Recipe for Alphabet Soup
A Surreal Times Special Reprinting
As received by SETI Deep Space Stethoscope-114323 on 20181025 0611- 0619
And published in The New Mythologian’s Diary of Doubt Vol. 11
(Begin Transmission)
Alphabet Soup:
I've eaten this every day since I realized I was me. It's been both the king and queen of my tongue, and the flavor of my mind ever since I've been bored with the game. The clock tick has gotten to me. It's Time for someone else to play.
Serves: more than you would think.
These ingredients aren't rare. They've lined the walls of every store shelf I’ve stalked.
● Take about 13 barrels of freshly-frayed monkey tales. They are quite easy to find with their ceaseless barking drowning all noise to silence.
● You’ll need precisely every lasting ounce of pre-fried monkey brains found in this (or any) universe. I’ve always had at least one laying around, although that’s not as much as you’d think. So be sure not to spill a drop (not that you could, I have tried).
● A plastic baggy knotted at the top filled with sighs, caught so that they play in tune with the moon’s puppet’s frolicking path.
● A slather of ellipses. Take care when handling, they've soured with time and give off quite the stench, such that soon your nose will long for a full stop.
● Find a bottle of lemming tears helplessly mid-fall like those of the hanging string left in the wind; forever suspended in the impotent unfulfillment of the velvet line ropes. If you’ll ever find them, their shape will be familiar.
Directions to the End.
1. Once possessed by these ingredients, mix them all together in a large glass spherical bowl. Stir them until they all blend together. When no single word could describe any one them, stir until they are no longer separable, until plurality is a faded myth scrawled under a pulled tablecloth.
2. Oh no, don’t stop stirring for even a moment. It is far too easy to chance a reflection. If you see one winking at you, begin to stir ever so slightly faster, so that your face melts into the obscurity of the soup. Oh, the taste of my sweet familiar obscurity, the flavor of my dishes.
3. Repeat these directions to yourself with every orbit of the spoon. Repeat them until they lose touch with their own meaning and when a new meaning peeks it head out of its groundhog hole, repeat them again. So it falls back into the cold embrace of a midwink shadow.
4. Repeat these directions until your own ear falls off and the ears of everyone you pass on the street give up and fall too.
5. Squint your eyes, bite your tongue, and block your ears. Picture that last person you just passed. Do you know you lie in the corner of their eye. An invisible asterisk in every tangential tale you will never hear, the soup can read it to you.
6. Spelled out in its seas is every poem trapped within a thought bubble. They wait for a sign as they sigh in the inky waiting room of alphabet soup. You see words talk and play, read and breed. All their names are called and all are appointed and all eventually reschedule. Yet I'm the caller, a crystal ball clipboard stitched to my hands, tied to my tail and forced on my head. I call out and “Next” hatches into “Next”, names upon names flow by. They pass on to be past with no end in sight. Why, I just want to blink.
7. The screaming chorus of letters all blend into soupy silence, you fold them into words, crossed and played out. When everything could be everything else nothing looks the same.
(End transmission.)
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