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.
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 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
Last week there was a Simon Pegg retrospective at our local cinema and Slim invited me back to his one bedroom apartment after we watched an early showing of “Shawn of the Dead”. Slim had prepared dinner and by that I mean he had peeled back the tin foil edge of a take-out carton of butter chicken, removed the cardboard lid, and handed me a plastic fork and a can of Old Style lager. He then lapsed into one of his silences.
I found myself noticing the beads of condensation on the clear plastic lid of the steamed rice container. The rice was long past fluffy. The evening stretched before me like a Sunday in Ottawa. My only recourse was to ask Slim an irritating question.
“So, Slim”, I said, “who do you think is the better poet, Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen?”
Slim’s face wrinkled in disgust. “Bob Dylan’s not a poet”, he snapped,“ he’s a poetic songwriter”.
“And Leonard Cohen is…..?”
“Leonard Cohen is a poet who writes songs”.
“Ok then, what’s your favorite Bob Dylan line, verse, whatever”
“I can only think of the bad ones”
“So what’s the worst Bob Dylan line ever?”
Slim blinked once like he was accessing a folder in his brain with an internal mouse.
“John Wesley Harding, ‘As I walked out One Morning’, third verse:
‘Depart from me this moment
I told her with my voice’.
It’s like saying ‘there’s going to be a jailbreak somewhere in this town”
“But that’s “Thin Lizzy”.
Slim looked like he had taken a sip of battery acid.
“My point is they are expressing the obvious just for the sake of a rhyme. It’s obvious that the jailbreak will be at the f….ing jail and how else will he tell her except with his voice, they’re in a field, for f… sake!”
“Oh”, I said, reaching for a poppadum.
After Slim’s brief outburst, he lapsed into silence again and did his impression of a lizard sitting on a rock. The not unpleasant smell from the Indian take-out mercifully masked the usual faint odour of sour sweat emanating from Slim’s bedroom. His bedroom door was closed, a yellow light leaked through the gap between bottom of the door and the threadbare carpet. The room pulsed in a vaguely sinister way.
I began to panic; he could pull out his blueprints of the Star Ship Enterprise at any minute. I was about to ask him why so much depends on a red wheelbarrow, but thought better of it. I reached for my phone.
“Slim”, I said, “I was looking at Rolling Stone’s list of the top 500 albums of all time, the other day, do you want to see it?”
“Not really”, he replied.
“Ok”, I tried, “what do you think is the most over-rated album of all time?”
“All right”, he sighed, ”show me the top 10 albums.”
I passed him my phone and he studied the list for a few minutes, then pounced.
“Number 7, ‘Exile on Main Street’, by the Stones”
“Really, why?”
“Because, it’s awful. It’s recycled 12 bar, refried boogie, Jagger sounds like a cat being neutered. It’s not even the seventh best Stones’ album. Creedence and The Band did this kind of thing a few years before and a lot better. This is the sound of the Stones throwing in their creative hand and saying, ‘enough, we’re tired’. It’s the artistic equivalent of taking a package holiday to Majorca. Look, it’s listed higher than ‘The White Album’ and ‘Kinda Blue’. Absolute bollocks!”
“Kind of…”
“What?”
“It’s ‘Kind of Blue’ not ‘Kinda Blue’
Slim looked at me like he was wondering why he bothered to speak to the rest of the human race at all.
“Well”, I said,”why do you think Rolling Stone rates it so high?”
“Because, it’s a Keef album and, to rock critics, Keef embodies the rock and roll spirit, the dead romantic hero, except he’s not dead. He’s the guy who would never have hung out with them at school. Plus, there’s this legend of the Stones hunkered down in a house in France recording the album, escaping from the tax man where in fact, Mick, Charlie and Bill never stayed at the house probably because they didn’t want to be around Keef’s junkie friends. Anyway, Mick didn’t think much of the album at all”.
“Really?”
“Look it up”.
So I did.
This is Mick Jagger talking about ‘Exile’ in “According to The Rolling Stones” (Chronicle Books, San Francisco):
“Exile on Main Street is not one of my favourite albums”.
