Don loves Vlad
Vlad loves Don
Love as big as
A nuclear bomb.
Front door, back door,
Kremlin, tower
Nuclear love
Nuclear power.
Trumputin (a romance)
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Category Archives: Poetry
When the Twittering Stops (a slimverse)
it’s all fun
and games ’til
the body
bags come home.
Photo: “Sitting on the Fence (1)”
Autumn (2 haikus)
Autumn
I
a clear day in fall
a call from the governor
a pardon granted.
II
trees leaking colour
like a paint store catalogue
et tu, chlorophyll?
This poem has formed and re-formed since I started this blog, I think this is the last re-incarnation.
Photo: Chlorophyll molecule (Chlorophyll-a-3D-vdw, licensed under public domain)
On Hearing that Justin Trudeau had approved the Kinder Morgan Pipeline (a slimverse).
there are 3
certainties
death, taxes
corrosion.
Poem 2 in the series “poems with titles longer than the poem itself”
Sunrise on Planet Cistern
****************************************************
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”).
Driving Home with Leonard Cohen
Driving Home with Leonard Cohen
Despite what he says
not everybody knows,
not everybody knows
like Leonard knows.
Not everybody knows
that the best songs
are about loss,
endings,
so long,
ways to say goodbye
closing time,
and that age
can be laughed about
but not at,
if I had a hat
I would raise it to Mr.Cohen
perched up there alone
in his ancient tower.
I have posted this a few times before, but I think it’s worth one last reprise!
POTUS
potus
poultice
poultry
poetry
podcast
pomegranate
pornography
porridge
pork
only
one
of
the
above
is
a
lethal
weapon
when
given
to
a
fool
Thought I’d reprise this one on this sad day.
A More Innocent Time….(a conversation and two poems)
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!
Roger Waters at Desert Trip (a poem, photos and a shameless segue)
A Conversation Overheard at the Craft Beer Barn at Desert Trip (a triple slimverse)
I’m from New
Yawk, we were
raised to hate
Donald Trump.
My mother
used to say:
beware of
the man with
orange hair,
beware of
the man with
orange hair.
Roger
“The Sun is the same
in a relative way
but you’re older”
Maybe so, but Roger has lost none of his anger, he managed to have a go at Donald Trump and the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestine and entertain 75,000 people at the same time. Oh yes, and that pig in the title photo carried a none too subtle message.
This incensed the guy in front of us, who was obviously a Trump supporter, he started to swear at the pig, and give it the finger, but the pig sailed on full of truth and helium.
(All photos by Marie Feeney)
Shameless Segue
“He’s got a concealed weapon’s licence
a shot gun and a rack,
and he has no idea
how he’ll pay the hospital bill
he says guns never hurt nobody
only people kill”
from “Saturday Morning in Idabel” by The Mitchell Feeney Project. Click here to check out our album, also available on iTunes (search for “The Mitchell Feeney Project”).
4 Poems in the Galway Review
The Galway Review has been kind enough to publish 4 of my poems, check them out here at
The Mitchell-Feeney Project – Track 7, 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
I had just landed on Caye Caulker, which is little more than a sand spit off the coast of Belize, when it started to rain heavily. There was nothing else to do but go to an ocean-side bar, in the hour before happy hour. It was as crowded as a bar gets on Caye Caulker and there was this guy bragging in a loud voice about how he had just sailed up from Placencia in his new boat with “the mother of all hangovers” and no water on board. The guy was a bit of a jerk, so I decided to write him into a poem (which turned into this song lyric) and give him a hard time. By the way I tried working “Placencia” into the lyric but the word just hissed and flopped around like a drunk snake, so I gave up on it! Take a listen, and then John Mitchell will explain how he managed to sound like a rock band all by himself!
Here’s John:
I could hear “The Note” played by a real southern rock band. That’s the attitude I took to the musical arrangement. Earl had a bad case of the regrets mixed with a helping of anger, a bad hangover and topped with a soucent of despair, all in all a pretty heavy feeling, so it needed rough and heavy music. The opening distorted guitar lick is a nod to “Susie Q” by CCR played through an overdriven Fender Deluxe amp. I tried to make the track sound like a 5 or 6 piece band playing live in a smokey, roadside bar. I added the rock and roll piano on the choruses, as if Leon Russell was playing and the greasy Hammond organ as if Greg Allman was sitting in, especially the solo played through an overdriven Leslie speaker with a tear in the cone. I think Earl would appreciate how the band interpreted how he was feeling after getting “The Note”.
