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
I
Todd’s time machine
has three settings:
time was
time is
time will be.
II
Sometimes
the time travel sickness
hits him
like a five alarm flu.
III
Returning through the time hail,
through the accelerating centuries
he hears his wife yell
from the ever present
from the basement stairs: I’m turning off that bloody time machine your dinner’s getting cold!
This was originally written as a response to a dVerse prompt “Time and What if”.
Early December, downtown Vancouver and it’s raining more than the usual cats and dogs, it feels like the city is trapped in a giant car wash.
All year long the weather has been acting like a child that hasn’t been taught limits.
Three months of summer drought.
We woke up one morning and white ash from forest fires covered the deck, and that evening down on the beach we were treated to a red ball sunset worthy of Beijing or Mumbai. The Indian guy in the coffee shop told me it made him feel homesick.
Something’s happening to the frogs.
The Oregon spotted frog is Canada’s most threatened amphibian, I saw that on TV program called “Canada’s Most Threatened Amphibians”. Also threatened is the northern leopard frog.
Sea stars have sea star wasting syndrome
We’re losing song birds, bats and bees
The world is an orchestra and the string section is leaving one by one.
Anthropocene Anthropocene Sixth Extinction, soon there will only be us.
****** At the corner of Georgia and Granville a pigeon waddles through a puddle created by a blocked storm drain
and I’m thinking: Who’d be a pigeon on a day like this? Who’d be a pigeon at a time like this?
I have always thought that Eve ate the apple because she was bored out of her tree which is not to imply that Eve lived in a tree it’s just an expression nor do I mean to imply that boredom is a feminine condition no far from it far from it but let’s face it Adam seems more than a little boring as does, let’s be honest, Paradise as a kid that was what I thought nothing much happening trees and fruit trees and fruit a serpent a bored Eve and hapless Adam and as we all know boredom is the mother of destruction just hand an empty glass bottle to three ten year old boys on a stony beach on a wet day.
Brendan over at earthweal asks us to write about beginnings.
Today I thought about Reince Priebus
not so much the man,
more the strange music of his name;
those slender vowels reversing
that echo of wince
the possible meanings
a salve, an ointment put some Reince on that cut, son;
the Latinate portliness of Priebus
a writ to slap someone with – Habeas Priebus
a complicated skateboard manoeuvre he executed a perfect reverse Priebus;
then I thought of Anthony, dear Anthony, Scaramucci, Scaramucci will you do the fandango,
you were not long with us
but still the smell of aftershave lingers
and it was you who let us know
about Steve Bannon’s auto fellatio,
alas, poor Steve
abandoned on the side of the road
like a rumpled sofa
a rumpled sofa smelling of yesterday’s sweat
and stale doctrine;
and what about Spicer and Huckabee
cartoon characters
Plucky and Angry
your souls will be in the repair shop
for some time to come.
They appear in waves,
the arrested –
Flynn, Cohen and Stone,
the ones who once were serious people –
McMaster, Kelly, Bolton.
In years to come when men and women gather
to talk of greatness
your names will be long forgotten.
The list of the fallen goes on and on
and still Humpty continues his slow and tortuous fall.
Flashback to 2021 Cop Out at Cop26 Coal will be phased down but not phased out Down But Not Out
Semantic Antics
This late amendment was tabled by the USA, China and India but India took most of the flak.
India’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are far lower than USA or China.
Canada’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are higher than USA or China
But this is not a competition anyone wants to win.
Juxtaposition This is not a poem.
November 12 Toxic air enveloped Delhi making it the second most polluted city in the world. According to 2020 average data Hotan, China is the worst Delhi is the 10th so Delhi was having a bad day 50 percent of the pollution comes from vehicles. If you go down the list you have to get past the 200th most polluted city to get out of India and China.
Juxtaposition This is not a poem
The prosperity of the west was built on fossil fuels.
Carbon dioxide emissions are a subset of pollution
Pollution covers a multitude.
Imagine the human experiment as a black box emitting carbon dioxide. Reducing those emissions requires a collective approach. Is the human experiment capable of a collective approach. So far not so much.
Juxtaposition This is not a poem
four years after the Great Smog of London the Clean Air Act of 1956 prohibited the burning of coal in homes change can happen
juxtaposition we are beside ourselves
we have been burning fossil fuel to stay warm since the cave old habits die hard
we need speed bumps not fist bumps we need idealism and pragmatism we need strategy
For your challenge: Express your thoughts and feelings about how humankind has brought Mother Earth to this critical point in time, and what you think and feel about where we go from here
Slim plugs in his guitar
sets the dial on his amp
to “heavy metal”
hits an E minor seven
walks out of the room
makes a cup of coffee
drinks a cup of coffee
checks the football results
texts his brother in England: what’s up, mate?
his brother doesn’t answer
he starts writing a novel: The sun – a red ball of anger on the horizon – shouts through the brown chemical haze: “that’s it, I’m outta here”. Then, and only then, they hear a baby cry.
That’s all he’s got
He returns to the room
that E minor seven
is still going
but faint now
like a rustle of paper
like the distant chatter
of dead drummers
in heavy metal heaven
he picks up his guitar
hits an A minor seven
walks out of the room
starts his taxes……
Having a coffee And reading Tom Wolfe On Chomsky in Harper’s Riding the express train of his prose As he hurtles through Chomsky’s early life Circling back all the time to linguists in the jungle Linguists in the jungle some where Until finally he pulls his linguist out of the jungle To attack Chomsky’s theories of Universal grammar and Recursion With news of the Piraha tribe in Brazil Who have no time for Jesus or Crooked Head tales And no concept of the future or the past There is only today and the other day And together they conspire To chew up Chomsky and spit him out.
The theme for this week over at earthweal is “Wild Language”
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.
In his new television series Foraging with Farage
coming soon to The Bollocks Network
Nigel laments
the influx of foreign fungi
to the hallowed fields and forests
of the Kingdom By The Sea
and the subsequent decline
of the Great English Mushroom.
In the final episode,
under the influence of psilocybin
Nigel takes a walk in the forest
and encounters a naked Boris Johnson
sitting on a giant toad stool
in a sunlit glade. Boris, Nigel exclaims,
full of chagrin
and psilocybin, I thought you were a natural blonde! Has it all been a lie? This is dream sequence, you fool,
Boris replies The writers have run out of ideas.
He then tumbles off the toad stool
and bounds on all fours into the forest.
I tell you folks
if you miss one television series this year
make sure it’s this one.
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!
that guy in front of you walking slow getting in the way of where you want to go give him time, give him space, leave him alone he’s just another geezer looking for photos on his phone.
A low metronomic plash waves flat-lining on the shore sailboats tacking kayakers kayaking, someone talking loudly about the cost of child care, two blankets down. It’s Father’s day and all the dads and kids are out throwing ball, kicking ball building elaborate castles in the sand and they are not alone, the ghosts of fathers passed are here too, including my own; pale-bodied, they roam the beach wearing old-fashioned swim trunks, grinning widely at the continuum of dads, kids, sun, sand and sea.