Mark Cunningham
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1903-1904: Desperate Poaching Affray and How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the
New York Herald Personal Columns: early development of chase films: actors fall down a lot. In
broken-up lettering, the slogan stated Shatter Resistant. He claimed the new material was “many
fold as abundant” as the old, but we noticed it kept getting smaller. “We used to talk. Only all
he’d say was words.” The Milky Way is the Void’s dandruff. Turns out the only thing she was
allergic to was the anti-histamines.
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I said our corporation was no longer a driving force in society, and he said we were located in an
industrial park for a reason. The ideogram means “Man Standing by His Word,” or so the
committee decided after checking the dictionaries. We told them they didn’t have to worry about
our leaving a carbon footprint, because we weren’t leaving. My sense of guilt pushes me toward
suicide, but there comes a time when you just have to stop the violence.
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The guru said you can cover the world with leather or make yourself a pair of shoes, so we
sprayed the homeless with deodorant until they’d built up a weather-resistant layer of aluminum.
She got cancer from her cell phone and insurance wouldn’t pay, so she moved closer to one of
the towers to get free radiation. A simple genetic jiggle, and people can jog rather than walk in
their sleep, and those extra pounds will just melt away. To get good market share, we named our
hair product The Human Conditioner. He always types “momento mori” before spell check
reminds him it’s “memento mori.”
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Our new super-weapon knocked down the invaders, and now they take up even more room. The
object objected to being objectified. Stephen Hawking points out that if you read and remember
every word of The Brief History of Time, the order in your brain will have increased by two
million units—but if you’ve taken in one thousand calories between starting and finishing the
book, the energy you lose in the form of heat from sweat and convection will have increased the
disorder of the universe by twenty million million million million units. Dear Walt Whitman: we
unscrewed the locks from the doors and the doors themselves from their jambs, and now nobody
understands our knock-knock jokes.
Copyright © Mark Cunningham 2017
Mark Cunningham has a handful of books out, the easiest to find being 71 Leaves, a free e-book from BlazeVox. Alphabetical Basho, a chapbook, is just out on the Beard of Bees site.