On Reflection…. Donald Trump
America has given birth
to a giant orange child
a zaftig infant Gulliver
striding the ravaged earth
of his own imagination
trampling whole villages
swallowing villagers whole.
This poem was published previously in Oddball Magazine.
Waiting for the Man
It’s a Sunday afternoon in late May and I’m sitting outside The Post Coital Beetle watching the traffic on Broadway. At the next table, four bearded guys wearing flat caps and plaid shirts, looking like The Lost Sons of Mumford, are downing pints of over-hopped pale ale and talking about Death Cab For Cutie. And who is this I see 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 wearing a white T shirt, a size too small. The T shirt asks a series of questions:
Is u at?
At issue?
Is it u?
The second and third lines of the message are on a different plane because of Slim’s stomach which is about the size of a regulation soccer ball. So, the effect is almost cubist, images stealthily approaching the eye. He sits down; we order a plate of nachos which arrives looking like a volcano discharging molten cheese. He turns and says:
Let’s talk
about the effable
in the room.
One of Those Conversations
“Hang on” he says, “I am feeling a vague fin de saison ennui, a certain je ne sais quoi and I have this urge to use every hackneyed French phrase I know in a pathetic attempt to sound world-weary, like I’m sitting in an outdoor café, a scarf knotted at my neck, smoking a Gitane and nursing an existential crisis.”
rain swept pier
lone tourist
bends to the wind.
Note: A little while back it occurred to me that I may have been writing halibuns without knowing it. So I started to revisit some previous posts and trying to halibun them. (I know, ‘halibun’ is not a verb). The hummingbird , of course, has nothing to do with the halibunnery!
By the way is it “halibun” or “haibun” or both?
Taking part in open link over at dverse.
Old man lying by the side of the road
With the lorries rolling by
Blue moon sinking from the weight of the load
And the buildings scrape the sky
Cold wind ripping down the alley at dawn
And the morning paper flies
Dead man lying by the side of the road
With the daylight in his eyes
When I first heard this song (“Don’t let it Bring you Down”), I thought : “What’s with the ‘lorries’ , Neil? I mean you’re a Canadian, living in California, should they not be ‘trucks’?”
A side note: The word ‘lorry’ is a word used in Britain and it comes from the verb “to lurry”, meaning “to pull or drag”.
On reflection:
Of course, if he used “trucks”, it wouldn’t scan, but he could have sang “big trucks rolling by”. However, as we all know, Neil is a poet and the answer lies in his ear, not for music but for the music in language.
Consider the letter ‘L’, it appears in every line of the verse: “old, lying/ lorries, rolling/blue, load/ buildings/ cold, alley/ flies/ lying/ daylight”.
Consider the letter ‘O’ as in assonance, look at its role in the first three lines: “old, road/ lorries, rolling/ moon, load”; its repetition in lines 5, 6, 7: “cold, down/ morning/road”.
Consider the inversion, how the “lor” in ” lorries” becomes the “rol” in “rolling”.
No, “trucks” would just not hack it.
Phew! Glad to get that out of my system, otherwise, after a few pints I might start regaling my wife and two daughters with these insights and have to watch them getting that “beam me up Scotty look in their eyes”.
Photo (by Marie Feeney): Neil and Paul McCartney at Desert Trip 2016.
Taking on Open Link over at dverse. (This is not a poem obviously, but it is about poetry so I hope it fits!)
Raining Hard in Grimsby
It was raining hard in Grimsby
the night, United crashed and burned.
Is this the end for Amorimby?
In his grave, Matt Busby turned.
A Personal Note:
Jonathan Shallowpond, editor of Vapid Magazine, here, I’ll get right to the point. My wife kicked me out. Said she was tired of supporting me. Told me to go get a job. I told her that I had a job, that I was editor of Vapid Magazine. She said ‘I mean one that pays f***ing money.”
So here I am living in my parents’ basement, sleeping on a camp bed. My dad’s okay with it but my mother keeps giving me that “you should have done medicine or law” look.
It’s not too bad except the basement doubles as a rehearsal space for my dad’s band which consists of my dad, Johnny Shallowpond Senior on guitar and vocals, his friend Slim on bass and his friend Jake on drums. They rehearse twice a week in the afternoon which means I have to put my headphones on while I’m writing but they play so loud that it’s impossible to concentrate.
I’m not sure what they are rehearsing for because they don’t do gigs, I guess they are just jammin’. Their name changes every couple of months. They started off as The Liver Spots , then it was The Good, the Bad and the Varicose. Currently it’s Johnny Statin and The Beta Blockers and they keep playing the same song which they wrote to the tune of the Doors’ song, ‘Riders on the Storm’. It’s called “Geezer in the Pool”. It goes like this (my dad shouts out chord changes between the lines):
Geezer in the pool
EM! A!
Geezer in the pool
EM! A!
He’s got his swim trunks on
C! D!
