Canto the First-and-a-Half
Being a Not-So-Heroic Episode of Porcine Transport and Philosophical Rodentia

I
In some forgotten drawer of God’s own sleeve,
Where dreams of plastic gently come to grief,
There rode a pig (of pink, if you believe),
With chipmunk strapped in saddle like a thief.
He bore a flask, a lantern, and — naïve —
The sense he journeyed toward some strange motif:
A painted fae with trumpet in her lip
Had beckoned him — or so he let it slip.

II
Now chipmunks are, by nature, fond of jest,
Yet this one bore a burden in his pack —
Not merely bits of walnut or a vest,
But something like the weight of being back
Before the tale began, when he confessed
To pig that time might fold and leave a crack
Through which one stumbles, blinking and perplexed,
To find one’s future is one’s former text.

III
They halted at the foot of painted mirth,
Where fairies danced with vaguely awkward grace.
A goblin drummed. A satyr’s fleshy girth
Obscured the finer points of time and space.
“I know this crowd,” the chipmunk said. “Their worth
Is measured less in wisdom than in face.
They’ll never speak a word, but if they do —
It’s bound to be a riddle split in two.”

IV
The pig, whose tongue had rarely found its cause,
Declared: “We come in peace, or so I think —
But should they offer rules or sacred laws,
I say we nod, and quietly steal their ink.”
The chipmunk, wise, applauded with his paws.
“No hero ever prospered with a wink,
Yet every villain flourished by a grin —
So let’s begin by neither lose nor win.”