Rain feeds the filters, flushing the frosted ferns free of flattened flaps and pummeling the runny roofs and runnels.  Scrambled squads with sculpted quiffs and pockets stuffed with sponges parade in figure eights, then rush to don their mufti, seeking fortunes great and small in titian trunks and tasseled tops, in brittle slacks with funneled cuffs and tunics glazed in beige.  There’s none who’ll knot the mottled rope and twist the speckled twine.  Not for nothing sweet and sour tied with tempered tinsel.  Not for all the nutmeg tins you find on terraced fjords.  There’s none who’ll net a needle kit and knit some fishy hose--not a single majorette in Manx mask, nor slim, salacious squire with a gift for swift persuasion.  Though none will name the face of night and pump the air to pulp, the more-than-ample amperage whips up a froth and furrows the foam, spewing spittle clockwise on the counter, round and round.  While peeling ceilings shed spent tickets into vats of Harvard beets, paragrammatical paladins adhere to the circle’s edge and stare at the worsted vortex.  Maelstrom for them is feminine.  In Kevlar helms with headlamps, they’re ready to play their martial parts in whatever scene demands it, wherever the tour bus lands.  Theirs is a road of rune stones.  Mine is a street of chances.  Yours is a maze of choices, but for me, sphere and zero are almost exactly the same.

KARL ROULSTON delivers words and bluesic in New York City and surrounding areas.  His written works can be found in various great weather for MEDIA print anthologies and George Wallace e-journals.