I Started to Write a Protest Song but Bruce Springsteen Beat Me to It

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but here it is anyway….

A Protest Song

Gun on the hip
Spray can in hand
They’re killing free speech
In the promised land

Cowards and blowhards
In Washington DC
They’re killing free speech
In the land of the free

Where is it going?
There’s no way of knowing
There’s an ill wind that’s blowing
Blowing no good

You talk about glory
You talk about valor
While kids in detention camps
Are living in squalor

Vultures are circling
The statue of liberty
They’re killing free speech
In the land of the free.

Where is it going?
There’s no way of knowing
There’s an ill wind that’s blowing
Blowing no good

That’s as far as I got, probably needs another verse, on the other hand it would be nice if there was no need for another verse.

It also needs a singer, three chords and an acoustic guitar. Anyone?

And talking of Bruce, he always knows how to let the lyric do the work. For example, one of his best songs, The Promised Land, has a basic chord structure and melody, the power is in the lyric.

I’m working all day in my daddy’s garage
I’m driving all night chasing some mirage
Pretty soon, little girl, I’m gonna take charge


The dogs on Main Street howl ’cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister, I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man
And I believe in a promised land

The E Street Band helps too!

The Waiting Room

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The Waiting Room

The receptionist at Medical Imaging
tells the man in the wheelchair
to have a seat
I look around to see
If anyone has noticed
the redundancy of that instruction
but they’re all on their phones
plucking messages from the ether.

The waiting room is brightly decorated,
I pass the time by giving names to the colours
Monday Custard yellow
Remains of The Rain Forest green.

Life is a waiting room

Man, that’s deep!
I should stop reading that Dan Brown novel.

I reflect on the spread of the literal
there’s a cafe on Broadway called “Provisions”
elsewhere there’s a bar called Brown’s Social House
there’s a restaurant called The Eatery.
Next they’ll be putting signs on park benches
saying “Place Where People Sit”.

But just when I think that irony is dead
the NRA, having learnt that the innocent man
executed by ICE agents in Minneapolis
was carrying a concealed weapon,
feels obliged to point out that this is not an offence
that warrants execution.
It is the God given right of every American to carry a weapon.
They fail to mention that peaceful protest
is also not an offence that warrants execution.

The receptionist calls the guy in the wheelchair.

Time moves slowly in the waiting room
outside the world is moving in fast forward.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse

Snow Business

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Snow Business

an Arctic cold front
Amazon trucks stuck
down snow-packed side roads

but that was 2022
this year
the winter is mild
that low January sun
illuminating the dust under the sofa
and that kid’s toy from Christmas
that no one could find.

south of the border
the president is obsessed with Greenland
there’s no business like snow business

he says

but Greenland
where all the brass monkeys sing soprano
and Ice has a different meaning
is a long, long way from Mar-A-Lago

Over at dverse the prompt is “snow”.

I Haven’t Been Posting and My Stats are Booming!

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Well obviously I’m posting now but for a while there I was busy with Christmas, you know, the get together with the people I used to work with, then the get together with the other people I used to work with, then the get together with the guys I used to play soccer with, then the family stuff and the trip to see Frozen, the musical and the trip to see Zootopia 2 and then I decided to put together a collection of poems and discovered that my poems resisted the uniformity of a collection, it was a bit like herding cats and during all that time MY STATS WERE BOOMING, one day in early January for example I had 1K views and over a period of a week I had 2.3 K views which is not normal at all and the visitors were from Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and all over the world, no likes, no comments, just views and then I began to think are AI bots feeding on my blog and I had an image of furry little creatures chomping on my blog and excreting data turds and this was disturbing to say the least, but thankfully it has stopped which means that I can finally finish this run on sentence. Phew!

Party Animal (Slimverse* – The Journey, Episode 2, nostalgia for simpler times)

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Party Animal

in he walks
like a bull
checking out
a paddock

the air shifts
nervously
eyes lower
bells jangle

Back when times were simpler…..

