Haiku for Donald
petulant pillock
splenetic philanderer
bombastic buffoon.
****
scowlmaster supreme
diarrhethic dissembler
rhodomontade cad.
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.
there is nothing worse
than a politically drawn border
it’s like a break in a limb
a break that won’t heal
yes you can put a cast on it
but it still won’t heal
yes you can take drugs for the pain
but after a while the drugs don’t work
Talk about what we know
….the border between Northern Ireland
and the Republic of Ireland …..
for a while there in the mid sixties
it was a border we crossed
to get condoms, Mars bars and copies of Playboy
(not available in the south)
then the minority tribe in the north
got tired of being kicked around
by the majority tribe in the north
(isn’t it always the case)
then came civil rights marches
Sunday Bloody Sunday
violence to counter violence
atrocity to counter atrocity
hard men talking about
glory, sacrifice, our patriot dead
down south we stopped crossing that border
and took the boat to England
to get our condoms, Mars bars and copies of Playboy
and, yes, abortions too
because it wasn’t all sweetness and light down south either
it wasn’t all little green people playing fiddles
and lepping up and down like a herring on the griddle-o
but that’s another story
eventually up north after nearly twenty years
reasonable people on both sides started to talk
agreements were reached and a lull ensued
but that low hum of anxiety is still there
the morning after atavism has not yet dawned.
Is this a lesson too late for the learning
or a lesson for our times?
I’m just talking about what we know
I’m just talking about what we know.
Over at Desperate Poets, the challenge was to write about Desperate Crossings. Also over at Dverse, Bjorn asks us to explore the use of the collective pronoun “we” in writing a poem. Bjorn points out that this way of writing is particularly useful in a political context.
Also it’s been a brutal week in the Middle East, which was another impetus for this poem.
Any Capitalist Fantasy Will Do
1
white Lexus on lease
new suit, shoes, two day stubble
bubble? what bubble?
2
the wrecking balls swing
well-dressed ladies from Beijing
pose with hand on hip.
3
petals, debris, Spring
the air is sticky with greed
houses, for sale, sold.
The title comes from Brendan’s challenge over at Desperate Poets.
These haiku appeared at the height of the recent real estate boom in Vancouver; a boom that was driven by speculation, primarily by foreign buyers. Real estate became a commodity. Houses that had been around since the 1920’s were demolished and replaced by larger houses, some with an architectural style that had no context in the Pacific North West (white tiled French Colonial). Around where I live there was constant disruption: dump trucks, concrete trucks, agents knocking on my door, white Lexus’ (Lexi ?) driving up and down in front of the house every weekend, neighbours cashing in and leaving. Then like all bubbles, it burst or to be more exact, floated off to Toronto.
I have revised the post for Brendan’s Challenge
Sub-urbs
Ours was not a through street
local traffic mostly
and even that wasn’t a lot
less than half the families owned cars.
So around mid-afternoon when school got out
an impromptu soccer game would start,
the black tar strips that separated the concrete sections of the road
would serve as goal lines
the pitch could be expanded as needed,
learning how to use the curb was key.
In summer the Spanish students would arrive
to learn to speak English with a Dublin accent,
they were a lot better than us
they spoke soccer fluently.
Occasionally our neighbor, who was proud of her roses
and didn’t like us trampling around to retrieve the ball,
would call the police and we’d all scatter
and re-group as soon as they were gone.
Then just around 6 pm,
doors would open all along the streets
and aproned moms would call their kids
in for tea, sausages, and baked beans on toast
and slowly the game would evaporate
leaving the street empty and my neighbor’s roses
safe for the moment.
Over at Desperate Poets, Brendan asks us to write of:
Suburban Desperation: About the American Dream (any consumer or capitalist fantasy will do), about the vast necropolis of suburbia and the things its revenants still carry out with deadly, ghostly, embalmed precision.
Obviously I haven’t done that. In Ireland there was too much history and ironic distance to talk about the American Dream. The American Dream was a construct that came to us through I Love Lucy. The suburbs I lived in spread south from Dublin and west into the Dublin hills, row upon row of semi-detached houses and yes they were all made out of ticky tacky and all looked just the same. At the center of these communities were cavernous churches to house the faithful on Sundays. But I can’t really impose, in retrospect, a negative narrative on this. When you’re a kid, it’s just the place you live, it’s what you know, it’s the place you get to be a kid in.
