Down with the ship

“ Haul Once and Twice Again” the sailors sang,

on a boat run aground on an iceberg made of the

hardened bits of birthday cake you throw out only

after it’s been sitting on your counter for a week while

you’ve been too hungover to remember it’s still there.

“Confound it! Not Again!” the captain screeched,

but no man listened, too busy bailing out buckets of

rancid popcorn oil, the kind that coats the floor of the

movie theater and somehow clings to your hair even though

you only had a piece or two since you’re on that new fad diet.

“Starboard and Port! All hands on deck!” the crow’s nest cries,

as the oil rises to knee level through the cracks made by the cakeberg

but the ship’s Chef just hears the “port” part and thinks “WINE” and like any

reasonable human in his situation gets as drunk as you did at your ex-boyfriend’s

going away party your senior year of high school and we all know how well that turned out.

“Goddamn it! This is not a good time!” yells the second-in-command

who had lately been getting frisky with the chambermaid in cabin three

as he runs across the deck, half pulling up his pants as he goes like that time

you accidentally walked in on your sister and her idiotic boyfriend who thought

you were your father so he vaulted out the window bare-ass naked across your yard.

“Terribly inconvenient, terribly inconvenient” the chambermaid chants

as the oil rises to thigh-level and she gives up on holding her skirts up high because

she can’t even find one of her petticoats, which she supposes is a hazard of finding the

second in command attractive in the middle of a popcorn-related emergency which

reminds you of the time a fireman asked you out when he was supposed to be stopping

your kitchen from burning down so you had to sacrifice your beloved sweater to the

popcorn-related flames.

“Fucking ridiculous”, the stowaway sighs,

hearing all the moaning from above as he sits safely in the storage hold,

all the cracks plugged with half-chewed Bazooka bubble gum, which every sailor

worth his salt keeps around for emergencies because the gum turns to cement within

three seconds, which you know because of that one time you forgot to take your gum out

before you fell asleep at grandma’s house and couldn’t pull your teeth apart for one whole

terrifying minute, so really it’s only good for the comics, which the stowaway thinks

says something about life.