MITCHELL KROCKMALNIK GRABOIS

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over a thousand of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, and Queen’s Ferry Press’s Best Small Fictions for work published in 2011 through 2015. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. He lives in Denver. 

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Octopus by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

I am an octopus
and evil
Telepathic
I inhabit the minds of men

My motivation: 
I wrote a memoir
but no one read it

The ink ran 
The paper sogged 

I’m going to rewrite it
and include the most recent events of my life
and my most recent thoughts
the most brilliant ones ever

By rights, it should be a best seller
but every agent tells me
it’s either too literary, too crude, too sexual, too feminist
too quirky
or simply too octopoid
for the mass market

If I were a famous talk show host
I could easily find representation
but I’m an octopus
living in a hole at the bottom of the ocean
that’s like the worst public housing 
in the most terrible slum

I flee from speedy predators
like sea lions--
that’s one of the chapters in my book

Sea lions lack subtlety
They never suffer from depression
Even when they’re thrown off an ice flow
by a killer whale or two
and their offspring are eaten
they never get blue 
never suffer hate
or thirst for vengeance--
that’s not the way they’re made
They lack emotion

My memoir
is full of emotion
It has depth

I sometimes suffer depression
and have many notes about how depression 
gets one in touch with one’s soul

though if I had my choice
I would forego depression entirely

Word by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois
​
In the beginning was the Word
but what word was it?
Was it Fuck! after God bashed his thumb hammering out
the first day’s creation
or was it a long drawn out yeah of appreciation
as God watched day and night draw apart?

Or was it No! 
after God got a unexpected glimpse of human evil?
Was it then, even before Man was created
that He began planning the flood
that would drown the world?
Theologians have said: Our God is a conflicted god  

Did He also create a planet made of anti-depressants
(like the moon is said to be made
of green cheese)
that he could eat of
from time to time?

Another theological mystery:
does serotonin act in God’s mind
the way it acts in ours?
Was He the first to understand the concept
of the inhibition of serotonin reuptake?

South by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

We sailed south
into a sunburnt nowhere
that we could not see 
because our optic nerves had been burnt

but we’d been told that the skeletons of slaves
littered the landscape

We pulled up to Yawzi Point
where the victims of Yaws had been quarantined 
by their ungrateful masters 

Go no further 
read the sign at the head of the point 
That sign now hangs on the wall of a Copenhagen museum

Museum goers feel a chill
as they ignore it and 
go right, left 
or straight ahead into other galleries

The specters of those dead slaves reside there
all of them disfigured by the sun
and hunger
toil and illness

The coffee in the downstairs café 
turns red

Scandinavia is no longer such a utopia
as the past merges 
with the present and the future

Einstein protests: Each tense must remain
in its own realm 
This trespass must not be allowed!

But the museum guards are propped against 
the walls in catatonic poses

An emergency session of Parliament is called