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Michael M Clements

Michael M Clements⁠

Bali-based autodidact creative polymath with poetic tendencies 💫

A Different Story

A Collection of Brief, Stream-of-Consciousness Renderings in Fake Time.

2 min readAug 2, 2025

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Feelin’ Splunky. (Ninh Binh, Vietnam, 2025, photo by author)

The meat grinders and the halfway blinders and the coconut builders are on the roof looking for the truth that hits hard in the winter.

Remember the splinter group that regrouped after they broke up? The whole thing was fabricated in a Labrador retriever.

My radio receiver only sends signals out into space — the kind that rings once a year, around the holidays, when all the sales are unfurled. And the tourists come in waves like locusts. Once every 12 years, they reappear and say, “Where did I leave my keys?”

Probably put them in the shed, right next to Cousin Ed. Says he’s going to nursing school. Got a hangover. Too much maple syrup on the knees.

The bees make honey but not much else. Still, they seem alright. Not alt-right or far left out of the LED picture, clear and transparent — that’s what happens when mom becomes dad and vice versa. Role reversal, but just in rehearsal.

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This ain’t no matinee. It’s too early in the morning to mourn for the one that got away. He’d rather stay, but there’s no more room at the in-crowd, so he hitchhiked up the cost of living.

All is forgiven if you can give it all up. Quit like an engine running out of gas at the tip of the Khyber Pass. What a view — as far as the eye can syrup. Did I mention Aunt Maple?

She’s doing it too. All the cool kids are. Lining up to down a pillbox locked in a heart-shaped lapel pin. The kind you see at a wedding right before the shit hits the fan.

Somewhere in the diagram, in the figure eight, you cross the same street but can’t relate to the culture. It’s so foreign. All these other people talking in tongues, twisted.

I got my passport confiscated. Said I was skating on thin ice, so I pulled out my marble device and shouted, “Michelangelo.” They let me go, but they kept my shoes as a down payment.

So, I hit the pavement on all four one and one for all. After all, I was on a mission bell ringing in the new year. Resolutions are a nuisance. The things that keep us up at night.

Someone called the cops. All the crops were dead. Ran out of water. Neighbor said he needed it for his son and daughter. They’re underwater — home foreclosed, now the only thing they own is their clothes.

But that is a different story.

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Michael M Clements
Michael M Clements

Written by Michael M Clements⁠

Bali-based autodidact creative polymath with poetic tendencies 💫