Carbo Protein Fat & Dairy
Clown may wax incendiary
Clown may wax inflammatory
“He’s just joking” is the story
..
Baby-Toddler-Youth transition
Clown may speak of acquisition
“I want Greenland I want Cuba”
Backed by an oomph-oomphing tuba
..
Clown kills innocent civilians
Maybe next will be Brazilians
War may visit on our nation
Many-fold retaliation
..
Crypto coinage trading cards
Ill-got fortune thus enlards
One-percenters double money–
This a joke? IT ISN’T FUNNY.
soul full ness
long ago I read The Lady Who Sailed the Soul
by Cordwainer Smith (secret identity Paul Myron
Anthony Linebarger), about a woman who had a
starship across a vast distance while her c o n
s c I o u s n e s s was slowed so that it seemed to
her her hair gushed out of her head.
later he began “Himself in Anachron”
but died before he finished. an artificial intelligence
just told me it is about a man who must save his wife
by divorcing himself from time and space,
in the sacrificial sense similar
to “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul.”
the author and editor Harlan Ellison went to some
length to acquire “Himself in Anachron” for the third
volume of his Dangerous Visions trilogy. his effort
was in vain.
today i walked two miles to see the west Toledo
library for the first time. I perused the science fiction
shelves and found Tommy dismay that they had NO
Poul Anderson books, NO Isaac Asimov. But they had
a single volume of Harlan Ellison, copyright 2014:
The Top of the Volcano, a compilation of Ellison
stories that had won awards.
i had read most of them but there was a long story
i had not. in it a man named bailey
had his soul yanked from him to be placed
into the soul of an alien military subaltern named
Pinke, there to cajole Pinke into ending a war that
had gone on for generations.
i have not finished the story. I will leave that
for another visit. rather, now, i reflect on the amazing
succession of life-events: i read Cordwainer Smith,
his story was covered by Harlan Ellison, i found the
Ellison book in the West Toledo Public Library, and
I began to read his story of the abduction and
exploitation of souls…
three weeks to the day
after having arrived in Toledo
from Phoenix, Arizona
in the company of my sweetheart
in an automobile of make Kia,
model
Soul.
Late this evening I completed a draft of the two acrostic poems on this page. I also embellished the textual elements and did more drawing within the two half-moons.
King& Queen
Kumquats @ a B•B•Q
If you mist it — c’est perdu
Now sweet breezes intervene
Getting shut of airs obscene
& reventing shit up spleen
..
Mana Wife
Many woes beset us now
As our land resists the plow. I
Need you, dear. Help me un-oaf
As we ask our soles to Loafe
..
These are drafts. More stages coming soon!
Day after day I’ve told my sweetheart Donna, “I have got to draw today.” And yet I didn’t and didn’t.
Today is different. Marvelously so. I have the above Work In Progress well under way, and pleasant surprises abound with it, and I have high hopes for it. The “King& Queen” acrostic’s rhyme scheme has been solved, rhyming BBQ with C’est Perdu (schoolboy French to the rescue again!) and the first line establishes a bizarre matchup.
Much needs to begin, but as Mary Poppins tells us, “Well Begun is Half Done.”
Cheers, my friends!!
shaving techniques of the corrugated-skin american: haibun
complications ensue when an american male’s facial flesh ages and he wishes to be clean-shaven. many hairs that were softly pliable in the springtime of youth have become thicker and tougher in their dotage. they are anchored in skinfold that was once smooth hillside. the hide of the old american’s face must needs be stretched into tympanic tightness for effectual shaving to occur; and the stretch must often be not merely with fingers, but perhaps over sawhorse-planked teeth, compressed cheek-air, or even tongue-poke for that mutant milkweed of a follicle that so stubbornly resists shearing.
over decades, standards of the american facial æsthetic have shifted. in the mid 1980s it became popular to always look as if a shave had not occurred for several days. this was due to the star quality of mr. don johnson, one of two male leads in the hit series miami vice. but in 2020s america foliagiality is more complex. baseball pitchers, once facially bald as eggs, may now be found with anything from pencil moustaches to old-testament-patriarchy on their young faces.
an old man has just realized that he is able to shave with the grain of his beardstubble and still look as if he recently shaved. today he has done this for the second day in a row, and confirmed that this technique reduces nicks and cuts to zero.
in times uncertain
let us draw the act-ending curtain
on self-harm.
