THE MARRIAGE OF WILLIAM FAULKNER AND e.e. cummings

the Hack responded to the Melbourne Assessment through a TeamViewer portkey probing into the case of the missing emails, the mystery of the Monday meetings overlap, why the line to Kuala Lumpur is in Rio De Janeiro when a reallocation was approved to develop content for Jakarta with an OPA amendment as the aborted rumble in Phnom Penh was reenacted in a condensed appraisal report, the flight to Luang Prabang imperiled by an intense electronic exchange inscribed in a project charter and a memorandum about an MCP review on why the Phantom Biker was enrolled in both MSH International and Cigna Healthcare     

'twas pooping cat and dogs

and a vegetable medley wrapped in tripe

warm and airy, short and gamey like salt bread 

a delicate curtain of soft college rain

St. Peter's milkfish, dressed in mud then fried in bottles of extra strong lager, stood between two nights of pure libationism, a wall of bottled amber for the advance nights of a fatback on a crisp February evening, plated and skewered, as the pool filled up with exceptional blended Scotch whiskey to celebrate St. Valentine's abstinence in a week when a "prose of complex and unconventional sentence structure" was fused with "modernist free-form poetry"

a benediction, a warm morning feed, a wet market

a party of saints and kings at a Lakers ballpark

ripe fishwife carved  in a plump green plastic mesh

a homily, a bike wash, pickled tank goby

LYRICS FOR A SONG (The Guerilla Ride Anthem)

trash, breakfast, lunch

quick rides between a report submission and a seccesion
Let's Talk! of guidelines, of a big event in Luang Prabang

credit cards, Compass 2,  and a JET network conversation  

breakfast, lunch, dinner

mornings that smelled of smoked fish, phone bills and a ToR
Linked boosted, like climate to social security and the Sequoia slides

ACE delivered, enveloped in a virtual world, a policy retreat

lunch, dinner, breadfruit

old nuts in scraps of umeshu, I-Phone 13 in a retail warehouse
a community mall, a crime scene, a ghost load spewed  

stale tofu, fried shumai, and a half tank of l'eau de vie

dinner, sweet bulbs, green gram

burning sweepings smoke a swath of bone-dry road verge
a free bird in the market, a man confused by church lauds 

the Almaguer Account signed with ink from charred muscles   

A POEM (sort of)

Once

the internet died in Yangon

"save to survive" it hummed

harsh verses for Vientiane

Twice 

partners spent and tell

a line spoken and heard

KL and Jakarta acceded 

Thrice

poked, probed, crossed

eager Melbourne reformed

civil and secured as a Sequoia

Frice

square as a Lenovo ThinkPad

boxy like the bike from Manila

that's me safely programmed

-o0o-

Rides and vice rhyme

like peddlers and bakers, servers and menders

remittances and riddances

debits for a hermit

not cantaloupes, groundnuts, or a fritata  

nor handy men beating the clock

but routine meetings gone sour...