down in the basement
vacuuming shards of sunshine
slanting ‘cross the floor.
This a re-working of a recent haiku. Not much time to write lately (my daughter got married last weekend!), so 17 syllables are as much as I can squeeze in.
Early in the morning
I’m still watching CNN news
24 hours to parse a sentence
I’ve got those dry heavin’ blues.
petulant pillock
curmudgeon with a cudgel
bombastic buffoon.
Nha Trang
At the National Oceanographic Institute,
among tanks cramped
with circling neurotic fish
(Hit the glass. Stop. Turn around)
there is a multi-coloured specimen
whose toxin,
the sign says,
renders its victims
“unconspicuous or even dead”.
Further north
in the Hanoi War museum
conspicuous beneath glass
lie the dog tags
of dead American soldiers –
to a man
young, buzzcut and hopeful.
Photo taken outside The Hanoi War Museum
Like a lot of nouns
he had spent a bit of time
in declension centres
discussing cases
with case workers
it wasn’t that bad
he just wishes
they weren’t all
so accusative.
he felt deleted
like a worn-out expletive
declined, like a noun.
Photos: Waiting for the Drop
high fives and fist bumps
haircuts just like Eric Trump’s
brodacious banter
The girl, two tables down
angles her right shoulder forward
every time she makes a point.
Beside us,
the expensive suits and haircuts
play with their phones
like fishermen on the dock in Mykonos
playing with their worry beads.
After four beers,
they relax into loud brodacious banter.
The glass towers flare as the sun goes down.
Happy Hour Friday
on The Tap and Barrel patio
and Monday morning
seems a lifetime away.
Cyphers magazine has published one of my poems – “A Turn Of Events” – in their Spring 2017 issue. I am really pleased about this, it’s a short poem but it’s one of the few that I have written that I don’t think needs to be fixed in some way. Cyphers is a Dublin based print only magazine which has been in existence since 1975. I have been subscribing to it since that time and I cannot recommend it enough. The current issue contains a number of tributes to Leland Bardwell, one of the founders of the magazine, who died in 2016. She was by all accounts a fascinating character and an original and playful poet. Here are a few lines from her poem “The Party Ended Yesterday”:
The sea in party frock
punched the air, slapped in the new.
The mountain moved across the light.
This and two more of her poems are included in the Spring issue.
Cyphers can be found at http://www.cyphers.ie
If you want to subscribe to Cyphers magazine, you can do so by writing to the following address:
Cyphers Magazine, 3 Selskar Terrace, Ranelagh, Dublin 6, Ireland.
Subscription rate is €21.00 for three issues including postage
In Britain £20.00 for three issues including postage
US $36.00 for three issues including postage
Early Sunday morning, Slim and I head down to “The Post-Coital Beetle” to watch Manchester United play Spurs; early because of the 8 hour time difference and because neither of us subscribe to the sports channel showing the game so we can’t PVR it, plus The Beetle is open and we get to watch the game and shout abuse and/or encouragement at the screen in the company of like-minded people. We both order the all day breakfast; it’s called that because it’s available all day, not because it takes all day to eat it. I ask for the eggs over easy, Slim, in an outbreak of irony, orders sunny side up.
It’s nearing the end of the season and the United manager, Jose Mourinho, the surly one, is showing signs of cracking. In a game during the week, he tried to hold onto a one goal lead by switching a to 4 defensive central midfielders and nearly lost the game to a very average Spanish team. Today, he starts with 3 central defenders, and 2 full backs; one of the central defenders is playing in the full back position and one of the full backs is playing in midfield. Ten minutes in and United’s French striker, Anthony Martial, is sulking around in a state of Gallic pique, because there’s no one to pass the fucking ball to him, which is what I shout at the screen:
“There’s no one to pass the fucking ball to him!”
Plus, there’s something seriously wrong with Wayne Rooney’s hair, he seems to be going bald again, despite his much publicised hair implants.
Predictably, United lose. I turn to Slim for a comment, my nose streaming and my eyes watering because I put too much hot sauce on the hash browns, and he goes all tri-syllabic on me. “Doldrums”, he intones:
end of the
season and
United
look like a
team about
to put on
a fucking
garage sale.
And he’s not finished, “I have a bone to pick with you”, he growls. He is wearing a white T shirt stretched over the helmet of his pot belly. The T shirt says: “The end is nigh, and not a moment too soon”. Apparently he’s pissed off because I removed one of his poems from this blog. The poem was called “Moab- an Obituary” and it was his response to the dropping of very large bomb (The Mother Of All Bombs) on Syria by the US.
MOAB – An Obituary
A sad day,
the Mother
Of All Bombs
is gone, she
is sorely
missed by the
bombs she has
left behind.
