The Full Extent

a poem partially stolen from IHOP Management

 “If you are caught vandalizing
our restrooms you will be
prosecuted to the full
extent!” —IHOP Management.
And that means you will be
washing dishes the rest of your days.

And you will want to die but won’t
be able to because
you are shackled to the sink
and the knives are out of reach.
A tiny fragment of
blue sky will beckon from the window

across the room and you will dream
of fresh air and flowers
as the busboys bring dishes
sticky with simulated
maple syrup. Your hands
will turn to prunes and your feet will ache.

And you will wish you had never
been born to vandalize
our goddam restrooms, mister.
Do you get it? When we say
“the full extent” we mean
the goddam fullest fucking extent!

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Note: I refashioned the first stanza above from a custom-made sign (and found poem) by IHOP Management. The stanza thus formatted could be called a “hexastich” of the sort I’ve been writing in connection with my consultations of the I Ching over the past year or so. This time, however, instead of basing the poetry on the consultation, I reversed the process (as I’ve done recently with my similar thievery of material by Martin Mc Carthy, Morgan Waters, Megan Youngmee, Jed Moffitt, Troy Putney, Peter Himmelman, and Sam Aureli) and used the syllable counts of the lines (8-6-7-7-6-9) to arrive at a reading of the I Ching, which I then imposed, along with those same syllable counts, on the subsequent stanzas written by me and combining into what I call a Fourfold Oracular-Syllabic Hexastich (or FOSH) — in this case, pointing to the 56th hexagram of the I Ching, “The Wanderer” (aka “The Vandalizer”) with lines 2, 5, and 6 changing, which in turn points to Hexagram 28, “Preponderance of the Great.” If you’d like to delve further into the meaning of these hexagrams and the changing lines, I’d recommend the classic Wilhelm/Baynes translation (pretty easy to come by in used bookstores and libraries but also here) or Paul O’Brien’s more contemporary but also excellent Visionary I Ching.

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The source:

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