Archive

Uncategorized

NaPoWriMo Poem for April 30

April 22, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

With this poem the requirement of a poem per day for National Poetry Writing Month will be fulfilled. Bonus/extra poetry will appear under “NaPoWriMo Poem for April 31,” “NaPoWriMo Poem for April 32,” etc. We’ll see if I can get to April 50 before the end of the month. [smiles]

not a love letter to a dead dog or two, but it might as well be

he was my best friend
and his name courtesy of my daughter
was william doglas bowers.

that’s not a typo. it’s d-o-g-l-a-s.
i haven’t seen him in nigh on five years,
because that’s when he died.

i harbor no illusions that he’s smiling down at me from dog heaven;
even if there was one, he’d have far better things to do;
but no, my sad surmise is that when he got the big sleep
courtesy of the strong drug intravenously applied
that smacked him so hard his eyes never closed
he was completely extinguished,

and that,
given the joy he gave me and the rest of his family,
defines tragedy better than any play or headline.

i so hope i am wrong.
some quantum physicists are now bruiting about the continuity of consciousness
via transport of the energy state/configurations in “brain microtubules,”
but i think even the smartest of us are desperate enough
to indulge in creative wishful thinking.
i am glad that they think so, though,
especially since they are smarter than me.

if bill does indeed continue,
and if further he’s free of the dysplasia and other physical woes he wore,
then that undoubtedly means that cowboy,
dog of my childhood,
has persisted.
they may even meet and exchange that-stupid-gary stories.
they may romp,
with bill mocking his dysplasia as romplstiltskin,
and cowboy might then reenact his epic encounter with the horse in the meadow,
or the skunk at camp geronimo,
but all of this has a probability vanishingly small.

i wish i could tell bill
about this other bill
who is only vaguely doglike,
and that only in the fact that he does amazing tricks,
only they’re with words.

i wish i could tell cowboy
that that line in the song “mister bojangles” is an understatement.
“after twenty years he still grieves.”
twenty years?
chicken feed…

Spoon Sonata with Crossword Counterpoint

April 22, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Image

Every night I work I fish out one of the beautifully round-bowled spoons from the silverware tray and take it to the desk. There is something about its shape and its reflectivity that just grabs me. Last night I did this drawing, posing the spoon over and over again over the crossword puzzle grids I’d drawn and filled in earlier, and then I put the spoon, though still clean, into the dishwater tub by one of the industrial-strength garbage disposals.

Over thirty years ago I did a 24″ x 30″ drawing with the remains of several chicken dinners variously posed, and I called it “Bone Symphony.” It now hangs in our dining room, thus:

Image

So this decades-later, much-simpler drawing of mine is “Spoon Sonata with Crossword Counterpoint.” I got lucky with the alliteration. [smiles]

Ballade d’amour: NaPoWriMo for April 29

April 21, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

This is my first try at the Ballade form. Suddenly I fell like a teenager again…

Ballade d’amour

Our connection plays hard to get.
Hands held, we are still two, not one.
Longing’s true since before we met;
Fission’s flashing: a Megaton.
We’ve a passion that shines like Sun.
After dusk there is still a glow.
Seeing through what we’ve well begun
Let us learn what we don’t yet know.

Wrestling Chance, we eschew roulette;
Dueling Fate needs no sword, nor gun.
Picking paths through the woods, we let
Intuition rule; stroll, don’t run.
Daze may pass—please excuse the pun—
Nights may whisper to rev and go;
Plans may form and then grind, undone.
Let us learn what we don’t yet know.

Acrobatic, we fuss, and fret,
Caught in spider-webs Doubt has spun.
Locks confined in a tight barrette
May be formed in a braid or bun,
Some light blinds us enough to stun,
Implications may dam the flow.
Still, there’s many ways cats were skun.
Let us learn what we don’t yet know.

Let us face what’s to come, and shun
Desolations where naught will grow.
Lovers leap when misgiving’s None,
THEN they learn what they don’t yet know!

 

Perceiv’d Pane: NaPoWriMo for April 28

April 21, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Image

Peaceful inside; outside, glop
Evanescent crackle/pop
Route that jet to Barcelona
Craft that Lisa: first name Mona
Even fish can get a fin in
If it’s oil on Belgian linen
VIM, my dearest, needs a Spine
‘D suit a darling Clementine

The crude drawn house inside the skewed window pane hearkens back to the early early Sixties. The teacher had us draw houses; I drew three or so. I distinctly remember that the one I drew with windows and a door got a gold star. The one with windows but no door got a silver star, and the one without windows got no star at all, even though it was a faithful rendering from memory of the windowless west side of our house.

