If I Saw a White Cat Eating a Black Rat I Would Build a Monument.

I awoke with an image of a man with freckles and a full beard
over a royal blue three piece denim suit still in my eye from sleep.

He looked like pictures from my history text
of Joseph Smith digging up the Plates of Moroni in New York.

Mr. Smith claimed to be digging up his ancestors, and told me that
his pet rattlesnake was friendly.

I backed off despite Mr. Smith’s insistence that the venomous snake was safe.
I could not get close enough to see exactly what I-Ching hexagrams were written on the tablets.

Would you believe that Joseph Smith could read the I-Ching?
He was asking the oracle for answers to his questions about the Book of Mormon.

The oracle told him that he really wasn’t a prophet that he really just had a brain tumor.
The oracle also told him that his people were in danger.

They were being over run with dark crickets.
It was Joseph who brought the seagulls to Utah with a mystical control of reality.

The angelic seagulls flooded the sky devouring
the plague of black crickets starving the Mormons.

Now there is a monument in Salt Lake City for this bird
with the inscription,

“THE SEA GULL MONUMENT
ERECTED IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF
THE MERCY OF GOD TO THE MORMON PIONEERS ”

The same bird whose aunts and uncles you can see flocking over
the trash dump on I-94 south of Chicago.