“…when I listen to Exile it has some of the worst mixes I’ve ever heard. I’d love to remix the record, not just because of the vocals, but because generally I think it sounds lousy. At the time Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies.”
“Exile is really a mixture of bits and pieces left over from the previous album recorded at Olympic Studios…..These were mixed up with a few slightly more grungy things done in the South of France. It’s seen as one album all recorded there and it really wasn’t.”
“So there’s a good four songs off it, but when you play the other nineteen, you can’t, or they don’t work, or nobody likes them, and you think, ’Ok, we’ll play another one instead’. We have rehearsed a lot of the tunes off Exile, but there’s not much that’s playable.”
Photo of detail of a Botero painting in Museo de Botero, Bogota, Colombia
Slim’s Dream
The poet struggles
to achieve opacity
his poems are
clear like perspex
familiar like sin
in his dream
he explains this
to the grey arse
of an elephant.
Photos taken around Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, Cambodia, by Marie Feeney
Do you know who I miss? Jeb Bush. I miss Jeb Bush. He was my first. When I hit him with that low energy jibe and he fell apart and all the Bush family could not put Humpty together again, I knew I was on to something. Then Little Marco and Lyin’ Ted, I miss them too. But most of all, I miss Hillary, Crooked Hillary. Man, she was tough, had me on the ropes. It took Comey and Vlad, that pointy headed villain, to get me back on my feet. I was nearly out for the count, which might not have been a bad thing. Who needs this shit! I should give Vlad a call, I’m a bit worried -there’s no such thing as a free hack.
Reince Priebus – what kind of fucking name is that? It sounds like bad news from the doctor. “I’m sorry, Donald, you have a Reince Priebus on your rectum and it doesn’t look good”. Ha, I just made myself laugh. And Bannon, I’ve seen sofas on the side of the road in better shape than that rumpled fucker. Spice Box? Hardest job in the world – explaining the unexplainable. That Melissa Mc.Carthy just slays me. How come all the cool people are on the other side? Who have I got? Ryan and Pence? Bland and Blander? Where did Pence come from anyway with his brush cut and his antediluvian politics? The best surgeons in the world couldn’t remove the poker from that guy’s ass. Antediluvian, you didn’t expect that did you?
Talking of cool, I should give Barack a call, ask him down to Florida for a game of golf; check his birth certificate again (Joking! How I miss those days). Man, I hate this fucking White House furniture, is it Friday yet?
The Arc of Agent Orange
I
And so we
spin from one
spin to the
next; things I
said, I did
not mean; things
I meant, I
did not say.
Stand by for Greatness
Stand by for Greatness
Stand by for Greatness
II
Success can
be measured,
The toys have
left the pram.
Stand by for Greatness
Stand by for Greatness
Stand by for Greatness
Photos taken in Medellin, Cartagena, Guatape – Colombia.
The rooster crows
before the break of dawn –
damn, preemptive cock.
He is joined
by the gecko
behind the bed,
the village dogs,
birds,birds and more birds
and finally
Fiona the donkey
whose indignant heehaw announces
she is not ready for another day
tethered to a pole
in feckless shade.
Graffiti, Getsemani, Cartagena, Colombia.
I had a dream last night
about trigonometry
sines, cosines, angles
my mind going off
at a tangent
maybe it was that email
out of the blue
from Leo Mangan,
an old school friend.
Between the caucus and the carcass
Between the chaos and the calm
Between the fracas and the ruckus
Between the righteous and the damned
Between the priest and the sermon
Between the sermon and the song
No one can determine
Why we all can’t get along.
Between the question and the answer
There is a lifetime of space
Between the dance and the dancer
There is beauty and there is grace.
I
No free verse today
I’m taking my doggerel
for a long, long walk.
II
San Diego Zoo
a pink-arsed baboon presents
it’s late afternoon.
Kissinger had Nixon
Cheney had Bush
Jim Henson had Kermit
Steve Bannon has Trump.
we can not
decide if
we are blessed
or damaged.