A Pedestrian in Toledo Walks Past a House
North of Sylvania west of Bowen
In Toledo predawn a pedestrian sees a house
Bunting is draped in front of the front porch
A week after Independence Day
The house glows near both front and side doors
The upstairs lights are out
The pedestrian pulls his phone from his pocket
And uses it to record an image of the house
Simple photoediting tools add magic to the light
Adherence to the rule of thirds guides cropping
The pedestrian/photographer/poet/publisher finishes
Suspending judgment, he wishes the household well
weed woe
the unjunglization of a back yard in toledo
ohio will now commence
and the association with purgatory become
particularly dense
as two souls in their seventies take on
this onerous task
the bitter fluid of drudgery is served
in an earthenware flask
fat hours
sunday 7:53 am edt
sun way up
weeds tall in the back
coffee unbrewed
..
in the fat hours
fate fatigue fatality fata morgana loom
inertia stuns the leanhearted
as the hours fatten yet more
goodbye, sweet hot phoenix
where a poetry bomb was brought
where a corridor was caffeinated
and a marriage was dissolved
I lived in the Valley of the Sun most of my life. I was able as a child to walk barefoot on asphalt in heat upwards of 110° F. In 1989 I and my then-spouse bought a house near 19th Avenue and Bethany Home Road, and about a year later our daughter was born at Community Hospital, less than a mile away. The marriage lasted 23 years, but was only intermittently happy.
hello, toledo, ohio
where my sweetheart has taken me on as cohabitant
whence we came after traveling in a 2023 kia soul
named celeste
At 11:52 PM the night of July 3rd, 2026 I left my apartment for the last time; the lease expired at midnight. I and my sweetheart spent our last night in Phoenix at the Hampton Inn & Suites. The morning of July 4 we left Phoenix; near sundown we found ourselves in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, looking for authentic New Mexican Mexican food. My sweetheart stepped on a sort of grating with small round cutouts, her flipflop caught an edge, and she pitched forward onto her face most of the impact was absorbed by her right knee and her nose near its bridge. We ended up ordering pizza delivery from Pizza 9, a chain based in New Mexico. It was delicious.
Next evening, after driving halfway through the Texas Panhandle, we stopped for the day at Amarillo and had appetizer takeout from the Red Robin across the street from our hotel. The pretzel bites were good but after a day of monotonous scenery of grass, wind farms, baled hay and occasional cows, we were too hypnotized to enjoy it much.
In Yukon, in metropolitan Oklahoma City, we had an unmemorable meal except for fried green beans while watching the U.S. soccer team fall to Belgium. The better team won, thank Goodness. That day we’d had nice cloudscapes and terrain that reminded my sweetheart Donna of her native Tennessee.
In Saint Robert, Missouri, near Lebanon, Donna and I had a DELICIOUS steak dinner at a place called Colton’s. We were a bit put off by the bad taxidermy of the trophy heads, though.
Next day was chaos and mishap. In Saint Louis sudden rain and an abrupt lane change lent themselves to a near collision, sending me into a narrow triangle of asphalt that was neither one lane nor the other, and only quick braking prevented a sideswipe. I did not shake, but was shaken.
Right past the stadium in Indianapolis the AI navigator announced a seventeen-minute slowdown, and gridlock prevailed. Just when it eased some came the news that a five-minute slowdown was imminent. It feels crawly to go from 70+ mph to less than a slow walk.
From then on, despite frequent lane closures and mowing and construction zones, driving was smooth. The “Welcome to Ohio” sign gave us a big boost. The “Highway 225/Toledo” turnoff was positively thrilling; and we rolled up our driveway before it was fully dark.
now we are in a town
that will become my town
as the end of one journey dovetails
into the beginning of another.
gas station catfish
To Lyn Herndon Burmeister
we drove across new mexico
intended to stop at tucumcari
but none of the exit signs said we were there
so we drove past tucumcari
and needing gas pulled in a valero
in the middle of new mexican nowhere
..
the gas station had a convenience store
the convenience store had cornmealed catfish
and we were starving
..
and my beloved tennessee sweetheart
ate the catfish
and found it good
though perhaps shy
of the epic catfish she had had when young
..
granted it is improbable to find catfish of this caliber
at a gas station
but i just moved from phoenix arizona
where many delicious burrito had by me
came from a chevron station on 3rd and indian school
i mean–you never know
