Despite having created her, I know little about this sweet old lady except that she is a work in progress and is surprised and overjoyed to exist.
Chess Pawn, Bastille Day 2025
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Heat Management in the Valley of the Sun
I’m in Phoenix AZ at 7:07 AM Mountain Standard Time
And the temperature is 91 and well into its eager climb
And my Fitbit is at zero steps and I need ten thousand more
But if I face the harsh broad daylight now my sweat will surely pour
And the shower I just took will take a turn to null and void
So my challenge is to get my steps in a way to be enjoyed
And I think of nearby Fry’s at which I buy foodstuffs and fluids
And the Goodwill on the way there with arcana fit for Druids
But the Goodwill doesn’t open till 9 and the Fry’s though open now
Will be an E-Z Bake GIFTEEN HUNDRED STEPS one way and bedrenchment nigh and how
But I could drive there and take a tour of endcaps shelves and aisles
But the net steps won’t be much and what I really need are miles
So what I’ll do is make ceramic ware at PIP Coffee and Clay
May take the bus may walk.may drive but I’ll get a good spin on the day
And later at Scottsdale Fashion Square I’ll mallwalk hither and yon
A ragamuffin imposter facing bougie brigades full on
But cool! and fresh! and lucky! for their Harkins boasts a movie
That will reward ten thousand steps with a Pitt stop O so groovy
And their covered parking will keep my doors and steering wheel cool
And my undisheveled revelry will fluff like unworn wool
****
Afterword: We desert dwellers, ambulatory or motorized, have a daily challenge to meet at this time of year, and I thought a walk through my own challenge today would be fun. I decided on a slightly clunky rhyme/meter scheme typical of those who do not have enough poetry-writing experience under their belts that yields smooth, glib (and sometimes cloying) verses, and tried to “sound” like a typical Phoenician on a typical summer’s day.
I mention Harkin’s Camelview Theatre, where I am a fairly frequent flier, and “Pitt stop” refers to the movie Foula One, starring Brad Pitt. It is hard for me to resist bad puns, especially with light verse.
A Landmark Event in the History of Heckling
You have heard of Plato
He was the guy that made Socrates famous
And you may have heard of Diogenes
He was the guy who lived in a barrel and wandered around looking for an honest man
Less known is that Diogenes heckled Plato during one of Plato’s discourses
Let the audience know that he thought Plato was full of it
And rhyming word thereof
.
Much more recently
Last evening in fact
Heckling history may have been made
During my fabulously-talented poet friend June Powers’s reading of her poem “Close Your Eyes”
And after she had invited us the audience to close their eyes:
A masculine voice at considerable volume came from the smartphone of an audience member
And it said “I AM AN AI. I DON’T HAVE EYES.”
Is this the first instance of AI heckling a human poet?
It seems probable.
.
Will it be the last?
Unlikely.
his and hurts
some boys never become men
they used to play marbles and now they play markets
they think of sex as conquest
income as “fuck-you money”
and the poor as annoyances as best and barbarians at their gates otherwise
their neverland is gimmegimmegimmeville
and they daydream of centerfold pleasure even as their own skin sags and mottles
and many of them die as ancient boys
still lusting
still hurting
still baffled
degreed
there are academic degrees and thermometer degrees and degrees of freedom and degrees of criminality
and to be degreed academically is to acquire the prestige of letters following your name
whereas to be degreed thermodynamically is to be subject to a certain amount of heat from the sun or lack of heat due to compressor activity in a walk-in cooler
and then from an engineering standpoint there are dimensional degrees of freedom found in a mechanical linkage or in musculoskeletal motion
but there is a sense in which “degreed” refers to none of these
but may refer peripherally to degrees of criminality…
can you see it?
see, in the single word “degreed,” the solution to many human problems?