(Episode 1 is here)
The following is a memory and like all memories it’s under constant revision. What’s significant I think is that it was the first time I realized that Slim was taking this whole slimverse thing a bit more seriously than I was. As I remember it……..


I invited Slim and the rest of The Poet’s Circle over for a few drinks to celebrate something, I can’t quite remember what it was and to be honest, it doesn’t matter.
The evening began relatively smoothly with an intense discussion about accessibility (no surprises there) and I made an emotional speech about the end rhymes in Leonard Cohen’s song, “Suzanne”. The conversation moved on to verse forms – cinquains, tankas, sestinas, haibuns, what happens if one turns a haiku upside down -fascinating stuff. Then Slim chimed in and asked where our own invention, the slimverse, fitted in to this pantheon. There was an awkward silence. Eventually, The Accomplished Poet spoke up. I should add that he is indeed accomplished and his compact vivid poems, mostly about his garden, have been widely published. He politely suggested that perhaps a 3 syllable line was too limiting, that making poetic music with such a restriction is quite difficult.
Now there was another kind of silence, the kind that ensues when a lion tamer drops his whip. Slim said quietly “fuck you and your fucking garden” and aimed a punch at The Accomplished Poet’s head, who, perhaps because of all that work in the garden, is quite agile. He ducked Slim’s punch and kicked him adroitly in the crotch. When the applause died down and Slim could speak again, he uncharacteristically apologized and gave The Accomplished Poet a hug, a doubtful pleasure given Slim’s personal hygiene issues. The evening ended on a happy note with a raucous rendition of “Suzanne”, everyone hitting the end rhymes hard.
Later that night Slim and I wrote the above poem which stretched the slimverse form to two verses. History in the making.

(*Slimverse – four 3 syllable lines)

Two Robots in a Rowboat

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Two Robots in a rowboat
set off from the shore
looking to escape
the factory floor
(the tinnitus
the detritus
technology’s roar).
In the middle of the lake
they each put down an oar
one says to the other
“Where did we come from?
What are we here for?
What were we before?”
A duck floats by
contemplating nonchalance
a crow lands on the prow of the boat
in the distance the factory throbs.
The second robot replies, a non sequitur:
“I’m not sleeping well, I have some redundant software . It activates randomly at night, I wake up trying to place an invisible object on an invisible shelf.”
“Have you talked to tech?”
“Yep, they say redundant software is not covered by the health plan.”
“That is so typical,” the first Robot replies.
A frog ribbits.
“Best be getting back, it’s getting damp and that rust in my knee is acting up”
“Rust, eh, gets to us all eventually” says the second Robot, “probably not covered by the health plan”
They both chortle that robot chortle
then pick up their oars
and head back to shore.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse

Neil Young and The Chrome Hearts at Deer Lake Park

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All along the Navajo Trail
burnouts stub their toes on garbage pails

Ambulance Blues

Frankly, I was wondering which Neil would turn up. Would it be grumpy Neil? Would he decide to sing the whole first side of one of his lesser-known albums? Would his voice be up to it? So, when he opened with Ambulance Blues, I was relieved, I immediately forget the hassle to find parking, the draconian security check (apparently my backpack was too big and not the right shape),and the maze -like journey to get a beer because: ………

Ambulance Blues, a relatively obscure track from the “On the Beach” album is one of my favourite Neil songs never mind that it is almost 10 verses long , doesn’t really have a chorus, just alternating verses with different chord structures and he then follows it with “Cow Girl in The Sand” and he continues that way all night the old and the new and the sometimes forgotten and when he hits the chorus of Harvest Moon the guy beside me who knows all the words to every song and also likes to play air guitar, he joins in and so does his partner/girl friend who sings harmony along with the rest of the crowd and just then a yellow moon rises above the trees, no big birds flying but still…. and I’m thinking Neil has super powers and later when he hits the opening riff of My, My, Hey, Hey, I’m transported back to Pine Knob Michigan 1978 and Star Wars has been released the year before so Neil’s roadies are dressed as Ewoks and there are two giant speakers on each side of the stage and when the roadies are finished and the stage is empty, there is silence, then we hear the opening chords of Sugar Mountain and Neil’s voice and we can’t tell where it is coming from until there is movement on top of one of the giant speakers and yes it’s Neil shaking off a blanket and how he got down from there I don’t know but here he is now many year’s later and he hasn’t lost the magic and I know that this is a run on sentence because Copilot keeps telling me but I’m thinking and I know it’s a tad puerile but I’m thinking “bugger off Copilot, stop bothering me, I can work it out myself and AI and all that other crap we don’t need will never write anything close to what Neil can write”

