A key of light,
From outside of here and this, stabs,
Announcing of translation
of possibility into fact.
this is a story of a thing
that happened which you
probably forgot.
Zing zinnnnng…
Zing zing zinnnnnnng
Do you remember
Crazy frog?
What a free agent!
What was he even advertising? nothing.
He was just *transcendent frog*…
Slipped thru a hole.
Communicated,
to us,
through a shiver: a gap in the unifying field
of anxiety that holds this particular universe
together.
A lifeline from a place free of product and
commodity, beamed and completed from some
confederacy of better worlds: 21st century
Soviets, triumphant global Jainists, a Häxannactic
league, et cetera, et cetera…
OR
maybe
a tear, from God, long delayed, drippy
Crazy frog, given to us, to sing a free song
liberated from all possible tyranny (meaning,
control, et cetera)
but God’s napkin wiped away their only and
accidental tear: the universal heartbeat of
misery caught back up
our poisoned world gave its answer and
we spurned the frog,
read him as a star, his message to be consumed,
bought his records out of hate, mocked, tore,
shredded, castrated… captured
him, emptied him out, refilled him
and made a cruel and hateful cargo-cultish
effigy from his stretched skin and solid bones, a
vessel from his made-quiet body,
filled with spite and rage,
and called it Pepe: our poisoned World’s answer.
so search, and you cannot find the Crazy Frog
anymore, only the debased image is left.
and what an image!
hear forever: the hollow wattling scream, in tears,
as it transmutes and warps and shits itself, groping
about under an eternal midday sun with its eyes
pushed in,
desecrated:
exemplar of filth,
pawn of turds,
the metonym of this, worst of all worlds,
that never knows the mercy of ending but bores on
and on and on.
U laugh but I weep… weep for the world
and for the frog that was denied
this is not a joke, this is a tragedy
There are no jokes
in the place that the Crazy Frog came from.
FROG
2020
digital collage, short story
1080 x 1350 pixels (x8)
Joseph Buckley, lives and works in NYC.