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cubic and tetrahedronic and pentagrammatical supper

October 23, 2024
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if i eat in the late evening/then i am one who sups supper/making me a supper supper

and if i habitually greet friends with “‘Sup?”/ as a contractual corruption of “What’s up?”/ why then i suppose/whether or not i wear supp-hose/that i am a supper supper supper

but then if a pterodactyl swoops down and dines on me/well guess what?!/i will have become a supper supper supper’s supper

and the pterodactyl/also one who sups

and if i am clark kent also known as kal-el

then we have a super supper supper supper supper’s supper

and speaking of super

this poem is over

fish lesson

October 22, 2024
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forty-two years ago a gaudy tropical fish/was flipped by a net akin to a flyswatter/into a saltwater aquarium

to the human watching the fish looked stunned/paralyzed/it did not move so much as a fin

long minutes went by/and at last the fish stirred

stirred as if it were a spoon/handled by a sleepy someone in no hurry/and it made a slow tight circle/around the spot where it had been dropped

and over many more minutes/the slow circles the fish made widened/as if it were tracking the spiral/of an impossible small galaxy/from its core to its outskirts

and eventually it skirted an edge of the tank

and it changed course and started to explore/nosing into and around a loose web/of coral skeleton/and nodding at the fake miniature deep-sea diver

and in not long/it acted as if it were home

i was the watching human/and forty-two years later the memory of that fish/sprang into my thoughts

i was remembering yesterday/being at the potter’s wheel/at a studio open to the public/and an interesting woman i had met some months ago/younger than i but probably by less than a decade/came up to me and asked me what i was making

and i glanced up at her/and felt some voltage of attraction

and my eyes went back to my hands/and i told her that i was throwing off the hump/making bases that would keep the mugs i would later make/a little bit up from the surface/so less heat would dissipate

she was friendly and nice/and i imagined having coffee with her/but the voltage started coming up again

so i kept my eyes on my hands/and after a little more nice chatting/she sensed my shyness/and left me to my work

now i realize how much i am just like that longago fish/and how in a new interactive situation/i start stunned/and must proceed with caution

but the fish/wiser than i/learned to gain familiarity/to liberate itself/to relax

i hope i see her again

upfall

October 21, 2024
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mood: powder blue

dress: spiffy

prospects: woo and hoo

music: riffy

an old kid going places/through grit and heave and tug/whom fortune now embraces/rewarding all that lug

so…

romance in the offing

flowfont on the awning

shabby clothing doffing

cheery morning dawning

fittings groomings travel plans/room accommodations/lengthening attention spans/subcute indurations

but…

goal: expansion

flame: enkindle

build that mansion

free time dwindle

other pinnacles entice/don’t-stop-nowish impulse gnaws/roll those more-credentials dice/up momentum down with pause

then…

power surger

crush competer

force a merger

lust? defeat her

upward mobility/deepens the pocket/but gets hot-skillety/lashed to a rocket

so…

party: opportunity

weekends shrink then vanish

partners cash out? buyback spree

now learn french and spanish

lines are chiseled in your face/effort stretched to max/no such thing as happy place/no way to relax

what’s that feeling in your chest?

might be Death. –a chance to rest!

A Wicked Time with Dad

October 19, 2024
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Sometime in the year before he died/My dad and I were on Fremont Street in downtown Vegas/Where the night seems day like with all that light

We were shooting craps at Binion’s Horseshoe/And I had placed the 6 for six dollars

And the 6 came up and I said “Press it”

And it hit again and I said “Go to 18”

And I got another one and I said “Go to 24”

And then unbelievably 6 came up yet again

And Dad said “You should take it down”/But I said “Hard 6 for two bucks”/Throwing two one-dollar chips/To where the stick man could get them

And there were several rolls that were neither 6 nor 7

Then the shooter flung a crazy-bouncing roll/And one die was 3 and the other spun like a top

And I murmured something I’d heard a pit guy say long ago: “And then the waiter came out carrying…”

And the other die stopped spinning/and 4 was on top/but it did a half roll! Three!/And as the men at the table/Let out a lusty masculine roar/I finished my sentence loudly though doubting I’d be heard: “…TWO TREYS!!”