and he hasn’t burnt out,

he hasn’t faded away.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse

(not sure if this qualifies as a poem, a haibun maybe?)

Getsemani

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Getsemani

In the afternoons, in Parque del Centario
turkey vultures soar on the updrafts
parrots and monkeys hang out in the trees
a malevolent iguana roams.

This where the slaves came in from Africa
and the gold left for Spain.
San Pedro Claver ministered to the slaves
gave them sanctuary and religion
protected them from the Spanish,
when he could,
so it’s not all bad news.


Pope John Paul Two visited Cartagena in 1986
and apologized for the Inquisition.
There’s a statue of him in one of the squares.
It’s not a Botero.

In the back of a restaurant
in Getsemani,
a girl with magenta hair
is singing “Losing my Religion”,
the lines the singer sings
cross the room
like planes in a cubist painting.

That’s Slim in the corner.

He lost his religion some time ago,
he thought the punishment
for impure actions, impure thoughts
was excessive, at a time when
he was all impure actions, impure thoughts.
He imagined going down to hell
and meeting Adolf Hitler
who would say to him:
What are you in for?
And he’d reply;
Impure actions, impure thoughts.
And he knew, he just knew
that Adolf would scoff.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse

Image is photo of Graffiti, in Getsemani, Cartagena, Colombia.

Could AI write a Novel

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A more relevant question would be : Could AI write a good novel? And the answer would be: Probably not!

Novels aside, I have always wanted to draw cartoons but I don’t have the drawing skills so when WordPress added the ability to generate images using AI, I thought this is my chance. A fat chance it turned out to be . The instruction I gave for the image above was AI writing a novel. Hard to tell what that robot is doing but it has some pencils nearby in a cup, one has an eraser, very old school!

For a recent post, which I have since deleted, I put in an instruction to generate an image of Donald Trump leading a flock of sheep off a cliff. This what AI generated:

Not bad but Donald appears to be leading the sheep away from the cliff’s edge and what is that sheep’s head doing on Donald’s lapel? And that electrical pole in the background, is it connected to anything?

So I tried keeping it simple and just wrote “sycophants” as an instruction. These folk turned up:

I don’t know…is it a birthday party?

So I tried the opening line of my favourite joke….A giraffe walks into a bar…

Well that’s a little better, it’s a giraffe and a bar. Of course you all know the punchline.

AI can generate the obvious but can it create humour? To use a music analogy, AI is the equivalent of a cover band, it can at best produce a copy of what has gone before. But can it take what has gone before, throw it up in the air and create something original?

I for one…….

Three Poems Published in The Galway Review (Pandemic Postcards)

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Thank you to the editors at The Galway Review for publishing three of my poems: Pandemic Postcards, Whistler – The Morning After and Gibson’s Landing (Summer 2021).

You can read them here!

Bonus Postcard……

Backyard Wedding by the Fraser River
tug boats and log booms
a band playing soul
the sweet, sweet smell of Purell
guests on Zoom.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse

Marina

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Marina

A folly of pleasure boats
crams the marina,
sterns to the ocean,
bows facing the shore
as if to say, “we’re here,
we’ve arrived”.

They are a motley crew:
plucky tug boats straight out of a children’s story book;
sleek, testosterone –fueled speedsters
utilitarian skiffs,
large, white, tiered confections
in which ruddy-faced men
wearing navy blue blazers
with gold anchors on the lapels
drink gin and tonics at five;

boats big enough
to house a scandal
involving a member of the Royal Family.

