Writing Samples

Poetry by Jon Raasch


Michaelmas

We awake in Hyperborea's bucolic
outskirts to distant drums
erupting in hypergolic
fury, announcing Michaelmas: angelic
pounding nightmare of the wassail
that undulates with rollicking
fun, rampant frolicking,
and the sheer bouncing of lithe
bodies; a crowd that swells into a blithe
ululating blob through some anabolic
marvel, a festival in praise of both zymology
and the amazing nuances of hymnology.
 
The etymology
of the crowd's song suggests gallic
roots, although etiologists
can find no explanation outside of ufology.
French contact was disproven at a forum
for and by paleoclimatology,
where several anemologists
used phycology and petrified frazil
data to show the North Wind as both quaquaversal
and emanating from Hyperborea.  As the nautology 
of the past permitted only sailed vessels that writhed
under the wind's might, Hyperborea remained blithely
 
isolated, able to leave but never return; lithe
Ulysses.  At present, the crowd's best posologist
buys another round and the music sounds blither.
Beer never existed during the reign of lithe
Apollo, at a time when all was idyllic
and warm in Hyperborea: a blithe,
heliolithic society reflecting even blither
rays of sun.  Helios' coup was a bona fide carom
against Apollo and the sun, causing both the ever-rum-
bling metropolis and the transformation of blithe
Hyperborea into an icy wasteland.  Fossil
records show a layer of ash at the time of Sol's
 
imprisonment, supporting the causal
argument between Helios' blithely
indifferent coup and the death of Yggdrasil.
Paleobotanists, using carbon dating of soil
samples and the dendrochronology
of the fossilized tree determined Yggdrasil's
precise year of death: precisely when the basil-
isk Helios fell upon Hyperborea like a catabolic
nightmare, disseminating all.  The evil warlock
imprisoned Apollo in a cabochen girasol
and used his heliotherapeutic blood serum
as electricity in his metropolis, a rum-
 
bustious act that separated the terrestrial from
heaven and hell by killing Yggdrasil.
Thus did Helios, with his grinning labrum,
destroy the sun, the tree of life, and rem-
ove all that was godly and blithe
to achieve personal immortality; his grim,
selfish end.  His crowd will never run out of rum
in this festival of phony theology
as scientific and fact-based as phrenology.
As the sun sets, the crowd falls into megrims,
beset with disillusionment and colic,
they return with frozen breaths to their bucolic
 
hovels.  Darkness overwhelms the land like black liq-
uid.  On the horizon, a metropolis, with its harems
and filth, is an awesome beacon of Sol
that smells freedom and beckons us to destroy its blithe
indulgences, to shed light on these obscure 'ologies.

2004