Since light takes time to travel (usually 186,000mi/sec or so but can be as slow as 32ft/sec if passing through pressurized liquid helium, so I’ve heard) all glass windows are a sort of time-machine perception portal. The light from some stars has taken a galaxy’s rotation or so to get to our naked eyes.

 

NaPoWriMo Poem for April 26

April 20, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

unsouled merchandise

the plastic form, the plastic grin;
the blurbs beneath the bubble wrap
commit a pleonastic sin:
they don’t seduce, but do entrap.

ideas, feelings, memories;
the message in a loved one’s eyes:
you are the one i long to please.
this plastic is a ghoul’s disguise;

its maker knows we love to give
and do not trust a home-grown gift
will pass the is it worthy? sieve,
and ads sow seeds of doubt. short shrift’s

conferred to those who do not spend.
thus money’s love’s analogy,
and thus the moneychangers lend,
and then collect rapaciously.

let’s from this artificial pit
retreat, and up a true path climb;
we’ll learn that ultimately it
means most when we give love plus time.

NaPoWriMo Poem for April 25

April 19, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

g. bowers, agent of ARROYO (alternate reality rectangles of youth ordained)

the funnies, to answer no question,
like NANCY and PEANUTS and such,
made windows to buttress the bastion
a kid needs to starsky his hutch.

in book form were comics like X-MEN
and BATMAN and HERBY and PEP
realities strange as a henchman
DICK TRACY would trace and–nab?–yep!

some funnies were crack-us-up laughable:
UNfunny but suited for sneering,
some wisecracking dialogue affable,
some action distractive-to-veering.

some artists belonged in asylums,
and some of their work in the Louvre,
some classics were seek-ems-&-buy-ems,
some stuff from the Sixties a grouvre.

the best should be well-wrapped in plastic
and kept from acidity’s harm;
leave stretching to Mister Fantastic;
seek Scarlet[t] (Johansson? Witch?) charm.

the kid in us all is eternal.
the youth is within to arrange;
it’s true just as Springtime is vernal;
just DOCTOR with touches of STRANGE.

(Afterverse note: I admit to a strong Silver Age Marvel bias.)

NaPoWriMo Prose Poem for April 24

April 19, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

NOTE: NaPoWriMo is shorthand for National Poetry Writing Month, which was founded on April Fool’s Day, 1996. To participate, the goal (“mission”) is a minimum of one poem a day, every day through the month. But there are no requirements. The Facebook page says “NaPoWrimo is a contest you hold with yourself, so grab inspiration from wherever or whatever you want. Write about anything you want.” I see my own participation as an opportunity to become a more well-versed (haha) poet by setting additional challenges; and the challenge I want to meet today is to write a “prose poem.” (There is controversy about what constitutes a prose poem; for instance, what would distinguish it from flash fiction? My personal definition is “writing shorter than a short-short story that contains both storytelling and fanciful turns of phrase without relying on stanzas or other form-specific line breakage.”)

The SHAME of It All, Or Not

Shame drives my car. I do not own a car. Shame is what I feel when I think of what I regard as my criminal history. I have never been arrested, indicted or tried in a court of law. I paid a ticket for Consuming Alcohol While Driving a Motorized Vehicle once. The shame was that I was caught. I had accepted a Michelob bottle from the young, attractive woman in the passenger seat on our way to skiing. Skiing is sliding down snow in near-frictionless fashion. The friction is reduced via wax. One brand of wax for surfboards is Sex Wax. Its popularity relies obliquely on Shame. I have used boogie-boards and my body to surf, but never a surfboard. Thirty-five years ago I “borrowed” some hundreds of dollars from a cash box belonging to a company I was working for. I replaced it within a day, but during that day I was stealing, and could easily have been indicted, tried and convicted.  My behavior changed, but don’t take my word for it; sometimes I tell lies. We all tell lies, but that does not excuse mine.

NaPoWriMo Poem for April 23

April 18, 2014
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

fraidy cap

light s too bright so let us dim it
here discussing heavy stuffs
fear is awful needs a limit
in a lifetime s starks and roughs

with insurance out of pocket
sees a max and then relief
that fits fear like ball & socket
cortisol & chain & grief

dostoevsky kafka swinburne
shirley jackson stephen king
cast the arts with palls & sinburn
crafted well enough to sting

deaths of philip seymour hoffman
amy winehouse mickey r
films of tarantino scoff man
euver myth across the bar

worldis scary worldis doomful
life is precious too soon gone
we ve delusions by the roomful
taliban to telethon

fear the need for medication
fear the monster fear the whip
fight with calm and dedication
kiss the sweetheart child on hip

cap the fear and tame it quell it
use a focus on a friend
use a handhold then compel it
to a corner to its end