Inappropriate Conversations

"Sounds Like a Serious Offense" has not come up before in poetry-focused episodes of Inappropriate Conversations, and that's mainly due to the use of rape as a literary comparison. It's uncomfortable, and I would never want to dilute the meaning of such a heinous crime. Having said that, I've had conversations with people of both genders who have been used, manipulated, and socially shunned. This is how they feel.

Accepting the notion of Eternal Now from Boethius and others, we have known the people we love most deeply for much longer than we acknowledge or understand.
"A Belated Happy Birthday"

How we read a poem and how we read a hymn are very different things. Mixing that up intentionally can produce interesting, or taxing, results.
"Tithe"

In perhaps an equal and opposite reaction to Valentine's Day as a concept, the poem "Unrequited Love" is -- whether romantic or not -- deeply sad, in my opinion. It's open to interpretation, of course. One interpretation is the death of a friendship.

I believe the out-of-place feeling between leaving school and being established in a vocation is universal and remains relevant, if not more than just relatable, today. The same cannot be said for postal concepts like "six to eight weeks for delivery."

A few weeks ago, I posted one of the longest pieces of fiction I've written. This is one of the shortest, composed in the simplest way possible, using only simple sentences.

Some Assembly Required (A NeoSurrealist Forsaking a Habit for Lent) was completed on April 1, 1994. 
It's nonfiction title was Temptations from the Wilderness II, a second Lenten writing experiment. This one was a jumble of 40 different writing styles during Lent of that year, including traditional omniscient narration of plot-driven action, a recipe, sermon, poetry, drum music, and more.  

Three years ago, these eight chapters were shared in a serialized form of sorts through seven Inappropriate Conversations episodes -- each with its own Different Drummer, etc. This file pulls the entire novella, such as it is, together.