Too Strong for a French Fry
But light enough for love
One time a plastic fork decided to become Enlightened! No one knows why these things happen, and, in honesty, very few of us even care. We have much more important things on our minds, war and struggle, office politics and streaming movies that invade our dreams … but that’s how it is! This plastic fork had decided to drop it all.
So he tried.
He got as far as a Waffle House on a rarely traveled country road in Texas, where he stopped for the night, bravely jumping out of an old Dodge pickup truck festooned with mud and playing old Willie songs on the radio. He leapt from the bed of that truck and landed snugly, hidden in the brim of a decrepit cowboy hat making its way to sugar and carbohydrates, while that hat sweated in the cool night air, oblivious to a country band inside, playing songs that no one even knew.
“Why are you sweating so much?” the fork inquired.
“You would, too, if you knew what’s going to come down soon!” the hat replied.
“What?”
“Aliens, son,” the old hat let him know, “Aliens from Jupiter.”
“That doesn’t scare me!” the brave fork ventured. “I’m traveling the country in search of my Original Face!”
“You’re a spiritual fork?”
“I only look plastic. My chemical bonds are stretching, stretching ELASTICALLY, so I can become one with the Universe!”
“You’re pretty weird for a plastic fork, bud.”
“You’re on the head of a guy who doesn’t bathe often.”
“I know. It gets rough.”
“Let’s both run away then! We’ll hide out under a waffle and let the heat launch us to the Moon!”
“Have you tried this before?”
“Only in my dreams,” the bizarre plastic fork admitted.
And that’s the way all of us are, it seems, hiding out under a waffle, and hoping the heat loosens us up.
We’re too serious, and so few of us have been to the Moon.
_______________________
© “John” Lesly Levin 2023
