FUGACITY by Richard Fleming

For many years now, traffic signals have been routinely ignored by the fellowship of bicycle messengers. It’s a carefully planned obsolescence with small souvenirs of happiness.

Things have a tendency to disappear when you snap your fingers in a cross wind. The brains of the outfit come with no guarantees. I can’t predict the outcome when there are so many variables and difficult choices. Can goldfish live outside the bowl, and survive on love alone?

What if they’re surrounded by disgruntled customers demanding a refund? This is the last straw in a basket of food left at the door of a family of four. Someone drops a baby out of the eighth floor window. Some ideas don’t fly; just disappear forever into thin air.

Forever will be over soon. The meter is bound to expire. Lichen grows on the shady side of a headstone. But it’s a good death for a noble cause. Wouldn’t it be nice to visit Hell in the springtime? Air fares will never be cheaper. Excess crude from Super Tramp tankers is soaking the shoreline while leviathans wash up next to the skeleton of a broken down roller coaster of market shares.

There will be loads of opportunity for advancement up the ladder once the villagers know how to read the lips and are easily organized into conspiracies. And when friends come around to inquire after the whereabouts of a very reclusive author, it would be a snap to hook up and infrared camera and measure some dissipation of heat from the passion of a secret admirer. Someone saw him yesterday, boogie down Broadway with a dancing bear he met at the apiary.

Richard J. Fleming is a survivor of three Chicago blizzards. He graduated from Mundelein College of Loyola University, and has degrees in Fine Art & English Literature. He has recently had poetry published in Right Hand Pointing, The Rusty Nail, Inkwell Mag, Curio, Otoliths, Rain, Party & Disaster Society, One Sentence Poems, Unbroken, Poetry Super Highway and Rat