A Found Story: What Do You Say About It?

When you're done talking to the tree, say "Hello!" and go fly a kite. When you leave, remind yourself one great book is better than two crappy books. Fall asleep in your chair and fart so bad that you question the very concept of writing blogs. The Stoned Theory Of My Own Destruction doesn't suck. 

Read some of what Juliette had to say. She's read my story. Someone else who read my story is Jerry, and he's a little like me, but a better conductor.

I'm self-publishing next year, because it's publish and perish.

A Lost Story: Knock Down That Tree

The schizo stood and shook my hand in a forest. “Years ago,” he said, “when you lived a lifetime beyond sun and moon in a basement, or maybe Africa -- one day you promised, when you had become a crone, one who could only hobble, totter, drabble, dribble and leak, you promised to return from The Great Beyond. And you did. You are here. You told the congregation listening to your poetry and stories that you would take schizos into a forest and shout at them with a noble voice: ‘Nazis, Russians and friends. You were my neighbours and chose to murder my soul.’ You lived many lifetimes and yet you have returned. You have returned from The Great Beyond. You have returned with your broken, desperate heart. And you have lived beyond time.” And then the schizo finished speaking and slowly sat down to rest.

“I have returned to talk to you and to the dead, also,” I said. “To tell you that I have lived. I have lived to write many blogs in The Great Beyond. We mourn and we remember a past precedence. Those buried in the soil beneath these living trees. We live in the name of schizophrenia, mental illness and addiction. And we remember the names of unborn children. We take you as the example and then elevate you above the forest, because without you there cannot be a future.” I handed him some cold fast-food.

I turned around and then I turned on the ghetto-blaster. The rich music sounded magnificent. And then he sat more comfortably and took a bite of the Big Mac and tore a piece off the bun of the burger. “But I’m imagining that I’ll live beyond the end of a new tomorrow,” he said, “where there are no schizos.” He finished the end piece of the burger and chomped vigorously on the bun. Drool began to fall from his lip.

“Ronald McDonald is a clown and schizophrenia is an illness,” I said. “And you are as branded as McDonald’s and unless you can split that tree…” I pointed at the tree behind him. "There's no other way you can rid yourself from the clown within. To split means you must cut down the tree from the tree of loneliness and contempt.

He turned his head. “No,” he said, “I do not wish to split wood.”

“Then you would do well to hide from the world,” I said.

A Poem Without An End

Inside a haunted forest,
bruised lonely trees.
Inside a beaten tree
is battered wood.
Inside tree-parts
is a heart,
scared of an axe
beating faster
out of control
with fear
and me
cutting down
the tree,
ripping out
the roots.
Forever.

Richard Tattoni

The Edge Of Reality: Can't You Smell That Smell?

Credit Valley Footpath was quiet and I was quietly lost in the middle of nowhere and there was nobody and it was awesome. All of a sudden, a tree started talking to me. What the fuck? I wouldn't talk back to it and it wasn't Skedaddles the Cat, but wow, it was a fucking big ass tree staring at me with wooden eyes. Looking down at me, it wouldn't leave me alone. Its leaves were huge, tree trunk enormous and round with roots spreading out, dominating the forest -- there was nowhere to hide.

The tree said to me, "You don't have the credit to be in the valley of my footpath." The tree was right. I had blown my savings on Amazon, betting on Indian sports teams, Nyquist as the Triple Crown winner, and NyQuil. I wanted to go home, but I was curious about the talking tree.

"How did you know that?" Maybe the tree put on a suit and tie and worked at RBC when nobody visited him. Everything was trippy.

"I've read your diary," the motherfucker echoed. "You're a poet." Shit, I had Lionheart Leaks and unreleased installments. It was worse than the Sony cyber attack. I was going to sue his goddamn wooden ass.

The tree grew a second face with three eyes bugging out at me, another mouth formed under its two noses and it grew nine branched-out arms. It was the most wood that I had ever seen. It tossed my diary at me with two of his hands. His third arm reached out and grabbed a fat joint underneath a log. Buddy was into the herb and Indians.

Indian Teams

Buddy rolled another joint. I took a mean piss on his ugly roots. It felt good to relieve myself and I wanted to piss off the tree. The tree tried to grab me with his arms. Wood was flying everywhere, but I escaped. I started running away. Stopping once to look back, the tree turned around and mooned me with his wooden ass. His deep crevice spat out birch bark, but I was beyond his teepee and the edge of the magical, enchanted forest filled with giant mushrooms and eleven-leaf clovers.

Credit Valley Footpath