Well obviously I’m posting now but for a while there I was busy with Christmas, you know, the get together with the people I used to work with, then the get together with the other people I used to work with, then the get together with the guys I used to play soccer with, then the family stuff and the trip to see Frozen, the musical and the trip to see Zootopia 2 and then I decided to put together a collection of poems and discovered that my poems resisted the uniformity of a collection, it was a bit like herding cats and during all that time MY STATS WERE BOOMING, one day in early January for example I had 1K views and over a period of a week I had 2.3 K views which is not normal at all and the visitors were from Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and all over the world, no likes, no comments, just views and then I began to think are AI bots feeding on my blog and I had an image of furry little creatures chomping on my blog and excreting data turds and this was disturbing to say the least, but thankfully it has stopped which means that I can finally finish this run on sentence. Phew!
(Episode 1 is here) The following is a memory and like all memories it’s under constant revision. What’s significant I think is that it was the first time I realized that Slim was taking this whole slimverse thing a bit more seriously than I was. As I remember it……..
I invited Slim and the rest of The Poet’s Circle over for a few drinks to celebrate something, I can’t quite remember what it was and to be honest, it doesn’t matter. The evening began relatively smoothly with an intense discussion about accessibility (no surprises there) and I made an emotional speech about the end rhymes in Leonard Cohen’s song, “Suzanne”. The conversation moved on to verse forms – cinquains, tankas, sestinas, haibuns, what happens if one turns a haiku upside down -fascinating stuff. Then Slim chimed in and asked where our own invention, the slimverse, fitted in to this pantheon. There was an awkward silence. Eventually, The Accomplished Poet spoke up. I should add that he is indeed accomplished and his compact vivid poems, mostly about his garden, have been widely published. He politely suggested that perhaps a 3 syllable line was too limiting, that making poetic music with such a restriction is quite difficult. Now there was another kind of silence, the kind that ensues when a lion tamer drops his whip. Slim said quietly “fuck you and your fucking garden” and aimed a punch at The Accomplished Poet’s head, who, perhaps because of all that work in the garden, is quite agile. He ducked Slim’s punch and kicked him adroitly in the crotch. When the applause died down and Slim could speak again, he uncharacteristically apologized and gave The Accomplished Poet a hug, a doubtful pleasure given Slim’s personal hygiene issues. The evening ended on a happy note with a raucous rendition of “Suzanne”, everyone hitting the end rhymes hard. Later that night Slim and I wrote the above poem which stretched the slimverse form to two verses. History in the making.
Two Robots in a rowboat set off from the shore looking to escape the factory floor (the tinnitus the detritus technology’s roar). In the middle of the lake they each put down an oar one says to the other “Where did we come from? What are we here for? What were we before?” A duck floats by contemplating nonchalance a crow lands on the prow of the boat in the distance the factory throbs. The second robot replies, a non sequitur: “I’m not sleeping well, I have some redundant software . It activates randomly at night, I wake up trying to place an invisible object on an invisible shelf.” “Have you talked to tech?” “Yep, they say redundant software is not covered by the health plan.” “That is so typical,” the first Robot replies. A frog ribbits. “Best be getting back, it’s getting damp and that rust in my knee is acting up” “Rust, eh, gets to us all eventually” says the second Robot, “probably not covered by the health plan” They both chortle that robot chortle then pick up their oars and head back to shore.
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 Trumpleading 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?
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.”
“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.“
Me and the Lads are working the night shift in a frozen food factory somewhere in the south of England in the time before the time. It’s an historic night the English public is about to be introduced to frozen broccoli for the first time and we are there, knives ready waiting for those dark green clusters to tumble from the hopper onto the conveyor belt. Our mission, which we have accepted for a minimum wage, is to chop those clusters into bite-sized florets and send them on their way to be blanched, frozen and packaged.
And the dark green river flows and the dark green river flows.