Amsterdam, Amsterdam
a rhyme in itself
the land assumes the flatness of the sea
down by the canal
bikes in a row
on seedy side streets
sex shops and sex shows
stags and stagettes
dildos in windows
but thank you for Heineken
Rembrandt, Dennis Bergkamp
Johann Cryuff
Vincent Van Gogh
does art need anguish
or does anguish need art
who knows, who knows?
.
back in Vancouver
an exhibition…
They’re taking photographs down by the water
in front of the cubist whale
float planes take off from the harbor
the mountains slumber in the morning haze.
Inside the convention center
paragraphs of opaque prose
attempt to describe the genius
of Vincent, Vincent van Gogh.
But if painting is the medium
there is no need for go-betweens
it’s all there on the canvas
the painting is what the painting seems.
*
but now it’s Autumn
the leaves on the trees
bordering the soccer field
are leaking yellows and reds
like a paint store catalogue
a scene to impress an impressionist
Where’s Vincent when we need him?
Where’s Vincent when we need him?
This is a mash up of old poems and new in response to Brendan’s prompt on the subject of desperate beauty over at Desperate Poets.
Golf, Flying Saucers and The Planet Odd
The end of the world has come and gone
but you remain standing on the eighteenth tee
feeling the gravitational pull of the Planet Odd
there’s no smoke without mirrors, you remark
and looking down you notice that you’re still wearing
a green polo shirt
your favorite plaid shorts
and your faded white golf shoes.
Golf is the only sport that requires blandness of its heroes
you think
and then you think …where is this shit coming from
and shouldn’t that be “demands blandness”?
There’s a low hum, you look up,
a large flying saucer hovers over the trees
to the left of the fairway
on top of the saucer is a giant inverted tea cup
complete with handle
a door opens in the side of the cup
and you’re sucked up, through the door
and into a room that looks remarkably like
the original Star Trek control room.
A guy who looks like Leonard Nimoy
walks over and says:
“How’s it going?
We’re from the Planet Odd or to be more formal, Earth 2.
You see, the Creator royally fucked up his first attempt
so we are the newer model, the second attempt.
Still a few things to work out, but we’re not doing badly at all.
We have created some illusions to make you feel at home,
but first things first , amigo.
Can I call you amigo?”
You nod.
“First things first, amigo, let’s get rid of those plaid shorts!”
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.
This poem was inspired by a challenge from Brendan over at Desperate Poets :
“Here’s the challenge: Start with two oracles. You can follow my lead and use The Aenead as one source if you have a copy, but any classic text will do — the Bible, Shakespeare, a volume of your favorite poet or one on Native American myth, whatever. Open the book blind and let your finger fall where it may on the page and write down whatever lines you struck on. Or deal a Tarot card or iChing hexagram. If you don’t have any such tools at home, there’s a random Tarot card generator at https://randomtarotcard.com/. You can try an AI version of the Delphic oracle at < https://delphi.allenai.org/> and there’s an I Ching hexagram generator at https://www.eclecticenergies.com/iching/virtualcoins.
Next, cast a more self-referential oracle from something you created, a poem or journal or dream. Source a few lines in the same accidental manner.”
So I went to my book shelf , picked a book – “Daddy, Daddy” by Paul Durcan, opened a page and let my finger fall on the two lines that start the poem above. I then went to “Notes” on my IPhone which is where I record random lines, sayings, thoughts and found “the gravitaional pull of Planet Odd” and “there’s no smoke without mirrors” and I took it from there. Lots of fun, thanks Brendan!
(the Paul Durcan poem that provides the first two lines is called : The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.)
The Poetry Superhero Convention.