Click here to preview/ buy the whole album or individual tracks! Also available on iTunes (search for “The Mitchell Feeney Project”, no hyphen)
The Mitchell-Feeney Project – Track 6, Saturday Morning in Idabel.
There’s a dead armadillo
on the side of the road
empty beer can in his claws
that joke just never gets old.
There’s a dog on the shoulder
trying to bite his own tail
I’m in the motel parking lot
watching that dog fail.
This lyric started with a poem I had published in The Shop literary magazine (called Down and Out in Idabel), then took off in a different direction. When writing the lyric, I was thinking of the feel of Kris Kristofferson’s, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and the structure of songs like John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” in which the verses are a series of snapshots that connect back to the chorus. Play it in your car and sing along with the chorus when no one is listening! That’s what I do!
Here’s John to tell his side!
When I saw that Idabel, Oklahoma was in this little bitty, piece of land between the states of Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma I jumped right off the front porch, because now I could REALLY do a country song. I’ve always loved the pedal steel guitar but you have to have it in the right song, and “Saturday Morning in Idabel” is just the song.
The chord progression is pretty much true country. I found a lovely little rhythm track with some nice tight fills, added the bass and then I used my Larrivee D-50 to lay down the acoustic track. I added some Fender strat. with heavy Duane Eddy tremolo for flavour. I called up John McArthur Ellis, a wonderful pedal steel player, and asked him to just play whatever he felt fit the song, and he was fantastic. Again the tracks were exchanged by e-mail. I think the best way to be a producer, is to let players play the way they feel, with only a soucent of direction. If you don’t trust them, don’t hire them. After I did the lead vocal, I called on the John Mitchell choir to do a little back-up singing, and there ya go. A swell little country song thanks to the inspiration of Jim Feeney.
Click here to preview/ buy the whole album or individual tracks! Also available on iTunes (search for “The Mitchell Feeney Project”, no hyphen)
The Mitchell-Feeney Project – Track 2, The Road.
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……
The Road….a song about a man who has run out of options.
To buy the song, album, click on link above, the album is also available on iTunes (search for “The Mitchell Feeney Project”, no hyphen).
Notes..
In this lyric, I wanted to imply a story through a series of images. This proved to be harder than I thought! This is one of those songs that John and I kicked back and forward a bit, tweaking the lyric. The chorus was always there, though!
Now, John will tell you how he took the words on paper and worked his magic……. (by the way one of my favourite moments in this song is when the guitar solo kicks in after the second chorus)….here’s John:
When I read Jim’s poem, “The Road” I could see myself looking through the cracked and dusty windshield of a ’81 Pontiac Catalina, on that real, dry stretch of highway between Santa Rosa and Albuquerque, New Mexico, that seems to go on forever. The song obviously needed a rolling tempo to match the movement of the car, and I thought that the jangle sound of my Rickenbacker electric 12 string guitar and a solid drum track would add to the constant moving effect. I use the key of G, because that open G chord with an added D on the B string really has an open ringing sound, Lots of fifths. I also felt that the song needed a bridge, but felt that it didn’t need a bridge with a lyric, so just added some different chords and put in a guitar solo using a Standard Strat. on the middle pick-up. Jim’s poems always feel like they have a country twang to them, so an all guitar background was the right thing and some nice tight 2 part harmony seemed to work, thanks to singer, Nikki MN, who just happened to be here from London.
(Photo: Sunrise 1)
The Mitchell-Feeney Project – Upcoming Album (Crossing the line between Poetry and Song-Writing)
I was sitting down one night over a few drinks with my good friend, John Mitchell, talking about music, poetry and soccer when the subject of song lyrics and song writing came up. At that point in the evening where the power of drink makes every idea seem like a good one, John suggested that we should write a song together. John is a successful professional musician and I am a chemical engineer and occasionally published poet, so I have to admit I felt a bit out of my league, but I agreed anyway!