The night howls, fog curls
a thin cloud bisects the moon
at the graveyards’ edge
an abandoned well
from the bottom of that well
Thom Yorke cries for help.
The dead wake slowly
grey fists punch through mounds of earth
Thom Yorke cries for help.
it
does
not
augur
well.
Photos: Orange is the New Bleak 1 &2
The Art of the Deal
The Art of the Grope
The Art of Chaos
The Art of False Hope.
you call your
self a tree
my bank has
more branches.
For John D.
fecund, moribund, quincunx
fecund moribundity
moribund fecundity
rhizome, rissole, piss-hole in the snow
phenom, pheromone, genome
lissom, blossom, possum.
This poem is all about sound, association and perhaps, memory. The first three lines are an homage to the sound of ‘un’. The phrase -“fecund moribundity, moribund fecundity” – was uttered by my friend, John Damery (John D.) during a discussion about the music of Neil Diamond – his oeuvre, his place in the pantheon. This was some time ago but it has always stuck in my head, it has a brevity and clarity that could only have been brought on by the consumption of 5 or 6 pints and the ingestion of greasy chicken. After a long legal battle (not really) he has recently granted me permission to use it in a poem.
The fourth line is the workhorse of the poem, the engine, the poem’s midfield general. It inverts the ‘mo’ from the first 3 lines to create the ‘om’ that dominates the last two lines. it also introduces ‘iss’ which makes an appearance in the last line. As for “piss-hole in the snow”, I defy anyone to find a finer example of bathos . The fifth line is all about ‘om” but note the clever inversion back to ‘mo’ in ‘pheromone’.
The sixth and last line has a slick softness to it like blancmange. As promised the ‘iss’ from ‘rissole’ and ‘piss-hole’ makes an appearance before morphing into ‘oss’ and in a final stroke of nothing that remotely approaches genius, the transformation of ‘om’ into ‘um’.
Notes:
quincunx (a word that flirts with obscenity):
an arrangement of five objects with four at the corners of a square or rectangle and the fifth at its centre, used for the five on dice or playing cards, and in planting trees.
rhizome:
a continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals.
Both words were used in an article in the Irish Times on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, sent to me by John D; ‘Cartesian dualism’ and ‘Binarism’ were also mentioned (and Jesus wept).
rissole:
a compressed mixture of meat and spices, coated in breadcrumbs and fried.
My mom used to make them, although I remember them as being more like a hamburger patty without the bun…thanks, mom!
Photo: English Bay, Vancouver, A-MAZE-ING LAUGHTER, by Yue Minjun.
When 2016 began, slimverse was an obscure 12 syllable (3-3-3-3) verse form, standing in the shadow of its older sibling, the seventeen syllable (5-7-5) haiku and now that 2016 is being carried, battered and bruised, out of the building, slimverse is an obscure 12 syllable (3-3-3-3) verse form, standing in the shadow of its older sibling, the seventeen syllable (5-7-5) haiku. This is a collection of the best of 2016, compiled by Slim and I in the early hours of the morning following “the Poet’s Circle” Christmas Party which was held at the Accomplished Poet’s house. It was a fun-filled night of poetic over-indulgence and excess. The Accomplished Poet read a poem about pruning as a metaphor for the editing process involved in writing a poem, it was tortuous but accomplished. The Upper Case Poet had a minor shoving match with our newest and youngest member, who edits an edgy E-zine called “Capslock Off” – no prizes for guessing what the argument was about. Slim hung around the buffet all night like a dog that had come across a bag of pork chops while walking in the woods, then later insisted that he had an invented a new word : “tumultaneous” – when tumultuous events occur simultaneously. He was met with benign indifference.
Here’s the List:
Like an old
Christian
Brother, an
unkempt monk.
***
Golf
the one sport
that demands
blandness from
its heroes.
***
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.
***
Holy Scripture
when asked to
pick a font
he replied:
baptismal.
***
And No Tom
Danger Mouse
Modest Mouse
DeadMau5. It’s
all Jerry…….
***
Vancouver Jazz Festival (Re-Mix)
a humid
lion house
hogo hangs
on the air
dogs and trees
dogs and trees
free jazz, jazz
for free, the
bass player
leans like a
drunk around
a lamp post.