here: take the word greed and append to it the prefix de-
degreed, verb transitive: to remove greed as a factor in persons or legislation or decisions
ah, but we cannot live without greed, proclaimed gordon gekko as brilliantly portrayed by Michael douglas in the 20th-century film wall street
sure we can, says minor poet gary “the tomatoman” bowers in this thing you are reading
and here is what he imagines: that we define greed as desire to acquire to the detriment of someone else
easy as that
and degreed will be to shift focus to benefit to all and not detriment to some
that’s not marxism, communism, socialism, nor globalism
it’s just decency and honesty, within which true capitalism can thrive and blossom
please try to prove me wrong, world
paradise will reward your efforts
No Smoking, No Joking, No Kings
We who have ceased our childhoods choose
To put such childish things aside
As self-indulgent bad-for-yous
Like put-down jokes that slur/deride
And drawn tobacco into lungs
That bystanders will breathe as well
To climb adulthood’s ladder’s rungs
And make a Heaven of a Hell
.
We also need some leaders who
Are not to parasites beholden
Which parasites suck killing goo
That turns the beacon sun ungolden
We need to oust denounce unseat
The big shot bully would-be kings
That growing up become complete
With birthing Mother Earth Who sings
One Brother, Two Presents
Today is my brother Harold’s 73rd birthday.
I talked to his wonderful spouse Terry earlier this morning. The plan is for me to meet them tomorrow at the Olive Garden nearest where they live. It will be there and then that I present Harold with a small gift bag containing these two ceramics works of mine, one functional, one whimsical.
Harold doesn’t do social media to speak of, so I have no fear that I am spoiling the surprise. It tickles me to think that people in the Etherverse will know in advance that this will happen, just as if this were a surprise party and they were hidden in the living room waiting for him to come home.
Happy Birthday, Brother.
countryslide
we are as decent and honest as our leaders, God help us
so now we are neither decent nor honest
we are Hellbound
with blooded hands and dreams of the malnourished children we knowingly abandoned
the weight of our recent myriad sins
heavy as a calving edge of Antarctica
sliding into the cold sea
some of us fight
but ineffectively so far
our waving signs no match for the punches in the face delivered by mayhem-gleeful malicious, masked fools and goons
who round brown folk up
for the express purpose of fucking them up with extreme prejudice
it is true that we would be better off without a small few of them
but the powers that be act as if due process is a mosquito
to be waved off or smashed
and so they scoop em up and ship em out and see what happens
.
fight harder friends
stay decent and honest and unhateful
undo this doom
before it is ratified
the squishiness of ugly tomatoes, and vice versa
we are in the twilight of manual labor
and the work i do slicing tomatoes will dry up sooner or later.
but till it does I put on six gloves–
vinyl, cut-resistant mesh, vinyl–
and with my left three-gloved hand I pluck a well-washed tomato from a container,
place it stem-orificed down on the runway of the nonmotorized tomato slicer,
and with my elbow tucked in, in the manner of a boxer delivering a body blow to an opponent, ram the tomato through a parallel set of blades remindful of open venetian blinds,
while my right hand waits on the other side of the blades
to catch the freshly subdivided tomato.
that’s the plan, anyway. in a perfect world with ripe yet firm tomatoes and a slicer with new blades, it is a lovely process.
today was unlovely.
all tomatoes are not created equal. most in a case i was slicing were overripe. more than one of this batch also had skins cut-resistant enough so that the imposed pressure of blades-ramming caused a rupture, jamming the tomato in the blades and spraying juice and seeds.
one tomato had the temerity to spit in my eye.
halfway through my shift i changed aprons, the sprayscape looking like something done on canvas by one of the lesser abstract impressionists.
i finished my shift, drove home, and shed tomato-redolent clothing, but would not be surprised if my hair retained some of the plant-based fragrance, even though I wear a bouffant hair net on the job.
but it is honest work…declaims the Tomatoman.
the stars and stripes forsaken
some Republican lawmakers were gloaty yesterday
they thought they had won
because what they called “the big, beautiful bill” got shoehorned into american history
.
they failed to realize that what they won
was future ignominy
shame
scorn
.
they voted against we the majority of people
and they voted for the tawdry gimmegimmegimme of those who think having more than they could possibly spend in five lifetimes entitles them to more
they have trampled on the flag that represents liberty and justice for all
and historians will note this
.
The America of Liberty and Justice for All IS Beautiful
just as those who have forsaken her are u g l y
One with Clay, Image and Text 