Tag Archives: poetry

Party Animal (Slimverse* – The Journey, Episode 2, nostalgia for simpler times)

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Party Animal

in he walks
like a bull
checking out
a paddock

the air shifts
nervously
eyes lower
bells jangle

Back when times were simpler…..

(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.

(*Slimverse – four 3 syllable lines)

Two Robots in a Rowboat

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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.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse

Neil Young and The Chrome Hearts at Deer Lake Park

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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”

and he hasn’t burnt out,

he hasn’t faded away.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse

(not sure if this qualifies as a poem, a haibun maybe?)

Getsemani

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Getsemani

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.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse

Image is photo of Graffiti, in Getsemani, Cartagena, Colombia.

Three Poems Published in The Galway Review (Pandemic Postcards)

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Thank you to the editors at The Galway Review for publishing three of my poems: Pandemic Postcards, Whistler – The Morning After and Gibson’s Landing (Summer 2021).

You can read them here!

Bonus Postcard……

Backyard Wedding by the Fraser River
tug boats and log booms
a band playing soul
the sweet, sweet smell of Purell
guests on Zoom.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse

Marina

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Marina

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.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.

Halibuns (Haibuns) and Photo of a Hummingbird

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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!

By the way is it “halibun” or “haibun” or both?

Taking part in open link over at dverse.

Neil Young and those “lorries rolling by”

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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!)

Vapid Magazine : A Personal Note ( from current editor, Jonathan Shallowpond)

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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?

at night
basement drafts
drumkit cymbals tinkle

Keeping it Vapid!
Jonathan Shallowpond

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.

Shooglenifty and the Canadian Snowbirds at the Vancouver Folk Festival (2025)

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Shooglenifty and the Canadian Snowbirds at the Vancouver Folk Festival (2025)

Shooglenifty are skipping the light Celtastic
On the main stage Saturday night
Jigs and reels
Jigs and reels

The Canadian Snowbirds roar overhead
And the band plays on
Peace, love and jet planes
Contrails in the sky.

Sunshine on Goodge Street (Donovan mash up edit)

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Sunshine On Goodge Street (Donovan mash-up)

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 Paul Durcan)

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Thanks

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!

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.

Tales from the Gym (I love the smell of nostalgia in the morning)

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And your gravity fails and negativity don’t pull you through….Bob Dylan

Know your gym……Slim Volume

Gravity, Don’t Fail Me Now

two geezers
pink and steaming
towelling down
after a shower
discussing gravity
how it is not fixed
how it decreases
with distance from the earth’s core
how, if one was to climb to the top of Everest,
since weight is the product of mass and gravity
one would weigh less at the top of Everest
and Slim’s thinking
this is one fucking erudite conversation
and he wants a piece of it
so he points out that
one would regain that weight
on returning to sea level
and one of the geezers replies
yeah but you’d probably burn 10,000 calories
climbing up and down the fucking mountain
and a nearby jock encased in breathable fabric
says shit, I’d burn that in 40 minutes on the rowing machine
and Slim fires back wryly
keep telling yourself that
and the locker room erupts in laughter
and in that moment
basking in the unbearable lightness of banter
Slim defies gravity and levitates
above the bacterial swamp
that is the locker room floor.

“A man who is tired of the gym, is a man who has been to the gym”. Slim Volume

Two Bros

Two bros on a mat
one on his back
hands clasped behind his head
legs bicycling like a capsized fly;
the other,
the one with the green hair
and the tattoos of a religious nature
is grunting weights .
Fly bro, it appears,
is having girlfriend problems
and is experiencing
some kind of vague existential crisis,
green hair bro listens carefully to his tale of woe
and after some reflection says:
It’s life, man,
stop trying to understand it,
no one can
and then, as if startled by his own profundity,
he repeats: no one can.
Out of the mouths of bros….

in the background a bearded jock
in a tight black T shirt
his muscles packed with powdered whey
his eyes a steroid yellow
is down on his hunkers
knees akimbo
moving sideways
across the  floor
like a slow motion crab
across packed sand at evening.

Go Fly a Kite (The Loin King))

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Go Fly a Kite

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.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse.