My tea is herbal prickly pears
Mixed up with lemonade
My bagel avocadoed wears
Balsamic grinned pomade
My wheel is Shimpo and it bears
A cylinder I’ve made
The venue’s PIP
The potter cares
To catch the clay world
Unawares
One fine day with much
Loves and Shares
And comments with no shade
A Southwest egg well laid
Joseph R. Blough
Swaggers into a bar
You could tell by his look and his sway
He’d better not go
Near the wheel of his car
Or he’d land in the pokey today
Bartender Zeke
Rolls his olive-hued eyes
And presents irritation and frown
“Don’t be so bleak,
Mister Doom in Disguise,
I’m one wounded Joe-Oe. Blough. Me down.
“So….
Untangle that Noodle, Young Man,
The one in your vagabond brain
You’ll be much less tense
And the traffic less dense
So unstrangle that Noodle to Sane.”
Hey, take it easy, Bucky, gal
This cowgirl’s sure hung over
Tequila shots and Southern Cal
And cream-filled Russell Stover
So amble on and be a pal
And I will feed you clover.
From the second track of the debut album of Nick NB, also known as Nicole Enby
We had done all we could with the kissing
And had driven each other insane
That old steamkettle lust wasn’t hissing no more
It was high-pitch a-whistling and raising some Cain
So she took me in hand
And we went and we shed
And she said
This is my flesh it is sacred
So touch me with care and respect
And she drew us together both naked
And she fondled my face and my neck
And we melted onto a soft surface
And we melted and joined up and riffed
And we gave in to frenzy and dervish
And together we bathed in the gift
From “Skin Gift,” a track on Engaged to Be Merely’d, an album by Nick NB
Nick NB’s debut album, Engaged to Be Merely’d, had nine tracks:
Side One
Skin Gift (Enby) 3:44/Stumbling Rider on a Sure-Footed Horse (Enby) 6:07/Untangle That Noodle, Young Man (Enby/Fitzhugh) 2:51/Gravitas Ave. (Enby) 13:12
Side Two
A Satellite Dish of a Girl (Rubin/De los Santos) 1:51/Ankle Deep (Enby) 5:00/Hesitant Lover (Delkins/Enby) 3:47/Powder Blue Episode (Enby) 18:18/Had (Enby) 1:17
The album didn’t chart, but Nick’s friend Sheila Garland sent a laudatory review to the op-ed of her hometown newspaper. The editor titled it “Nota Bene, Mr. Enby” and cut it to size a little. Excerpt: “Who wouldn’t love to be that Satellite Dish of a Girl, on a horseback ride with her stumbly Hesitant Lover boyfriend, headed for that Powder Blue Episode?”
****
Five albums later, Nick Enby was famous, touring, and breaking hearts. Dirt in the Sugar peaked at #7 and stayed in the Hot 200 for eleven weeks.
Side One
Toll Boot (Enby) 3:35/Grab My Clothes for Me, Willya, Babe? (Enby) 3:56/That Flea Has Dogs (Enby) 1:19/Certificate of Shame (Enby) 7:29/Half Falcon, Half Baked (Enby) 12:22/Dribble Me This (Enby) 8:40
Side Two
Journey to Aintville (Enby) 22:52/Dirt in the Sugar (Enby/Ribble) 5:00
Excerpt from “That Flea Has Dogs”;
Hop to it, says the Devil/Step lively, says the Queen/You’re a bubble off the level/With your walker turning green…
Excerpt from “Journey to Aintville,” seen by some critics as a cautionary tale Enby was telling himself:
When you awaken and you don’t know what you’ve done/But the crawling guilt says you must have had some truly nasty fun/In your nakedness you stumble/And through dresser drawers you fumble/And your heart stops at the cold touch of a gun…
***”
Ten years later, Nick Enby had fallen from grace twice, bounced back four and a half times, almost gotten married, and had almost fathered a child. He still had some creative fuel in the tank, though, and in a series of sessions in recording studios in three countries he mined the ore that became V(aled)ictory.
Side One
Genny Wouldn’t Know (Enby) 4:16/I’d Give My Left “Eye” to Go Back (Davidson/Enby) 5:09/Sure-Footed Rider on a Stumbling Horse (Enby/Ribble) 6:15/It Only Aches When It Beats (Enby et al) 15:02
Side Two
Wicky Stick-It (Enby) 3:58/Genny Told Me So (Enby) 4:16/Footcuffs & Earmuffs (Edge/Vortex) 2:01/Genny Fades Anew (Enby) 4:16/Time to Go Unhome (Enby) 6:42/Genny, It’s Always Been You (Enby) 11:11
Nine of Nick’s friends contributed to “It Only Aches When It Beats.” His friend Beth Svensdottir wrote this one:
Your ardor lasted twenty days/And brought me to a love-stunned haze/And then I’m high and dry and jilted/I guess your ardor must have wilted.
