Living on Tanka Time
up on Dunbar Street
the barber shops are empty
a guy smokes a joint
and laughs hysterically
at the blank screen of his phone.
Living on Tanka Time
2 Replies
Neil Young and The Chrome Hearts at Deer Lake Park
All along the Navajo Trail
burnouts stub their toes on garbage pails
Ambulance Blues
Frankly, I was wondering which Neil would turn up. Would it be grumpy Neil? Would he decide to sing the whole first side of one of his lesser-known albums? Would his voice be up to it? So, when he opened with Ambulance Blues, I was relieved, I immediately forget the hassle to find parking, the draconian security check (apparently my backpack was too big and not the right shape),and the maze -like journey to get a beer because: ………
Ambulance Blues, a relatively obscure track from the “On the Beach” album is one of my favourite Neil songs never mind that it is almost 10 verses long , doesn’t really have a chorus, just alternating verses with different chord structures and he then follows it with “Cow Girl in The Sand” and he continues that way all night the old and the new and the sometimes forgotten and when he hits the chorus of Harvest Moon the guy beside me who knows all the words to every song and also likes to play air guitar, he joins in and so does his partner/girl friend who sings harmony along with the rest of the crowd and just then a yellow moon rises above the trees, no big birds flying but still…. and I’m thinking Neil has super powers and later when he hits the opening riff of My, My, Hey, Hey, I’m transported back to Pine Knob Michigan 1978 and Star Wars has been released the year before so Neil’s roadies are dressed as Ewoks and there are two giant speakers on each side of the stage and when the roadies are finished and the stage is empty, there is silence, then we hear the opening chords of Sugar Mountain and Neil’s voice and we can’t tell where it is coming from until there is movement on top of one of the giant speakers and yes it’s Neil shaking off a blanket and how he got down from there I don’t know but here he is now many year’s later and he hasn’t lost the magic and I know that this is a run on sentence because Copilot keeps telling me but I’m thinking and I know it’s a tad puerile but I’m thinking “bugger off Copilot, stop bothering me, I can work it out myself and AI and all that other crap we don’t need will never write anything close to what Neil can write”
and he hasn’t burnt out,
he hasn’t faded away.
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse
(not sure if this qualifies as a poem, a haibun maybe?)
Poem published in Oddball Magazine’s Horrorthon
Thanks to the editors at Oddball Magazine for publishing my poem!
Getsemani
Getsemani
In the afternoons, in Parque del Centario
turkey vultures soar on the updrafts
parrots and monkeys hang out in the trees
a malevolent iguana roams.
This where the slaves came in from Africa
and the gold left for Spain.
San Pedro Claver ministered to the slaves
gave them sanctuary and religion
protected them from the Spanish,
when he could,
so it’s not all bad news.
Pope John Paul Two visited Cartagena in 1986
and apologized for the Inquisition.
There’s a statue of him in one of the squares.
It’s not a Botero.
In the back of a restaurant
in Getsemani,
a girl with magenta hair
is singing “Losing my Religion”,
the lines the singer sings
cross the room
like planes in a cubist painting.
That’s Slim in the corner.
He lost his religion some time ago,
he thought the punishment
for impure actions, impure thoughts
was excessive, at a time when
he was all impure actions, impure thoughts.
He imagined going down to hell
and meeting Adolf Hitler
who would say to him:
What are you in for?
And he’d reply;
Impure actions, impure thoughts.
And he knew, he just knew
that Adolf would scoff.
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse
Image is photo of Graffiti, in Getsemani, Cartagena, Colombia.
Could AI write a Novel
A more relevant question would be : Could AI write a good novel? And the answer would be: Probably not!
Novels aside, I have always wanted to draw cartoons but I don’t have the drawing skills so when WordPress added the ability to generate images using AI, I thought this is my chance. A fat chance it turned out to be . The instruction I gave for the image above was AI writing a novel. Hard to tell what that robot is doing but it has some pencils nearby in a cup, one has an eraser, very old school!
For a recent post, which I have since deleted, I put in an instruction to generate an image of Donald Trump leading a flock of sheep off a cliff. This what AI generated:
Not bad but Donald appears to be leading the sheep away from the cliff’s edge and what is that sheep’s head doing on Donald’s lapel? And that electrical pole in the background, is it connected to anything?
