Borrowing Your Blue Crow Bar; A Pretzel Named Nemesis by Paul Edward Costa

BORROWING YOUR BLUE CROW BAR

No one predicted what took place

since the saboteur's mentally-anguished mission

didn’t match the mellow aura circling them.

They looked the part, sure,

dual wielding a monkey wrench & crowbar

   artificially extending silhouette arms

on their way to smashing

the lotus masks and titanium beacons

throwing off a region’s compass,

but dark agitations

      didn’t follow in their wake;

where they passed,

woodland critters curled up asleep,

squirrels sat around tree-stumps for tea-parties

       and birds chirped contentedly

in an ironically tranquil freedom

around the saboteur finally saying, To hell with it,

and enacting destruction's baptism

through healing’s messy first stage

      sometimes mistakenly-labeled

                 as a misapplied system-shock.

A PRETZEL NAMED NEMESIS

The trick is to act before matter has set,

harder since you never know

           how anything will be when it dries,

and that takes an arrogance

needing balance with awareness

if it’s not to create

    a rising mistake instead of, say, a pretzel,

and yet, I’m enticed by the possibilities

of what I’ll find

          if I keep digging,

                keep contorting

dough in on itself,

                     into snacks,

                     into subatomic forms,

                     into symbols that, when heated

                            give birth to hexes,

                     into the constructed golem

breaking out of an oven when leavened

that smashes a mansion’s bone-filled walls

as delusional denizens gather outside,

weeping, and begging the question,

                       Couldn’t you have just baked a pretzel,

                       instead of divine retributions?