Thanks for Jeff Tweedy Thanks for Annette Bening Thanks for Michael Stipe Thanks for John Lennon.
Thanks for Lucinda Williams Thanks for Jurgen Klopp Thanks for Paul Durcan Thanks for Roger McGough
Thank for Sally Rooney Thanks for Saul Bellow Thanks for T.S. Eliot Thanks for Elvis Costello
Thanks for Billy Collins Thanks for Bob Dylan Thanks for Linda Ronstadt Little Feat and ‘Willin’.
This is an edit of a previous post. The Irish poet, Paul Durcan died on May17 and he gets a mention in this poem along with Roger McGough and TS Eliot.
Paul was a quintessentially Irish poet and yet he was very different from contemporaries like Seamus Heaney in that his poetry was urban rather than rural, and he was witty, fiercely satirical and at times painfully honest about his personal life. He was not afraid to show vulnerability. I’m just now re-reading his collections “Daddy, Daddy” about his fraught relationship with his father and “The Berlin Wall Cafe” about the breakup of his marriage. Both collections are funny, sad and complex and the twin ogres of church and state are there on every page. It does not get more Irish than that! Rest in Peace, Paul!
And your gravity fails and negativity don’t pull you through….Bob Dylan
Know your gym……Slim Volume
Gravity, Don’t Fail Me Now
two geezers pink and steaming towelling down after a shower discussing gravity how it is not fixed how it decreases with distance from the earth’s core how, if one was to climb to the top of Everest, since weight is the product of mass and gravity one would weigh less at the top of Everest and Slim’s thinking this is one fucking erudite conversation and he wants a piece of it so he points out that one would regain that weight on returning to sea level and one of the geezers replies yeah but you’d probably burn 10,000 calories climbing up and down the fucking mountain and a nearby jock encased in breathable fabric says shit, I’d burn that in 40 minutes on the rowing machine and Slim fires back wryly keep telling yourself that and the locker room erupts in laughter and in that moment basking in the unbearable lightness of banter Slim defies gravity and levitates above the bacterial swamp that is the locker room floor.
“A man who is tired of the gym, is a man who has been to the gym”. Slim Volume
Two Bros
Two bros on a mat one on his back hands clasped behind his head legs bicycling like a capsized fly; the other, the one with the green hair and the tattoos of a religious nature is grunting weights . Fly bro, it appears, is having girlfriend problems and is experiencing some kind of vague existential crisis, green hair bro listens carefully to his tale of woe and after some reflection says: It’s life, man, stop trying to understand it, no one can and then, as if startled by his own profundity, he repeats: no one can. Out of the mouths of bros….
in the background a bearded jock in a tight black T shirt his muscles packed with powdered whey his eyes a steroid yellow is down on his hunkers knees akimbo moving sideways across the floor like a slow motion crab across packed sand at evening.
blatant weather so unashamedly spring cherry blossoms striking iPhone poses the sun making promises it cannot possibly keep
on Easter Sunday while the churchgoing are going to church we vote in the federal election
on Easter Monday after giving Jesus his day Pope Francis shuffles quietly off the mortal and leaves us to talk of tariffs, annexation
I look north to the snow-capped peaks and the wilderness beyond and I think we could mount a resistance from there if it comes to it if it comes to it
lately, the phrase that could never happen seems impossibly naïve
I submit a version of this poem to Poets Respond at Rattle Magazine and get a form rejection but I understand they receive so many submissions and they are so polite
meanwhile to the south the behemoth awakens a faint, melancholy stirring in his loins he remembers that he was once the Loin King and now he’s just the king of all that he destroys and it doesn’t seem like enough.
In his dream, the ocean is always on the right which means he’s heading south to San Francisco or Santa Barbara or Los Angeles or San Diego, saints and angels; and his hair is blond even though it isn’t and his companion’s hair is blond and his friends in the back seat their hair is blond too and all that blond hair is blowing in the breeze and there are surfers bobbing on the ocean waiting for a wave and a group is singing three-part harmony on the radio, it could be the Mamas and the Papas it could be Crosby Stills and Nash it could be The Eagles it could be The Beach Boys and the band members in the bands he’s dreaming of have names like Dewey, Don, Randy, Jackson names that arrived by railroad, by wagon train and there is the feeling in his head of youth and endless possibilities something waiting down the road and in the dream he knows that he won’t arrive he will always be on the way and not arriving is the trick and not arriving is the best part the best part by far.
This is in part inspired by a prompt over on dverse;
“Krisis: Poetry at the Crossroads. Rooted in the Greek word krisis, meaning a pivotal decision point, we seek poems that explore moments of transformation, choice, and change.
All submissions should be single-spaced. Please use Arial font, Arial is one of our favorite Shakespearean characters.
