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.
A beach in North Florida, the sun is shining not a cloud in the sky. Well maybe there are one or two clouds this is a memory and memories are famously inexact. It’s hot and humid a scrotum-sagging Florida humidity. Out on the calm ocean children are floating on inflatable ducks, dragons, swans.
I’m on a work assignment and this is a day off. Beside me my colleague, Zlatan, is struggling into his swimming trucks under the cover of a small white towel. Zlatan is from a communist bloc country. He escaped to the West by accelerating in his car through a border crossing; he tells me he can still see the guards in his rear view mirror reaching for their guns.
There were pelicans down by the shore or were there?
Suddenly the calm is broken by a commotion out on the wooden jetty people are pointing at three grey fins moving through the water. Someone shouts: Sharks!
The ocean empties children, parents, inflatables splash frantically towards the safety of the water’s edge.
Meanwhile Zlatan has finally got his trunks on he gets up, walks towards the water past the hysterical families and the inflatables; he has a low centre of gravity his back is covered with black fuzz, he’s a soccer player one of those midfielders who can always find space and time.
Zlatan, I yell, there are sharks out there! He looks back over his shoulder, smiles, and shouts, Fuck the sharks!; then wades out until the water is waist high, dives in and heads off into the ocean his arms arcing in a steady crawl.
In no time at all he is out of sight.
This poem originally appeared in Cyphers Magazine Issue 93.
an Arctic cold front Amazon trucks stuck down snow-packed side roads
but that was 2022 this year the winter is mild that low January sun illuminating the dust under the sofa and that kid’s toy from Christmas that no one could find.
south of the border the president is obsessed with Greenland there’s no business like snow business
he says
but Greenland where all the brass monkeys sing soprano and Ice has a different meaning is a long, long way from Mar-A-Lago
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.
All along the Navajo Trail burnouts stub their toes on garbage pails
Ambulance Blues
Frankly, I was wondering which Neil would turn up. Would it be grumpy Neil? Would he decide to sing the whole first side of one of his lesser-known albums? Would his voice be up to it? So, when he opened with Ambulance Blues, I was relieved, I immediately forget the hassle to find parking, the draconian security check (apparently my backpack was too big and not the right shape),and the maze -like journey to get a beer because: ………
Ambulance Blues, a relatively obscure track from the “On the Beach” album is one of my favourite Neil songs never mind that it is almost 10 verses long , doesn’t really have a chorus, just alternating verses with different chord structures and he then follows it with “Cow Girl in The Sand” and he continues that way all night the old and the new and the sometimes forgotten and when he hits the chorus of Harvest Moon the guy beside me who knows all the words to every song and also likes to play air guitar, he joins in and so does his partner/girl friend who sings harmony along with the rest of the crowd and just then a yellow moon rises above the trees, no big birds flying but still…. and I’m thinking Neil has super powers and later when he hits the opening riff of My, My, Hey, Hey, I’m transported back to Pine Knob Michigan 1978 and Star Wars has been released the year before so Neil’s roadies are dressed as Ewoks and there are two giant speakers on each side of the stage and when the roadies are finished and the stage is empty, there is silence, then we hear the opening chords of Sugar Mountain and Neil’s voice and we can’t tell where it is coming from until there is movement on top of one of the giant speakers and yes it’s Neil shaking off a blanket and how he got down from there I don’t know but here he is now many year’s later and he hasn’t lost the magic and I know that this is a run on sentence because Copilot keeps telling me but I’m thinking and I know it’s a tad puerile but I’m thinking “bugger off Copilot, stop bothering me, I can work it out myself and AI and all that other crap we don’t need will never write anything close to what Neil can write”
In the afternoons, in Parque del Centario turkey vultures soar on the updrafts parrots and monkeys hang out in the trees a malevolent iguana roams.
This where the slaves came in from Africa and the gold left for Spain. San Pedro Claver ministered to the slaves gave them sanctuary and religion protected them from the Spanish, when he could, so it’s not all bad news.
Pope John Paul Two visited Cartagena in 1986 and apologized for the Inquisition. There’s a statue of him in one of the squares. It’s not a Botero.
In the back of a restaurant in Getsemani, a girl with magenta hair is singing “Losing my Religion”, the lines the singer sings cross the room like planes in a cubist painting.
That’s Slim in the corner.
