You see, WTF stands for something else as well…
Here are the words to the acrostic:
Wagon trains of happenstance’ll roll your spliff
WIN the Lottery & die: A lucky stiff
Willful resurrection takes us past Hell’s cliff
Soooo–WTF is Willful Resurrection? Ending a major bad habit and starting a major new habit is one example. If we manage it, we are reborn.
My daughter Kate, bless her born-in-the-90s heart, is polytheistic. She acknowledges the existence of David Bowie and Eric Clapton, and she acknowledges that both are God. So when I started sketching Mr Clapton, I naturally thought of her, and I chose an acrostic I thought she’d like.
Here are the words:
Elect acoustic, they say ‘G
Enter unplugg’d ecstasy–O
Excellence in modal D’
Even-handed normal C
Riffs that Weep & Seep & Wail
Reggaed sheriff rockful Layla
It’s a slow hand yet with pep
Indicates a Badge is kept
Cream, Blind Faith & Domino
Calypsodic Wisdom’s sown
Alas, as the gender-biased Bible has it, Man born of woman is born to trouble, as surely as the sparks fly upward. And humans are born with an acquisitive urge. See a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck. But a Birdie? We want to pick it up, to take it away from its harmony and minding-its-own-business life, to HAVE it, because we are predatory and foolish.
Here are the words to the acrostic:
Blimey ‘n’ sis boom Ah
It pays to be snatchy–tra la
Raddled, the Budgie’s o’erdrawn
Do let’s consider what’s SPAWN’D
I grew up in Glendale, Arizona. During my entire childhood I only went to church, any church, about a dozen times. Yet the Southwestern American ambiance filled my head with certain Christian-based religious notions, including that of angels and devils. I regret not being a sufficient world citizen to be as familiar with other beliefs. I’d love to be able to do an equivalent of the above page with, say, ringing-true Hindu archetypes, for instance. We’re all stuck with our upbringings, even if we renounce the ideas behind them.
In the illustration accompanying the poem, Mister Devil is poking at Mister Angel with his trident and tauntingly asking, “Who’s your DADDY?” Mister Angel replies, “Well, I’ll be Damned–YOU are.” My notion is that Lucifer, eons ago, sowed some wild ectoplasm; further, celestial beings can access all their eons-long memory perfectly, but there may be a bit of lag time. So Mister Angel cast his memory back to when he was an angel-pup and found that the Devil himself had sired him.
If you think that’s far-fetched, it’s not even close to the weirdest of the “facts” about angels and devils. Just ask Jacob, first member of the WWF–or was it his opponent?
Here are the words:
BAD-MOUTHING is Alive–indeed a
Euphemism NEEDS a feeder
DRAINAGE dries a cul-de-sac
Emptiness lacks Bacharach
Visiting the pic’d Corrida
Ink and haemoglobin lead-in
Leave your heart at home if bleeding
Emphasis beyond the pale
Douses HOPE; delivers NAIL
On the first of June I sat looking for the last time out the garage door of a place I and my girlfriend had lived for the better part of a year (she for the better part of two). I started this page there. I finished it just now, June 13th, 2013–so under my signature I effaced the “1” of “1 June 2013” so that it is now “June 2013.”
There is a poignance to moving away from a nice place. It is gently heartbreaking.
Here’s the words:
Wise folk: always packing, says the guru who says Om
Evangelics: benedictively will pray-to-go
Sometimes: matters clarify with change of P.O.V
Optimist: Excelsior! The Realist: we’ll see
What does Disaffected mean? Resentful of authority. Rebellious.
What does disaffectedness have to do with these three pages? It’s subtle. Chairs can be tyrannical, yet if they’re “perfectly good” we balk at spending money for a new one. The sketch of indigenous lifeforms came to be when my supervisor at work suggested I design a mural for the dining room, based on the local flora and fauna; I’m flexing compositional wings to produce good reporting of such while at the same time using inset spots and some text to make it not just any mural, but mine. As for the t.e.n.m.i.n.u.t.e.p.ag.e, I’m rebelling against my own compulsivity–I wanted to get the page done quickly and get on with my life. (It took more than twenty minutes to do the ten minute page, though. Irony writeoff, anyone?)
CHAIR TAKER words, correcting two spelling quirks:
Cushioned comfort is a much-sought treat
Heaven-set as crackers & Velveeta
Appetizing as a charry steak
Itch-reducing as a backscratch rake
Relaxation & recumbance near
Renovate your cubicled career
And here is the other set of words:
the art critic’s cosmic untruth doth drip
then random tenebration makes him mutter & flip
his trouble: being Heinlein’s Jonathan Hoag
enduring mortal manhood when forever is in vogue
Here are the words to the triple acrostic:
Form a talc & mortar marvel; that’s your métier
Raise a fine calzone structure heedless of feng shui
Amortize a LOAN for each divinely feathered wing
Notify the press it’s fit for Smith or Jones or Singh
Kaftanesque design may suit a form & function best!
Kool-Aid’s never to be had at Taliesen West!
Today I finished an abstract doodle with poetry and some coherent image. Here are the words:
Recurrence to motifs refer
Add frankincense and then de-myrrh
Note, Samson, how reliably
Delilah cranks your Model T
O sure as Hm is spell’d H
M Your actions will from that place stem
(Hm really is spell’d H-M, just like Sh is spelled S-H. This is an example of how, to make the acrostic fit AND rhyme, you have to go to the extreme of ending the line on the next line, which sounds impossible, but that’s what they said about the square root of negative one, about which, see one of my previous posts; sorry, its title escapes me.)
I am throwing in my Patrick Swayze portrait in remembrance of the late, great Roger Ebert, who years ago saw fit to bring it to the attention of his Twitter followers, bless him.
For a creative AND compulsive person, Prolificity is a real Monkey on the Back. Lately, with moving and full-time nightwork and a now-long commute, my Monkey is an unwelcome screecher of a creature. He screeches THE SHOW MUST GO ON! and YOU’VE VIOLATED THE EVERY-SINGLE-DAY COVENANT! YOU DON’T DESERVE TO LIVE! and batters my unbettered psyche.
Well, screw The Monkey. It is not an all-or-nothing world. I am happily romantically involved, gainfully employed, and I just became un-uninsured, so mostly things are sunny. (Still, it bugs me when an every-day streak ends.)
“Quasimodo” can be translated to mean “not completely formed,” and all of the images I offer on this post are such. Peter Lorre always seemed to me a quasi-Quasimodo, so this incomplete page of him–in glorious black and white, like the best of his movies–suits the theme exspecially well.
Doodles are almost always Quasimodos: we ever know when to stop. But hey, you fellow doodlers out there: a well-spent doodling hour can happen if you have a timer go off every five minutes or so, and you scan the doodle in its current state, and then continue. At the end of the hour, look at the scans in sequence, and you’ll feel like you’ve created something that’s Alive. You can also print the best of them and doodle yourself a new tangent. Warning, though: you have better things to do than doodle, and this can turn into a real time-suck if you get hooked.
Here’s something I did with my French Canadian friend Michel Lamontagne in mind. I’m hoping he’ll look at it and want to finish it. His mind is agile, and his image-sense startling.
Here are the words to “Secret Socket.”
Select eclectic trends if apropos
Elect electric-haired politico
Contort & make a body twitch & tic
Resort to form you rock with single click
Each win will amp the voltage that you mete
Teach Sinless Pride and Life just can’t be beat
One with Clay, Image and Text 