(Sketch Poem): In Bardo with Beckett Eating Celery Sticks

cruunNNCHH beckons the thicket of
Green stalk fibers.

Perhaps a setting, to start:
A prairy, replete with grasshoppers and bumblebees
Steepled in the weeds.
Or, rather:
An orange grove near hushed meadows
Amidst a lush indigo breeze.

It was inevitably Beckett’s checkup with the clockmaster.
Beckett: “Ahhhh, the time is up!”
An alarm clock shudders.
4:09 A.M. ET
A rising dawn
Roused by the bell to whom it was told.
Clockmaster: “Ah—yet this much is riddle speak!”
A peculiar stodge of twisted whiskers and fibrous bristles twitch aloft his labium.

__________________________________________________________________________

Lately, the tom cat Chin Lee
Had been learning karate kicking around at the dojo,
A hop, skip, and a rat’s ass beneath the tallest building
In Manhattan, where you could hear an imperial nickel
Land tight on its tails
From thousands of feet tall,
Loud as the drop of a pin of a hat
On its race to the lowest common gutter.

That cat had caught a cold and was tallying up
Hairballs next to a shabby old brick and mortar by beat-up
Fire escapes, lodgings, ladders, and lean-tos:
A hodgepodge of sticks and poles
Thick as yarn, weathered and deformed by the storms that took their toll,
And yet,

Where was Marie when Harry met Sally?
Beckett, befuddled: “Why have my clocks stopped their spinning?!”
Clockmaster: “Hmm, you must be the famous playwright… Have you by chance fought my cat, Chin Lee?”
Beckett: “Codswallop!”
Clockmaster continues to persist.
Close at hand: a peddler selling celery by the pound.
A plant in the corner shudders.
Chin Lee squishes furtively through a burrow agape. Begins slinking slowly about the scene.

Chin Lee (mustering a slow, five-second squint)
Breaks loose all hell:
KKKIIIIIYYYYAAAAHHHH!!!
Potted plant topples, shatters, spilling soil ‘cross the clockmaster’s workbench.
The first and final scratch,
A tumble that took its turn for the worse—
Beckett was certain: the skirmish must play out each time between Chin Lee and the dramatist.
Inevitably, it was Chin Lee who won the verse.
Chin Lee was top dog (in fact)
And the backhand of destiny bit Beckett at each recurrence…

Clockmaster (watchful, making it worth his while) winds up his timepiece
Once more, patiently, carefully, eternal
As I stood in bardo with Beckett eating celery sticks.