And I collected and was way ahead

But sometime after midnight I and my dad were almost tapped out

So we went to the Union Plaza where the minimum craps bet was only a quarter

And we lasted about an hour

Dad was busted out but I had a few bucks/So I took him to a cheap breakfast

Feeling less like a son/Than a brother

name

October 19, 2024
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a name is a label/that may not carry any other burdensome weight/nor cause us to prejudge/but is that ever true?

my parents named me gary after a hitchhiking drummer/my middle name is wright which is a family name on my mother’s side/rumor has it my last name came from peeblesshire on the border between scotland and england

in the seventh grade in room 55 they called me mr. g. bowers/to distinguish me from classmate chuck bauer

another grade-school classmate/has an odd form of glossolalia/and he has called me at least a thousand different names/in the last 61 years

“bongo” and “nahblotz” and “bigby” and such

but the one that stuck with our circle of friends is the definite article followed by the first syllable of my name

“the bow”

rhymes with now and chow and how

sometimes i spell it b’ao

and sometimes i say “when the b’ao breaks/the cradle will fall”

just to be strange

fill

October 18, 2024
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it is to make unempty/but that does not exempt me/from finding other ways that it can mean

it is a product cushion/when buffetin and pushin/might biff the box or ball a hammer’s peen

it can be interstitial/with blank space unofficial/a random drawing photo block of text

it’s this that you are reading/so gently interceding/between your Now and what might happen Next

If Not Now, Venn?

October 17, 2024
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Venn/Rhymes with Zen/Which is good news for us

When/We exten/Dagood Metaphor Plus

Work/With a circ/Cull with ARTIFICE named

Smirk/Like a jerk/And move on unashamed

.

ARTIFICE and INTELLECT in circles overlapping

Nearby there is AGENCY unsure which root it’s tapping

Doctor Isaac Asimov had FOUR laws of Robotics

“Save Humanity” was primal guarding from psychotics

.

But Agency is tricky/When the motivation’s sticky/And the mission is not properly selective

A sign that just says STOP/Can confuse a RoboCop/With Obedience hard-wired as a directive

Do NOT keep your fingers crossed/Superstition gets us lost/And is cursed with mean invective and attack words

Baby, match and gasoline/Fire up carnage that’s obscene/So Gain Wisdom, let’s, and take a big step backwards.

****

Afterword: The hot topic now is Artificial Intelligence, or whatever AI actually stands for. It is an ambiguous, slippery field of endeavor, and so I wrote this ambiguous, slippery poem.

cheatku

October 16, 2024
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he cheats on taxes

wives golf contracts real estate

then claims the dems

cheat

.

he whipped up a crowd

told them to fight like hell but

“peacefully.” yeah sure

.

sat and watched chaos

for hours and then pinned it on

nancy pelosi

.

“donald trump v.

united states” is his get

out of jail free card

.

please vote blue my friends

till you are blue in the face

be red white and blue

the jumper in the beige overcoat on the bridge at 1:37am (part three of three)

October 15, 2024
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as olaf lindberg fell feet first/he pushed a stud on the side of the cylinder/and a nine-foot luminescent rod, pale blue/telescoped instantly/from the bottom end of the cylinder

and as the rod touched the water it bloomed/into an inverse trumpet shape/with notches that the man’s shod toes fit into

the man gripped the rod and leaned slightly forward/and as the trumpet shape clove the water/bubbles and then a wake came up beyond the lip of the trumpet/behind the man

he looked into the camera eye of his faithful drone/and raised his voice above the churning water noise to say

“With nano and jet-ski tech and beamed energy–” a slight jolt from the turbid chop/interrupted him. “…something weighing only eight pounds–” and another jolt tipped him a bit–“saved my life.”

then another chop of water/tipped the man more harshly/and a bit of the river/flowed into the trumpet/and it submerged/and the man’s feet and ankles went underwater…

cheerfully and loudly he exclaimed/”It was a hell of a fun ride while it lasted!/I shall have to abandon ship!”

chest-deep in water/and as he and the river/approached the next downstream bridge/the man brandished his now rodless cylinder/and shouted joyfully “Plan B! Monofilament tech! Batman tech!”

he thumbed the stud again/and monofilament wire shot out of the top end of the cylinder/and its adhesive end/stuck to the far-side underside/of the downstream bridge…

and just like batman and vicky vale/the wire pulled him upward/but he was so heavy with water and overcoat and gadgets/that the wire disadhered from the bridge…

and as he fell he pulled out his drone controller and yelled “Plan C! Dronefish!”

(end of part three)

…

…

epilog

to make a long story short, because we all need to get on with our lives, a fleet of little drones dropped out of the sky above him, fell into the water, and formed a sort of magic carpet raft for him. they quickly conked out but he had time to go to plan d, which was a friend of his in a nearby helicopter. but just as he reached the third to top rung of the rope ladder the friend turned rogue and hit a button, quick-releasing the ladder, and so the man switched to plan e, which was really plan a all along, and his real and ground-breaking invention, which was a giant disembodied hand that sparkled as it scooped him out of the water and lifted him slowly and gently into the sky. the man had his drone stop following him after his last recorded words, which were “Don”t you DARE call this the Hand of God! It’s just tech! Seems like magic, though, doesn’t it? And WAIT till you see the mischief it and I are going to make, Kids!” And then he was lifted away from the drone, which stopped recording and uploaded the video it had made to various social media, and the billions of views it got were a harbinger of history-changing things to come.

The End