(or The Seven Duds from Silver City: A Parable)
“Would you please kindly
excuse me for just a
moment? I need to pull
a cashew out of my shorts.”
He had always called all of the
shots. And so each pair of eyes
went zipping all about the
room at what appeared to be
an erratic, irrational and
seemingly impossible speed
before a full and unwavering
stop to perform a short-term
sort of a half glare square on
in the direction of Dozier, as he
went about taking every second
of the time it might likely take an
elegant, seven-foot-tall octogen-
arian who casts a shadow identical
to the shape of the silhouette of
a slender-as-an-overripe shoot of
bamboo would no doubt take to rise
and to then begin to amble, from any
table, be it dining or office or, as was
the case here this morning, a game of
cards, and in the general direction of an
exit, right after he’d just resoundingly
beaten (in truth, it was a full-on rout)
the most sly and most sinister set of
treacherous villains ever to be ass-
embled into a conglomeration for a
maximum-stakes, all-night game
of poker. Once Doze had ever-so-
slowly slipped past Herb and Rat-
cliffe (each stood so that Doze
fit neatly between their knees and
and shins and the card table as he
idled sideways through, and once
free, limped at a pace that seemed
to run through eternity down the
short hall to the back exit, the
screen door of which was just out of
sight from the men that were gathered.
There was not a move made all the
while, that is until after the door, which
had let out a slow scrawling squeak
as it apparently opened, had at first
gone silent for a few long seconds,
and then, with a snare-sounding
rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat-tat in reverse,
slammed shut, when all of the men
let out a long, collective and slightly
voiced and even melodic exhalation.
Each head, after that, relaxed to a
bend that could be described
as bobble-forward – or in half-
prayer, but with all of their arms
a-dangle, gone limp and just
hanging, each man’s left and
right arms intersected each's
respective thigh; and also, with
what from above appeared as
with stunning precision, each arm
made, in combination with thigh,
a perfect ninety degree angle), who,
like the rest, were still seated in
what appeared to be a pigskin
fight’s huddle at the table holding
aloft all of the elbows (as well as,
in two cases, the faces) and a
discordant, messy scatter of cards
(there were clubs, there were spades,
there were diamonds and hearts;
there were kings, there were queens,
there were jacks, there were aces.
And alone on the in front of the space
just exited there was, facing upwards
as if look at each of the poor men, if
not in their eyes then at least at their
faces) a messy scatter of cards, the
leftover runes from the last hand of
the long game, as if only to remind
each worthless man that remained
in that dank basement of their defeat
in a horribly unfortunate game just
ended – one that had begun at dusk
the night previous all the way to
and then well past morning’s first
light which by now had begun to seep
directly downward, into the tepid
basement, and onto those motley parts
of the sweaty and oil-spotted skin
that one could see, that were
exposed to the elements; the
parcels of skin on the backs of
the necks of despondent men
who’d each been so duly defeated
glowed, and if one were to look down
at the view from just above the table
the ring of necks might easily be
imagined a beautiful, radiating crown
of thorns or, just perhaps if one’s power
of sway or depth of imagination were
more than unusually convincing,
might be that of a sun-yellow
highlighted halo, belonging assuredly
to some unknown creature or another
that might live in the ground at a
level however deep but directly
below the once ballyhooed but now
neatly bedeviled circle of men who’d
only just all been put in their rightly
low-downed, respective places by
a man in obvious and stark contrast,
lauded within these humble lines,
the intent of which is of course to
assist in setting the mood for what
is hoped to be a long celebration,
of high-minded, goodly, Silver City
denizen, our dear fellow Dozier. But
also to serve to remind us all that
good does indeed inevitably win in the
end, and that we must always at least
believe. It is toward this ideal that with
steady composure lead men like Dozier
to ardently fell or reform earth’s bad
inhabitants, those who are rotten, nasty,
revolting, so that those whose hearts,
whose souls and whose minds are, in
all generality, good, may swiftly or may,
at the very least eventually clobber
those who are not. In summary, we
might also put in this way: may we
as the good and most honorable people
be always goodheartedly triumphant,
and in being so, may we leave enough
room here on this fine earth, not only to
bury the onslaught of rotten we clobber,
but also ensure that what’s left, what
goodness* remains, is filled with, embodies,
in fact, the maximum levels of peace,
the highest rates of joy and the
most whopping gargantuan un-
burstable balloons of giddy and
lovey-dovey contentment. Om.
*It need not be said (and yet here it is nonetheless) the list of
specific characteristics which make up our goodness, which is to
say that which it is that of goodness consists and of how just exactly
to seek out and distinguish these various extant goodnesses, these
are things that can only be officially ascertained by those (relatively few
of us, of course) who are capable of intercepting, or in any other ways
of finding, receiving and securely capturing, by way of what we
call divine intervention; or by those (even fewer, I might sadly add)
who hold the sacred gift of speaking The Tongue, of those who can
and do communicate (directly) with undead (ghosts), with visions and
a variety of erstwhile apparitions, which is to say only to those with such
inherent knowledge and command over the ethereal beings, who can
outwit them and with whom can negotiate, interpret and oversee
implementation of enduring treatises of peace and liberation; and finally
there are those (maybe one, perhaps two of us, tops, in each given era) we
call The Learnèd. It is their lives who have been called forth to repurpose,
to sacrifice themselves toward the greatest of all of services to human-
kind. These of the highest order are steeped completely, so as to become
the masters in these the most divine studies, which are of the realms of
in these most divine studies, in the realms of numbers, of stars and of all
things horoscopic.
