a forest fire haze turns the morning sun orange, down in the Village square dazed coffee drinkers nurse their hangovers too many stayed too late at the Dublin Gate here and there perky couples with dogs take photos for their blogs, jpegs spiral upwards into the cloud which is not a cloud it’s a bank of a billion hard drives humming hard in flat roofed, air-conditioned buildings somewhere I will always think of as Texas
no snow on the mountains the glaciers have retreated as if they’re afraid of something leaving behind bare granite
over on the islands there is talk of low water tables and no water for the table
we fiddle while forests burn
Nero….. Nero has nothing on us.
This is a response to Lindi’s excellent challenge over at earthweal
Repartee Slim gets off the no.3 bus at the corner of Hastings and Main -the corner of Desperate and Lost- having travelled east on the 99 express, his nose stuck in the feral stink of some guy’s armpit, wishing, not for the first time, that he was six inches taller. A country lyric twangs in his head something about “the losing side of town”. He surveys the wreckage all around him: a guy with a raw scabrous face scratches frantically; a bundle of rags twitches in a doorway; people are scurrying back and forth like they’ve received a message from an alien dispatcher that the mother ship has landed, and they can’t find a toothbrush; further on in a laneway that smells of piss a man and a woman, both dressed in black with sweating raddled faces sway back and forth shouting: Fuck you! No! Fuck you! in a profane loop.
Repartee, Slim says, to no one in particular, what an unexpected bonus.
baselines, fault lines , paradigm shifts ignorance has been weaponized what will we do, what will we do when all the nouns are verbed?
I think I made a mistake how is there still doubt in that sentence? A man goes to a party to get infected with a virus in order to prove that the virus is a hoax, the man dies. It’s hard not to be harsh. Is this a new baseline, a new low? Is it an intelligence deficit? Is it lack of education? No, this is something different this is a sea change the beast has left Bethlehem the malware has been activated the human race has started to self-limit. Whatever god, assembly of gods or conglomerate of alien scientists malevolent or benevolent that designed this whole shebang that opened this can of worms has had enough the malware has been activated the fix is in it’s past midnight and the eagle has flown Aunt Mary is hanging out the washing the human race has started to self-limit.
A man goes to a party to get infected with a virus in order to prove that the virus is a hoax, the man dies.
“For Today’s Poetics, I want you all to write in the style of the Beat Generation. Pour out the first thought, the first thing that comes to mind and let the words take you forward.
Feel free to write about darker (more under-rated) subjects. The aim here is to explore the “human condition,” and to write spontaneously. Shall we?”
I thought the above poem might fit.
(Thanks to Brendan over at earthweal for the original challenge: Observe shifting baselines in your world, in climate change, your nation’s governance, the pandemic. )
tender is the night
long is the day’s journey into night
it’s easier to name a street car
than it is to name one’s desire
never attempt a ménage in a glass menagerie
there is nothing less erotic than a red wheelbarrow
a thing of beauty is a joy for a fortnight.
This poem was originally written as a response to Anmol Arora’s prompt – Poetics: Desire and Sexuality in Poetry, at dverse
photo taken in Sitges, Catalonia.
Also taking part in Open Link over at earthweal: earthweal
“Hey Mister that’s me up on the juke box” is on James Taylor’s third album, “Mudslide Slim and the Blue Horizon”. I have always thought it is the best track on the album. James has a reputation as a soft rock crooner (You’ve Got a Friend) but his earlier stuff , like this one, could have an edge to it, e.g ….”I need your golden gated cities like a hole in the head”…..or these lines …”Let the doctor and the lawyer do as much as they can / let the springtime begin/ let the boy become a man”.
The musical structure of the song also has an unsettling quality to it. It starts with the chorus , followed by a verse , followed by another chorus , then a second verse . But the second verse has a completely different rhyme scheme and chord structure to the first, and it’s followed by a bridge, then the chorus then a coda to end the song. So the song has five distinct lyrical and musical sections.
Combined with the elusive, conversational tone of the lyric this makes the song one to return to, again and again….there’s more to James than that aw shucks persona!
(It’s also an example of metasongwriting in the songwriter acknowledges that he’s in a song).
I
Todd’s time machine
has three settings:
time was
time is
time will be.
II
Sometimes
the time travel sickness
hits him
like a five alarm flu.
III
Returning through the time hail,
through the accelerating centuries
he hears his wife yell
from the ever present
from the basement stairs: I’m turning off that bloody time machine your dinner’s getting cold!
This was originally written as a response to a dVerse prompt “Time and What if”.
Early December, downtown Vancouver and it’s raining more than the usual cats and dogs, it feels like the city is trapped in a giant car wash.
All year long the weather has been acting like a child that hasn’t been taught limits.
Three months of summer drought.
We woke up one morning and white ash from forest fires covered the deck, and that evening down on the beach we were treated to a red ball sunset worthy of Beijing or Mumbai. The Indian guy in the coffee shop told me it made him feel homesick.
Something’s happening to the frogs.
The Oregon spotted frog is Canada’s most threatened amphibian, I saw that on TV program called “Canada’s Most Threatened Amphibians”. Also threatened is the northern leopard frog.
Sea stars have sea star wasting syndrome
We’re losing song birds, bats and bees
The world is an orchestra and the string section is leaving one by one.
Anthropocene Anthropocene Sixth Extinction, soon there will only be us.
****** At the corner of Georgia and Granville a pigeon waddles through a puddle created by a blocked storm drain
and I’m thinking: Who’d be a pigeon on a day like this? Who’d be a pigeon at a time like this?