What a weekend that was
truly a Marvel
all the usual suspects were there
and they were all into the sauce from the get go,
Ricky the Rhyme King did his rap routine
Simile Sal sang:
Nothing Compares to U
Assonance the Loud and Consonance the Cool hooked up again
can’t keep those two apart
and the bands
The Meta Four and The Alliteration Alliance
laid down a solid groove,
and let’s not forget the families:
the Sonnets – lovely people, very iambic
the Villanelles – again lovely people
but don’t get stuck in conversation with them
they can be a tad repetitive
the Lai’s , the Sestinas, the Rubai’s
all knocking back the vino
the Ghazals had visa problems
and couldn’t make it
but the Haiku’s and the Tanka’s
came all the way from Japan
(you don’t have to bow all the time, guys)
and the Epics were there too
it took five buses to fit them all in, but they made it.
The highlight of the weekend of course
was the Bad Pun Competition:
For Better or for Verse
and the winner for the tenth year in a row
was, yes, Logan King of the Limericks.
A great weekend indeed, all verse no chapter,
some sore heads of course
and some poetry in motion in the washrooms
but well worth it.
This is a response to Brendan’s challenge over at Desperate Poets:
“So why don’t we dream super big for one unsettling week. What would your poetry superhero or heroine look like, what would h/her powers be?”
Also taking part in Open Link over at dverse.
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.
Fernando Botero, the Colombian artist, died on Friday. He was 91.
The photos were taken on a trip to Colombia.
A Pedestrian Affair
they met on a zebra crossing
it was a pedestrian affair
she had an air of competence
he……just had an air
they went downhill from there
to her house
in the middle of a roundabout
near the station
in the morning they looked out
and the cars had changed rotation
the clouds were tinged
with a tawdry shade of orange
the sky was diffident
the sun judgmental
things would not be the same
would not be the same again.
Over at Desperate Poets, Brendan asks us to take a look at illicit encounters.
Why I have difficulty writing haiku
problem with haiku
definite article is
first casualty
next casualty
indefinite article
makes me sound little
like Japanese guard
in prison camp in movie
world war two movie
who for some reason
is speaking English (how? why?)
with staccato voice
or perhaps I am
po-faced guru on mountain
dispensing bromides:
crow flies at midnight
in front of luminous moon
affair ends badly
all because I am
in service to, at mercy
of, syllable count
here it comes again
surplus syllable flop sweat
haiku-tortured night.
Over at Desperate Poets, Shay asks :
“What subject, genre, sacred cow, or literary convention do you ache to spin until it’s dizzy? What mask do you long to pull off and drag a confession out of its wearer? What accepted wisdom do you long to expose as horsefeathers? Or perhaps you just want to set your keyboard on “stun” and knock us over with your unexpected use of language? Come on, flout convention! Irony and all major credit cards accepted. Unreliable narrators welcome.”
This is a post from a while back but with a new verse!
Thanks to The Galway Review for publishing two of my poems. They are more song lyrics than poems, so I’m not sure how well they work on paper (or the screen to be more exact). Other versions of the poems have appeared on this blog, but I think they may have finally settled down, although….
Check them out here.
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.
Taking part in Open Link Weekend over at Desperate Poets
Easons Book Store
Just after graduating from university
with a degree and no job
I had time on my hands
so I would take the 46A bus into the centre of Dublin
and read poetry in Easons Books Store.
Why poetry?
Well, it’s hard to browse a whole novel.
It was there I learnt ironic distance
from TS Eliot and Roger Mc Gough,
It was there that I learnt from Sylvia Plath
that rhyming doesn’t have to be doggerel
It was there I learnt from Robert Lowell
writing about the woe that is in marriage
that a poem could be a novel
that a poem could cover the same subject matter
as Updike, Bellow, Roth, Heller
that poems
don’t have to be about peat bogs and Celtic mist
and that all good poems contain lines
that snag on the brain
like wool on a barbed wire fence
and all for the price of the bus fare there and back.
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.
This poem was inspired by a prompt over at Desperate Poets, where the incomparable Brendan asks us to “consider what influenced you as a poet and what you have done with those influences as you have grown and developed in your work. What bid you fly, where have you flown and what are you still looking for?”
If you haven’t done so already, check out Brendan’s blog, he puts out one prompt a week and they are always intriguing and inspirational.
