Étude in Nostalgia Minor, “You May Be Able to Help Solve a Mystery”
The reliquary of Tab lacks a chalice,
so puts a vending machine in confessional’s place.
What’s the ordinance that confuses proverb with parochial gene?
The implications were tax return or holy spirit,
travel agents leaving us pulpit-lurch.
Lichtenstein, what are your blue laws?
Andorra, has geo-sphagnum set in?
Who remembers Dennis Christopher,
thespian I’d load onto time-zeppelin
because Breaking Away does for rock quarries
what Robert Stack did for the update?
The best origami? Sybils of a cold case.
They crumple, but who said the future’s denim-proof?
Sadly, the Alcatraz memorabilia
industry goes south after the Bay
Extinction Act of 2043.
Cattle mutilation too.
Where pan-dimensional cutlets fail,
plant-based meats exceed.
Jell-O Hollywood signs tell me
saliva has stock value and taste
buds evolve en-lime,
gospel-tonsiling outlawed—
a monk sect with theirs still in
deemed vogue biologic.
Remember when oxygen was courtship
and retinas fortune-favored? Dennis,
your poster my hallway, glaucoma
mainstream. Everyone enamors
the sienna ampule, vision clinics
the singles bars of 2118.