I have always thought that Eve ate the apple because she was bored out of her tree which is not to imply that Eve lived in a tree it’s just an expression nor do I mean to imply that boredom is a feminine condition no far from it far from it but let’s face it Adam seems more than a little boring as does, let’s be honest, Paradise as a kid that was what I thought nothing much happening trees and fruit trees and fruit a serpent a bored Eve and hapless Adam and as we all know boredom is the mother of destruction just hand an empty glass bottle to three ten year old boys on a stony beach on a wet day.
Brendan over at earthweal asks us to write about beginnings.
The Vancouver Folk Festival returned last weekend (July 15, 16, 17) and it was great fun, some outstanding performances and some maybe not to my taste (a Korean folk ensemble with an interest in improvisational jazz sharing the stage with a Finnish folk group and an Ethiopian group was challenging). There was an absence of artists from England, Scotland and Ireland this year, and more emphasis on North American roots music and country and western, so at times it seemed a bit like The Grand Ol’ Oprey. That aside , it was good to be listening to live music again.
Highlights (for me)
Allison Russell, Robben Ford and the workshop “We are the Family”.
Allison Russell is a Grammy nominated song writer, has a great voice, plays electric banjo and alto sax and had a tight all female band with her (electric violin, acoustic guitar and electric guitar). They could play the soft stuff and then have head banging sonic meltdowns. She appeared on the Saturday night, in between Asleep at the Wheel and The New Pornographers and also shared the stage the following day with Frazey Ford and Clarel.
Robben Ford is an American blues , rock and jazz guitarist who has played with almost everyone including Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell and George Harrison. He looks like an older Jack White – dressed all in black with long jet black hair- and he can really play. His set was mostly electric blues and he had a great band with him but what I liked most about him is he knew when to stop. Yes he could do the long solos but mostly he chose to keep it tight and when the other band members were taking solos he was doing all this chording and inventive rhythm bits. Not folk, but hey variety is the spice.
The best part of the festival is often the afternoon workshops. These take place on smaller stages , this year there were three of them located on the east, west and south of the festival grounds. The idea is that three acts with some thematic connection share a stage; each act gets to sing three songs in a song by song rotation. The hope is that some synergy will occur and they will join in on each other’s songs. This does not always occur but when it does, it’s magic.
The We are the Family workshop was hosted by Joey Landreth of the The Bros. Landreth. Joining the brothers on stage were Haley Henderickx and a South Carolina duo, Shovels and Rope. It was all fairly low key until the band rehearsing on the main stage began to drown out Joey Landreth’s introduction to one of their songs. At which point he decided to change to an uptempo song, upped the volume and got the other perfomers to join in. That was it, they collaborated on the next three songs, Haley Henderickx’s Oom Sha La La was a standout. The video below doesn’t really do the live performance justice.
Worlds Colliding On the Saturday night, Asleep at the Wheel – a bunch of good ‘ol boys from Texas who are really good musicians but sang songs that were old chestnuts or more exactly, fossilized chestnuts – opened their set with a song about falling in love with a Cherokee maiden. The site of the festival, Jericho Beach Park, is located on the west side of Vancouver in the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam Indian Band, Squamish Nation and Tsleil-Waututh Nation. I dont know…….is it just me….
Special Mentions
A shout out to those 2 guys in the audience who danced solo all Friday evening to a different tune and yes, the bearded guy wearing a straw boater, a white business shirt and a pleated lime green dress.
Today I thought about Reince Priebus
not so much the man,
more the strange music of his name;
those slender vowels reversing
that echo of wince
the possible meanings
a salve, an ointment put some Reince on that cut, son;
the Latinate portliness of Priebus
a writ to slap someone with – Habeas Priebus
a complicated skateboard manoeuvre he executed a perfect reverse Priebus;
then I thought of Anthony, dear Anthony, Scaramucci, Scaramucci will you do the fandango,
you were not long with us
but still the smell of aftershave lingers
and it was you who let us know
about Steve Bannon’s auto fellatio,
alas, poor Steve
abandoned on the side of the road
like a rumpled sofa
a rumpled sofa smelling of yesterday’s sweat
and stale doctrine;
and what about Spicer and Huckabee
cartoon characters
Plucky and Angry
your souls will be in the repair shop
for some time to come.
They appear in waves,
the arrested –
Flynn, Cohen and Stone,
the ones who once were serious people –
McMaster, Kelly, Bolton.
In years to come when men and women gather
to talk of greatness
your names will be long forgotten.
The list of the fallen goes on and on
and still Humpty continues his slow and tortuous fall.
Flashback to 2021 Cop Out at Cop26 Coal will be phased down but not phased out Down But Not Out
Semantic Antics
This late amendment was tabled by the USA, China and India but India took most of the flak.
India’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are far lower than USA or China.
Canada’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are higher than USA or China
But this is not a competition anyone wants to win.
Juxtaposition This is not a poem.
November 12 Toxic air enveloped Delhi making it the second most polluted city in the world. According to 2020 average data Hotan, China is the worst Delhi is the 10th so Delhi was having a bad day 50 percent of the pollution comes from vehicles. If you go down the list you have to get past the 200th most polluted city to get out of India and China.
Juxtaposition This is not a poem
The prosperity of the west was built on fossil fuels.
Carbon dioxide emissions are a subset of pollution
Pollution covers a multitude.
Imagine the human experiment as a black box emitting carbon dioxide. Reducing those emissions requires a collective approach. Is the human experiment capable of a collective approach. So far not so much.
Juxtaposition This is not a poem
four years after the Great Smog of London the Clean Air Act of 1956 prohibited the burning of coal in homes change can happen
juxtaposition we are beside ourselves
we have been burning fossil fuel to stay warm since the cave old habits die hard
we need speed bumps not fist bumps we need idealism and pragmatism we need strategy
For your challenge: Express your thoughts and feelings about how humankind has brought Mother Earth to this critical point in time, and what you think and feel about where we go from here
Stopdraggingthepanda 