On impulse I picked up an unfinished acrostic poem from my cluttered card table. I had just had a nap and felt refreshed. Great luck! The double acrostic was IMPULSE CONTROL. Impulsively I spent 45 minutes finishing the acrostic, no mean feat since the only word I’d written besides the bookending IMPULSE and CONTROL was “FDIC.” Greater luck! Impulse control, and the increasing lack of it, played a major role in the poem’s composition. Look at the lines and you will see that they start evenly, almost stodgily, and then get wilder as the poem rolls along.

The greatest luck of all was having just read an article about the plague of Internet trolls ruining things for everyone. Epiphanatically I realized I was writing about the ultimate, impulse-control-challenged, troll of all, the mad Tweeter King.

Three successive weeks last month I bought a sculpted heart from my friend Deborah Hodder, whose work was on display at five15 Arts on Grand Avenue. I asked her if I could use the hearts in my creative expression. She enthusiastically assented, and went so far as to suggest performance art. This post is a performance of sorts. One of Deborah’s hearts is in the image above, and it and the two others I own are in the image below, along with a bird I sculpted a few weeks ago.

Here is the poem.

Impulse Control

Invigorate your system with a dose of cold Hi-C
Investigate your president as if FDIC
Mull Holland Mueller Malkovich and high-fived CEO
Meticulustfully to see how to and fro we go
Perhaps we grapple with a loss and cray-cray now and then
Upanishads and Spanish moss seduce a soul unpent
Let’s lift and drop and call a cop for grins or grim diss-honor
Seek chicks and sex and cello vex S Kubrick meets R Donner. O
Entre-penury of late is loose and on a roll
Engagement and no rules reveals the Season of the Troll

Here are the boxed earthly remains of my younger brother next to an urn I made at the Thunderbird campus of the Phoenix Center for the Arts. I knew while I was making the urn that the odds of it being suitable as a vessel for Brian’s ashes were small, but that I needed the practice; and it is helpful to learn what doesn’t work, on your way to making something that does.

the birds didn’t ask

to be made. they seem to wish for spiff, for the respect paid with twice the time spent on making them. they are not

pleased at their warpage.

if i am not