***
Names
those that can
stand alone
those that can’t
hyphenate.
***
Old Cowboy
bowed legs
straddling a
ghost horse, beef
jerky thin
Holiday
Inn, buffet
breakfast, far
from the range.
***
it’s all fun
and games ’til
the body
bags come home.
***
On Hearing that Justin Trudeau had approved the Kinder Morgan Pipeline
there are 3
certainties
death, taxes,
corrosion.
Photo: Cranberriment
Melons
When asked if the melon is ripe
The girl behind the counter at the Chinese-Canadian Deli
Sniffs the pale green globe, shakes her head
And pointing to a small beige circle, says:
This is the melon’s bottom
The melon is ripe,
When the bottom smells sweet.
While outside,
The Christmas traffic
Stalls on Dunbar Street.
Photo: Sitting on the Fence (2)
it’s all fun
and games ’til
the body
bags come home.
Photo: “Sitting on the Fence (1)”
****************************************************
While you’re here, check out “The Mitchell Feeney Project, country rock with an edge!
“The sun beats down like judgement
on the armour-plated road”
From “The Road” by The Mitchell Feeney Project. Click here to check out our album, also available on iTunes (search for “The Mitchell Feeney Project”).
A More Innocent Time…
It’s a Sunday afternoon in late August and I’m sitting outside The Post-Coital Beetle watching the traffic on Broadway. At the table next to me, four bearded guys wearing flat caps and plaid shirts, looking like the bastard sons of Mumford, are downing pints of over-hopped pale ale. At the traffic lights, an eighteen year old Asian kid checks his hair in the rear view mirror while his Lamborghini growls like a panther on a leash. And who is this 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 carrying a magazine which he slams down on the table in front of me and says:
“Look at this bullshit!”
For some reason, Slim is wearing a Bernie Saunders tee-shirt. The magazine is called “Windows 10 for Seniors”, inside a couple straight out of a Cialis ad, stare blissfully at a PC screen like they’ve never seen one before, which is a bit strange because they are well dressed and obviously middle class. So, it’s hard to believe that they have not encountered a PC sometime in the last 20 years. The magazine answers questions like ”what is the Internet?” I say to Slim:
“When are you going to admit you are not a medium?”
Slim’s gut pushes Bernie’s face forward. Bernie has that look of his that says “I need to fix the world, and I’m running out of time”.
Slim is silent, so I say:
“What’s your problem, you’re not a senior so why should it bother you that Microsoft assumes anyone over 60 is a complete idiot and where did you get the tee shirt?”
“Seattle, it was on sale and you’re missing the point. I wanted Windows 10 for Dummies and this is all they had, so the cashier assumed I was a senior, she called me ‘sir’!”
“You are wearing the face of a seventy four year old on your tee shirt, and you do not want to be associated with seniors, see this is the problem, people have recently acquired the ability to house two completely contradictory thoughts inside their heads. For example, Donald Trump doesn’t always mean what he says, Donald Trump tells it like it is”
Slim smiles smugly like a man who has just spotted the finishing line at the end of a long wank.
“Did you have to study to become an asshole or does it come naturally?”
“A bit of both, nachos?”
“Why not”
“Guacamole?’
“Knock yourself out”
And as the sun goes down over Point Grey and automatic timers turn the lights on in empty Styrofoam mansions, we settle in to a plate of nachos and one pitcher follows another until we find ourselves face to face trading lines like Lennon and McCartney (well, not quite) and two poems emerge which with election day approaching now seem like whistling past the graveyard and if that’s not a run on sentence I don’t know what is.
Here they are:
Ivanka (a slimverse)
Ivanka
you seem fine
but your dad’s
a wanka.
Melania
Melania
his megalomania
don’t let it stain ya
don’t let it restrain ya
and if he should fail ya
remember this:
you know the size
of his hands
and
his genitalia.
Boom! Everyone a winner! Not a dry seat in the house! Laugh? I nearly cried!
Stopdraggingthepanda 