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.
I have 2 poems (“Living Off the Grid”, “Railspur Alley Park”) and a song lyric (“Willie’s Oasis”) up at the tri-quarterly web magazine “The Basil O’Flaherty”.
Regular visitors to this blog will recognise the second poem as a triple slimverse. Only the second time this verse form has appeared outside this blog….is that momentum I feel?
I’m never totally sure about publishing song lyrics as they sometimes seem a bit thin on the page without melody and music, but I hope this one stands up! You can check out a sample of the recorded version here.
I have to admit that when I first moved to Canada from Ireland I used to dread St. Patrick’s day – the fake Irish accents, the green beer, the where’s-me-lucky-charms awfulness of it all. I have since learnt to embrace it.
I never felt quite like that about Irish pubs, I have always regarded them as oases of something approaching familiarity when I found myself in a foreign country. I once got quite sick from food poisoning in Nicaragua and when I was well enough to eat again, I had a longing for Irish stew which I found in an Irish pub run by an ex farmer from Limerick, but that’s another story.
I was recently in Medellin, Colombia, staying in the El Poblado district and I dropped in to Patrick’s Irish Pub to sample Ireland through a Colombian filter. The pub had the usual collection of Celtic bric-a -brac, Gaelic geegaws, Paddy paraphernalia, Shamrock gimcrackery. As is often the case in Colombian bars, one wall was half covered with television screens showing mostly football/futbol/soccer; though there was one screen devoted to UFC and another showing old MTV videos – Rob Zombie, Deborah Harry, Metallica , Eric Clapton singing “Cocaine”; oddly appropriate, Pablo Escobar once lived in this neighbourhood, his house is now a civil engineering office. Yes, this was the soundtrack of Patrick’s Irish Pub. Occasionally, the screen would go blank and they would play “The Rocky Road to Dublin” as a reminder.
The waitresses were young and wore short kilts, I found myself wondering what they thought of this strange universe they found themselves in every evening – a heavy metal Ireland full of tattooed bruisers. I ordered bangers and mash, which is technically more of an English dish, and it was spectacularly bad – two chorizo sausages on a soft bog of mash potatoes. Still, the beer was good -craft roja from BBC (The Bogota Beer Company).
Outside it was a beautiful warm evening and locals and tourists were pouring into the area to sample the restaurants and salsa bars – a mass of colour and pounding drum beats, the feeling that the party was getting started and would not stop until the early hours of the morning. Back in Ireland, the pub is a warm convivial place that people go to, to get out of the weather ; here in Medellin , Colombia, Patrick’s Irish Pub felt more than a little redundant.
Donald’s Early Days
A farrago of fiascoes,
banishments and bans;
weekends at Mar-A-Lago
the world in his hands.
I thought I would update this one for dVerse’s open link Thursday ( I know, it’s Friday). Even though it was written in the early day’s of the stopdraggingthepanda.com/2018/09/06/the-toddler-king-parts-12-and-3/reign, I think unfortunately it still applies.
I am participating at the open mic at Words and Feathers with my poem “Auto”.
This is unusual for two reasons:
Check it out plus the other good stuff at Words and Feathers.
Check out this piece by Laura Morgan:
Not too many people in the Blogosphere writing at this level about nature, landscape, place.
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.
They would have pilloried Hillary
if she had a discussion with a Russian.
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.
look like
portals to
hell.
‘The Road’, music by John Mitchell, lyrics by Jim Feeney.
From the album, ‘Crossing Lines’ by The Mitchell Feeney Project.
Available on iTunes (search for ‘The Mitchell Feeney Project’) or at
https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/themitchellfeeneyproject
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.
Not the export it used to be,
nothing like the glory days
Hiroshima, Vietnam, Cambodia;
still popular at home tho’
nearly twelve thousand gun deaths a year
the gun barrel points both ways.
This is not much of a poem, is it?
That last metaphor was a bit clumsy
and there’s no music in statistics
but there is a rhyme in that last line
and there’s assonance in ‘American Carnage’
and there is an ass in the White House
but enough about that
stay away from the low hanging fruit
we need a rhyme
carnage, baggage, garbage, image
imagine all the people
that’s what this situation needs
a protest singer, a protest song
three chords and a chorus
that we can sway and link arms to
Where are you
Josh (Ritter)
Michael (Stipe)
Bruce ?
I have 4 poems up at Anti-Heroin Chic, an online literary journal. Check it out here:
http://heroinchic.weebly.com/blog/four-poems-by-jim-feeney.
Be sure to have a look at the rest of the journal too, some interesting art work, poems, etc.
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
Hard Brexit.
Soft Brexit.
Brexit over easy?
Not on the menu.
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)
Don loves Vlad
Vlad loves Don
Love as big as
A nuclear bomb.
Front door, back door,
Kremlin, tower
Nuclear love
Nuclear power.
