Dire Strait(s) of Hormuz
DJT and JDV
just can’t buy a win
even Pope Leo
even Pope Leo
thinks they’re The Sultans
The Sultans of Sin.
(apologies to Mark Knopfler)
Elvis Costello & The Attractions – (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding
Dire Straits – Sultans Of Swing (Official Music Video)
Taking part in open link over at dVerse | Poets Pub
A sunny Spring morning
I’m walking past
The Foxy Box Laser and Wax Bar
on west 10th avenue
waxing lyrical
thinking of childhood Easters
chocolate eggs and religion
pleasure and guilt
that Catholic Cocktail
and something about the time that’s in it
and that sun streaming down west 10th
takes me back to 1969
moon missions
and the United States in a war that won’t end
the more it changes……..
but the Earth in the new photos from Artemis
looks different
less vibrant, a bit faded
as if from the vantage point
of the rest of the Universe
we are a failed experiment
suffering from a chronic inability to learn.
I start to wax facetious
my brain is thinking of ad slogans
for The Foxy Box Laser and Wax Bar
but it seems like they’ve got it covered
or uncovered,
a guy jogs by, wearing just shorts and jogging shoes
his sweating torso ripples with muscle
headphones on
a jog before work
as for me
I’m at an age
where I think “muscle tone”
is a Hebrew greeting.
And so it goes
waxing facetious
again
the world turns
the astronauts fix the toilet.
Taking part in Open Link over at Its’ Open Link Night AND our LIVE session is just around the corner! | dVerse
Operation Epic Cruelty
Amid the twisted rebar and the rubble
the pages of a schoolbook flutter.
Taking part in Open Link over at Open Link Night #404 | dVerse
The Toddler King has Second Thoughts
5 am
the Toddler King checks Truth Social
his stomach gurgles
shouldn’t have had
that second burger
in the parking lot of a big box store
two plastic bags
pirouette on the morning breeze
in the back seat of a Ford
a store day shift worker wakes up
and checks her watch
she’s been sleeping in her car
to avoid that 2 hour round trip
gas is too expensive
in the Middle East
war drags on
eyes for eyes
teeth for teeth
but no one is tallying
the eyes and teeth
and no one is turning
the other cheek
that is soooo New Testament
a week ago, a Tomahawk missile
hit an Iranian school
and killed 170 people, mostly children
the US Military weren’t sure
if it was their Tomahawk,
considering the missiles
cost around $2 million dollars
you think they would know
where they were sending them
no one is claiming responsibility
and the news media has moved on
meanwhile the Toddler King
is sitting on the can
could be a lengthy process
that protein carbohydrate diet
has its drawbacks
he’s feeling nostalgia for times past, simpler times
last month for example
Greenland eh,
now that would have been less complicated
he’s thinking also of Tomahawks
and the Tomahawk chop
and how Native Americans don’t like the term
but no one objects to the name being used
for a missile and he thinks
man, that’s deep,
I should call a press conference
if I could only get off
this damn toilet.
Zlatan
A beach in North Florida,
the sun is shining
not a cloud in the sky.
Well maybe there are one or two clouds
this is a memory
and memories are famously inexact.
It’s hot and humid
a scrotum-sagging Florida humidity.
Out on the calm ocean
children are floating
on inflatable ducks, dragons, swans.
I’m on a work assignment
and this is a day off.
Beside me my colleague, Zlatan,
is struggling into his swimming trucks
under the cover of a small white towel.
Zlatan is from a communist bloc country.
He escaped to the West
by accelerating in his car through a border crossing;
he tells me he can still see the guards
in his rear view mirror
reaching for their guns.
There were pelicans down by the shore
or were there?
Suddenly the calm is broken
by a commotion out on the wooden jetty
people are pointing at three grey fins
moving through the water.
Someone shouts: Sharks!
The ocean empties
children, parents, inflatables splash frantically
towards the safety of the water’s edge.
Meanwhile
Zlatan has finally got his trunks on
he gets up, walks towards the water
past the hysterical families and the inflatables;
he has a low centre of gravity
his back is covered with black fuzz,
he’s a soccer player
one of those midfielders
who can always find space and time.
Zlatan, I yell,
there are sharks out there!
He looks back over his shoulder,
smiles, and shouts, Fuck the sharks!;
then wades out until the water is waist high,
dives in and heads off into the ocean
his arms arcing in a steady crawl.
In no time at all
he is out of sight.
This poem originally appeared in Cyphers Magazine Issue 93.