I explained to him that I had seen Hasan Minhaj on The Daily Show doing a piece on how serious journalists like Jake Tapper of CNN had started making snarky comments about Donald Trump. His point was that this is a bad thing because we need serious journalists to be serious and snark undermines that seriousness. I thought the last verse of the poem was too snarky.
“Well’, Slim says, “here’s some snark for you, go fuck yourself!”
I point out that this is technically not snark, but he has already stormed out of the pub, leaving behind a sausage which I finish. High point of the morning, really.
I was watching Fareed Zakaria and Don Lemon on CNN last Friday night; they were trying to make sense of the ongoing tragic farce that is the Trump White House and Don Lemon posed a question which could be summarised as follows : “Is Donald Trump crazy like a fox or crazy like a fool”. It was clear that Fareed thinks that the needle has been stuck on ‘fool’ for quite some time. At one point, he says to Don something like “look, you have to understand that Donald Trump is a performance artist.” This sounded familiar to me, so I looked back through my blog posts and there it was in a poem I published on Reuben Wooley’s website :’I am not a Silent Poet” back in January 2016. Here’s the poem, but please click on the link above and check out Reuben’s excellent site.
I get it now
Donald T
Is a performance artist
Like that guy in Beijing
Sucking dust out of the air
With a vacuum cleaner
Or maybe he’s
one of those mirrors
In a fairy tale
Reflecting only
The worst in ourselves.
Fareed, I’m waiting to hear from you.
Arrhythmia
out here where real estate agents
explore the frontiers of sleaze
I default to fish tacos, pale ale, unease
and the air is stained with memory
and the air is strained with memory
out here where real estate agents
explore the frontiers of sleaze
and I can’t be adrift
because that would suggest
that I’m floating
it doesn’t rhyme every time
out here where real estate agents
explore the frontiers of sleaze.
Our resident poet, Slim Volume, and I sit down once a week for a classical music appreciation session. As our guide, we are using a book called “The Vintage Guide to Classical Music”, by Jan Swafford. This is an excellent reference book. It contains explanations of various musical terms, essays on the significant classical composers and a “best of” list for each composer. This led me to what Jan Swafford describes as possibly the greatest of the nine Beethoven symphonies, Symphony No.3 .
The symphony was originally dedicated to Napolean Bonaparte but Beethoven changed the name to “Sinfonia Eroica” or “Heroic Symphony” when he became disillusioned with his hero.
The first movement clocks in at seventeen minutes and is described by Swafford as an “indefatigable outpouring of dramatic intensity”. At the end of the movement, I paused the recording. Slim was staring straight ahead in what appeared to be a catatonic state.
“So, Slim”, I said, “what did you think of the first movement?”
He blinked once like a dishevelled owl and replied: “It sounds to me like there’s this man wearing big boots and he’s stamping around a large dimly lit house. In the house are rooms where violinists and flautists are playing. The man with the big boots occasionally opens the door to one of these rooms, but quickly gets bored listening to the violinists and flautists. He signals this by slamming the door repeatedly.”
We obviously have some distance to travel.
This is another re-post, not a lot of time to write currently. The poem originally appeared in issue 38 of The SHOp poetry magazine which was a fine magazine, unfortunately they closed up shop 2 years ago. I have made some minor changes here. I later used the dog and the armadillo in a song lyric.
Down and Out in Idabel
How Myron found himself in the parking lot
of the Holiday Inn in Idabel, Oklahoma
looking out at the road
on a Saturday morning in April
– after a breakfast of brittle bacon,
sausages slick with grease,
dry fluorescent scrambled eggs –
is not important.
The road pauses,
a skittish dog roams;
Myron’s eyes are drawn to a dead armadillo
upside down on the hard shoulder,
empty beer can in its claws –
Old Milwaukee. Prehistoric drunk. Someone’s joke.
A pick up truck passes
a pick up truck passes
a pick up truck passes
over the fence a cow chews grass
and makes a meal of it.
Dogwoods bloom.
The cow moos like a reluctant foghorn.
Myron’s mood turns;
he thinks about the cow,
Manifest Destiny,
the plight of the bison
our lust for red meat
while greenhouse gas
shimmies upwards
ice caps melt
glaciers retreat;
and looking down
the road to Shreveport
buoyed by the prospect
of seeing Idabel
in his rear-view mirror
he quietly resolves
to recover what he was
before sadness lodged
like a wet sack
in the back
of his head.