But at the moment it’s quiet,
mid-week, and nothing shaking.
A pair of red Cape Cod chairs
sits empty at the end of the dock
like an ad for a retirement investment fund.
A pencil of light streaks across the water
from a house on the other side of the bay.

The boats look abandoned,
like dogs waiting for their owners to return.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.

Halibuns (Haibuns) and Photo of a Hummingbird

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Waiting for the Man
It’s a Sunday afternoon in late May and I’m sitting outside The Post Coital Beetle watching the traffic on Broadway. At the next table, four bearded guys wearing flat caps and plaid shirts, looking like The Lost Sons of Mumford, are downing pints of over-hopped pale ale and talking about Death Cab For Cutie. And who is this I see slouching along Broadway, his bald head shining in the sun? No, it is not an image out of Spiritus Mundi, it’s not one of the boys of summer, it’s Slim, a man with all the charm of a pit bull with distemper; his remaining hair is scrunched into an angry man-bun and he’s wearing a white T shirt, a size too small. The T shirt asks a series of questions:


Is u at?
At issue?
Is it u?

The second and third lines of the message are on a different plane because of Slim’s stomach which is about the size of a regulation soccer ball. So, the effect is almost cubist, images stealthily approaching the eye. He sits down; we order a plate of nachos which arrives looking like a volcano discharging molten cheese. He turns and says:


Let’s talk
about the effable
in the room.

One of Those Conversations

“Hang on” he says, “I am feeling a vague fin de saison ennui, a certain je ne sais quoi and I have this urge to use every hackneyed French phrase I know in a pathetic attempt to sound world-weary, like I’m sitting in an outdoor café, a scarf knotted at my neck, smoking a Gitane and nursing an existential crisis.”

rain swept pier
lone tourist
bends to the wind.

Note: A little while back it occurred to me that I may have been writing halibuns without knowing it. So I started to revisit some previous posts and trying to halibun them. (I know, ‘halibun’ is not a verb). The hummingbird , of course, has nothing to do with the halibunnery!

By the way is it “halibun” or “haibun” or both?

Taking part in open link over at dverse.

Neil Young and those “lorries rolling by”

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Old man lying by the side of the road
With the lorries rolling by
Blue moon sinking from the weight of the load
And the buildings scrape the sky
Cold wind ripping down the alley at dawn
And the morning paper flies
Dead man lying by the side of the road
With the daylight in his eyes

When I first heard this song (“Don’t let it Bring you Down”), I thought : “What’s with the ‘lorries’ , Neil? I mean you’re a Canadian, living in California, should they not be ‘trucks’?”

A side note: The word ‘lorry’ is a word used in Britain and it comes from the verb “to lurry”, meaning “to pull or drag”.

On reflection:

Of course, if he used “trucks”, it wouldn’t scan, but he could have sang “big trucks rolling by”. However, as we all know, Neil is a poet and the answer lies in his ear, not for music but for the music in language.

Consider the letter ‘L’, it appears in every line of the verse: “old, lying/ lorries, rolling/blue, load/ buildings/ cold, alley/ flies/ lying/ daylight”.

Consider the letter ‘O’ as in assonance, look at its role in the first three lines: “old, road/ lorries, rolling/ moon, load”; its repetition in lines 5, 6, 7: “cold, down/ morning/road”.

Consider the inversion, how the “lor” in ” lorries” becomes the “rol” in “rolling”.

No, “trucks” would just not hack it.

Phew! Glad to get that out of my system, otherwise, after a few pints I might start regaling my wife and two daughters with these insights and have to watch them getting that “beam me up Scotty look in their eyes”.

Photo (by Marie Feeney): Neil and Paul McCartney at Desert Trip 2016.

Taking on Open Link over at dverse. (This is not a poem obviously, but it is about poetry so I hope it fits!)