Taking part in Open LInk over at Open Link Night #403 with Live Edition | dVerse
What the Book! The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown
I bought this book because I wanted a page-turner, and I wasn’t disappointed. Although, there are a lot of pages to turn, six hundred and seventy-one to be exact; that’s one hundred and thirty-nine chapters of spare, economic prose. Each chapter is designed to advance the plot. And what a plot it is; intricate, convoluted perhaps, a bit unbelievable perhaps but Dan Brown doesn’t really give the reader the chance to let these impressions sink in, he keeps it moving and that’s what writing best sellers is all about, I guess.
The novel is set in modern times in the city of Prague. The city, with its history and architecture, quickly becomes one of the main characters which is a good thing because there are only two other Czech characters in the novel – two cops who border on Keystone in their ineptitude. The rest of the characters, good and bad, are mostly American. On the side of good, are Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology and Katherine Solomon a professor of noetic science. On the side of evil, tempered by the need to protect the US of A, is the CIA.
Robert and Katherine are in a romantic relationship. In fact, as the first chapter begins, they are waking up in Robert’s hotel room bed after a night of well….sex is alluded to but not described. It’s all very PG, almost prim, this is Dan Brown not John Updike. Although at one point in the book there’s a discussion about the science of the orgasm. You’re a wild one, Dan.
But talking of science, writing about science is one of Dan Brown’s strengths and how he incorporates it into the plot, when discussing human consciousness, is what makes this novel worth reading. The underlying theme in the book is that regular physics cannot explain how the human brain functions, that the human brain could not possibly store all the data we accumulate through our life spans. Instead, all these memories, emotions, knowledge, stories are stored in a universal consciousness and when we die all those memories etc. live on in that universal consciousness not unlike the way some religions describe the soul leaving the body at the moment of death. Dan Brown explains this and a number of other concepts far better than I have and weaves them effortlessly into the plot.
So buy the book, turn those pages, you’ll learn something and you’ll end up wanting to take a trip to Prague!
In Rattle Magazine Issue 87, Lew Watts, the Welsh Poet, was interviewed by the editor, Timothy Green. It is a fascinating, wide-ranging and entertaining interview about all things ‘haibun’ and during the interview, this book was mentioned.
A confession. I’ve been mispronouncing ‘haibun’ for some time. Even now when I see the word on paper, ‘halibun’ pops into my head. I even cracked jokes involving ‘halibun and chips’. But back to the book.
This book is essential reading for anyone interesting in reading and writing haibun. It is accessible, entertaining and breaks down the essential ingredients that go into a haibun. That is no mean feat, because, like the haiku there is an ineffable quality to the haibun.
arcane moon
po-faced
fades to morning
Okay, pump the brakes. A good haiku makes or breaks the haibun. The other ingredients…title, and prose complete the trinity. What this book does well, through several fascinating examples, is explain how these three ingredients spark off each other and cause the reader to revisit the haibun again and again.
So go out and buy this book, you won’t regret it!
Does my blog have bot-ulism?
I know I have talked about this before; my stats are booming. In January I had 7.7K views and 7.4K visitors. To put those stats in perspective, prior to this a typical month for me would be around 600 views. The most popular post in January was: https://stopdraggingthepanda.com/2019/02/14/indignatron-b-as-seen-on-tv/
Lots of views, but no likes, no comments and the visitors were mostly from The United States, Singapore and Hong Kong with the majority being from The United States. And it’s still continuing.
So I dug deeper. WordPress stats lists not only countries but also cities where the viewers are located. Apparently I am very popular in North Bergen, New Jersey; 4.7K views in January alone. Before this I did not know North Bergen existed. Although I did spend a summer in Bradley Beach, New jersey working as a student in The La Reine Bradley Hotel. But that’s another story.
North Bergen apparently has a population of approximately 60,000. According to Google AI, it “thrives on a diverse economy heavily anchored by transportation, logistics and warehousing”. This doesn’t explain why I am so popular in North Bergen. The answer could be , of course, that I am not popular at all in North Bergen and yes, there’s a bot chomping on my blog.
On the other hand, if some of you nice people in North Bergen, New Jersey are actually reading my blog, hey, make a comment, say hello! I’m waiting.
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.
Miller and Bondi
Homan and Noem
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.
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse
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
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”.
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
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
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
Living on Tanka Time
up on Dunbar Street
the barber shops are empty
a guy smokes a joint
and laughs hysterically
at the blank screen of his phone.
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?)
Thanks to the editors at Oddball Magazine for publishing my poem!
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.
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…….
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
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.
On Reflection…. Donald Trump
America has given birth
to a giant orange child
a zaftig infant Gulliver
striding the ravaged earth
of his own imagination
trampling whole villages
swallowing villagers whole.
This poem was published previously in Oddball Magazine.
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.
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!)
Raining Hard in Grimsby
It was raining hard in Grimsby
the night, United crashed and burned.
Is this the end for Amorimby?
In his grave, Matt Busby turned.
Stopdraggingthepanda 