He weighs about 300 lbs is wearing a cowboy hat and an XXXL tee-shirt, made by an underpaid worker in a communist country.
This paragon of rugged individualism this zaftig freedom fighter this ersatz John Wayne is telling the interviewer he doesn’t believe in vaccination passports
because, you know, I mean it’s a threat to our personal freedom if we go down that road what’s next
and I’m thinking yes there are slopes out there and yes they are slippery what next indeed… driver’s licenses birth certificates visas to enter countries security checks in airports customs concealed weapons licenses
but most of all I’m thinking God help the horse God help the horse.
Taking part in Open Link Weekend over at earthweal
I’m standing in the liquor store staring at a bottle of Pinot Grigio when Wild Thing by the Troggs comes on the store speakers and I’m thinking, to quote Leonard, that song is a shining artifact of the past and just as I’m thinking that one of the Troggs launches into a bizarre ocarina solo and I turn around to find myself face to face with a large blue and yellow parrot perched on the leather-gloved hand of a lady who has seen hippier times never at a loss for words, I say, “that’s a nice parrot” and the lady says “I have three more at home one of them is a real man-hater but this one here is my favowite he’s a vewy, vewy, vewy nice pawwot” she says, nuzzling the parrot, nose to beak the parrot inflates its technicolor plumage let’s out an almighty squawk and displays its full wing span and I’m thinking “Wow, there’s a ocarina solo in the middle of Wild Thing, who’s that on ocarina I think it’s the lead singer what was his name, Reg Presley, I think, yeah, that’s it Reg Presley.”
This first appeared in Open Link Weekend over at earthweal.
The other day I came across the word ‘runcible’ as in ‘runcible spoon’.
The word was invented by Edward Lear as in ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’.
There is something risible about the word ‘runcible’ as in ‘laughter provoking’ which is different than ‘laughable’, ‘laughable’ has connotations of contempt as in ‘derisible’ meaning ‘worthy of derision’, ‘derisible’ is almost an anagram of ‘desirable’ but back to ‘runcible’, there is a great bounce, a great versatility to the word:
he walked out the morning after humming a runcible tune
he had a runcible air about him an odour that lingered long after he had left the room.
the sun rose, red and runcible in a diffident sky
I once spent the best part of six hour plane journey trying to describe the sunrise. There was no inflight entertainment, I could have used the downloadable app but I couldn’t imagine watching out of date Jason Bateman movies for 6 hours on my phone, so I had picked up a Craig Johnson novel, The Cold Dish, to get me through the flight. This is the first novel in the Walt Longmire series. Walt is a sheriff in modern day Absaroka County, Wyoming. His wife has been dead 4 years and his life is a bit of a mess but there are various people looking out for him including his best friend, Henry Standing Bear. I know what you are thinking – an American law man with a Native American sidekick!! Anyway Craig Johnson navigates this well enough. There are a number of women in Walt’s life, including his daughter Cady, his dispatcher Ruby, a café owner Dorothy, Vic –his deputy, and Vonnie – a romantic interest. Vonnie is rich, beautiful, and troubled. They are all strong women and they don’t take no shit from Walt. Walt is at Henry’s bar talking to Vonnie when he gets a call from Vic that a body has been found in a gulley up in the mountains. Walt heads to the scene, the body is hard to get at and the crime scene is complicated by the fact that a herd of sheep has surrounded the body, shat upon it and chewed at the clothes. The body turns out to be Cody Pritchard, a local boy who was involved in the rape of a girl from the reservation and got off lightly. It’s early morning by the time the crime scene has been secured and there is this moment after a long night where Walt, the narrator, says : “I gazed back up to the patch of sage and scrub weed and watched the sun free itself from the red hills”. This is what amazes me about novelists, they have to handle character, plot, dialogue and create a world for characters to inhabit, for events to occur and they still find time to come up with lines like I have just quoted. So that was it for me, I spent the rest of the flight trying to come up with different ways to describe the sunrise.
As for the book, it’s well worth a read. Craig Johnson creates believable characters, characters to care about, to root for and the whole thing meanders along laconically with lots of witty banter and joshing – the kind of joshing you would find in a small town cafe at 10 in the morning, one of those cafes with gingham tables and a robust waitress with chemically damaged hair who won’t take any shit from the bunch of plaid shirted retired guys who turn up every morning to shoot the breeze.
the sun rose, red and runcible in a diffident sky .
