Dip Twice (Zuihitsu poetry form)

Ken Brody
2 min readFeb 12, 2024

We approach word salad slantwise.

The average attention span is thirty words. Tik is half of tiktok.

Cauliflower words are white and plump, crumble in the mouth taste like cheesewater.

Pass the Brussel sprouts to someone else, rutabaga.

An insubordinate clause must bloom and die, inedible.

Wash your words before eating.

Light and blood are both corpuscles. Or is it a wave?

I remember my first poetry accident.

Eat carefully, one word at a time, dip twice.

Ghost peppers count as three.

Souls slide down like raw oysters.

I miss my first wife like arugula, more than raw oysters.

I will never forgive the bottom of the bowl.

Those salty blue pronouns…

Meet gerunds with me, in spite of bad press.

Why discriminate against a retired verb?

Past tension, future tension, intention, extension.

Conjugate or decline is not a clear choice, is it?

Here we discuss the meaning of meaning. It is spaghetti,

noodles to the right of me, noodles to the left.

Those are our confusions, please, you may touch them.

Elliptically, we are without meaning, without souls,

nameless, or with too many names,

so many meanings cancel out.

It is all relative anyway.

We are in an orbit of decaying adjectives.

around the black hole of word salad.

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