The great Paul Simon once said: “I’d rather be a llama than a whale”. Ok, maybe he didn’t but perhaps he should have. Anyway, this is not about rhymin’ Simon, this is about rhymin’ Diamond who once said:
I am, I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair
Implying that, in a room containing inanimate objects, the object most likely to reply would be a chair. But all smart ass carping aside, that chair is important, not just because it rhymes with “there”. The chair suggests that Neil is in a room, and there is only one chair (“the chair”), so Neil is most likely lying on a bed and of course he is alone, so alone that he has resorted to talking to the furniture. Without the chair, he could be anywhere, it becomes the focus of his existential crisis. This is a “pop song”, grab the attention of the audience or they are gone and it has to look easy and that’s hard and he does it through that one detail, the chair.
It has to be said that Neil is perhaps not at the same level as Paul Simon when it comes to poetic, sophisticated lyrics, but he has his moments. Take the first verse of “ Cracklin’ Rosie”:
“Aw, Cracklin’ Rosie, get on board
We’re gonna ride
Till there ain’t no more to go
Taking it slow
And Lord, don’t you know
We’ll have me a time with a poor man’s lady”
There’s that internal rhyme happening – board, more, Lord, poor -and all those ‘O’s’, fifteen in total! And the assonance in the chorus of
“Cracklin’ Rose,
You’re a store-bought woman”
It goes a bit downhill after that – “you make me sing like a guitar hummin’” – hummin’ and woman – ouch!
But, for my money, Neil’s finest moment when it comes to writing lyrics is in “Sweet Caroline”. The song, admittedly, is not without some absolute groaners:
“Where it began,
I can’t begin to knowin’”
And that’s the first two lines.
Even the chorus, which contains that finest moment is a syntactical nightmare:
Sweet Caroline
Good times never seemed so good
I’ve been inclined,
To believe they never would
Oh, no, no
I have wrestled with this for some time and the best I can come up with is this: ”I’ve been inclined to believe that good times never would never seem so good”. Think about that too long and I guarantee that steam will come out of your ears. But it doesn’t matter, because all that matters is that rhyme between “Sweet Caroline” and “I’ve been inclined”. He could have gone for “fine”, “wine”, “mine” etc but there is something about “inclined” that is so unexpected, so colloquial, so conversational. It surprises every time you hear it. And of course, the acid test of any chorus is how well it does in a pub or bar late in the evening and everyone is a little hammered and some skinny guy on acoustic guitar hauls out “Sweet Caroline” and everyone is just waiting to belt out that chorus and I guarantee you that the volume will perceptibly increase when they reach that line and everyone takes just a little credit for recognising just how clever it is.
Another post from the past.
I’m not sure when rhymes all but disappeared from modern poetry, but pick up any recent collection and you would be hard put to find a single rhyme. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, on the other hand, stop anyone in the street and ask them to recite their favourite poem and invariably, if they reply at all, it will be a rhyming poem. So people like rhyme but if poets have stopped rhyming where do people go for their rhyming fix?
The answer of course is popular song. Pop, folk, country, rock, rap, hip hop could not function without rhyme; obvious rhyme mostly, rhyme that can seen coming a mile away. If you hear ‘dance’ there will be ‘romance’; if you hear ‘night’, it’s going to be ‘alright’, if you hear “love’, there will be a ‘sky above’. This can be boring or comforting depending on your point of view. But there are rhymes in popular song, rhymes that avoid cliché, that manage to surprise. For example:
The bridge at midnight trembles
The country doctor rambles.
(Bob Dylan from “Love minus Zero, No Limits)
Or more recently, check out the “The Trapeze Swinger” from Sam Beam[i] of Iron and Wine who writes songs of such fragile beauty that it feels like they will fall apart if you touch them.
But please remember me, fondly
I heard from someone you’re still pretty
And then they went on to say that the Pearly Gates
Had some eloquent graffiti
Or, from the White Album:
I’m so tired, I’m feeling so upset
Although I’m so tired, I’ll have another cigarette
And curse Sir Walter Raleigh
He was such a stupid get[ii].
‘Trembles, ‘rambles’, ‘poetry’, ‘graffiti’, ‘cigarette’, stupid get’, all rhymes that don’t resort to cliché, that manage to surprise and there are many more. So if there is anyone out there reading this, send me your favorites, let’s get a list going! Only two criteria: 1) the rhyme must surprise 2) no rhymes ending in ‘ution’ as in “make revolutions/ not institutions/ dilution/ is not the solution/ to pollution/ make restitution…enough already.
*******
[i] Why has Sam Beam not been made poet laureate of the United States of America? He could have written “Trapeze Swinger” alone, and he would be streets ahead of anyone else. Graffiti on the pearly gates -‘tell my mother not to worry’, ‘rug-burned babies’, ‘a trapeze swinger as high as any savior’; check it out here:
[ii] Some websites write this as “stupid git”, but the album liner notes show it as “stupid get” which obviously rhymes better but also it would be more likely that Lennon being from Liverpool would use the Irish (and also Scottish) pronunciation ‘get’ rather than ‘git’ which is more common in the south of England. By the way, Wiktionary suggests that ‘get’ is related to the word ‘beget’, whereas I think it is more likely that it comes from the gaelic word ‘geit’ meaning ‘fright’ or ‘terror’. The meaning has since morphed into something close to ‘jerk’.
