Cattle ride trains to Chicago, while wolves pretend they’re running alongside; and travelers who look out through the windows of their own eyelids, see reflections of towns that never materialize, as candy dancers sing about what they’ll do to O and John Henry if they ever show up on their tracks.
When he would awake from his night’s sleep in bed each morning, one man on Mondays and Thursdays would immediately ask himself: “Is this really me lying here, and if so; how do I know that it is?” On Tuesdays and Wednesdays he would say to himself: “What is it inside of my head that keeps talking to me?” By Saturday he would have worked himself up to, The Big Inquiry: “What is it in me, that believes it is me, that is hearing this talk?” This would always get his weekend off to its gregarious start.
Cattle like stories about Lazy Days and Peaceful Pastures; wolves want to hear tales of Tamerlane, and Timbuktu. Men with too-loud voices upstairs keep an ear cocked, and men with constant rumblings down below keep a cock cocked.
One father finally revealed to the son, “The Real Conspiracy”:
He described how life initially puts a thought in everyone’s mind that pictures the perfected model of everything they will ever encounter in life, and then puts in another thought that will forever see imperfect executions of the model wherever they look in life.
Hey, they’re starting the topless volleyball tournament, now headless cattle and wolves have something to do. Hey, better be careful; don’t go outside, and never, ever leave your room ’cause I hear them stockyards a’callin’, and it’s sure better to be careful than Oscar Meyered, huh?!
Once the audience had partially doused the flames, they began to jump about as they shouted out a new demand: “How do you get yourself fittingly ground up and tied at both ends?”
Then suddenly they froze,
their minds turned to ice,
as he pulled out again,
his incendiary device. ”
J.