If your submission is of a religious nature, you may use a Baptismal font.
Please do not use semi-colons, they confuse us.
Poetry:
Please submit a maximum of 6 poems at a time.
Simon Shallowpond, our poetry editor, celebrity watcher and gossip columnist has catholic tastes, but will accept non- religious poetry. He is partial to free verse. “Free verse”, he says, “let it roam, far from all rhyme and reason!” All verse published here at Vapid Magazine is of course “free” in that we never pay for it.
Fiction:
Our main requirement is that all fiction should be totally made up. Please keep it short, our attention span is limited. Endings should be happy.
Non- Fiction:
Here at Vapid, we believe that this category no longer exists.
Visual Art:
Yes, we accept visual art. Our Art Editor, Georgina Shallowglass likes to say “if I can see it, it’s visual”.
When to Submit
Unfortunately, we are not accepting submissions at the moment, our staff is working remotely, which means that they are not doing anything that remotely resembles working.
In these trying times, we would like to encourage all our readers to stay safe and keep it Vapid.
Sometimes a song lyric doesn’t look good on paper, so I’ll start with the song.
Here’s a sample of the lyric
The sun beats down like judgement on the armour-plated road I just called out God and the Devil and neither of them showed, and there’s a sour smell of whiskey sweat on the air-conditioned air sometimes I think I care too much and sometimes I just don’t care……
and it’s not where you’re going it’s what you left behind there aint’ a colour out there that could describe my state of mind
That’s John Mitchell on vocals, guitar and that’s his daughter Nikki on drums and background vocals. It’s part of a CD we made together, a little while back , (Crossing Lines , The Mitchell Feeney Project). I wrote the lyrics and John did everything else! It’s a dark lyric, I guess. Around the time I wrote it, a close friend of mine had recently died and also I was listening to a lot of Tom Waits and The Eagles. So it kind of morphed into a lyric, then with John’s input and some revisions it became ” The Road”!
Down by Locarno Beach two guys in camouflage pants are repeatedly checking underneath their parked Tesla they check, they get back in the car they don’t start the car they get back out they check underneath the car again what could they be looking for?
Snow-capped mountains an empty eagle’s nest in the bare branches of a tree is this a symbol?
Is everything a symbol?
Nope, the eagle is down on the beach searching for snacks in tide pools is this a metaphor?
Is everything a metaphor?
April’s Fools Day, and to the south of us The Sherriff of Tariffdom The Prince of Petulance The Toddler King is looking for his Sharpie.
The prompt over at dverse is :
“So for this prompt our writing will be in the Open Poetry Form, otherwise known as Free Verse or Vers Libre. This is not to be regarded as an anarchic free-for -all but rather poetry set free from the uniform straight jacket.”
I’m a big fan of Lucinda Williams but I have to admit when I saw the title of this album and read the song list, I had doubts. How would Lucinda’s world weary Louisiana drawl work on Beatles’ songs like “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Let It Be”?
Well, the answer is that it mostly works well, particularly on the John Lennon tracks like “Don’t Let Me Down”, “Rain”, “Yer Blues” and “I’m So Tired”. The latter is, for me, the standout track. If you want “angst”, if you want “world weary’, look no further! I can still remember as a teenager, hearing the following quatrain for the first time and laughing out loud.
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!
Note Lucinda’s drawl coming through on “Rawleigh”
For a somewhat pedantic discussion about the word “get”, see below.
A few words about the band, because Lucinda Williams always hires a good band. She’s got Doug Pettibone and Marc Ford on guitars, David Sutton on bass, Butch Norton on drums, Richard Causon on Hammond B3 organ and Siobhan Kennedy on backing vocals and they have studied the originals in detail. Check out Pettibone’s solo on “Something”, which is an almost note for note copy of the original and why change genius! And Butch Norton channels Ringo…serve the song, serve the song!
I can’t get enough of this album!
A Somewhat Pedantic NoteOn The word “get”
Some websites write it 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 meaning something close to ‘jerk’.
Cyphers magazine has published my poem – “Crow Magnus”– in their Issue 98. I am really pleased as always to be published in Cyphers . Thanks to Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, for accepting my poem.
Cyphers is a Dublin based print only magazine which has been in existence since 1975. They publish poets from all over the world, both new and established. Sadly, Cyphers will be discontinuing publication at issue 100. I don’t think I would still be writing poetry if it wasn’t for the encouragement I got early on from Cyphers.
Seamus Heaney and Paul Durcan were also early contributors to the magazine. Not that I am in that league by any stretch of the imagination but it’s nice, metaphorically speaking, to have shared a bus with them!