He lost his religion some time ago, he thought the punishment for impure actions, impure thoughts was excessive, at a time when he was all impure actions, impure thoughts. He imagined going down to hell and meeting Adolf Hitler who would say to him: What are you in for? And he’d reply; Impure actions, impure thoughts. And he knew, he just knew that Adolf would scoff.
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!
Old man lying by the side of the road With the lorries rolling by Blue moon sinking from the weight of the load And the buildings scrape the sky Cold wind ripping down the alley at dawn And the morning paper flies Dead man lying by the side of the road With the daylight in his eyes
When I first heard this song (“Don’t let it Bring you Down”), I thought : “What’s with the ‘lorries’ , Neil? I mean you’re a Canadian, living in California, should they not be ‘trucks’?”
A side note: The word ‘lorry’ is a word used in Britain and it comes from the verb “to lurry”, meaning “to pull or drag”.
On reflection:
Of course, if he used “trucks”, it wouldn’t scan, but he could have sang “big trucks rolling by”. However, as we all know, Neil is a poet and the answer lies in his ear, not for music but for the music in language.
Consider the letter ‘L’, it appears in every line of the verse: “old, lying/ lorries, rolling/blue, load/ buildings/ cold, alley/ flies/ lying/ daylight”.
Consider the letter ‘O’ as in assonance, look at its role in the first three lines: “old, road/ lorries, rolling/ moon, load”; its repetition in lines 5, 6, 7: “cold, down/ morning/road”.
Consider the inversion, how the “lor” in ” lorries” becomes the “rol” in “rolling”.
No, “trucks” would just not hack it.
Phew! Glad to get that out of my system, otherwise, after a few pints I might start regaling my wife and two daughters with these insights and have to watch them getting that “beam me up Scotty look in their eyes”.
Photo (by Marie Feeney): Neil and Paul McCartney at Desert Trip 2016.
Taking on Open Link over at dverse. (This is not a poem obviously, but it is about poetry so I hope it fits!)
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?
in the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty
a violent hash smoker shook a chocolate machine
sunshine came softly through my window,
thrown like a star in my vast sleep
I opened my eyes to take a peek.
Yes, I could have tripped out easy
forever to fly, wind velocity nil
but I decided to stay.
(Donovan Phillips Leitch
Superman and Green Lantern
ain’t got nothing on you)
This is a found poem using lines from 5 Donovan songs: Catch the Wind, Sunny Goodge Street, Sunshine Superman, Hurdy Gurdy Man and Mellow Yellow. I’m sure you can figure out which line came from where, but just a note on the second line:
“a violent hash smoker shook a chocolate machine”.
This line is from Sunny Goodge Street and is my favorite Donovan line because of its inherent music –violent, smoker, shook, chocolate, all those o’s, that recurring ‘k’ and the internal rhyme between hash and mash. Say it out loud a couple of times and it will stick in your head!
Sunny Goodge Street appears on Donovan’s second album “Fairytale” and , according to Wikipedia, it “foreshadows the jazzy feel and descriptions of life in urban London that Donovan would continue to explore over the next two years”. There are a few covers out there (Judy Collins and Tom Northcroft), but they are little too earnest and none match the sludgy stoned feel of the original. The recording of the song is almost perfect, except for Harold McNair’s flute solo in the middle which nearly derails the whole thing. Take a listen:
Thanks for Jeff Tweedy Thanks for Annette Bening Thanks for Michael Stipe Thanks for John Lennon.
Thanks for Lucinda Williams Thanks for Jurgen Klopp Thanks for Paul Durcan Thanks for Roger McGough
Thank for Sally Rooney Thanks for Saul Bellow Thanks for T.S. Eliot Thanks for Elvis Costello
Thanks for Billy Collins Thanks for Bob Dylan Thanks for Linda Ronstadt Little Feat and ‘Willin’.
This is an edit of a previous post. The Irish poet, Paul Durcan died on May17 and he gets a mention in this poem along with Roger McGough and TS Eliot.
Paul was a quintessentially Irish poet and yet he was very different from contemporaries like Seamus Heaney in that his poetry was urban rather than rural, and he was witty, fiercely satirical and at times painfully honest about his personal life. He was not afraid to show vulnerability. I’m just now re-reading his collections “Daddy, Daddy” about his fraught relationship with his father and “The Berlin Wall Cafe” about the breakup of his marriage. Both collections are funny, sad and complex and the twin ogres of church and state are there on every page. It does not get more Irish than that! Rest in Peace, Paul!
Stopdraggingthepanda 