Taking part in Open Link Weekend over at earthweal
Write a dream poem using its language and rhetoric and dark sense. What moony light does it cast on the day? If you care, add to the poem or a note with any associations from waking life that the dream seems to be commenting on. If the dream is your unconscious speaking to you, what is it trying to help your waking writing mind to see?
My sister died recently after a very short illness. She was the eldest, there are six of us. I had the dream described in the above poem around the time she died. A family , particularly a large family is, in some ways, a collection of vantage points and we lost our top vantage point, the one who had seen it all. Now five seems like a very small number.
They’re taking photographs down by the water in front of the cubist whale float planes take off from the harbor the mountains slumber in the morning haze.
Inside the convention center paragraphs of opaque prose attempt to describe the genius of Vincent, Vincent van Gogh.
But if painting is the medium there is no need for go-betweens it’s all there on the canvas the painting is what the painting seems.
That poetic hum your ear always on the alert for the cadence in the everyday, that unconscious internal rhyme there’s a barber shop on Dunbar Street; or that line that requires a non sequitur she was a woman before her time and you say to everyone’s irritation in a town lost to time. Then when you find that seed that germ of a poem you are lost to all around – family, colleagues, friends your head in the clouds; and when you poke your head through the accumulated cumulus you come face to face with another poet who says that last line’s a bugger, eh? and you say it most certainly is it most certainly is.
Outside the Gates of Hades sits a cross-eyed toad beside a burnt-out serpent a broker and a phone.
Outside the Gates of Heaven sits an angel in disguise beside a corpulent bishop with ecstasy in his eyes
and the sign on the gate says:
Closed for Renovation no judgement today if you’re looking for accommodation clear off, go away.
God is on vacation taking a well-earned break there’s only so much suffering one true God can take
So, get your ass back down there be good to everyone drink lots of water and try to get along.
Brendan’s challenge this week over at Earthweal is to write of a voyage to the Otherworld. As he explains:
I have used the medium of Irish myth, but voyages to the Otherworld are universal. Journey there this week from inside your own story-cycle, and report on the news you find there.
I was born and educated in Ireland and that education did cover Irish (pagan/Christian) myths and legends but the dominant Otherworlds by that point had become Heaven and the everlasting fire of Hell. Irish Catholicism is indeed a rough beast . Somewhere in between these poles, the minor worlds of Purgatory and Limbo floated. So when I read Brendan’s quote I thought of this poem (previously posted)
Note on the title:
Thispoem title came about because, for a brief period, I was listening to prog metal. Brief because, like all things prog, the talent rarely matches the ambition, the concepts. An exception would be Pink Floyd ( Piper at the Gates of Dawn) who were a progressive band but they were successful because they could write songs and had one of the best lyricists in rock, the concepts were secondary. Prog metal players, from what I can tell , are accomplished musicians – the guitarists can play at incredible speeds and the drummers sound like they are descended from the octopus but the lyrics are banal at best and the melodies vestigial. The album titles, though, are always interesting and that’s where this poem started – I was playing around with making up titles for prog metal concept albums…the poem evolved from there.
The sun with rare generosity
beats down on the solar panels
on the roof of Vincent’s log cabin.
The first sentence of his organic novel
–The abattoir, for once, was silent –
sits alone on his laptop screen.
This is the seed from which will spring
plot, character, content.
He gets up, walks out through the kitchen door
through the tortured arch of his driftwood arbor
and into the vegetable garden
where he urinates in a jagged arc
sprinkling life-giving nutrients
on the unsuspecting butter lettuce.
Returning to his desk
he taps out another sentence: With his mother’s mop, he wipes the blood from the kitchen floor.
Why so morbid?
It’s warm, he’s feeling drowsy,
he detects a faint signal from a long-dormant source
like the distant ping from a submarine
at the bottom of the ocean.
He should invite someone for dinner,
the lady who sells jam at the Saturday market, perhaps,
or the angry sculptress – she of the tangled hair,
the scrap metal raptors, the acetylene scent.
The jam lady it is.
Bottle of wine from the retired lawyer’s vineyard,
salmon from the gnarled fishermen down at the dock,
try a little humor,
ask her if raspberry jam is a male preserve,
make a nice salad. What’s the worst that could happen?