The picture above shows that I did eventually buy some books!
Late Summer Groaner
I’m sitting in the garden
listening to the black-capped chickadees
chatting in the trees
and I’m thinking
talk is cheep
talk is cheep.
Mr. Courtney
Sitting in Mr. Courtney’s English class
moving my feet to that iambic beat
while greasy Joan doth keel the pot
and snot runneth down the back of my nose.
He tells us he is not a happy man
which makes us feel embarrassed, awkward, sad
(behold the dawn in russet mantle clad)
we pretend interest in (yes) Charles Lamb.
He struck me on the face once, hit me hard.
Have at you varlet! A palpable hit!
A snide remark I made, yes that was it,
about poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Still, would this poem be, if not for him,
Keats, beaded bubbles winking at the brim?
Over at Desperate Poets, Brendan quotes Joyce Carol Oates:
“There’s lots of reasons that people have for not doing things. Then the cats are gone, the children move away, the marriage breaks up or somebody dies, and you’re sort of there, like, “I don’t have anything.” A lot of things that had meaning are gone, and you have to start anew. But if you read Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Ovid writes about how, if you’re reading this, I’m immortal. You see that theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets: You’re reading this, so I’m still alive. In fact, they’re not alive, they’re gone, but while they were alive, they did have that extra dimension of their lives. That is not nothing.”
When I read this I thought of the above poem “Mr.Courtney” about my high school teacher. The poem has had a number of forms but ended as a sonnet. As Joyce Carol Oates also points out (see Brendan’s intriguing post) that memories fade but if you capture that memory in a poem, a novel, a painting it gets a life ot its own.
Mr. Courtney taught us Latin and English Literature. The curriculum was tilted towards the great English authors, like Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats. he was a big Keats fan. We had to learn whole poems and passages off by heart. Some lines are permanently stuck in my head and I have inserted them in to the poem here and there. And yes, he did clatter me across the face once, he could never quite look me in the eyes after that.
The sonnet idea came from Bjorn’s verse form challenge over at dVerse to write a sonnet. I’ve chosen an ABBA, CDDC, EFFE, GG rhyme scheme. I’ve used half rhymes here and there to add interest and tried to keep to a ten syllable line even though I haven’t always stuck to that iambic beat.
And hot off the press……
What a Difference an A makes
Angela Merkel
consults with Meghan Markle
they exchange vowels
and Merkel becomes Markel
and Markle becomes Merkle.
This tanka was hidden in my last post, thought I’d bring it out into the air
?
Agent Orange Returns
Who would have thought it?
Trumpty is back on the wall
Ron de Santis is lost like Atlantis
and the others have no chance at all.
There will be no succession.
No, he’s not Logan Roy.
He’s Agent Orange, he’s Teflon Don
he’s the one and only Slogan Boy.
And there’ll be no tremblin’ in the Kremlin
when Donald takes control
and the Grand Old Party re-discovers
its Magaleptic soul.
The theme over at Desperate Poets is satire.
Parking
I have this memory.
I am walking across a field
a squelching field
a field that would suck your wellingtons off
the wind is a wet dish cloth
slapping my face
cow pats are dotted like landmines.
I love the countryside
but I don’t love this countryside
with its barbed wire fences
its ragged ditches
its baleful cows.
In the far corner of the field
I come across the rusty shell
of an old Mercedes
abandoned by the farmer
after one last muddy trip to the market,
and I’ve been thinking lately
I should take some ideas I have
some long held, unexamined beliefs
and park them in the far corner of a field,
top of the list being
the irrational notion
that somehow
against all odds,
we would all continue
to live, forever.
The ever eloquent Brendan over at Desperate Poets aks us to write an elegy. This is one from the past , I think it has perhaps an elegaic tone
It previously appeared on dverse (the prompt was “metaphors”)
This poem originally appeared in Cyphers Magazine.
Desire – what is it good for?
tender is the night
long is the day’s journey into night
it’s easier to name a street car
than it is to name one’s desire
never attempt a ménage in a glass menagerie
there is nothing less erotic than a red wheelbarrow
a thing of beauty is a joy for a fortnight.
photo taken in Sitges, Catalonia.