So I tried keeping it simple and just wrote “sycophants” as an instruction. These folk turned up:
I don’t know…is it a birthday party?
So I tried the opening line of my favourite joke….A giraffe walks into a bar…
Well that’s a little better, it’s a giraffe and a bar. Of course you all know the punchline.
AI can generate the obvious but can it create humour? To use a music analogy, AI is the equivalent of a cover band, it can at best produce a copy of what has gone before. But can it take what has gone before, throw it up in the air and create something original?
I for one…….
Three Poems Published in The Galway Review (Pandemic Postcards)
Thank you to the editors at The Galway Review for publishing three of my poems: Pandemic Postcards, Whistler – The Morning After and Gibson’s Landing (Summer 2021).
You can read them here!
Bonus Postcard……
Backyard Wedding by the Fraser River
tug boats and log booms
a band playing soul
the sweet, sweet smell of Purell
guests on Zoom.
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse
Marina
Marina
A folly of pleasure boats
crams the marina,
sterns to the ocean,
bows facing the shore
as if to say, “we’re here,
we’ve arrived”.
They are a motley crew:
plucky tug boats straight out of a children’s story book;
sleek, testosterone –fueled speedsters
utilitarian skiffs,
large, white, tiered confections
in which ruddy-faced men
wearing navy blue blazers
with gold anchors on the lapels
drink gin and tonics at five;
boats big enough
to house a scandal
involving a member of the Royal Family.
But at the moment it’s quiet,
mid-week, and nothing shaking.
A pair of red Cape Cod chairs
sits empty at the end of the dock
like an ad for a retirement investment fund.
A pencil of light streaks across the water
from a house on the other side of the bay.
The boats look abandoned,
like dogs waiting for their owners to return.
Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.
On Reflection…. Donald Trump 2.0
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.
Halibuns (Haibuns) and Photo of a Hummingbird
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.
Neil Young and those “lorries rolling by”
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!)
The Night they drove Old Man U down
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.
Fortunate Son (Creedence and Donald T)
Vapid Magazine : A Personal Note ( from current editor, Jonathan Shallowpond)
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
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 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.
Vancouver Folk Fest 2025
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
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 edit)
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 (Poem)
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 (in this ever changing world)
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.
Une Saison d’Être
The Sun is Slowly Leaving the Party that is the Day
The Evening News (haiku)
The Evening News
a cheery fanfare
death, mayhem and disaster
dog befriends squirrel.
Thanks (for Paul Durcan)
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.
Tales from the Gym (I love the smell of nostalgia in the morning)
And your gravity fails and negativity don’t pull you through….Bob Dylan
Know your gym……Slim Volume
Gravity, Don’t Fail Me Now
two geezers
pink and steaming
towelling down
after a shower
discussing gravity
how it is not fixed
how it decreases
with distance from the earth’s core
how, if one was to climb to the top of Everest,
since weight is the product of mass and gravity
one would weigh less at the top of Everest
and Slim’s thinking
this is one fucking erudite conversation
and he wants a piece of it
so he points out that
one would regain that weight
on returning to sea level
and one of the geezers replies
yeah but you’d probably burn 10,000 calories
climbing up and down the fucking mountain
and a nearby jock encased in breathable fabric
says shit, I’d burn that in 40 minutes on the rowing machine
and Slim fires back wryly
keep telling yourself that
and the locker room erupts in laughter
and in that moment
basking in the unbearable lightness of banter
Slim defies gravity and levitates
above the bacterial swamp
that is the locker room floor.
“A man who is tired of the gym, is a man who has been to the gym”. Slim Volume
Two Bros
Two bros on a mat
one on his back
hands clasped behind his head
legs bicycling like a capsized fly;
the other,
the one with the green hair
and the tattoos of a religious nature
is grunting weights .
Fly bro, it appears,
is having girlfriend problems
and is experiencing
some kind of vague existential crisis,
green hair bro listens carefully to his tale of woe
and after some reflection says:
It’s life, man,
stop trying to understand it,
no one can
and then, as if startled by his own profundity,
he repeats: no one can.
Out of the mouths of bros….
in the background a bearded jock
in a tight black T shirt
his muscles packed with powdered whey
his eyes a steroid yellow
is down on his hunkers
knees akimbo
moving sideways
across the floor
like a slow motion crab
across packed sand at evening.
