(with apologies to Martin Heidegger)

By Kurt Rasmussen

At the fiction writer’s group they keep telling me
not to write adverbly because it is very bad.
They heard it somewhere and it’s a rule now.
This news brings something in the mountains of my brain
to howl out wolfly lone across a precipice, knowing
that I am closetly an adverb myself. I want to stick up

for all of us because I walked through my city
today and I must tell you very lapel-grabbingly sir
that the streets and the alleys teem abundantly
with adverbs like me, all doing the same things
in slightly different ways (mostly because we can’t help it).

Rumorly we all must grably live. Tornly must we die.
In the meantime, though, we lift our faces to the sky
and if we leave a mark it is in our ways of failing—
for instance, in the way we imagine god. Did I tell you
I had to give up on omnipotence and other super powers?

It’s a scuffling god who knifely wears a dust boot
I see out there on the road. She can’t settle down.
She lets her long mane flow grayly and relatively snake-free.
You know the old witch is near when the horses whinny scaredly
(although of course we have no horse). She walked mournful lone defeatedly
into our alley town last night. We’ve started laughingly calling it “Coolsville”.

We gave her a drink and a stale dumpster sandwich
while she sat there, silence shooting sun-rayly out of her.
“I got the best deal I could for you,” she finally spat. “You are judgely
sentenced to life, my babies. Condemned to live it youly.”

Double Down Blogger image credit/Kurt Rasmussen.

Kurt Rasmussen lives and writes in downtown Las Vegas. One of his good friends during the COVID pandemic has been the tree in the photo, to whom he speaks often as he walks through the arts district, knowing exactly how it feels.

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