Here is a shameful false start on the verses. The meter is fine, the rhyme is good, but each line is self-contained platitudinous nonsense that does not advance story, symbolism nor truth. I have stacks and stacks of such in my seven-year history of acrostic poetry.
It’s time for research: history of Latvia, significance of the ankh, anklet styles then and now. Stay tuned!
something needs to be said of barley
the grain
barley makes an ideal soup ingredient
it is a sponge for broth
and thus a gum and tongue pleaser
apparently it is used for beer as well
but more subtlely
the word
tolkien once named an innkeeper barliman butterbur
barley for short
and made him fat and chatty and slow of mind and pure of heart
fitting his name
which–hey–imagine alfalfiman aloebur
alfie for short
too too bristly
wrong
barley sounds like barney
and barely
and burly
father of barbie? sure
nice guy
the verse
be ye more like barley
kick it up a notch
make yourself unsnarly
butter up your scotch
The title for this series owes its colonscape to the Miller Analogies Test, Interested parties may quickly find a website that has the lowdown on the MAT, and free sample tests to boot, but all you need to know here is that ” : ” means ” is to ” and ” :: ” means ” as “.
:: you may recall, the double-acroticist looked at his (my) ANK LET beginning, and quickly epiphanied opportunity toappend aitch and tee, yielding ANKH LETT and enabling a DOUBLE Double Acrostic, which is not to be confused with a Quadruple Acrostic. The twin-twin challenges remaining were to 1) finish the acrostic a) so it would makes sense either way; and 2) do the illustration, which must b) incorporate the acrosticization in a single image. The above study is a possible serving suggestion, imagining a Lett woman (identified through her choice of having the flag of Latvia on her ankle) wearing an anklet that bears amongst its links an Ankh. What about LET? some astute observer may ask. Well, my Sweet Girfriend, who shall go named–Denise–LET me take a photo of her lower leg, and I based my drawing on the photo.
Two parts down, five to go. See you fine folks in a couple of days!
I keep getting possessed by a lovesickeningly romantic Sap who thinks life is hunky-dory as long as She Loves Me and, contrariwise, life is horrible if She Loves Me Not. Every so often I let him ride the Pencil and the Rhyme-Scheme-atron. This is one such time.
Here are the saccharine words:
Overtures at any other time may have been rash
Out of their contextual ensconcement–likely hash
If, however, frank assertions from a soulmate’s cache
Infiltrate a heart it may restore one’s hope, for sure
Cats who are enthusiastic tend to preen and purr
Catch a wholesome ecstasy: just meet a gaze and stir
The Sap wants me to point out the hidden message of the middle words: other contextual assertions restore enthusiastic ecstasy. Sap, it is done. Now please get lost until I need you again…
Index cards, four inches by six, ruled on one side and blank on the other, are the antibane of my existence. A few dozen of those babies and a couple of sharp Ticonderoga Black pencils and I can fly intercontinentally and be kept engaged and amused throughout the flight. Get a hundred-pack at any office supply and for less than four cents each you have the ideal unthreatening Idea Playground. Bad ideas can be tossed, good ones added to the uncut-diamond pile.
Today I have the acorn of what I hope will sprout into the oak of an exemplary journal page. I started with ANK LET, perhaps a next-in-the-series to my previously posted GOB LET. As I was working out end words ANK and LET were staring me in the face and ANK started hankering for an aitch at the end: ANKH. Ankh: powerful life-symbol from ancient Egypt. “Spirits of ancient Egypt..,” Paul McCartney sang once.
But what about LET? Well, add a tee and you get Lett, which means Latvian. This can go any number of good ways.