Over the next few days, I pulled out some poems I had hanging around but none of them really fitted the bill given that they were basically non rhyming free verse. I had a phrase, though, – “sitting in this motel room/ I could be sitting anywhere”- and I started to develop a character and story around that phrase. The final lyric eventually became the song, “Emma Jean”, which you can take a listen to below. It’s a long way from words on paper to a finished song, and that’s where John’s talent as a singer, song writer, composer, musician and arranger took over (in other words, John did the heavy lifting!). Here’s the song, please, please use headphones to listen rather than just your computer’s speakers, the song is mixed with headphones in mind.
In the end John and I collaborated on 5 songs which, together with 2 songs written by John alone, we have put together on an album.
Click here to preview the whole album, and if you like the songs, buy one, buy them all!! Also available on iTunes (search for “The Mitchell Feeney Project”, no hyphen)
A few notes about the song “Emma Jean”, it was obvious from the start that this would be a country song, it’s about divorce, separation, there’s a child involved, and what could be more country than that? But I wanted to avoid formula, so the story took a twist, at the end, that perhaps disqualifies it as a mainstream modern country song, but hey, never pander! Initially, the song didn’t have the middle two verses, being more accustomed to writing poetry where my rule is “say what you have to say with as few words as possible”, I thought I had said enough. But songs need verses and John told me to flesh it out a bit, so I came up with the lines “Who know why love goes wrong/ It’s not written anywhere” and took it from there. John was right of course, the extra verses created context. Now…over to John!
Writing lyrics for me, is about as easy as giving birth, not that I have experience of both. My lyrics are either incredibly self indulgent or incredibly preachy, or a bit of both. The ability to paint pictures with words is truly an amazing gift and I appreciate that gift in others. My favourite lyricists tell stories and take us to another place and time or share experiences through someone else’s eyes. When I first read Jim’s poem, Emma Jean, I could see that motel room and I could smell the mixture of stale beer and carpet cleaner that is the telltale odour of cheap motels. I recognise it from years on the road with bands.
In the case of “Emma Jean”, the music came quickly. First, it had to be in a minor key, as the story was fairly dark and the background music needed to be sparse with minimal instruments so as not to interfere with the lyrics – just guitar, a little bass, and a touch of southern slide. The vocal tries to express how Emma Jean’s dad would feel in that hotel room – loneliness with a good helping of bitterness. I then wanted to use different instruments to accent the chorus, so I added accordion and trombone and orchestral cymbals. The acoustic guitar( a Larrivee D-50) and vocal are all real, but all the other sounds are digital samples. I recorded it all on my laptop using the program, Logic, and mixed the tunes for headphones to hear the full spectrum of instruments.
As Jim noted above, please use headphones to listen to the sample track above or plug into a good set of speakers.
In our next post, John and I will discuss another track on the album.
Driving Home with Leonard Cohen
Driving Home with Leonard Cohen
Despite what he says
not everybody knows,
not everybody knows
like Leonard knows.
Not everybody knows
that the best songs
are about loss,
endings,
so long,
ways to say goodbye
closing time,
and that age
can be laughed about
but not at,
if I had a hat
I would raise it to Mr.Cohen
perched up there alone
in his ancient tower.
This is a re-blog of a post from last year.
Where have all the Good Rhymes gone?
Where have all the Good Rhymes Gone?
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’.
Having a Pint with Adele (and the meaning of post modern)
It is late afternoon in The Post Coital Beetle and Slim and I are starting into our first pitcher of Blue Buck Ale, nachos have been ordered. On the television screen on the wall in front of us, a baseball player is attacking a dugout water cooler with his bat. The television is on mute. Adele emotes in the background.
It’s been a while since Slim and I have got together and although nothing has been said, I sense that he has a beef of some kind. Not that this is unusual, having a beef is Slim’s default mode, but at the moment he seems relaxed. He has just finished a three hour practice with his band “Bad Complexion”. Slim plays bass and does background vocals. The armpits of his faded Clash T shirt are wet with sweat and the T shirt has been washed so many times that it no longer fits, leaving a gap of bristly pink flesh above the belt of his jeans. The image of a pig’s cheek pops into my head.