Last night it teemed with rain, now the garden fence steams in the morning sun.
That fence has been there oscillating between disrepair and repair since we moved in.
The posts are the weak points, when you dig down the ground teems with wood bugs and weevils gorging on that succulent cedar.
The garden shed is also cedar. One summer, a family of skunks made their home underneath it. They would regularly strut across the lawn in single file father, mother and two young skunks tails cocked, sphincters primed afraid of nothing or no one. I wrote a haiku about them and then when they were no longer of literary value I spread moth balls all around the entrance to their hole, an internet remedy which did not work. It’s a tad quixotic or ironic or both, isn’t it, trying to use smell to get rid of skunks.
All that summer as we sat drinking on the deck and the evening sun warmed the cedar shed, the odour of skunk and moth balls that naphthalene-mercaptan cocktail would hit us in gusts, in waves like halitosis at a party and inevitably, invariably I would turn to anyone within boring distance and say, as our noses twitched in disgust, “Isn’t nature marvelous? Isn’t nature marvelous?”
This poem was originally inspired by a prompt from Brendan over at earthweal, see below. The theme today over at dverse, courtesy of Claudia is:
“Write about your own, your neighbour’s or your city’s garden – or one that only exists inyour imagination. Write about harvest, growth, decay – where ever the word “garden” takes you.“
So I thought I would give the poem another outing!
The prompt from Brendan over at earthweal was this:
“For this week’s challenge, TEEM. Write a poem that introduces the reader to the environment you live in –a landscape shaped by time with a culturally diverse ecosystem (with human, animal and non-animal elements). Widen the focus, deepen the gaze and green the voice. “
The great TS Eliot once wrote:”April is the cruelest month”. I’m not one to make facile connections but April is also National Poetry Writing Month or NaPoWriMo which is about as un-poetic as an acronym can get and now….
poets are dutifully posting a poem a day the blogosphere is loud with words like babble, ripple, burble, unfurl glow, glitter, shine, glisten winds are blowing suns are setting dawns are breaking waves are crashing on every available shore and birds, yes, birds are chirping, trilling, twittering, even singing, nature is under siege; but I have to admit I’m not up to it I don’t have the diligence, the discipline the creative bandwidth besides it’s the second day of April and I’m one day behind already nothing constipates a poet like a deadline.
Versions of this poem appear every year around this time
dogs and trees dogs and trees free jazz, jazz for free, the
bass player leans like a drunk around a lamp post.
After hearing this one, I asked Slim if he found this verse form, this 3 syllable line too confining. Did he not want to escape its shackles and roam free, go for 5, 6 syllables or even stretch a line across the width of the page. “Au contraire”, he said. He actually said that, “au contraire”, which I thought was a bit effete, a bit foppish for a bald guy of his heft, his corpulence.
“Au contraire, in fact I find it liberating to escape the tyranny of free verse, the endless decisions – upper case, lower case, line length, is it really a poem or is it just chopped up prose, if I am writing a poem about a flower, should the poem be in the shape of a flower, should I rhyme or not rhyme, what is doggerel anyway? This is like fundamentalism, religion, the boundaries are clearly defined, this far and no further, you have 12 syllables per verse, make the best of it!”
Well, that answer was a bit more than I needed or wanted, if I owned a watch I would have been looking at it.
“Got to go, Slim” I said.
“Hang on” he said, “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, out on
a rain swept pier, a lone tourist bends to the wind.”
Bono, Paul name those streets it’s time it’s time.
Mr. Joyce, James yes, that sea still tightens the scrotum.
Mr. Beckett, Sam we’re waiting we’re waiting we’re waiting
Mr. O’Brien, Flann, Myles of the Little Horses this is not about a bicycle. My dad once told me you were a regular on the last bus out of the city, heading home to Booterstown langered, stotious, three sheets to the wind whether this was an observation or a judgement or an exaggeration I could never quite figure but if you should meet my dad in that section of heaven reserved for former residents of South Dublin please say hi from me and I hope it’s always late June up there and the evening is stretching its legs and the light is like filtered longing.
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.
When apes start coughing what are sperm telling us? Must we dance on Rush Limbaugh’s grave? Seeking distraction, we chose dragons you’re not too old for picture books.
All the above lines (including the title) were headlines in the New York Times Sunday Review, February 21, 2021
(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, halibuns, 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.
Stopdraggingthepanda 