I hadn’t done an acrostic poem in a long time, so when I unearthed an old sketchbook with the beginnings of an acrostic page on it, I wondered if I still had the knack. So I spent the last hour filling the space between PASTE and BOARD, Putting images in the cards I’d drawn in 2023, and signing, dating and photo editing the page.
It rhymes, it scans metrically, but it is vague near-gibberish–OR it is the bare bones of an ingenious Murder Mystery that the reader is invited to concoct. Time will tell. 🙂
Soon I will move from Phoenix, Arizona to Toledo, Ohio. I want to have all my wordly possessions reduced to what I can fit into my 2023 Kia Soul, with my sweetheart and future cohabitant Donna in the passenger seat.
The problem: I have dozens of ceramic works, and eight cases of comic books. The comic books alone would take up most of the cargo space in my vehicle. Same with the ceramics.
The strategy: I will donate all but a very few of the comic books to Friends of the Phoenix Public Library. I will pack up the ceramics and take what I can. The rest I will preserve in two dimensions, digitally…and abandon.
An ancient proverb goes something like “In the course of a long lifetime, a wise man must be prepared to abandon his baggage several times.” This is one such time.
It is June 22, 2026. Eight days from now I will leave Phoenix with a car full of my possessions. I have decided to take at most a dozen of my ceramic works.
This a table of about half of my ceramic works. The more to the left you look, the more likely it is that a given piece will end up in the dumpster.
It is no tragedy. Most of the pieces were done in haste and are consequently flawed; and this photo preserves the ideas behind the pieces. If I do a “remake” of a piece, it is guaranteed to be better than the original.
It tickles me to think that an archeologist of the future might find my work in a landfill.
As the proverb has it, “In the course of a long lifetime a wise man will find it necessary to abandon his baggage several times.”
The Crack in the Sidewalk by Ava Neiss-Tripp (illustrated by C. U. Nicks-Fall)
But now this fastidious brain demands a plot, so let’s cook one up.
Joe dragged his feet, or anyway didn’t lift them enough. He was inventive enough to imagine a device that would help him avoid sidewalk cracks, and before he knew it he had had shoes made with toe cameras and imminent-crack-detection AI, and so he heard an alarm-sound when a crack candidate was two steps away. At the same time, in the same city, an equally inventive Molly Siefer Coddle, similarly crack-trip-prone, solved the problem with compressed-air footlifting-assist tech, and a geneticist named Noh Pronouns published a paper describing a modification to the human genome that would make humanity more graceful. Then a materials engineer perfected “the sidewalk of the future,” which had self-healing cracks. Two months later there was an extinction event, so there was no one around to trip over sidewalk cracks, which evolved sentience, and the wise cracks lived happily ever after, cracking each other up with stupid-human jokes.
Next time you stroll on a sidewalk, remember: if you step on them, you won’t trip on them.
disposable razor at the ready/gushing water warming/the old man blearily splashes his face/and fills his hand with gooey gel/and rubs his hands together/and rubs the goo al over his face
the foliage has spread down to his throat/and up to his upper cheekbones/and it is more bristly/more slice-resistant/yet still hasn’t filled in/still makes him loirsok like a candidate/for the drunk tank/if he lets it abide for three days or more
he rinses the slather off his hands/starts at the sideburn wannabe on the left/slaloms down the dizzy-gillespied cheek to the knot at the clenched jaw/and beyond
zambonis his left neck up to the jawline/cenerslices from larynx to chin/zambonis the right neck/then up the face over the puffed right cheek/to the other quasimodo sideburn/and then skates around right cheek and left/feeling with his non-razor hand/for random rogue hairs
now the under chin/with its special jowl-sector problems/requiring taut stretching of the sagflesh/and several special swipes
the chin has a tricky grain requiring up down&sideways/and the underlip is a mutant jungle/needing micro-machetes
now it is time for mustache removal/with the worst hairs catching and snagging the blade/and inflicting little wounds over the lip
the mouthcorners/pushed from within by the tongue/ seem so often to have ONE recalcitrant hair/that refuses to release its follicular grip
at long last the faceflesh is smooth
he likes to wipe the remaining foam off his face with his vanity towel/it looks so cool in the movies when the rugged hero does it/but it yields a gummy soap-residue towel/so he splashes and splashes it off
then the towel and the bits of toilet paper to stanch the tiny wounds
A few weeks ago superstar Valley poet Bill Campana, knowing that I was leaving Phoenix at the end of June, gave me three sizable U-Haul boxes that he had used during his own recent move. And on Memorial Day he and I had breakfast at the Ranch House Grille. I had this strawberry crepe there.
Then some days later my friends the Plaskos and I had a delicious meal at Dos Los Molinos. I wrote about that at some length in my post “Phoenix Memories.” Here’s a member of the delightful trio of ectoplasmic scamps known as The Deeminz–a Plasko creation.
On the first Friday in June, at the open-mic poetry event at Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe, I began my performance by announcing my imminent move to Toledo, Ohio and made a light-hearted reference to my appearance at CHB as being part of my “Farewell Tour.”
Moving Day is June 30, a mere 17 days from this writing. There is at least one more Farewell Tour event scheduled, the last Esso Coffeehouse Open Mic on June 21st. I hope there will be one or two more.
One with Clay, Image and Text 