Elaborate (following the sound)
elaborate
haliborange
aurora borealis
abhor
great expectorations
Little Dorrit
Oliver
more
invigorate
adumbrate
helleborus orientalis
Mary Tyler Moore.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/elaborate/
Nod to Bob
I’m a poet
but I can’t
bestow it.
Talking of Bob, here’s a post from the past
Bob Dylan’s Worst Line Ever
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 fucking jail and how else will he tell her except with his voice, they are in a field, for fuck sake!”
“Oh”, I said, reaching for a poppadom.
Joint Memories
I have this vague memory
of the last time we were stoned
how we all stood around laughing
at a joke that no one told.
Trigonometry
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,
made me think of blackboards
chalk dust
Isosceles triangles.
he felt deleted
like a worn-out expletive
declined, like a noun.
Photos: Waiting for the Drop
1
I often ask myself the question:
Is James Comey a bit of a wanker
a self-aggrandizing prima donna
who only looks honourable
when compared to Donald Trump?
I often ask myself that question.
2
I often ask myself the question:
can a man
mansplain to a man
or can a man
only mansplain
to a woman, and if so
if one explains something
in a condescending manner
to a member
of one’s own gender
is one, in effect,
cisplaining?
I often ask myself that question.
All Bubbles Burst
1
white Lexus on lease
new suit, shoes, two day stubble
bubble? what bubble?
2
cherry blossoms bloom
well-dressed ladies from Beijing
pose with hand on hip.
3
cherry blossoms bloom
the air is sticky with greed
houses, for sale, sold.
4
cherry blossoms bloom
the wrecking ball’s lazy swing
petals, debris, spring.
These haiku appeared at the height of the recent real estate boom in Vancouver; a boom that was driven by speculation, primarily by foreign buyers. Real estate became a commodity. Houses that had been around since the 1920’s were demolished and replaced by larger houses, some with an architectural style that had no context in the Pacific North West (white tiled French Colonial). Around where I live there was constant disruption: dump trucks, concrete trucks, agents knocking on my door, white Lexus’ (Lexi ?) driving up and down in front of the house every weekend, neighbours cashing in and leaving. Then like all bubbles, it burst or to be more exact, floated off to Toronto.
I have updated the post for in
Luminescence
The stars are out
luminescence rises
from the surface of the pond
I think of Tommy
Tommy Tumescent and the Hard-ons
yes you could say
they were big in the fifties
yes you could say
they rose to stardom in the fifties
all pompadour and pointy toe
and to counter this puerile nonsense
I also think of iridescence
finesse
obsolescence.
Game Day
the soccer dads
bark and pace
like chain-linked hounds
like dogs locked
in parked cars
on a sunny day,
while in the bushes,
Thwarted Ambition
waits to join them
on the long journey
home.
Inchoate
inchoate
inculcate
incarcerate
incubate
inundate
indoctrinate
inseminate
incarnate
incinerate
inoculate
inanimate
inhabit.
(Pete, still churning it out with that same energy and anger, talking ’bout his generation)
Photos by Marie Feeney
Drive
On a strange day
in a life that’s becoming stranger
Myron is driving north of Kona
on a road bisecting the black lava landscape
when Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
comes on the radio,
and in no time at all
he’s picturing himself
on a boat on a river
and marveling for the first time
at that rhyme between
marmalade skies and kaleidoscope eyes
not the skies and eyes
but the lade and leid
and just when his head
is filling with technicolor
the black cloud that’s sitting
on the mountains to the right
moves across the sun
that’s shining
on the blue ocean to the left,
and the black asphalt road
and the jumbled chunks
of frozen black lava
that cover the landscape
suck the remaining light
from the air
leaving everywhere
a dull monochrome.
This poem was published in The Galway Review some time back and also previously published here.
Daily Prompt : Quartet
Micro
phone
scope
meter
soft
manage
be
the prefix
that belittles
everyone
and everything
but can’t hold
a candle to
nano, pico, femto.
Louis CK
What the FK?
I can’t see
a way BK
from where
you are now.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/micro/
The Toddler King Part (2)
5 a.m. in America
the toddler king
checks his Twitter feed
in the empty parking lot
of a big box store
a plastic bag pirouettes
on the halitotic breeze
national monuments
fear for their lives
the adjectives – good, bad, great-
drop in value again
the toddler king
picks a fight with himself.
The Toddler King Part (1)
5 am in America
the toddler king
checks his Twitter feed
a five hundred pound ball
of carbohydrate and grease
rolls across the parking lot
of a big box store,
no one notices
assault rifles take stock
the second amendment
thinks about making amends
the founding fathers
find themselves wanting.
talisman
miasma
chalice
charisman
polisman
phallus.
In Praise of Extended Benefits
born identical twins,
they became indentured servants
to Lord Denton,
a wealthy landowner
who believed passionately
in the benefits
of dental care,
consequently
the identical twins
lived a long
indentured life
and never endured
the indignity of dentures.
we can not
decide if
we are blessed
or damaged.
These poems were originally written as an attempt to provoke. That didn’t happen, and nothing changed as a result of writing them but at least I had some fun doing it. The second poem appeared in the magazine Anti_Heroin Chic
Haiku for Donald
petulant pillock
postcranial curmudgeon
bombastic buffoon.
Trumputin (a romance)
Don loves Vlad
Vlad loves Don
Love as big as
A nuclear bomb.
Front door, back door,
Kremlin, tower
Nuclear love
Nuclear power.
ee
cummings
cummings
ee
typeset tyrant
champion
of the
lower case
thank you
for showing
me
that
poetry
could
be
about more
than
dead heroes
fairies
and bogs.
Heavy Metal Heaven
Slim plugs in his guitar
sets the dial on his amp
to “heavy metal”
hits an E minor seven
walks out of the room
makes a cup of coffee
drinks a cup of coffee
checks the football results
texts his brother in England:
what’s up, mate?
his brother doesn’t answer
he starts writing a novel:
The sun –
a red ball of anger on the horizon –
shouts through the brown chemical haze:
“that’s it, I’m outta here”.
Then, and only then, they hear a baby cry.
That’s all he’s got
He returns to the room
that E minor seven
is still going
but faint now
like a rustle of paper
like the distant chatter
of dead drummers
in heavy metal heaven
he picks up his guitar
hits an A minor seven
walks out of the room
starts his taxes……
taking part in Open Link Night over at dVerse
you call your
self a tree
my bank has
more branches.
plus a bonus poem in which Slim escapes the 3 syllable shackles of slimverse and displays an uncharacteristic lightness of being.
The low November sun
hits the silver birches
and the cherry tree
sending the bush tits
and the black-capped
chickadees
into a flitting frenzy
Who pulled the alarm?
Which one is my nest?
Where did I leave that worm?
Both poems have appeared in other posts, this combination was prompted by the Daily Prompt – ‘branch’.
allergens loiter
on the vacuum’s humid breath
spiders abandon
web based solutions
seek cover in crevices
domestic terror.
Fabric
rubric
Rubicon
Kubla Khan
scabrous
lexicon
toucan
Aga Khan.
Stopdraggingthepanda 