Flight of Ideas

By Robert Jeschonek

A 2013 EPIC EBOOK AWARDS FINALIST. From the dizzying heights of a soaring imagination come 50-plus poems--some old school, some new school, some so far "out there" that you've never seen anything like them and probably never will again. (Check out "The Last Night of the Last Bokey-Bokey on Earth" or "The Day After They Rounded Up Everyone Who Could Love Unconditionally.") This collection includes poems, stoems, prosems, tweetems--whatever it takes to give your mind wings and make it take flight. In medicine, a "flight of ideas" signifies a rush of free-flowing thoughts and speech. It's the perfect title for this dazzling book from award-winning poet and storyteller Robert T. Jeschonek, a master of the unpredictable in theme, style, and expression--a truly unique voice.

Contents
Poetry plus novel preview

Reviews

"Robert Jeschonek is a towering talent..." – Mike Resnick, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author

On "The Day After They Rounded Up Everyone Who Could Love Unconditionally": "...a small masterpiece that breaks all the known rules of storytelling and works anyway." "He takes a title that could be a bad 1960s folk-rock song, shows you in the first 100 words that whatever you thought it was going to be about you were wrong, and comes up with a kicker at the end that will have you thinking about it...at the oddest times weeks and even months afterward." –Mike Resnick

"Robert Jeschonek is the literary love child of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman..." – Adrian Phoenix, critically acclaimed author of The Maker's Song series and Black Dust Mambo

About the Author

Robert T. Jeschonek is an award-winning writer whose fiction, poetry, comics, essays, articles, and podcasts have been published around the world. DC Comics, Simon & Schuster, and DAW Books have published his work. His young adult urban fantasy novel, My Favorite Band Does Not Exist, is now available from Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten First Novels for Youth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Jeschonek
• Release date: Feb 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466197534

Book preview

THE LAST NIGHT OF THE LAST BOKEY-BOKEY ON EARTH

Hindquarters glowing dim red in the darkness, you perch on the sleeping man's big toe,

Holding on with your barbed black feet, six eyes gaping like pimento-stuffed olives

'round your pink-glowing knot of a head.

You shiver like a violin string in time with his breathing, so excited you can barely control yourself,

Yet melancholy, for this will be the last time your kind merges with humanity,

With a man,

For you are bzzeep zeep you are the last of the Bokey-Bokeys.

Your name meaning savior

Your name meaning conscience

Your name meaning beauty

Your name meaning hope.

As you shinny up his leg, through the forest of his leg-hair,

You buzzwhistle a traditional song, a mating song that's been with your people always,

Something about crawling through gates, oozing up a tunnel

Burrowing into a mound, piercing clay with roots like needles,

Only the gates are teeth, the tunnel's a windpipe,

Bzzeep zeep the mound's a brain.

Once, men begged your kind to visit them in the night, they made burnt offerings and spoke through shamans and priests who knew the chants and dances it took to draw you from hiding. They cheered and shook rattles as you shinnied up sweat-soaked backbones by firelight, buzzwhistling your litany of promises. Sparks of static flickering from your million-fold cilia, wings glittering like fresh-dipped paraffin, pincers clacking front and back as did the pincers of your forebears, all the countless googolplexes of them in all the nonillions of centuries. Gods you were then, your methods unchanged from the first trilobite, first coelacanth, first dinosaur, first rodent. Names unchanged from the grunts of the first amphibian squatting in the mud, buh-kee...buh-kee...Bokey...Bokey...first gods of the creatures of the Earth, bzzeep zeep and now this, and now you.

If he woke, he would fling you across the room or crush you with the flat of his hand,

So pick your steps carefully through the thicket of his belly and chest.

Easy now, pry his lips open and slip past the teeth,

Giving off just enough anesthetic salve from the glands between your toes to numb the tongue and throat.

Once inside, you will make him dream as in days of old,

The bull bowing its head before him,

The eagle carrying him aloft, the sphinx with his features.

This is how all gods bred prophets at one time bzzeep zeep by entering

And entwining with the animal form.

Just because man has forgotten the Bokey-Bokey doesn't mean the Bokey-Bokey

Has forgotten man.

The man chuckles softly in his sleep as you claw your way into his brain,

Swallowing nuggets of salty gray pudding as your sacrament, the host of your host.

By morning, he will be changed beyond recognition inside,

Become pilgrim of an ancient nameless faith, disciple of a god both real and in his head

Who will give to him the greatest gift for one last time, the inspiration

For the leap of intuition and compassion, bzzeep zeep geometric evolution

Fit to change a world as a thrown bucket of paint changes a painting

And you shall curl up and wait in your burrow, Bokey-Bokey,

For the bullet that pierces your hideaway as one always does,

The god-killing bullet that stops the leap forward

And you, the last Bokey-Bokey, squirm and sigh one last time,

Receding like the final whir of summer's last katydid, unseen in the shadows,

A candleflame snuffed by the wind, a god of gods past,

Sinking fast,

Your name meaning barren

Your name meaning conscienceless

Your name meaning unbecoming

Your name meaning hopeless.

WHAT WAS UNDER THE REFRIGERATOR MAGNET STUCK TO THE DEATH RAY GENERATOR

Dear Doctor Stonehenge,

Sorry about scalping you

inadvertently

with my laser vision,

but I couldn’t let you put on your

Thinking Cap

and possibly defeat me.

As for the Death Ray,

why not point it at someone

we all hate the next time?

People would pay you more

to take lives

than save lives

You idiot.

But you didn’t hear that from me.

Now about the baboonapotamus:

Wouldn’t a crocotiger

or piranhahawk

make more sense?

Or a couple of codependent

manic-depressive

passive-aggressives

crossed with vampire bats?

But that’s just my opinion.

Now listen:

We both know I’m a righteous crusader,

Red, white, and blue

from my shades to my jock strap,

but times are changing

and to tell you the truth

the country’s headed more in your direction

than mine.

Plus which,

ever since we broke up,

I’ve been thinking

you have a point,

and maybe if I’d compromised a little,

taken an interest in your work,

like instead of stopping your plan

to hire more illegal immigrants as henchmen,

what if I’d, say,

wiped out the rain forest with my nuclear piss

or carved Satan on Mount Rushmore?

I think we could have had

a different cliffhanger ending,

one without your new sidekick Contempto,

who by the way I’m sorry about killing

in the line of duty

with my hyper-sneeze and gun-shooting powers

in the line of duty.

So anyway,

maybe we can team up sometime,

but only if you get your act together,

and no more lameass weapons

like the Low Self-Esteem Ray

or the Incontinence Flea

and no theme crimes based on nursery rhymes

or silent movies.

And no, for the record,

this has nothing to do with my trying to dominate

the relationship

(which there isn’t one, anyway,

as we both know)

or what happened last November

on the cruise ship you sank

single-handedly.

But let’s not beat a dead horse.

What matters is,

I’ve seen the light of evil

so to speak

and we’re both on the same side at last.

With my brawn

and your brains

(all three of them)

nothing can stop us.

(And just imagine how great the sex would be,

not that there would be any

because of course there’s no

us

and I swear to Hitler and Jack the Ripper

I’m totally only in it for the evil.)

WHISPERIN' JIM

Whisperin’ Jim came by today,