End of Part One
This is being written during the Winter Olympics of 2014, held in Sochi, Russia. I happened to tune in last night during a ski jump event. I learned that the competitors do not use skis with the traditional edge; that they sit on a crossbar till they’re ready to slide; that their landing area is cross-striped with red and purple and guidelined with what looks like rocks; that many ski jumpers can’t give it up, and go back to the jump even after they retire from competition. Hearing that, and seeing the exhilarating jumps, led me to this drawing and acrostic:
A floating specter seems to be from antigrav.org
Agility will keep him from the ER or the morgue
It helps to have a musculature up to the contort
It doesn’t hurt to NEED the thrill that only comes with sport
Restrictions are made moot yet new conditions are severe
Revel-lations liberate though icy wind may shear
This image is self-referential in that it involves a screen print of the prep work I did for the blog post.
For some reason I’m thinking of the funeral expenses my mother has just incurred. One line item was the rabbi’s fee, which was $400. There is no doubt in my mind that he earned his money, and then some: my mother was comforted by his well-chosen words, which showed an astonishing familiarity with the relationship my mother and stepfather had. Yet his “face time” with my mom and all of us was less than two hours. His own Prep Work for this task, though, began well before his thirteenth birthday.
Indeed, Prep Work for truly important work takes far more time than the work itself. My Prep Work for my first marathon began July 4, 1983, and more than 1500 miles of increasingly long runs and higher mileage per week. Yet when I took my place amongst the 10,000 other runners on August 19, 1984, I felt unprepared, and this proved true: my finish time of four hours, eight minutes and change was a bitter disappointment. (Now, however, I’m proud and happy about what I did, and what I’ve done since then. Age sometimes brings at least a little wisdom.)
In the largest sense, of course, everything we’ve done in our lives so far is Prep Work for what we’re going to do next. How’s by you? [smile]
Once upon a time there was an unhappy engineering student who was overwhelmed by tough classes and a tumultuous relationship. He decided to step back from the Master’s Degree program in which he was enrolled till he stabilized. Thirty-five years flew by, and somewhere in there the engineering career ship set sail for parts unknown. The End–or not quite. Remnants of his studies still float in his aging brain. The phrase “tails of the distribution,” first heard during a Probability and Statistics class, bobbed in his conscious thoughts an hour or so ago. The above page was created.
Here’s the horror: In order to tell the REAL Tales of the Distribution, I’d have to go back to school or self-study to refamiliarize myself with 1) polar coordinates 2) Payne’s theorem 3) Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss 4) Chi-squared curve smoothing 5) Use of factorials in permutations and combinations 6) the Central Limit Theorem 7) probability density function calculus 8) n-dimensional space. That prospect is horrific to me. My time is better spent communing with my friends and loved ones, composing acrostic poetry based on wordplay and subject matter I well know, enjoying the local landscape and other scenery, and making that tiny piece of the world within my jurisdiction a better place.
But some day, probably long after I’ve ceased to exist, knowledge will be downloadable directly into the human brain. No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks, just a clean upgrade. For the lucky-or-not folks enjoying such a technological advance, the sky will be the limit, and new, interdisciplinary ways of looking at reality will be made possible. Somewhere in there someone might stumble upon this blog-couched body of work of mine and feel amused contempt. What a moron! she, he or it may think…and that’s the REAL Horror of this Story.
Happy Valentine’s Day to my dear Girlfriend, Denise. Denise, I custom-created this for you while watching the very romantic movies WOMAN OF THE YEAR and PRIDE OF THE YANKEES. Hope you like it!
Sorry about the crappy-phone-camera photo quality, Darling. I’m Scannerless right now.
Here are the words, from me to you:
Get kisses right before we sleep: all very well and good
Great chemistry as surely as mahogany is wood
But thorough bliss is unfulfilled unless a savored wish
Be shared be sought be striven for be Had–we DO? Delish!
Love,
Gary
they slid on the slick
of cold-pressed board
and made verdant fieldevoking whorls
and then palmheels pressed
and they looked like feet
and a clean fingertip made toes
on a clean piece of paper
one by one the fingers admitted:
“this is him” “this is also him” “here’s more him” “you got him now”
and the prisoner escorted to his cell
wiping with paper towel only some of the residue
sighed for the days of fingerpaints
One with Clay, Image and Text 