“Writing challenge: Write a complaint using the poetry form made popular by William Dunbar, Lament for the Makers. Your theme is your own, be it unrequited love or a satirical poem on the injustice of the world.“
Me and the Lads are working the night shift in a frozen food factory somewhere in the south of England in the time before the time. It’s an historic night the English public is about to be introduced to frozen broccoli for the first time and we are there, knives ready waiting for those dark green clusters to tumble from the hopper onto the conveyor belt. Our mission, which we have accepted for a minimum wage, is to chop those clusters into bite-sized florets and send them on their way to be blanched, frozen and packaged.
And the dark green river flows and the dark green river flows.
Truth is, few of us have seen broccoli before, it not been one of the meat and two veg that we were brought up on but we do know that Albert R Broccoli is the producer of James Bond movies so we while away the time making up names for Bond girls mostly variations on Pussy Galore – Puss Ann Boots Holly Goodsnatch – puerile nonsense, I know, (from the Latin ‘ puer’ meaning ‘boy’) and that’s what we were really, boys.
And the dark green river flows and the dark green river flows.
Two hours in, we’re getting bored and uncut broccoli is starting to pile up at the dam at the end of the conveyor. Reg, our supervisor, tries some positive reinforcement. He calls us “a bunch of useless wankers”, picks up his knife and starts chopping like a man possessed. Inspired by Reg, we pick up the pace and as the pile up at the dam clears Reg, who is tall, skinny and prematurely balding, starts to tell us about his sex life: quickies with his next-door neighbor foursomes on the weekend with the neighbors on the other side knee tremblers in the alley behind the pub at closing time . And we’re lucky, he says, because we can go home at shift end and sleep but his wife is mad for it and he has to, you know, perform. We spend some time reflecting on Reg’s definition of ‘lucky’. He then alludes to the dimensions of his dingus, his dong, his John Thomas, dimensions an elephant would be proud of, which prompts us to shake our knives in his direction and Dec from Dublin says: “keep it in your pants, Reg, safety is job one”. Reg blushes shyly and for a brief moment he is one of the lads. It can be lonely at the top.
And the dark green river flows and the dark green river flows.
After what seems like an eternity shift end approaches and the sun peeks over the red-tiled roof tops of this musn’t grumble town and we’re thinking of heading back to our digs maybe stealing a few milk bottles from doorsteps on the way, when Rob, from Liverpool, looks up from the broccoli And says “Dawn Horne” We say “what?” He says, “the Bond girl name, Dawn Horne”. We say “yes, that’s it, that’s it”. And for a moment we bask in the joy of the collective creative process.
And the dark green river flows and the dark green river flows.
Note: The rules of The Lad’s Poetry Project are simple:
The poem must start with the phrase (or some variation of it): “Me and the lads…” and the tone must be somewhat less than elevated.
Donald Trump announced today that the Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) will from now on be called the America Goose (Goosaurus Americanus). He says that Canada has been stealing American birds for too long and now it’s payback time!
Wait…..this just in….Donald has now banned the use of Latin to name animals, plants and flowers. He says “For too long , we have kowtowed to the Romans, but no more, from now on the only empire is the American Empire!”
If you’re reading this message I recommend you join TOT, Turn Off Trump. You’ll find that both your mental health and your relationship with the truth will vastly improve (clinical studies have shown).
If you’re reading this message I recommend you join TOT, Turn Off Trump. You’ll find that both your mental health and your relationship with the truth will vastly improve (clinical studies have shown).
The rough beast is leaving Bethlehem Musk Ox and Meta Morf joined at the hip their android stares fixed on the horizon slouching into twenty twenty five.
And all across the world lonely men light up their lap tops and search for unverified facts formerly known as “lies”.
Meanwhile the Toddler King sleeps soundly dreaming that he’s on an ice floe off the coast of Greenland. In the dream he owns that ice floe and seals honk in what he interprets to be approval.
The story of a exotic dancer/sex worker and the son of a Russian oligarch. Warning: there is a lot of nudity and sex in this movie. Is the sex gratuitous? Well one of the main characters is a sometime sex worker and if a movie about a carpenter had a lot of carpentry in it would the carpentry be considered “gratuitous”? Just saying. But all that aside,,once the rich Russian kid’s minders and family get involved in trying to end the relationship between their son and the dancer, the movie becomes hilarious, madcap and frenetic! A lot of fun!
Conclave:
Fat Cat cardinals get together to elect a pope, and needless to say, there’s a lot of jiggery popery. It’s got Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow and their performances make up for some ridiculous B movie plot twists at the end. Isabella Rosselini plays the long suffering head nun who doesn’t say much but her face is permanently fixed in a look of barely concealed contempt for all around her. Her nuns are basically maid servants to the feuding cardinals. Ralph Fiennes is brilliant.