He’s smiling.
“She’s really just an old-fashioned British pop singer, isn’t she?” He says.
“Who?”
“Adele, you know…somewhere between Lulu and Shirley Bassey.”
“I guess…she also has that girl next door thing”
“Exactly,” Slim says, “like Cilla Black.”
“That name brings to mind a small black and white television set”
“You could have a pint with Adele,” Slim says, wistfully, and we both fall silent thinking about sharing a pint with Adele.
The pub door opens and closes. Cold blast of January air. Skunky whiff of over-hopped ale. Or is that Slim’s armpit? The silence lingers a little too long.
“I’ve taken up cooking, I’ve become a devotee of Wolfgang Puck.”
Slim does an owl blink, I can almost hear his brain working.
“Who the fuck
is Wolfgang
Puck? And why
should I care?”
He intones smugly.
“You’re doing that 12 syllable slimverse thing again, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he says, “and that reminds me, I have a bone to pick with you.”
Ahh, not a beef but a bone.
“Shoot”
“This lame-ass blog of yours, I thought it was supposed to be devoted to my poems, but lately it’s all your stuff and you’ve taken stories I’ve told you and used them for your poems and created this character called Slim”
“I’m being post-modern”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“You know, there are many ways of knowing and many truths to a fact.
“Crystal clear then, how can anything be post-modern? ‘Modern’ means ‘of the present’ – ‘now’, the only possible way a work could be post-modern would be if it was written in the future, for that we will have to wait for the invention of time travel.”
He folds his arms, discussion over.
“You have a point. Anyway, you haven’t been giving me much to publish lately.”
“Ok, how about this one, it’s called ‘Rasta’:
It’s a fact
all Rastas
are born out
of dreadlock.”
“Amusing, but a bit thin, we need flesh on the bones, Slim, flesh on the bones. Besides, I’m not so sure about this slim verse thing.”
Slim drains his half full pint glass and refills it.
“Go on.” He says.
“Well, you know, the haiku has got a headlock on internet poetry and it has seventeen syllables to work with, that’s five more than a slimverse. Now I hear that someone in the north of England has come up with a new form – the ‘anchored terset’ which is essentially a three word/four line poem, the fourth line being a punctuation mark, for example:
Sky
Field
Cow
.
It’s a race towards nothingness.”
Slim drains his pint glass and leans forward, his finger poking in my direction.
“Here’s an anchored terset for you….
You
Fuck
Off
!”
He tries to storm out but because we are in a booth he has to slide along the bench seat, his stomach rubbing against the table’s edge. His T shirt rides up. At the same time the waitress arrives with a plate of nachos shaped like a volcano, a volcano spewing molten cheese lava. The waitress stares in horror at the sinkhole that is Slim’s navel. Slim shouts at the waitress:
“I thought I said ‘hold the jalapenos’!
We watch him leave, on his back Paul Simonon slams his Fender Precision Bass into the stage at The Palladium in New York city.
“He seems upset”, the waitress says, and I’m thinking:
I can’t see
the pulled pork,
she forgot
the pulled pork.
After all
that bother
she forgot
the pulled pork.
Reference:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/feb/04/a-brief-guide-anchored-terset-poetry
Picasso at the Vancouver Art Gallery
Picasso What? (a slimverse)
oh yes, Jim
it’s still life
but not as
we know it.
Notes: Apparently the phrase “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it” is from a song by “The Firm” called “Star Trekkin” and not from the series “Star Trek”as I had thought!
Photo: “Coming Into Land”
Closing Time (Expanded version with additional rhyme)
Closing Time
Chairs stacked
legs in the air
like dead flies,
the barman
has that blank look
in his eyes
I’m sitting
watching suds dry
in an empty glass
and thinking
it’s July,
twenty sixteen
and events
are ripping by
at such a pace
it seems that
five minutes
ago was
a simpler,
more innocent
time .
Just when I thought I had nothing more to say about Donald Trump – a mongrel haiku, that adheres to the syllable count but not the spirit.
Oh Donald is it
policy or is it just
pandermonium.
This is the first in a series of poems called “Poems with titles longer than the poem itself.”
