full stop/fake muse/Grace Under Water

June 10, 2019
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Today sees one of those feeling-uninspired sessions of trying to light a fire with wet matches. So–draw a skinny upper leg. Attach an asthenic young woman with an icebag on her knee, held down by her crossed wrists, holding a smartphone and possibly taking the viewer’s picture. Go on from there. Finish the page but, feeling undone, start another. Draw an eye, then its mate. Attach a dissipated-looking not-quite-young face to it. Draw and compose by the seat of your pants. Finish the page, unsatisfied.

View them both at once. Not as bad. One thing’s for sure, neither works by itself. Some of the poetry is OK.

Friends, welcome to The Creative Process on a day when the artist/poet feels anything but creative. Artists CANNOT WAIT for Inspiration. The creation-rheostat has a full range, from 100%, which is Effortless and Seems Like It’s Creating Itself, to 0%, which is Death Valley and Tooth Extraction and You Don’t Know What The Hell You’re Doing all rolled into one. But every bit of directed effort is part of the continuum, part of the tapestry. So we grind on when we must, and savor when it soars.

full stop

failed the tests
under arrest
let that cop go
lollipop

fake muse

falsecolor galaxy fruit of the loom
antioch prep deuteronomy u
kale & verbatimy transcript–no mas
endochrinology–lift demitasse

Grace Under Water

Grant us thunder & a law
Rip nonSense & blablabla
Access wonder & delight
Catch some breezes w/yr kite
Etch & render ❤ u tender

mixing signal/love echo/bul[] shi[]

June 9, 2019
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Isn’t it frustrating to get part of a message, and have the rest of the message be forever beyond your reach? But that is, truly, Life, for all but the omniscient. Our simian heritage gives us a busybody’s curiosity; biological and physical constraints give us opaque horizons, signal noise, the need for sleep and other homeostatic housekeeping, and the tragicomedy of a finite lifespan.

This page is at least as frustrating for me as it is for you, O Viewer. So much is beyond my talent-reach, and I seem always to be short on time. But if it helps, I only wrote the last line of “Mixing Signal,” which is “Got Me? O well,” and other than telling you that it is a persona poem with a Yahwehesque God as the persona, you are free to either write the rest yourself, synopsis it without regard to meter or rhyme, or treat it as merely a visual element.

Similar goes for “Bul[]  Shi[]” though much more of the poem is visible. It is told from the point of view of a naysayer, and is an answer to “love echo” in the form of a sort of antiecho.

Bul[] Shi[]

Bombastitude has made a mess
Upyoursism oppresses flesh
Lamed intellect reverbs ennui
[.][…..] [……..] formed [..] Model [.]

Mystery fans, you now have all the clues you need to make some sense out of the last line. I don’t think anyone on Earth would be able to discern what the last line is, exactly, but the facts that Model is capitalized, and the rhyme-meter scheme revealed by the first two lines dictate that the last line be at minimum a near-rhyme of “ennui,” get you more than halfway there.

love echo

let those with baffled vision see
oppression plain as ABC
victorious are those who ooh
enlightenment’s a Bill & Coo

Every Seven Years

June 8, 2019
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20190608_051508

I had from 4:42 to 5:15 this morning to do this page, plus the knowledge that the words Every, Seven and Years are all five letters long. If more time–say three hours or so–becomes available today, I might do a more polished version.

Every Seven Years

Eat the sweet stuff happily
Victories come out to here
Enter venture out to sea
Riffed events become so clear
Y E A R N with widely scattered tears

doom mete mood meet doom

June 7, 2019
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Every day is an opportunity to wallow in the depressive miasma of guaranteed mortality. Some people seek such opportunities, some flee from them in such denial as “50 is the new 30,” and some get an unignorable knocking at the door.

DOOM METE MOOD

Doubt is such a Microcosm
Onus an Embarcadero
Otherwise a Tarantino
Might send messages Encrypted

mood meet doom

metabolism maladjusted
obsolescence wrecks a bed. o
one2three the dire days come. o
detriment is zero-sum

On the other hand, says the Mortality Denier, EVERY DAY is also an opportunity to experience the Joy of a Lifetime. Please, Friends, use kindness to seek such joy.

icad vi: INF LUX

June 6, 2019
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20190606_054913

INF might be short for Infinite or Influence. LUX is Light.

So here’s to the late, great Philip José Farmer, he of the wild imagination and penchant for punning (e.g. calling a device that stimulated the fornix area of the brain a “fornixator”). INF is for his Influence on me; LUX is for his odd and tasty book NIGHT OF LIGHT.

Mash them up, Friends, and you get Influx. You and I are now inextricably bound, because the influx of this blog post has ever-so-slightly altered your brain’s electrochemistry. And you are free to add your Influx via comments.

May we always be gentle with each other.

icad v: order/index/cards

June 5, 2019
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Here’s some whimsical fun. Grinning unicorn and guy with eyepatch. Nuff said?

The whimsical words to the acrostic:

O don’t fuss don’t bother if it’s bee ay ess eye cee

Rigmarole and rigidness can soon uncalm a sea

Dice are tossed with some decisions darers then go far

Explanations pale before the red meat flipped and charred

Roasted flesh attenuates extenuated swards

ICAD iv: Descriptors

June 4, 2019
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Corita Kent demonstrated long ago that text is a useful visual element, and there’s nothing illegitimate about using it in a composition. I have gone her one worse, here, though: my text is hard to read. The viewer will soon surmise that all the text does is label/describe what is near–but “LUNA” is so hard to read that, absent me telling you that that is what it says, you probably wouldn’t know.

I, Cad

June 2, 2019
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I can never resist a Bad Pun. ICAD stands for Index Card A Day, and for the last several years has been conducted from June 1st through July 31st. But “I, Cad” might also be the title of my autobiography, Cad meaning Scoundrel.

Here is my jumpstart of ICAD. The leftmost is a cover page of sorts, the center is a quick study of the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the rightmost says “I found to my astonishment that I do not exist.” It is an oblique reference to the prophetic novel 1984. Winston Smith was told he did not exist.

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Oddly, depending on when you the reader read these words, I, like Schrödinger’s Cat, do or do not exist. Some of my dead friends may still be found on Facebook.

If I do not exist, I have ceased being a cad, and I no longer suffer. Just about everything has an Up side.

apple oat barnacle muffin

May 21, 2019
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20190521_194723

I was in the middle of a much, much longer version of the poem I’ve done here, typing directly into my timeline on Facebook–when all that I had written just winked out of existence. I tried to get it back but no dice, and probably no big loss. It went into detail about the Vegan restaurant, and its cuisine, and the foam-heart on the mocha’s surface that I destroyed with spoonful after spoonful of sugar; and it had a couple of word-choice startles and an Indiana Jones metaphor, but I was taking forever to get to the point.

apple oat barnacle muffin

my teeth–

two in particular–

were endangered by the

barnacle crust of the

“apple oat muffin.”

but the spongy interior was my

s  a  l  v  a  t  i  o  n  .