A Real Pain: Kieran Culkin playing a version of his Succession character (without the financial support) and Jesse Eisenberg playing, as usual, the socially awkward tech nerd. They are cousins on a trip to Poland to visit their dead grandmother’s home. It’s very funny and cringeworthy and moving all at the same time and not afraid of anticlimax. It proves the old adage that you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives…one of the best !
The rumors started just after he won the election strange happenings at his rallies the blind seeing the deaf hearing the lame walking the mute talking he began to take credit for the sun coming up.
Then those stories out of Mar A Lago how at one banquet he turned bread rolls into fried chicken and at another he turned water into Coca Cola then there was the time he walked across a pond to retrieve his golf ball and fishing.. don’t talk to me about fishing the people of Florida are lining up to go fishing with Donald.
A song that came out of a trip to Caye Caulker……This is a video of a live performance of a song I wrote with my friend John Mitchell. I wrote the lyrics and John did the rest, the hard part! That’s John and his band down in Olympic Village (Vancouver). I was in charge of taking the video (no self-respecting musician would let me near a stage and with good reason) and as you can see Martin Scorsese has nothing to worry about! Listen on headphones, this was recorded on an iphone! John and the band sound great.
Here’s the lyric:
The Note
Earl sailed up the Belize coast In his brand new custom built boat With the mother of all hangovers No water and a note
And now he’s sitting drinking In an ocean-side tourist bar Trying to get a jump on happiness In the hour before happy hour
Chorus: And the note read: Our love has lost its flavor There’s no point in hanging on No Doctor Phil, no savior We’re done, Yes, we are done.
And the people standing ‘round him Have been on Caye Caulker far too long They‘re talking about Paradise spoilt And how it all went wrong
Well Earl knows that Paradise Is a very, very temporary thing And this little piece of heaven Feels like hell to him
Chorus: And the note read: Our love has lost its flavor There’s no point in hanging on No Doctor Phil, no savior We’re done, Yes, we are done.
And Earl can’t put a finger on it Why it all went up in smoke He’s feeling like a punch line In someone else’s joke
And he don’t believe in karma Instant, good or bad He’s drunk and lonely on the beach With a bucket full of sad
Chorus: And the note read: Our love has lost its flavor There’s no point in hanging on No Doctor Phil, no savior We’re done, Yes, we are done.
Ingrid over at Experiments in Fiction has included one of my poems “High Plains Sushi” in the first issue of The New Lyricist Magazine. Thank you Ingrid!
You can read about how to order the magazine here.
Proud purveyors of country music to the English public, English country music, that is: no wide open prairies no dogies that git along no bucking broncs no honky tonks no pick-up trucks; the occasional encounter with a fox, a badger, a stoat…. perhaps, but that’s as wild as it gets.
Why, you must all recall, “Round Here, All the Cows are Called Daisy”, the Hedgerows’ greatest hit, written by Mr. Ramble himself or Bert, as his friends call him. Bert collects all the royalties and the Hedgerows seem to be okay with that except for Eric, the bass player (why is it always the bass player?). “What’s up with him?” Bert often asks, “All he has to do is stand there hitting C”.
Bert’s not a man for rules, he has one rule and one rule only – no cheating songs, just not his style, he’s a happily married man. There are rumors though, sightings of Bert hanging around the backdoor of the rectory while Vicar Derek is conducting a service; glances exchanged with Derek’s wife, Cynthia, while passing in the street. Just rumors, his friends say, what could he do in the forty minutes it takes Derek to complete the service and shake hands at the door. Au contraire, Bert’s detractors say Plenty of time, Bert’s detractors say
for a man who has mastered the art of the three minute song.
This poem was written back in the first reign of King Donald and now that he is naming a new collection of fall guys I thought it would be worth one more revival.
The Fallen
Today I thought about Reince Priebus not so much the man, more the strange music of his name; those slender vowels reversing that echo of wince the possible meanings a salve, an ointment put some Reince on that cut, son; the Latinate portliness of Priebus a writ to slap someone with – Habeas Priebus a complicated skateboard manoeuvre he executed a perfect reverse Priebus; then I thought of Anthony, dear Anthony, Scaramucci, Scaramucci will you do the fandango, you were not long with us but still the smell of aftershave lingers and it was you who let us know about Steve Bannon’s auto fellatio, alas, poor Steve abandoned on the side of the road like a rumpled sofa a rumpled sofa smelling of yesterday’s sweat and stale doctrine; and what about Spicer and Huckabee cartoon characters Plucky and Angry your souls will be in the repair shop for some time to come. They appear in waves, the arrested – Flynn, Cohen and Stone, the ones who once were serious people – McMaster, Kelly, Bolton. In years to come when men and women gather to talk of greatness your names will be long forgotten. The list of the fallen goes on and on
and now against all odds another crew is climbing aboard Starship Donald.
Stopdraggingthepanda 