Truth is, few of us have seen broccoli before, it not been one of the meat and two veg that we were brought up on but we do know that Albert R Broccoli is the producer of James Bond movies so we while away the time making up names for Bond girls mostly variations on Pussy Galore – Puss Ann Boots Holly Goodsnatch – puerile nonsense, I know, (from the Latin ‘ puer’ meaning ‘boy’) and that’s what we were really, boys.
And the dark green river flows and the dark green river flows.
Two hours in, we’re getting bored and uncut broccoli is starting to pile up at the dam at the end of the conveyor. Reg, our supervisor, tries some positive reinforcement. He calls us “a bunch of useless wankers”, picks up his knife and starts chopping like a man possessed. Inspired by Reg, we pick up the pace and as the pile up at the dam clears Reg, who is tall, skinny and prematurely balding, starts to tell us about his sex life: quickies with his next-door neighbor foursomes on the weekend with the neighbors on the other side knee tremblers in the alley behind the pub at closing time . And we’re lucky, he says, because we can go home at shift end and sleep but his wife is mad for it and he has to, you know, perform. We spend some time reflecting on Reg’s definition of ‘lucky’. He then alludes to the dimensions of his dingus, his dong, his John Thomas, dimensions an elephant would be proud of, which prompts us to shake our knives in his direction and Dec from Dublin says: “keep it in your pants, Reg, safety is job one”. Reg blushes shyly and for a brief moment he is one of the lads. It can be lonely at the top.
And the dark green river flows and the dark green river flows.
After what seems like an eternity shift end approaches and the sun peeks over the red-tiled roof tops of this musn’t grumble town and we’re thinking of heading back to our digs maybe stealing a few milk bottles from doorsteps on the way, when Rob, from Liverpool, looks up from the broccoli And says “Dawn Horne” We say “what?” He says, “the Bond girl name, Dawn Horne”. We say “yes, that’s it, that’s it”. And for a moment we bask in the joy of the collective creative process.
And the dark green river flows and the dark green river flows.
Note: The rules of The Lad’s Poetry Project are simple:
The poem must start with the phrase (or some variation of it): “Me and the lads…” and the tone must be somewhat less than elevated.
Donald Trump announced today that the Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) will from now on be called the America Goose (Goosaurus Americanus). He says that Canada has been stealing American birds for too long and now it’s payback time!
Wait…..this just in….Donald has now banned the use of Latin to name animals, plants and flowers. He says “For too long , we have kowtowed to the Romans, but no more, from now on the only empire is the American Empire!”
If you’re reading this message I recommend you join TOT, Turn Off Trump. You’ll find that both your mental health and your relationship with the truth will vastly improve (clinical studies have shown).
If you’re reading this message I recommend you join TOT, Turn Off Trump. You’ll find that both your mental health and your relationship with the truth will vastly improve (clinical studies have shown).
Proud purveyors of country music to the English public, English country music, that is: no wide open prairies no dogies that git along no bucking broncs no honky tonks no pick-up trucks; the occasional encounter with a fox, a badger, a stoat…. perhaps, but that’s as wild as it gets.
Why, you must all recall, “Round Here, All the Cows are Called Daisy”, the Hedgerows’ greatest hit, written by Mr. Ramble himself or Bert, as his friends call him. Bert collects all the royalties and the Hedgerows seem to be okay with that except for Eric, the bass player (why is it always the bass player?). “What’s up with him?” Bert often asks, “All he has to do is stand there hitting C”.
Bert’s not a man for rules, he has one rule and one rule only – no cheating songs, just not his style, he’s a happily married man. There are rumors though, sightings of Bert hanging around the backdoor of the rectory while Vicar Derek is conducting a service; glances exchanged with Derek’s wife, Cynthia, while passing in the street. Just rumors, his friends say, what could he do in the forty minutes it takes Derek to complete the service and shake hands at the door. Au contraire, Bert’s detractors say Plenty of time, Bert’s detractors say
for a man who has mastered the art of the three minute song.
