in my big ol’ pants hiked up to here.

**

KABOOM

William Jennings Bryan ran for President three times.
Is that interesting? Not really. But from what I hear from my friends that he died from overeating, that was VERY interesting. “My friends,” he said, “as I sit at this lovely dinner table before you, I give thanks to the Lord not only for his bounty which we are about to receive, but also that on this day it is affirmed that we are not–as Mr. Darrow might suggest–descended from lower beings, apes to be specific, but that our dignity and grace is a profound and pure divination of the Lord and all his glory” then came the spare ribs and mashed potatoes and succotash and hot apple pie, and then things got very interesting.




all artwork, except likenesses of Lyndon B. Johnson, by Crispy Flotilla ® 2006