To the end of his life, Nick Enby refused to discuss the mysterious Genny.
to the spirit of stephen crane
in the dream a younger, troubled-days
robert downey jr
was auditioning for director
paul verhoeven
and the scene was going well
but then downey jr stopped,
overwhelmed,
and wept blood onto his bare chest.
verhoeven gently strolled over
and sat beside him,
and with a razor-sharp index fingernail
incised a design of a thorned heart
over downey jr’s real heart
with downey jr’s blood.
the tear-blood mixed
with the incision-blood.
verhoeven delicately put his hand
on downey jr’s shoulder
and downey jr looked up at verhoeven
with his wet, red-streaked face.
they were both weeping.
verhoeven so softly said,
“get your immaculate heart restored,
and we’ll talk.”
****
Afterword: This afternoon I came home from work exhausted, probably more due to sleep-deprivation the night before than from the rigors of work. I woke feeling refreshed and, still in bed, started to browse the Internet with my phone–but soon found the phone falling out of my hands as I nodded off. “Well, let’s take another nap.” In my second nap I had a dream substantially like the poem I have just written. I wrote a draft and was struck by the dream’s kinship to “In the Desert” by Stephen Crane. I then slightly rewrote the poem to make the cadence and language more Cranelike, more starkly descriptive; and I dedicated the poem to the spirit of Stephen Crane, one of my literary heroes.
Supporters of the Despot
Lend me your ears
And your consciences.
You let him lie.
You shrugged, said “All politicians lie.”
Out of the other side of your prevaricating mouths you said, “What I love about him is he’s not a politician.”
You never call him on it, not even after 30,000 lies, some of them told to get elected.
Can you say what exactly he did on Day One to stop inflation in its tracks? I can.
He did NOTHING to stop it in its tracks.
Sitting on his ass and watching TV doesn’t count, any more than it did on January 6, 2021.
He would have stopped lying if you shunned him for lying.
But you let him continue to lie.
YOU let him lie.
You LET him lie.
You let HIM lie.
You let him LIE.
So go to hell,
Take him with you,
And leave us to clean up your mess.
sorry if this disgusts
but many of us oldsters suffer
from undesired nasal cobwebs
and must either take tiny sharp scissors and carefully snip
(without a surgeon’s skill there will be pokery sufficient to induce tears)
or tweeze with tweezers
(yanking a subsector at a time. by the time you get that elusive last hair the tears are streaming)
or wax
(unsightly, unpleasant nose-pluggage with brown gunk on a popsicle stick)
or hands-only pinch and pull
(ineffective, painful or both)
.
so you look for that magical buzzwand device that is like a gentle weed-whacker and find one for only seven bucks and it works great for about a week and then doesn’t work worth a damn no matter how diligently you dig around up there and you think changing the battery might help but no
so you say the hell with it let nature take its course and before you know it you look like bruce dern in that movie where he was a cranky old man with seeming miniaturized tumbleweeds up his nose
and you keep your head down but then someone says chin up and you think ok dude you asked for it and your victim gasps and averts their eyes and then everyone else at work averts their eyes
and suddenly you are the quasimodo of the workplace
.
today I bought batteries for my new $24.99 grooming kit
here’s hoping that in 2025 the nosehair-removal state of the art has advanced
or they find a cure for senescent follicular misadventure
ps
“up your nose with a rubber hose” doesn’t work either
if people studied biology
while they studied the Bible
they would learn that there is much more to biology
than “male and female created he them”
they would learn that human males
are less elegant and more makeshift than females
that hormonal secretions influence gender
that we are all chimerical
and so we sort of rhyme with miracle
.
we cannot all be scientists
but every one of us can learn every day
but there are some of us who choose not to learn
who would rather stay at the shallow end of pooled knowledge
even though knowledge is power
and ignorance is crippling and destructive
but hey, why not get rid of urinals?
i for one would rather do my micturition in a stall
than have my nublike dick out for any gloating perv to peek over my shoulder to see
urinals are barbaric and demeaning
privy and privacy share etymologies
.
geez, are we all warped or what?
it’s JUST a BIOLOGICAL FUNCTION
annoying but necessary
embarrassing for many
we need to grow up about it!
fifty years ago i was in first love
we were intoxicated with each other
talked on the phone for hours about nothing
and we built a mythos around stuffed bears
and called each other “bear” too
read milne’s pooh books to each other
named members of her bear collection hair bear, bear hair, stranjber, the timid scare-bear, the red-capped festive bear, and so on
and sometimes the notes i wrote my sweetheart were in the persona of “annonamus bear”
signing the note “annonamus bear” and adding a couple of cartoon bear paws next to the signature
and always adding a postscript signed a. bear
.
alas, stupid choices and insane actions on my part led to the protracted ending of our relationship
and even five decades later occasional overwhelming regret wells up within me
and i hadn’t thought of annonamus bear at all this century
until today
for no reason I know
and here he is now, tiny, on my left shoulder
and except for “hi” he hasn’t said a word
but he implies plenty through his blackdot eyes
“don’t you miss the crazy magic?” say his eyes
“what good does frittering your day away in your unshared apartment do?” say his eyes
“learn from what you have loved” say his eyes
“this carnival ride will be over before you know it” say his eyes
.
alas, a. bear only knew me as a young pup and not as a sleepy, regretful old man
it’s a lot harder to find late-life love than his eyes say
but he has a point
One with Clay, Image and Text 