mound builders hither and yon and then and now

November 19, 2024
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in the midst of this valley of the sun/near the airport where i once worked/is an archeological dig/of a platform-mound community that we call the hohokam/but of course have no clue as to what they called themselves

and about a thousand miles away/and on the other side of the mississippi from what is now saint louis missouri/another people from another long ago built mounds

both peoples started broke/but luckily mounds are dirt cheap/when you add elbow grease

we now everywhere are mound builders/but our mounds are undesirable stuff called “garbage”/and our mounds are called “landfills”

twenty years ago i met a guy in the waste removal business/who when asked what he did for a living/replied with a joking “business is picking up”

alas his business was not only picking up/but also dropping off/and he said recycling really didn’t amount to a hill of beans as far as the environment is concerned/but it made people feel better

our throwaways include effluent of various toxicities/and traces of them end up in our bloodstream and fat cells and skeletons

an uncountable number of micromounds in every living creature on our planet/including you and me

so here’s to you o mound-builder reader/bystander innocent or otherwise

and here’s unsolicited advice from a fellow mound-builder: take out the trash

by which I mean

despoilers of our earthly home

the Church of Immediate Needs

November 18, 2024
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i live in an apartment complex that has water issues/and every now and then we dwellers get an e-mail/saying that the water has been shut off temporarily

last night i found not by e-mail/but by a gurgling sound and no water/that it was happening again

and the timing was awful/because i had yuck on my hands/and needed to wash them

i handled that crisis by using the drinking water in the fridge to wash/depleting my potable water supply by about a third

but another crisis began to loom/that of a growing need to answer the “call of nature”

and it seemed to me that the middle of the night between sunday at 10:26pm and dawn monday morning would not see a renewal of water service

consequently and from desperation/i created an ad-hoc religion called the Church of Immediate Needs/central to which dogma was the proposition that the presiding deity or reality-aspect or supernaturally-powered listener would prioritize prayer by immediacy of need weighted by relative outrageousness of request/and if the need were sufficiently immediate and the request sufficiently modest/it would stand an excellent chance of being answered in the affirmative

and having formed this religion immediately prayed that water would fill the toilet tank after i flushed and if possible would also resume gush-on-command from shower head and faucets

and then fell into mildly troubled sleep/and woke at the urgent message from my body’s evacuation system/sent at 3:57am

and stumbled to the bathroom sink and manipulated the faucet control

and LO AND BEHOLD like a car engine cold-starting the spigot sputtered and coughed/but then gushed blessed and holy WATER

and i was able to take care of business

.

so now there is a new church…or is there?

perhaps our own bodies have their own Church of Immediate Needs

and “Gotta go! NOW!!”

is a prayer

hark: a shark

November 17, 2024
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hark: a shark

hark: a shark

feel: an eel

swish: a fish…that got away…in the dark…

unreel

Afterword: Compulsivity led to the creation of this minimal list, minimalist poem. Midevening today I realized that if midnight came and went, and I failed to publish something on my blog, I would end a streak that started on July 25th. My friend RussKaz was nearby when I had this realization, and he happened to have single-word prompts on flash cards, so I asked him to pull one at random, and he pulled “shark.” The rest is hastily-written microhistory, with the subtext that a text-body in motion tends to stay in motion, especially if the textmaker has a screw loose.

flee fly flow fun

November 16, 2024
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she flexed her wings and flew into the sky/and orbited a planet she had known/before she donned her latest flesh. in high/aphelion our sun but dimly shone

but she supplied the radiance the brightness/and dove into the atmosphere a nymph/of firefly glow of first-time-kiss delightness/swift unlymphatic for she had no lymph

from core to ring she sped and danced en pointe/and left a ringdust phosphorescent wake/a kindred soul beheld in lust and want/but she was gone a differed need to slake

through solar wind she fled then bed resumed/through sun’s core in her dream cleansed unconsumed

the lost/unfound of words

November 15, 2024
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my mother started losing words/about four years before she died

“where is that…silver thiing?” she asked me/as i brought her sandwich/and salad with little jars/of extra virgin olive oil/and red wine vinegar/and exactly six lemon slices

by “silver thiing” she meant the tv remote/with which she accessed/her beloved “the price is right”/with host drew carey

she seemed to find her way/to and up the autistic spectrum/as she lost words and then concepts

and her pain was increasingly constant/and intolerable/yet it was still possible to draw laughter from her/till not long before she was gone

.

my older brother has begun to lose words

I have regarded him as my canary in a coal mine/and so this latest turn of life dismays

“i got this…thiing” he says

long pause

“dementia?”

