Note: The prompt offered on the NaPoWriMo website invited poets to explain obliquely why they are poets and not something else. But I AM something else, so let’s see what happens when I start with that.
These pieces were done by the author on April Third, 2025, at Lively Minds Art Studio.
The Potter’s Progress
Clay speaks to me tactilely/And telepathically
I need form/I need life
Clay chides me here and there
I deserve better/I do not deserve slapdash
Clay on the wheel connects me/With the Spin with which Creation began
That hum you hear is Universal
Clay has her delights and cruelties/And sometimes a will of her own
Stop trying to make a bowl. I do not want to be a bowl. Make me into a bird with four eggs on my back.
Sometimes cleanup is messy./Beware her dust!
Clay urges me to improve./I asked her why she was so demanding.
You know it is not I who demands. It is you yourself.
you sit still/but you also whirling around/the axis of a planet/which whirls around/the center of the sun/which whirls around/a black hole holding a galaxy together/yet you are not dizzy/because it is chiefly velocity at play/and not acceleration
you are calm/but your country has gone sideways/its leaders thieves and liars/its allies antagonized into disbelieving rage/but you are calm/because one of your own battles/is with overwhelmedness/and one of your defense tactics/is compartmentalization
an earth-striking asteroid or a nuclear strike/would be so game-changing/as to end the game
but so far so…uncatastrophic
so far unlikely
.
there is so much inherent sensibility/in laws of motion
so much wonder/that we got a chance to be alive/and to feel
On the NaPoWriMo website the optional prompt is an invitation to base a poem on a term or terms in a glossary of music or art. I have chosen fugue.
Watt: The Fugue
James G. Watt was precursive
Of modern folly’s MAGA
Interior subversive
Exterior oil-gaga.
.
James Watt was an inventor
Helped industry to flower
Steam engines at its centre;
Gave voice to his hoarse power.
.
James Bruce Watt helped found Brewdog,
And after countless rounds,
Earned more than me or you, dog:
He’s worth two million pounds.
.
So here’s to James and James
And BOO to crook James G.
And What the Fugue? Hell’s flames
Are Oil-based, sez me.
.
Note: The glossary I used described a Fugue as having at least two and usually no more than four voices, but not necessarily singing voices. And WTF might stand for any number of things. And the American James G. Watt, Secretary of the Interior during the Readan administration, helped trash the environment with profligate use of federal lands for oil drilling, was fired, became a lobbyist, was indicted for felony perjury, pleaded down to misdemeanor document-withholding, and lived out his last days in Wickenburg, Arizona. And the Scot James Watt helped jump-start the Industrial Revolution with steam engines, and invented the term horsepower; and the Brit James Bruce Watt co-founded BrewDog, a wildly popular string of pubs in Aberdeen and elsewhere, and Wikipedia says his net worth is around £250 million.
brad pitt, andre the giant, walter cronkite,/walter brennan, walter matthau, walter mondale,/gomez addams and cousin itt,/and famed nasa mathematician katherine johnson/all awaken in an enormous chamber.
“a new war is being waged,” says the voice of hal 9000. “a reality war.
“you have been gathered, the living, dead, and fictional,/to keep your reality from being erased.
“your enemy is a phalanx of four hundred zombies./in an hour you will be moved to a battlefield designated the plain of maguffin.
“it is there that you will engage in single combat with the zombies./battle will continue until all of one side or the other/is wiped out.
“the zombies have one weakness./contact with hair or fur or feathers/over at least a third of a zombie’s flesh/causes that zombie to be vaporized/into pure oxygen./but that is their only weakness./they cannot be burned, nor shot, nor blunt-force-traumatized.
“your ideal foot soldier, therefore, is cousin itt./but one of itt is not nearly enough,/and as of now/you don’t have any.”
with those last words cousin itt disappeared.
hal continued, “there is a way to get an army of itts/sufficient to defeat the enemy./you must find a slight variant/of one of the passages in the king james new testament/and with your present personnel/take a simple action that will generate such an army.
“you have fifty-six minutes. good luck.”
brad and all four walters and gomez and andre looked at each other, stunned. but katherine johnson’s brow was furrowed. she was calculating and collating furiously.
suddenly her brow unknit and she smiled.
“Messieurs Brennan, Mondale, Cronkite and Matthau, please gather together.” Startled, they did so.
“mr. andre the giant, please gently pick up mr. brad pitt.” and instantly pitt was in the giant’s arms, dwarfed by andre’s bulk.
“gently as you can, sir, throw mr. pitt at messieurs matthau and cronkite and brennan and mondale. gentlemen, don’t try to catch him, but do try to ease his landing.”
andre tossed pitt at the four, and they managed to break pitt’s fall without injury to any.
gomez suddenly grinned, his pop-eyes gleaming. his zany fictional brain had deduced what would happen.
suddenly the chamber, huge as it was, was crammed with cousin itts.
“what just happened?!” walter cronkite asked katherine johnson.
“mr. cronkite, possibly the worst pun of all time just happened.
“‘cast your brad upon the walters, and itt shall be returned a thousandfold.'”
One with Clay, Image and Text 