I sort of went Medieval with my chess-piece sculpting today, with a dim echo of the little I know of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales informing my tool-wielding hands.
pursuant to not going gentle, nor gently,
nor genially into that goodbadindifferent night,
i challenge and chivvy my sulky brain
to produce, which is why you are reading this.
.
it had been a long day.
i told my brain we needed a new poem, pronto.
my brain said, “i got nothin.'”
“that is a lot of hooey,” i shot back,
“you got plenty,
but you are lazy
and I shall have to wring you out.”
i reached into my head
with my third and imaginational hand
and single-handedly pulled my brain
[popping sound]
out of my head,
held its spongy form before my eyes,
and squeezed.
.
a few droplets–
cherry gumdrop-flavored teardrop-shaped droplets–
oozed from my brain and I shook them free,
compelling them to hang suspended
and reveal their contents
when touched.
.
i touched the leftmost cherry teardrop
and it said in a chimy voice
desire and reluctance
conduct civil war. the trick will be to write that one
without revealing whom you desire.
i touched another.
get inside the head of an ICE recruit.
another.
a wave slaps the viewpoint character in the face
and she gets cold saltwater in her nose
and she cries saltwater, becoming daughter and mother to the sea.
i stuff my brain back into my head.
i drink the cherry teardrops.
I stop writing for now.
Menagerie
Making friends again with clay
Efferversced your mood today
Notwithstanding sky-so-gray–
Amplified that riff-strewn sound;
Gotten butterflies astound
Everyone with what you’ve found.
Raise a glass to absent friends.
Iridescent dusk descends
East to west where rainbow wends.
1. Rig
In order to be a functional professional tomato slicer
You need a pair of slip-resistant shoes
You need an apron
You need a hairnet (plus a beardnet if your facial hair exceeds 1/8″)
You need six gloves, and each hand must wear a glove sandwich of vinyl glove, mesh-cloth cut-resistant gloves, vinyl glove (nitrile gloves may be used instead of vinyl if there is an allergy)
You need protective sleeves on your arms
A compliant work uniform
A large container to throw tomato scrap in for possible use as salsa ingredients
A sheet tray (layman’s “cookie sheet”) or the lid to an XXL container to rest the hand-operated tomato slicer on that will keep tomato juices and seeds from making a mess on your station’s work surface
Product trays to put the sliced tomatoes in
A roll of 12″ plastic film in a box with a built-in cutter to wrap the tomato trays in
Labels that accurately describe net tomato weight, creation date, use by date, and description (“Sliced Tomatoes”) to affix to the plastic film after wrapping
And you will need two tomato slicers,
One of which is yourself
.
2. Ma
I never called my late ma Ma
Nor even called her Mother
But since our time is limited
I call my brother Brother.
.
3. Role
Today I have been a sleeper, an alarmist, a driver, an idler, an employee, a tomato slicer, a diner, a puzzle solver, a correspondent, a customer, a distant admirer, a fertilizer manufacturer, and a poet. The last two roles are not mutually exclusive.
Chess Queen & King
Choose quickly be brisk &
Have uncials no-risk
Entreaties slice pi
So genies benign
Slide nonesuches; sing
Betty Bacall won Bogart’s heart
Bette Davis was Baby Jane
And Bettie Page; ah, she was naughty and smart
Turned bondage to Craft and fetish to Art
But all three had knocked over an applecart
For delectation and gain
All are gone but all remain.
.
Ted Williams Ted Danson Ted Kennedy too
One hit one kept bar one made scandal
One demonstrates what might testosterone do
When a man burns the hedonist’s candle
One went out a slugger one’s still in the mix
One hung in and passed legislation to fix
The wrongs of the right with their stones and their sticks
So it goes as new parents will dandle
All the babes bills and bliss they can handle.
a shoebox contains what was on the dining room table in a year-plus accumulation
not the bottle caps nor burrito wrappers nor anything else that would be considered “trash”
rather the shoebox contains what might be a regrettable loss if discarded
there are many business cards with appointment reminders and receipts and addresses of good friends and incomplete poems and illustrations on index cards
and the owner of the dining room table, the sole resident of the apartment, applauds this baby step towards a sane conductance of his daily life
but knows he has merely checked in at base camp for a climb of mount kilimanjaro
but it’s something
the tilt of a bottle induces flow
a crash clogs traffic
a good credit score greases transactional wheels
some capillaries are so small the corpuscles are in single file
ella fitzgerald
Awe Inspired Fun
As divers from the sky fall to the earth
With flying-squirrel tech and Plan B chutes
Engaged is one on guessing her net worth
Involved’s the other, flexing lats and glutes.
Now cliffsides peel away and greenswards beckon
Santana riffs and Dylan lyrics meld
Puréed epiphanies lend sense to reckon
Intrinsic navigation of the veld.
Released by ripcord pulls, the chutes unfurl
Engendering the braking of the falls;
Delivering safe-passaged boy and girl,
For yet another ride unbound by walls.
Umbrellas, canopies and awns are things
Now alchemised to take the form of Wings.
in these climatically incendiary times
and in this dutch oven we call the valley of the sun
the weather guy on kjzz referred to the temperature range for the next few days as “in the one-teens”
meaning between 113 and 119 degrees fahrenheit
.
the jackass in the white house talks of buying “or annexing” greenland
were i a conspiracy theorist i would say that his climate change denial plus his collusion with the petrochemical predators in fucking up the environment were part of his sinister plan to make greenland one of the only inhabitable places on earth
so that with “annexation” (rape with violence) he would consummate the biggest real estate deal of all time
while simultaneously extending the trail of tears into the 21st century and into the arctic circle
since approximately 89% of greenland’s population is indigenous greenlandic inuit
.
but i am not a conspiracy theorist
drop a syllable and i become a piracy theorist
and my theory, backed by circumstantial evidence of the long history of theft and fraud and pillage perpetrated throughout his career
is that donald trump is a pirate of the worst sort
of the same ilk as spiro t. agnew and Bluebeard
and he’s given this country a jolly rogering since day 1 of term 1
and should be made not to walk the plank
but to walk a mile at high noon here in phoenix
wearing speedos and flipflops
with the temperature in the one-teens
One with Clay, Image and Text 