Shay over at: Desperate Poets
asks us to write about desperate desire. This is a poem from a while back about desire, thought it might fit, and here’s one about a different kind of desire.
The Reverend George Weeble
The Reverend George Weeble
liked to visit churches
in foreign lands,
his parishioners called him:
the steeplechaser.
When I’m old and feeble,
George Weeble said,
when I retire,
my one desire
is to be
where the spires conspire
to show me the way.
Is it Time to put Woke the Word to Bed ?
I have a conservative friend who, lately, has started to use Woke the Word a lot.
Every time he uses it, he wags his fingers above his head to indicate inverted commas. Sometimes he’ll give me a conspiratorial wink.
The wink confuses me. What are we conspiring about? And the air quotes, who is he quoting? Or do they mean “so-called”, as in my boss asked me to take my laptop with me on my “vacation”.
I asked him what he meant by “woke” and he was flummoxed. He mumbled something about pronouns, cancel culture, activists, political correctness. I explained to him that it was African-American slang for being alert to signs of racism, it came out of the Black Lives Matter movement and that being anti-woke technically means that one thinks one should not be alert to signs of racist behavior.
This did not help.
He had the notion that the woke crowd had it in for him in some way. When asked who the woke crowd are, again confusion….the left, activists, progressives…who knows. So I ask is all activism bad, is progress bad, no that’s not what he means.
I think what he means is that the world is changing in a way that threatens him, the old assumptions do not stand. The arbitrary superior status he assumes because he’s an educated, upper middle class white male is no longer automatically acknowledged, taken as read.
And it’s that woke crowd who are doing it to him.
As history tells us …when a word or phrase is coopted by conservative white males, well that word is no longer groovy, far out, outta sight, cool ,hip; particularly when they think they are the first to discover it.
Air quotes… for fuck sake….
Yes it is time to put Woke The Word to bed.
Jericho Beach Mid May
out on the bay
kite surfers, tankers
no smoke haze yet
heat dome
early days
two Canada geese
pose for an Instagram shot
necks extended rod taut
at their feet a gosling
proud parents
they bob their heads
like ageing rock stars
Brendan and Sherry , the creators of the now defunct earthweal have a new website. It’s called Desparate Poets
Check them out!
This Sherry’s challenge:
What makes you feel desperate where you live? What is changing? What is being lost? How is “Progress” making inroads on your landscape, and how do you feel about it? Give us a snapshot. It can be as broad as a seascape, a desert, a teeming city. Or it can be the opposite: finding comfort in the beauty around us, whether it is as vast as the sky or as small as a dew-covered spider-web, on a cornstalk by the back fence in the early morning.
Pickets in the Midnight Hour
Barbeque
A meet and greet
with meat and grease.
Father’s Day
A low metronomic plash
waves flat-lining on the shore
sailboats tacking
kayakers kayaking,
someone talking loudly
about the cost of child care,
two blankets down.
It’s Father’s day
and all the dads and kids are out
throwing ball, kicking ball
building elaborate castles in the sand
and they are not alone,
the ghosts of fathers passed are here too,
including my own;
pale-bodied, they roam the beach
wearing old-fashioned swim trunks,
grinning widely
at the continuum
of dads, kids, sun, sand and sea.
Landline (for Dad)
Sometimes, I think
I should text my dad
give him an update
tell him where I’m at.
Not that he would answer
he’s been gone a few years now
and even if he were alive
texting would hardly be his thing;
at the turn of the century
he was still approaching
what we now call a ‘landline’
with some trepidation.
Landline: a rope
uncoiling towards the shore.
He once told me
that when we have children
we begin to understand
our own parents better
so I think my text
would be an attempt
to let him know
that, yes, dad,
I am finding this
to be true.
Father Bragg
he was a humble priest
until his altar ego
took over.
A Man for all Seasonings
he was a tautology
an oxymoron
a figure of speech
a prognostic
an atheist
he beggared belief
he was terminally contradictory
though he would say
he was not
he was a man for all seasonings
except paprika
…bergamot.
Stopdraggingthepanda 