it came as a gift now it sits in the corner like a sulky child demanding attention
later…
you learn that on a trip to the Arctic frost bit the tip of Harry’s todger making him a not so jolly Roger a less than artful dodger when he’s an old codger he will remember the day he froze his dingus, his dong his John Thomas his todger but for now his royal cannon is just, well, tabloid fodder.
As I watched Oprah, Harry and Meghen standing among the chickens standing at the epicenter of an event that sent shock waves throughout the free world I asked myself this question:
Is a rescue chicken a chicken that has been rescued by people or is it a chicken that rescues people?
I then asked myself another question:
How many Royals does it take to change a light bulb?
and a voice answered:
It’s a journey. They must first acknowledge that the light bulb was the source of the light that previously flooded the room then and only then is change possible.
Porcelain, Puppy Chow and Prince Harry (or The Ginger Vision)
You’re walking through your kitchen looking for some granol’ when you do a Prince Harry and land on your dog’s feeding bowl.
You’re lying there in the porcelain and the Puppy Chow bruised, confused and cursing your luck when Prince Harry appears and says: Hey, you could put this in a book.
What mighty wind blows hard out of Mar-A-Lago up-ending facts like trailers in a trailer park ripping the roofs off reputations revealing the gyrations in the bedrooms below hailing down bombast and innuendo on the corrugated tin of truth a wind that makes Ian and Fiona look like that nice Scottish couple across the road (Is she Irish?), the ones you should invite over for dinner or is it just a storm in a tumbler is it just Donald raving in the cocktail hour of his years.
Taking part in Open Link Weekend over at earthweal
doom has a harbinger death has an angel change has an agent; if the winds of change are blowing, staying inside is always an option; to embrace change put your hand in your pocket.
I have to say as an Irish person how proud and honored I am that the United Kingdom has appointed a prime minister whose first name is an anagram of “Irish”; I know we and the English have had our troubles in the past Troubles with a capital T (the Plantation of Ulster…don’t get me started) but the English are subtle people not given to public displays of emotion and this gesture is quintessentially English in its subtlety it’s as if they are saying thank you for Father Ted it brings a tear to my eye it takes the oatmeal biscuit so “Hello Rishi” as they say in Ireland “buachaill inniu, fear amarach” or loosely translated from the Gaelic “I hope your politics change soon”.
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.
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
This year for Grammarama we attempted to organize a hoedown for the pronouns they, she, he but we couldn’t get the verbs to agree. Things got very tense they kept dredging up the past getting all conditional on us every time we seemed close to a consensus they would run off into corners and conjugate. Then it got melogrammatic the pronouns them, her, him announced they were tired of being used as objects and refused to participate. In the end we threw up our hands and gave up. Give me a bunch of nouns any day.
Oft on a still summer evening I take my doggerel for a long, long walk
looking for rhymes in all the wrong places.
I bring with me a small, beige, plastic bag; when I finish the poem I’m composing I place the poem in the plastic bag and deposit the bag in a trash can deep in the forest
a trash can known to all the local poets a trash can where moon always rhymes with June a trash can where clouds are as fluffy as mashed potatoes.
The challenge over at earthweal is to write about ‘wild stillness”. So this is a poem about an attempt to write a poem. Check out earthweal here for poems that actually meet the challenge!
Scenes from a Restaurant in the Time Between Variants
the guys from finance hold their wine glasses by the stem and every now and again they do that swirl and sniff thing
the girl in the tight dress is two drinks away from feeling comfortable
a couple out on their first date have discovered too late that they have nothing to say to each other the long evening yawns before them
the bathroom door bursts open two bros wearing dark suits and built like refrigerators emerge, their eyes pulsing with guilty energy
it’s happy hour
cocktails are fifty per cent off and all the cocktails have jokey names Insane Moose Milantini Rogue Zamboni
nothing on the menu escapes description the Market Crashin’ IPA has a dry hopped finish with a touch of citrus the Failed Priest Sauvignon Blanc is full bodied with gooseberry and melon grace notes and that beet and feta salad we’ve ordered just happens to be a personal favorite of our waitress she loves that hint of sourness the cheese brings to the dish
she’s a dancer, by the way, lived for a while in Saskatoon.
NaPoWriMo eleven days in and I have nothing to show last night I rummaged through abandoned shoeboxes in the dusty attic of my mind (I apologize for those last two lines) and there’s nothing there, bro there’s nothing there………bro I’m moving in slow mo I’ve lost my mojo my get up and go I have met my Alamo or is it Waterloo? I’m running on empty no quid pro quo NaPoWriMo NaPoWriMo nineteen days to go nineteen days to go.
irritable vowel syndrome
arrhythmia
pain in the assonance
acute enjambment
inflammation of the lower case
latinnittus
typographical dysfunction
fear of sonnets
halibunions
grammaroids
rhymetism
pundruff
the irrational fear
on entering a room
that someone is going to recite
The Lake Isle of Inisfree
in a plummy, orotund
stage Irish accent.
Taking part in Open Link Weekend over at earthweal.
Your cell phone rings but you’re not listening because you left it in The Fox and Vixen behind the cistern in the last stall on the left next to the condom machine and now it’s 4 am your wife sleeps soundly beside you, in the corner of the room your hangover squats sorting a tray of instruments.
It all began with a few beers, some Christmas Cheer so how did it get from there to here?
Slowly you remember or think you remember….
Did you really poke your boss in the chest and tell him that you know better that you know best?
Did you really down three shots of scotch grab Mark from marketing by the shoulders and proclaim “I love you bro” over and over ‘till he begged you to stop to let go?
And why, why, why did you call that shy Dutch girl from accounting “sad-eyed lady of the lowlands” again, over and over?
You groan inwardly you groan outwardly
and just when you think it could not get worse your hangover stands up and crosses the room carrying what appears to be a small mallet Zooooosh, he enters your head and proceeds to knock on the inside of your skull with that same mallet all the time chanting this manic mantra “deck the halls with human folly Fa la la la la, la la la la”.
Four hours later your wife is shaking you Up you get, she chimes It’s time to do some Christmas shopping! Joe Fresh opens at 9!
We got off the train from Machu Picchu at the Ollantaytambo station, walked up the station road to the town square and came upon this: Mother’s Day in Ollantaytambo. It went on all day – entertainment, raffles, prizes, politicians’ speeches. The ladies seemed to enjoy themselves, although they never clapped once.
Later that evening, we had dinner in the restaurant down at the station and walking home we witnessed this haiku-worthy scene.
that’s what Myron’s mother called him – a reasonable facsimile , of his brother, that is, in that his brother was preternaturally unreasonable if his brother was the weather his mother said he would be deemed unseasonable his actions were incomprehensible reprehensible, irredeemable so based on the principle that no praise is too faint Myron was amenable to being called a reasonable facsimile of his brother.
up on Dunbar Street the barber shops are empty a guy smokes a joint
and laughs hysterically at the blank screen of his phone
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.
outside the traffic stalls on Dunbar Street
Sherry over at earthweal asks us: “Tell us about the places you hold most dear in the corner of the planet where you live. Share them with us; let us see them through your eyes and your words”.
I live just off Dunbar Street and to be honest, the street is more than a tad prosaic, even if the real estate pamphlets call it “bucolic”. But if I don’t put Dunbar in a poem, who’s going to? So these are two slices of Dunbar life. By the way, for some reason, there are more barber shops on Dunbar than the population could possibly need.