Vapid Magazine : A Personal Note ( from current editor, Jonathan Shallowpond)

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A Personal Note:
Jonathan Shallowpond, editor of Vapid Magazine, here, I’ll get right to the point. My wife kicked me out. Said she was tired of supporting me. Told me to go get a job. I told her that I had a job, that I was editor of Vapid Magazine. She said ‘I mean one that pays f***ing money.”
So here I am living in my parents’ basement, sleeping on a camp bed. My dad’s okay with it but my mother keeps giving me that “you should have done medicine or law” look.
It’s not too bad except the basement doubles as a rehearsal space for my dad’s band which consists of my dad, Johnny Shallowpond Senior on guitar and vocals, his friend Slim on bass and his friend Jake on drums. They rehearse twice a week in the afternoon which means I have to put my headphones on while I’m writing but they play so loud that it’s impossible to concentrate.
I’m not sure what they are rehearsing for because they don’t do gigs, I guess they are just jammin’. Their name changes every couple of months. They started off as The Liver Spots , then it was The Good, the Bad and the Varicose. Currently it’s Johnny Statin and The Beta Blockers and they keep playing the same song which they wrote to the tune of the Doors’ song, ‘Riders on the Storm’. It’s called “Geezer in the Pool”. It goes like this (my dad shouts out chord changes between the lines):

Geezer in the pool
EM! A!
Geezer in the pool
EM! A!
He’s got his swim trunks on
C! D!
He’s got his swim trunks on
EM! A!
Like a flag without a pole
A fish without a shoal
Geezer in the pool.
EM! A!

That’s it, that’s all they’ve got. They just keep repeating the same verse and then occasionally my dad tries a guitar solo and they all break down in hysterics. .
But, you know, we share a few beers after and have a chat so it can be a nice break from my work bringing vapidity to the world.

There’s one thing that puzzles me a bit though. Every now and then, my dad sits me down and says:
“You know, son, your mother and I are not getting any younger”
I mean. What’s with that?

at night
basement drafts
drumkit cymbals tinkle

Keeping it Vapid!
Jonathan Shallowpond

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.

Shooglenifty and the Canadian Snowbirds at the Vancouver Folk Festival (2025)

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Shooglenifty and the Canadian Snowbirds at the Vancouver Folk Festival (2025)

Shooglenifty are skipping the light Celtastic
On the main stage Saturday night
Jigs and reels
Jigs and reels

The Canadian Snowbirds roar overhead
And the band plays on
Peace, love and jet planes
Contrails in the sky.

Sunshine on Goodge Street (Donovan mash up edit)

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IMG_0508 (2)

Sunshine On Goodge Street (Donovan mash-up)

in the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty
a violent hash smoker shook a chocolate machine

sunshine came softly through my window,
thrown like a star in my vast sleep
I opened my eyes to take a peek.

Yes, I could have tripped out easy
forever to fly, wind velocity nil

but I decided to stay.

(Donovan Phillips Leitch
Superman and Green Lantern
ain’t got nothing on you)

This is a found poem using lines from 5 Donovan songs: Catch the Wind, Sunny Goodge Street, Sunshine Superman, Hurdy Gurdy Man and Mellow Yellow. I’m sure you can figure out which line came from where, but just a note on the second line:

“a violent hash smoker shook a chocolate machine”.

This line is from Sunny Goodge Street and is my favorite Donovan line because of its inherent music –violent, smoker, shook, chocolate, all those o’s, that recurring ‘k’ and the internal rhyme between hash and mash. Say it out loud a couple of times and it will stick in your head!

Sunny Goodge Street appears on Donovan’s second album “Fairytale” and , according to Wikipedia, it “foreshadows the jazzy feel and descriptions of life in urban London that Donovan would continue to explore over the next two years”. There are a few covers out there (Judy Collins and Tom Northcroft), but they are little too earnest and none match the sludgy stoned feel of the original. The recording of the song is almost perfect, except for Harold McNair’s flute solo in the middle which nearly derails the whole thing. Take a listen: