Broker

Mr. Conard, looking on
from death’s healthy distance,
waggled his grizzly head,
and harrumphed.

( though not too emphatically)

The point being that Charlie-boy,
his sometime protégé,
might just be headed into
unfriendly and undoubtedly
unctuous territory.

For there sat Charles,
amid the non-descript
office furnishings,
across a flimsy desk,
his brow all a-knit,
squirming mightily
in a seat too contrictive,
his head a-swim in
a numbing swarm of
legalese phraseology.

Out of his ken was he
seeking financial information
before a manically smiling,
over-cologned, salesman sort
in an questionable suit.

Charles,though plainly baffled,
still took time to note that
his thinnish lips seemed fixed,
unmoving around the terrible tooth-gleam
emmitted from his unprecedented dentistry.

Speaksong Start

Certain things there were
to which our Charlie
clung with ferocity unrefined.

Coaxed and coached
was he in the ways
of discernment and disdain.

To deeper truths swore he himself
and forsook the middler path wherein
the making of friends might more
prominently have figured.

Having cast himself an outcast
in the plastic environ
which was his adolescent imagination,
enjoyed he (somewhat)
swimming against the tide,
a picnic at the cliffs
where lemmings ran to die.

It amused him, but comfort little gave.

A long, slow while was it,
during the which was much read
in fields spiritual mystical,
awakening the primitive intuition
gone for so long ignored, unheard,
drowned out with ratiocinations
most vigorously exercised.

Something unschooled in him,
tightly strung, began to make
almost musical sounds-

sometimes a bagpipe like drone,

a Bill Evans ostenato

a sitar, a zither, a hurdy gurdy...

over which
the first timid words
were spoken,

spoken again,

rearranged,

then written.