Kung Fruit

Did you ever know some spacy little Seventies hippie chick, all beads and dreams, a flower child who might be caught reading Trout Fishing in America while in a moment of bedazzling distraction committing fellatio on a daffodil — and then one day, suddenly, right before your very eyes she twists a juicy red ripe apple in half with her bare hands, then tries to pretend it never happened?

When you call her on it, she dumbs it down; the next time you see her do it, she traces a line of longitude through the skin clear around the particolored pome, "along the seam," she says, with her thumbnail, then rips her Winesap in twain — just as though she'd done it that way the first time!?

Can everyone do that? Or just Italians? Is that the mark of a peasant? Or a princess? Is it just the disenfranchised who break the rules of consensus reality, the gypsies, the gifted, the gadabouts? Can I do that too? Why can't I do that? Why can't I do that? Why can't I do that?

Is it the ruthless who torture fruit? "Those who linger longest in the shade/ entertain themselves with Life, and Lemonade!" — 2nd Place, the 2008 Bad T. S. Eliot Contest