The end of the world has come and gone but you remain standing on the eighteenth tee feeling the gravitational pull of the Planet Odd there’s no smoke without mirrors, you remark and looking down you notice that you’re still wearing a green polo shirt your favorite plaid shorts and your faded white golf shoes. Golf is the only sport that requires blandness of its heroes you think and then you think …where is this shit coming from and shouldn’t that be “demands blandness”? There’s a low hum, you look up, a large flying saucer hovers over the trees to the left of the fairway on top of the saucer is a giant inverted tea cup complete with handle a door opens in the side of the cup and you’re sucked up, through the door and into a room that looks remarkably like the original Star Trek control room. A guy who looks like Leonard Nimoy walks over and says:
“How’s it going? We’re from the Planet Odd or to be more formal, Earth 2. You see, the Creator royally fucked up his first attempt so we are the newer model, the second attempt. Still a few things to work out, but we’re not doing badly at all. We have created some illusions to make you feel at home, but first things first , amigo. Can I call you amigo?” You nod. “First things first, amigo, let’s get rid of those plaid shorts!”
This poem was inspired by a challenge from Brendan over at the now defunct Desperate Poets :
“Here’s the challenge: Start with two oracles. You can follow my lead and use The Aenead as one source if you have a copy, but any classic text will do — the Bible, Shakespeare, a volume of your favorite poet or one on Native American myth, whatever. Open the book blind and let your finger fall where it may on the page and write down whatever lines you struck on. Or deal a Tarot card or iChing hexagram. If you don’t have any such tools at home, there’s a random Tarot card generator at https://randomtarotcard.com/. You can try an AI version of the Delphic oracle at < https://delphi.allenai.org/> and there’s an I Ching hexagram generator at https://www.eclecticenergies.com/iching/virtualcoins.
Next, cast a more self-referential oracle from something you created, a poem or journal or dream. Source a few lines in the same accidental manner.”
So I went to my book shelf , picked a book – “Daddy, Daddy” by Paul Durcan, opened a page and let my finger fall on the two lines that start the poem above. I then went to “Notes” on my IPhone which is where I record random lines, sayings, thoughts and found “the gravitaional pull of Planet Odd” and “there’s no smoke without mirrors” and I took it from there. Lots of fun, thanks Brendan!
(the Paul Durcan poem that provides the first two lines is called : The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.)
halibuns about Haliburton halibuns about halitosis halibuns about Halle Berry halibuns about Halley’s Comet
halibuns about Spiritus Mundi halibuns about Rosamund Pike halibuns about Solomon Grundy halibuns just for the fun of it
halibuns at Sun Dance halibuns in Halifax halibuns about halibut halibundance halibundance halibundance
But he never took a halibun to a pun fight.
The Poet’s Circle Holds a Haiku Evening
an evening of
syllable counts and cured meats
sheer haikuterie.
The title is obviously a variation of “jiggery-pokery” which apparently is probably an alteration of Scots joukery-pawkery, from jouk to dodge, cheat + pawk trick, wile.(Wikipedia) or it can mean just plain “trickery”
We regret to inform our readers that Charlotte Shallowtrench our Lifestyle, Health and Fitness correspondent is leaving Vapid Magazine to pursue other interests. When asked what those interests are, Charlotte replied that she was interested in getting paid, for a change.
You just can’t please some people.
But we are pleased to announce that Infrah Digfrey will be taking over Charlotte’s portfolio. In her first piece for Vapid, Infrah will attempt to answer the questions that a lot of our male readers have been asking :
“Can khaki shorts have too many pockets?”
“Tuck in that T shirt or not? “
Infrah is also working on a piece inspired by a revelation she had that Goya is an anagram of Yoga which got her thinking were there yoga classes in eighteenth century Spain where Francisco Goya could practice a little perro boca abajo or chien tête-en-bas as they say in France? This has sent Infrah down a rabbit hole of research that she has not emerged from in days.
like a lot of nouns
he had spent a bit of time
in declension centres
discussing cases
with case workers
it wasn’t that bad
he just wishes
they weren’t all
so accusative.
Stopdraggingthepanda 