Peter Johnson’s essay “Terra Incognita 4” for this month’s issue of Plume concatenates from one risible paragraph/prose poem to the next with irascible wit, verbal economy, correct political incorrectness, unabashed libido, and unloosed exegesis in succinct perorations of oneiric and cultural. Endowed with a comic muse who insists on banishing any conventional editor, Johnson wields a double-edged pen that inscribes an indelible line between humor and wisdom, satire and timely social commentary.
–Chard deNiord
“Dispatches from Terra Incognita 4”
Once upon a time . . . Jonas lived with a woman in Newport during an era known for a surplus of mock-heroic moments. At night, she’d feverishly awaken and make tiny scratches in a journal she’d share with her Jungian therapist. The dreams were always about Jonas, and not very flattering, each symbol suggesting he might run off with her best friend, solely because of his fascination for female facial hair. Ah, what we endure for love—the misinterpretations, the betrayals of what masquerades as objective truth! Once, at a party, after four Cosmopolitans, Jonas’s beloved said, “All you need to make Jonas happy is to feed him and fuck him.” A harsh appraisal, for sure, and yet a strong candidate for his epitaph—all in the service of alliteration.
* * *
The Bible rarely talks about conversations between Adam and Eve. Always the focus on the Garden and the Serpent, and, of course, betrayal, completely ignoring the epiphanic day Adam became aware of the “grey areas” of life—a phrase gifted to him in a dream, and which he spoke of incessantly to Eve, who herself was angered by her “fat ass and small breasts,” (her words), in contrast to how God made Lilith.
Adam’s angst-ridden grey areas and Eve’s fat ass and small breasts. That’s all they talked about, all morning, all night, until even the animals and insects, even the passing clouds, even the Lord God Almighty Himself got fed up. That’s when the idea of a future Great Flood began to germinate in His very exhausted mind.
* * *
Kafka’s ears! Enough said.
* * *
I was reading an essay called the “Short History of Tennis Skirts,” wondering what the long history was like. One thing for sure, they’d both be written by men, who would no doubt focus on “shifting hemlines,” completely unaware what that fixation suggested about them. Isn’t that the way it always is? An inch here, an inch there, and the next thing you know, you find yourself in someone else’s nightmare, straddling a nuclear bomb as it hurtles toward a target only a few hundred miles away.
* * *
Like the jolt of being hauled out of the moment, transported back to the womb, and given one more chance to finally get “it” right. Isn’t that our lifelong ambition?
* * *
“This administration gets no respect,” an overweight bald white guy wearing a cheap suit complains.
Respect? Respect? Let me see . . . a rich draft dodger and a hillbilly millionaire ambush the President of Ukraine, who has lost thousands of troops and civilians, including 700 children. And they’re offended by his wardrobe? Considering this arrogance, I offer Zbigniew Herbert’s prose poem, “The Emperor’s Dream”:
A crevice! shouts the Emperor in his sleep, and the canopy of ostrich plumes trembles. The soldiers who pace the corridors with unsheathed swords
believe the Emperor dreams about a siege. Just now he saw a fissure in the wall and wants them to break into the fortress.
In fact the Emperor is now a woodlouse who scurries across the floor, seeking remnants of food. Suddenly he sees overhead an immense foot about to
crush him. The Emperor hunts for a crevice in which to squeeze. The floor is smooth and slippery.
Yes. Nothing is more ordinary than the dreams of Emperors.
* * *
Given the limitations of the hysterical order of things, I deemed it appropriate to steal coins from the town fountain, not considering the weight of the wishes I’d have to lug around—all those karmic repercussions, symbolized by a family of frogs floating upside down, as if aware of some heavenly vision denied me.
* * *
“Don’t worry,” he said, “it will all be over tomorrow.”
“But it’s such a nice day,” I said. “What a shame if you’re right?”
“Sorry, but it’s pretty certain.”
“How do you know?”
He explained that all great men intuitively sense the exact timing of apocalyptic events. Truly “great men,” he added, were not priests or prophets. They were the blind guy on the street playing “Crossroads” on a harmonica, or the diminutive man selling extinct vacuum cleaners door-to-door. “We are the lightning rods,” he confessed. “We are in constant motion—motion generating kinetic energy that eventually coalesces and spirals into the heavens like a reverse tornado.”
“But it’s such a nice day,” I repeated. “And here I am on my way to the oncologist.”
“It’s something you need to do,” he said, thoughtfully scratching his full-length beard, as if already knowing my future.
“Even with the world ending?”
“I’ve been wrong before,” he said.
An admission that caused me to pass him a fiver, which he folded neatly and slid under the tongue of a red Converse sneaker.
* * *
“Dispatches from Terra Incognita 5”
1970: an upside-down world edging toward the kind of undifferentiated love destined to become unsustainable. I’m traveling with a barmaid from Buffalo to L.A., who, for 1502 miles, keeps zipping and unzipping her knee-high suede boots, providing me with an opportunity to practice Stoic patience—a virtue previously denied to every male of my bloodline. “Beware of all enterprises that require clothing,” I warn, naively believing in the power of aphorism, which, as usual, is easily defeated by the steely complaint of those heartless zippers.
* * *
“Sometimes to proceed forward, certain cuts will need to be made.” This said by God the Father’s Father to explain the complex responsibilities the latter would face.
* * *
At this disturbing time in history when an emergency tsunami siren is ignored by scantily clad nymphs rollerblading down a beachfront boulevard, when white guys of Generations A through Z have morphed into invertebrates, sanity finally arrives with the coronation of Vito the Pug at the 2024 National Dog Show. Long live Vito! Long live pugs, inarguably the most authentic species on this dying planet!
* * *
Some have argued that Socrates considered philosophy to be, in a sense, a lifelong meditation on death. Personally, I would lean toward man’s insatiable pursuit of chaos—a state of mind more approximating the immortal.
* * *
In 2015, on Japan’s forested island of Yakushima, a male macaque jumped onto the back of a female sika deer and attempted to mate with her. Since this behavior has persisted for years, researchers suggest its erotic nature is the natural outcome of a certain symbiosis. That is, while the deer follow the horny monkeys around, nibbling on monkey feces, the monkeys, in turn, groom the deer and feed off parasites in their fur.
And look at us, a country of old white guys who can’t even balance the budget without demonizing each other.
* * *
It seems we have embraced a kind of technobro pagan ritual where everyone holds hands, chanting, “Everything must be my all.” A moment similar to when the
ER doctor explained how he would remove a fishhook from my middle finger, which on the X-ray resembled a tiny question mark.
* * *
Genesis: God, a surgeon too drunk to thread the needle. And with so much at stake.
* * *
I’m listening to a wide-eyed military man, his head so gelled he appears to have just exited an alien womb. “No way is this man capable of organizing a siege,” I think, imagining a better world where he might be dipped headfirst into a giant boiling pot to fight it out with the angry clawed lobsters.
* * *
Headline of the Week: “MAGA Clothes Designer Blames Hillary’s Pant Suits for Zelensky’s Disrespectful White House Outfit”
“Tulip Glorioso, designer of “elegant” socks made from the skins of dead endangered animals shot by Donald Trump Jr. blamed Hillary Clinton’s black pant suits for setting a “president” for inappropriate White House attire. When told that she misspelled “precedent,” she looked off into the distance, later blaming the faux pas on being struck dumb by the Lord God Himself—an ingenious excuse advancing her two rungs up the Ladder of Insanity.
* * *
If not for the tattoo of “Peter” on my forehead, I would have wandered the world egoless, which, though a lonely life, would have certainly made me a better poet.
The End