Jeffrey Toobin – He’s not romantic about carbon byproducts
In a recent interview in the New York Times Book Review, Jeffrey Toobin (author of ‘American Heiress’), when asked the question “How do you organize your books,” replied that ‘he was romantic about reading not about carbon byproducts’. He apparently does most of his reading for pleasure on an iPad.
This statement bothered me for a couple of reasons. A byproduct is “an incidental or secondary product made in the manufacture or synthesis of something else”, a book is not a byproduct of anything, it is produced using paper which contains carbon, but it is a product in itself unlike carbon which is an element and not a product.
But more than the semantics, there was something else. There was a sanctimonious whiff to the statement, a hint of greener than thou, a suggestion of the moral high ground, an implication that Jeffrey is a greater friend of the environment than all you Luddite book lovers out there (myself included). So, I set out to try and determine whether reading a book on an Ipad is greener than reading an actual book.
Strike one against the IPad is that it consumes energy every time a page is read, whereas a book once it is produced consumes no further energy (for the purpose of this discussion let’s assume that the energy or power required is generated by the combustion of fossil fuel and therefore energy consumption or the need for energy results in the generation of carbon dioxide). How much energy does it consume? To find out I used my iPad to google the question, which proves that I am not adverse to using technology (I just like books). It turns out, it can all be explained using light bulbs. It takes 1 kWh to power an iPhone for a year, that’s the equivalent of powering a 100 watt incandescent light bulb for 10 hours. The iPad consumes about 11 times that or the equivalent of the energy consumed by a 100 watt incandescent light bulb in 110 hours. Of course, not all that iPad time is spent reading a book, so in the end, relatively speaking, it is not a lot of energy; but for the purpose of establishing greenness , a small amount is still too much. In the end, using an iPad to read indirectly results in a finite amount of carbon dioxide being released to the atmosphere; whereas the act of reading a book results in zero carbon dioxide emissions.
When it comes to recyclability, the moral high ground gets more slippery. Martin LaMonica of CNET’s Green Tech says only about 10% of US electronics get recycled and, according to Greenpeace not always properly, whereas paper is more likely to be recycled. Plus you can loan that book to a friend or donate it to your public library.
There are additional energy implications, all that data has to be stored. According to Greenpeace, data storage centers are the single largest driver of new electricity demand worldwide.
This is all, of course, just to make the point that it’s called the “moral high ground” because it is difficult to attain and to say to all you book lovers out there keep on reading those paper books with a clear conscience.
By the way, by all accounts Jeffrey Toobin is one hell of a writer.
To end, a slimverse:
What Can I Say
to leave no
footprint we
must fly but
never land.
Note: The following articles were used in the making of this post – http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/01/is-apples-recyclable-chemical-free-ipad-really-green-/1
Of Fish and War
Nha Trang
At the National Oceanographic Institute,
among tanks cramped
with circling neurotic fish
(Hit the glass. Stop. Turn around)
there is a multi-colored 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
So Long, Halong
As we ride out of Cat Ba
through a valley circled
by limestone crags,
a compilation of pop ballads
from the seventies and eighties
oozes from the speakers
and the affable English backpackers
at the back of the bus
groan in faux horror
as Aerosmith follows Bryan Adams
follows George Michaels
follows Michael Jackson
but when the Bee Gees launch
“How Deep Is Your Love”
the backpackers quieten down
and the driver stops honking his horn
at the dogs, children, women
in cone hats and cyclists
with finely balanced cargos
who drift carelessly
in front of the bus
as if it was an invisible
visitor from the future,
and we all strain against
the tug of the song’s chorus
far too cool to sing along
except for one backpacker
let’s call him Nigel
or Christian, or Jason, or Justin
who, in a high piping voice
declares his oneness
with the song’s embattled lovers.
This poem was first published in Oddball Magazine, about 4 months ago.
Closing Time (a slimverse)
Closing Time
barman’s stare
stacked chairs legs
in the air
like dead flies.
Down By The River
“Lock the door, Schoolmaster,
Keep the children in,
The river in spate at the schoolyard gate
Roars like original sin”
From “The Life of the Poet” by Charles Causley
Stopdraggingthepanda 