He’s got his swim trunks on
EM! A!
Like a flag without a pole
A fish without a shoal
Geezer in the pool.
EM! A!
That’s it, that’s all they’ve got. They just keep repeating the same verse and then occasionally my dad tries a guitar solo and they all break down in hysterics. .
But, you know, we share a few beers after and have a chat so it can be a nice break from my work bringing vapidity to the world.
There’s one thing that puzzles me a bit though. Every now and then, my dad sits me down and says:
“You know, son, your mother and I are not getting any younger”
I mean. What’s with that?
at night
basement drafts
drumkit cymbals tinkle
Keeping it Vapid!
Jonathan Shallowpond
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.
Walking past the cardiology clinic
I decide on an impulse
to go in and ask this question:
“Is the heart of Rock’n’roll still beating?“
The receptionist replies:
“Sir, you’ll have to make an appointment with Dr. Lewis.“
Shooglenifty and the Canadian Snowbirds at the Vancouver Folk Festival (2025)
Shooglenifty are skipping the light Celtastic
On the main stage Saturday night
Jigs and reels
Jigs and reels
The Canadian Snowbirds roar overhead
And the band plays on
Peace, love and jet planes
Contrails in the sky.
Tie-dyed shirts and hackey-sack
Hippy dances and wizard hats
That guy on stilts is back
Dressed to the hilt in red
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse
South of Bijou (redux)
Somewhere south of Bijou
they left themselves behind
the car smelt of stale coffee
they didn’t read the signs.
A mile north of Chamomile
they went their separate ways
peas split from a pod
buzzards circling the desert sky.
Sunshine On Goodge Street (Donovan mash-up)
in the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty
a violent hash smoker shook a chocolate machine
sunshine came softly through my window,
thrown like a star in my vast sleep
I opened my eyes to take a peek.
Yes, I could have tripped out easy
forever to fly, wind velocity nil
but I decided to stay.
(Donovan Phillips Leitch
Superman and Green Lantern
ain’t got nothing on you)
This is a found poem using lines from 5 Donovan songs: Catch the Wind, Sunny Goodge Street, Sunshine Superman, Hurdy Gurdy Man and Mellow Yellow. I’m sure you can figure out which line came from where, but just a note on the second line:
“a violent hash smoker shook a chocolate machine”.
This line is from Sunny Goodge Street and is my favorite Donovan line because of its inherent music –violent, smoker, shook, chocolate, all those o’s, that recurring ‘k’ and the internal rhyme between hash and mash. Say it out loud a couple of times and it will stick in your head!
Sunny Goodge Street appears on Donovan’s second album “Fairytale” and , according to Wikipedia, it “foreshadows the jazzy feel and descriptions of life in urban London that Donovan would continue to explore over the next two years”. There are a few covers out there (Judy Collins and Tom Northcroft), but they are little too earnest and none match the sludgy stoned feel of the original. The recording of the song is almost perfect, except for Harold McNair’s flute solo in the middle which nearly derails the whole thing. Take a listen:
Bunker Buster Bomb
Assonance and ordnance
alliteration and obliteration
assault by the letter ‘B’
Even the CNN anchors
can’t help but marvel
at the stealth, the wealth, the power
the Tom Cruisean glamour of it all.
Will there be a sequel?
There’s always a sequel
Anderson Cooper’s Hair
There’s something comforting
about Anderson Cooper’s hair
its quietude
its insouciance
its unabashed whiteness
no Clooney dusting of grey
no Pavarotti boot polish black
just plain white
lightly cropped
a hint of a comb over, maybe
but that’s ok
and it does not move
a Midwest tornado
vile invective
a blast of foul air
from the president’s mouth
nothing moves Anderson Cooper’s hair;
to misquote Paul McCartney
and triple down on a preposition
in this ever changing world
in which we live in,
there’s something
comforting about that.
The Evening News
a cheery fanfare
death, mayhem and disaster
dog befriends squirrel.
Thanks
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!
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.
And your gravity fails and negativity don’t pull you through….Bob Dylan
Know your gym……Slim Volume
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.
Go Fly a Kite
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.
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.
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.
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.
Vapid Magazine Submission Guidelines
Format:
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.
The Sheriff Of Tariffdom
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.”
For more on Laura’s excellent prompt, read here.
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 Note On 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!
Cyphers can be found at http://www.cyphers.ie . Pick up a copy!
…Jim Feeney
The Man with Orange Hair (A Lament)
Wiffle, waffle, wombat ways
These are the very worst of days.
Beware, beware, beware, beware
Beware the man with orange hair.
Grickle, grackle, grunt and grumble
Sit and watch the markets tumble
The threat of war is everywhere
Beware the man with orange hair
Trump, Rubio, Vance and Musk
It’s enough to make an angel cuss
Protest, protest if you dare
Beware the man with orange hair.
The prompt over at dverse is:
“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.“
Stopdraggingthepanda 