Fernand Roqueplan
“Everything Repeated Many Times”
from Caketrain Issue 03

           Met a man on a downtown Biloxi bus,
his affliction some doctor must
have phrases or explanations for:
everything repeated many times.
He described his house, called his house
yellow yellow yellow just like that;
thought maybe his mind worked in threes
then he said his favorite color—red

           red red red. I wasn’t sorry for him
or irritated, thought how nice
having a head jabbed full of words
stripped of eloquence,
sophistry and oration tripped up:
afflicted with everything
repeated many times,
how difficult it would be to lie.

           Told me his name name name—
John. I asked him again and he said
“my name name name is John.”
Leashed to description
we call and contain, trammeled by ego
we badger and bestow.
“This is my stop stop
stop stop stop” John said, “the casino
with the red red red neon swordfish.”
Someone laughed and John stepped down.
When my turn came I whispered it a block
early to see how it sounded: stop stop
stop stop stop.

Caketrain is a literary journal and press based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our interest is in bringing you, reader, the very best in contemporary creative writing, full stop. Our goals are for each issue of our journal to submerge you in a birthing tank for gelatinous language monsters, young masses of tentacular foci undulating as directed (in all, at once) by our eclectic stable of contributors; for each new book we publish to seduce and ensnare you, sometimes intangibly, always undeniably; and for you, reader, to be able to draw at least one passage from our banks that prods your mind with such precision and power that it feels as if it was written for your eyes alone. To wit and to whet, here is a snippet, a slight nip of our delicious lit mix:

Copyright 2003-2006 Caketrain Journal and Press. Rights to literature revert to their respective authors.
ISSN 1547-6839.

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