“no not that…what’s the…other one?”

“alzheimer’s?”

“yeah that’s it”

.

i can’t find a word for how i feel

but a symbol will do

😦

alarm will sound

November 14, 2024
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an alarm will sound if it gets too hot/where there is civilization and wisdom

and in fact the alarm is sounding now/because it is getting hotter year by year/and measures to slow the trend are my nuscule

and another alarm is sounding/because the heat of hatred is also rising/to an incendiary extent

but it seems only a few of us listen to the wails

and others pass the gasoline/in a bucket brigade

at this moment

November 13, 2024
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i dawdle. reading edward bryant’s “war stories” in the last dangerous visions while digesting pizza. on pages 104-5 a woman spy is having a conversation with a shark who has just swallowed her whole and dived into deep water. but it may not be a full-biological shark. my late friend bernard schober would have liked this passage, i think.

i dawdle. there’s music across town, and I am invited, and i have a rented car, but i am digesting both buffalo wings and storyline.

I am mentally ill in much the same way harlan ellison, editor of the last dangerous visions, was. he struggled with bipolarity and clinical depression, but to a much greater degree than i do. the brilliant scenarist j. michael straczynski, executor of the ellison foundation/estate, went into extraordinary detail about ellison’s condition in the introduction to this book, which i have waited for for fifty years because ellison’s condition kept him from finishing the job.

my dining table bears a similarity to straczynski’s description of the manuscript-strewn tables in ellison’s home, which will become a museum called “ellison wonderland.”

my left shoelace is untied. it was untied all my walk to little cæsar’s too. and I had forgotten to put my fitbit in my pocket, so i will not get credit for those 2000 or so steps.

time to tie my shoelace and put the remaining half of the detroit deep dish veggie pizza in the refrigerator and go.

time to go.

but let me just check facebook first…

rex

November 13, 2024
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governors govern/presidents preside/representatives represent/but kings rule

for some it is a good gig/what with the scepter and ceremonies/the command performances the hobnobbing with bigshots/with the king the biggest shot of all

paradise for a megalomaniac and a drama queen

but the implied hierarchy is unsettling to some/and the acquisitive urge of royals/leads to the greedy want of more and more

which leads to some getting less and less

and competition amongst monarchs/leads to war

and though henry v himself fought in agincourt/rare is the king who takes arms himself

.

we seem to love leaderboards/to know who’s on top/and if you speculate that such number-one-ing and top-tenning/might be inherently unhealthy

the mob might call you a commie

.

some kings live prosperous long lives/some are booted out or regicide while still children

.

mother earth does not care

Two from the Oven

November 12, 2024
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Today at PIP Coffee and Clay these two items came from the bisque kiln. The one on the left is a closed vessel with a cut-out lid. I have given it to PIP’s barista and resident sculptor Nadia L as a wedding present. She married her sweetheart Daniel some weeks ago. “Glaze it any way you want,” I told her.

The form on the right, while avian, is not quite a bird. Look closely and you’ll see a host of weirdnesses, because in the joy of sculpting, adherence to reality went out the window.

I’m still here at PIP, enjoying sparkling mineral water and waiting for 1:30 PM, when my second 3-hour session begins. I feel the mojo, and have a lot to do!

chillin on a beach of canvas

November 12, 2024
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i was lengths of roll-tubed clay/alchemy performed today/made me beach bum beach ball cat/cell phone on the side no hat/so i use my hand for shade

vaguely hoping to get laid/vaguely wishing for a towel/but there is no need to growl/i’ll just chill on canvas beach/vague existence tastes like peach