Cowbees ride the range

Bumblebees ride blooms
Bright yellow chaps of pollen
Cling to furry legs.

Wreck Beach

Miranda, her salt-encrusted bare white bottom gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight, hawked margaritas along the sands of Wreck Beach, while her friend, Giselle sat alone. She wore a long-sleeved white linen shirt, linen pants and a Panama hat. She longed for shade, but didn't want to venture beneath the trees at the base of the cliff where she would inevitably lose the delicious breeze coming from the Pacific.

"Aren't you hot?" a naked older man asked.

Giselle turned her head to see a flaccid, uncircumcised penis dangling a mere inch or two from the brim of her hat. Thank goodness for sunglasses, she thought, I don't know where to look.

Elvis v. Deano

The pigeons hum an Elvis tune in the rafters of the underpass. It echoes: Are you lonesome tonight? Yes, he says. They try another: Heartbreak hotel? No, he says. Stumped, they go for a third: Let me be your teddy bear? You're covered in parasites, he points out. Feathers ruffle, then settle. You're the devil in disguise? Bingo! The devil continues, off to suck a soul or two, and more feathers ruffle, then settle. Bingo wasn't an Elvis tune. The pigeons switch to Dean Martin.

The Future of Raccoons

A CBC documentary about urban raccoons asks: "In an effort to outwit raccoons, are we pushing their brain development?" We keep constructing better garbage bins to keep them out, and they keep reverse engineering them. If evolution continues along its Darwinian path, will raccoons soon be stealing our identities and jacking our cars?

The Snot Conundrum

What do you do when you're on the bus and you sneeze and a great big wad of snot comes out and you don't have a hankie and you think that everyone on the bus must know that you're sitting there with a gigantic blob of greyish-yellow mucus in your hand and you don't know what to do with it so you ponder how you can surreptitiously wipe it off on your pant leg or the inside of your coat without anyone seeing?

Lament for the Groundhogs, or Poor Buggers

Copyright © 2004 by April King

You lived on crap land
By noisy roads
If that bugged you
It never showed.

Your kinfolk died on
A roadway of hell.
An SUV sounded
Your ma's death knell.

We drove you out

We gassed you too
Guess this is progress
But not for you.

It ain't right

It ain't fair
There ain't no hide
There ain't no hair

Of the groundhogs. Poor buggers.

Sweet Caroline

It is a universal truth that no matter where you are in the world--whether on a crowded dance floor or alone in a padded room--if you sing the first two words of the chorus to Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline, no fewer than two dozen voices will holler back: Ba, ba, ba.