This appeared some time ago, thought I’d give it an outing.
Las Vegas
tattooed junkie
frantic call box
all that glitters
raddled toupee
prime rib buffet
entertainers
not so prime
cadillac
fossil fool
hot spot
for the uncool
synthetic jewel
neutral desert
In which Diane Lane
plays an American woman
recovering from the pain
of a recent divorce.
Sandra Oh will feature
As her quirky sidekick,
Tonto to Diane’s Lone Ranger.
Smoldering local love interest –
Xavier Bardem or Antonio Banderas –
they’re not Italian
but if you want “smoldering”
you’ve got to call in the Spanish.
We’ll need a Brit,
Maggie Smith, perhaps,
as a sage but ageing dowager.
Max Von Sydow is still alive
(I’ve just googled him)
he could be the priest
but that might be too much Swedish gloom
we need wry and twinkling.
Morgan Freeman, I’m thinking
an explanation will be needed
as to how he got there.
Richard Gere will appear
near the end,
as the ex-husband
rich and massively contrite
now that his bimbo has fled –
the philandering bastard.
And as for the umbrage
taken by whom
because of what
you’ll just have to wait for the movie.
What Can I Say
to leave no
footprint we
must fly but
never land.
On Hearing that Justin Trudeau had approved the Kinder Morgan Pipeline
there are 3
certainties
death, taxes,
corrosion.
The Stack (remix)
And what a
beautiful
plume we have
here, Nigel,
a plume with
time on its
hands, look at
it loping
across the
sky like a
giant Chinese
dragon, let’s
hail a cab
to find the
plume’s end, where
the last wisps
of vapor
drift upwards
and a blue
mist hangs, yes,
there it is
in the sky
to the west
stalking the
cars in the
parking lot
outside the
big box mall
while the sun
bawls and the
sky gets all
indignant.
***
The April meeting of the Poets’ Circle was a dry affair in more ways than one. The Serious Poet, at the invitation of The Accomplished Poet, read his 40 verse poem about the Canadian Constitution and afterwards spoke for an hour about the making of the poem and his creative process. The Serious Poet wore, as always, a Mountain Equipment Co-Op black fleece vest, a pale blue button down shirt, a pair of Khaki pants with more pockets than any normal human being could use, and a pair of Merrill hiking shoes. His creative process? He apparently decided at the outset on a six line verse with an ABABCC rhyming scheme and added the restriction that he would only use rhymes that had never been used before in an English language poem; a daunting task, as you can imagine. However, being a professor of literature at a local university, he had his resources and with the help of a few grants, he had a group of his students devise a computer program that would check all his rhymes for originality. This involved compiling a data bank of all the rhymes in English Literature, a process that took ten years and an ever changing band of students. In the end meaning and clarity had to take a back seat and the resulting poem turned out to be a real head scratcher, a masterpiece of obfuscation delivered in a dry monotone. To make matters worse, there was no alcohol at the event; April, the cruellest month, being a dry month for some of the poets in the circle who try to prove once a year that they are not cravenly dependent on alcohol for enjoyment and invariably prove the opposite.
Slim and I got out of there as fast as we could and headed for The Post-Coital Beetle…..to be continued.
I
cherry blossoms bloom
well-dressed ladies from Beijing
pose with hand on hip
II
cherry blossoms bloom
the air is sticky with greed
houses, for sale, sold.
III
cherry blossoms bloom
the wrecking ball’s lazy swing
petals, debris, spring.
These 3 poems appeared separately in Spring of last year, I thought they worth assembling together. They are probably the only poems ever written about cherry blossoms and the Vancouver Real Estate Market.
I have a poem (American Carnage) and a prose piece (Agent Orange has a Dark Moment) up at Rat’s Ass Review as part of a collection of poems under the title Such and Ugly Time, related to Trump’s first 100 days. Take a look, I’m the fifth poet as you scroll down – lots of good poetry in the collection.
Also check out the rest of the Review, the submission guidelines alone are worth a visit.
Both pieces appeared previously on this blog.
Everywhere,
the unbearable lightness
of beer.
That Bud’s
not for me.
Unsolicited Advice
Life is full
of quiet
nights, seek out
the loud ones.
I was not
aware of
Botero
until I
visited
Medellin
where he is
famous for
his art and
his largesse,
one could say
his largesse
is nigh on
bottomless
but his art
it is not.
Photos by Marie Feeney
