Batterson – #FridayFlash fiction

Former Drill Sargent Haines boots him out for dropping F-bombs…. Freshman returns following morning. Haines halts him at the threshold.

“Change your attitude?”

“Fuck off!” Kid pulls a blade.

Haines decks him and the knife disappears.

Haines’s cuffed; marched outside….

Cop asks, “Where’s your car?”

“Over there.”

“Get in and don’t come back to Batterson.”

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Care to hear me read these 55 words?

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If you or anyone you know has written a Friday Flash 55 Fiction piece (in 55 words), then please come tell G-Man.

Venus reads Wittgenstein (#FlashFiction)

Burnt coffee and B.O. headache. Inside it rains; drips into scattered pails. Spectacled, natural beauty who reads Wittgenstein on break slips into the storeroom; then returns past with semi-transparent white trash bags stretched from empty cups and pastry. Venus takes out the garbage—I muse, convinced the yuppie broker wraps her life in birthday fur.

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Want to hear me read this one?

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If you or anyone you know has written a Friday Flash 55, then please come tell G-Man.

writer

Royalty
“What majesty should be”
Ransomed kings
Criticism to crow about
No RSS feeding enslavement
Without creativity crossing utility lines
Dotted eyes, black shadows sway in the wind
Eviscerating wastelanding tragic dross

Horse powered hamster wheels
The circle run
Bulldozers push, upturning
Severed doll parts, smushed milk cartoons
Fertile lies, careers
Clearing ski hill sized dumps
With reigns held back
Or maybe sold out
Through market trends, tickering taint
Puppeteers, overworked interns
And pimping agents!
…Ivanhoes, please
I am the terrible one

Sorry if you think this harsh
Borders now crossed to bright light
Our planet’s temperature like the sun also rises
As weeklies (as well as most companies) continue to set
Downsized they call it trend
Due preference of a millennial generation not buying newsprint
When smart phones pick up Starbucks Wi-Fi signals
It takes one faint pressured point to get to craigslist

Stop thinking in terms mechanical
There is room for dead language footnotes
References to forgotten mythologies
Get medieval if you so choose
Dropping, echoing pecks without whirring hums
Or the bleating squeals sparking old modems
After sticky relic taps played without electricity
Devoid of cut and paste, and literary nerds
Gutenberg couldn’t picture our days
Driven by Google search
Windows opening one’s Facebook page

Think about past artists’ shun
Censorship, blacklists, ex-patriots
In cyberspace remaining chance
Digest, you can’t erase this

“Brevity is the soul of wit”
Polonius first said it, ironically
Shakespeare could not imagine texts and retweets
Or a wired earth in which peer artists
Encourage creativity, support, universal broadband connections
Global renaissance through computer inventions
Where one’s key strokes lead to instant feedback
Which will not obscure death when broke hearts attack
For a single typefacing metal-headed ribbon slapping caste off
writer

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Care for a reading?

*This poem is my response to the One Stop Poetry Sunday Picture Prompt Challenge. The prompt was shot by photographer JackAZ, featured today on One Stop Poetry.