what you are doing here and now

August 5, 2024
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half of yourself had been waiting in your mother’s ovary since some time before her birth. half of you was manufactured in one of your father’s testes some days before your conception. maybe. it is possible that half of you came from a thawed-out sperm donation.

your tadpole half plowed into your egg half. dna from the tadpole’s head did a jackson pollock number on the egg’s inside wall. the wall thickened and became like unto gandalf to the other sperm cells, saying in effect “you shall not pass.”

you developed and became viable.

you passed through a birth canal or an incision and if you did not cry a childbirth attendee gave you something to cry about.

what you are doing here and now is continuing the journey you began, a journey of survival and the satisfaction of your curiosity, now reading the expositive words of a stranger or a friend or both or neither, and this very instant you have satisfied your curiosity by finding out how this poem en

skew kus

August 5, 2024
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we hope something new/comes up today along with/the usual fun

temperamental/judgmental and paranoid/are all illnesses

what coffee enhances/double-shot diminishes/and slumber transforms

if you do a search/on “miracle near me” you/must be desperate

a chemical way/for a four-syllabled “skewed”/is “allotropic”

Absentmindedly: an Acrostic Sonnet

August 4, 2024
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As we accrue experience and skill
Bestriding academia and roles
Some memories grow vital, some just fill,
Ebb-tiding to the doldrums in our souls.
No one escapes some episodes of tedium,
The repetitious lulls between the dramas,
Mid troughs and peaks we find a happy medium
In being kids and oldsters, dads and mamas.
Neuronic loss, ironically, stokes memory,
Drives us to happy avenues of yore,
Ensorcels us whilst Now is filed with emery,
Delivers blank befuddlement at core.
Let’s see…where was I?? Candy bars a nickel?
Yum yum, and hey, who wants an Arnold’s Pickle?

mis nom ers

August 3, 2024
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something seems to be a mis

(mes amis is my friends mesa me might be a small plateau town in maine and between two res and two fas you will find two mis)

a cartoon cat nomnomnominates lasagna

(nom is the way norm is pronounced in south boston and if nome a small town in alaska got the e frozen off ditto and then there’s the dyslexic jamaican)

maybe ers is an embroidered cockney towel

(your brain resides between your ears but to make ears you can jam an a into ers and the superman of 60s dc comics said er when he was stuck for something to say and ulp when he was stymied and there were a lot of oofs too amongst the ulps and the ers and the word-append er means one-who exemplified by tender being one who tends and by logical extension the word-append ers men’s ones-who however surrenders does not mean ones who surrend)

(glad to be of welp that’s it for now folks)

The Birth and Early Life of the Snot Dogs

August 2, 2024
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Once upon a time there were these two guys, Jeff and Gary, who worked for a safety equipment company run by Gary’s dad, and sometimes after work or at lunch Jeff would break out his guitar and a few songbooks

And they would sing Beatles songs or Tom Petty or Bob Welch or The Who or some of Jeff’s original songs or Jeff’s brother Danny’s stuff (“Cord Whippin Mama” was a real saga)

And then one day in 1983 Jeff suggested that Gary buy a guitar and a little Gorilla amp

And he did and some more songbooks too like Great Songs of the 60s and Jackson Browne and another bigger Beatles book and Bob Dylan

So they played stuff and then Marty K came back to town and he had what he called a Good Smellin Bad Guitar and he joined in

And the fledgling band was christened The Snot Dogs and Marty who couldn’t always be there took to saying “We are The Snot Dogs/The Snot Dogs are we/Sometimes there’s two/And sometimes there’s three”

And fellow GHS alumni Charlie and George got the word from Marty and there started to be get-togethers mostly in Jeff’s living room

And Marty went off to law school and before long fellow law school students Karen, who played fiddle, and Vicki, who played flute, started coming to the sessions

And one fateful night at Jeff’s the heavily pregnant audience member Joni, who was Gary’s wife at the time, let Gary know between songs that she had felt something that may have been a contraction

So Joni and Gary left to give birth to their daughter while the band played on

For many years.

crazy stuff

August 1, 2024
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there’s this book that says all kinds of crazy things

talks about the sun stopping in the sky and people living more than 900 years and a woman punished for disobedience by being transformed into salt in defiance of physical law

talks about how to treat your slaves talks about a guy whose strength came from his hair and there’s also a talking snake

one of the last things in the book talks about corpses floating into the sky and four personifications of different badnesses riding horses

and this book has influenced human beings and their behavior unbelievably

fulfilling the wish of a bunch of men who convened about 1700 years ago and cobbled up the book which is really two books which is really a megacollection of transcriptions from oral tradition and accounts not from eyewitnesses but from people influenced by whatever happened decades before

believe what your mind tells you is true my friends wield your faith find your wisdoms and become the best representatives of humanity you possibly can be

and i will heartily do the same

baffledly confusedly searchingly

belly interesting

July 31, 2024
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time was when my belly did not throw

a shadow

and wasn’t out warping the woof of my pants.

but sure as my hero is sweet rā

chel maddow

the shelf of my undergut looks me askance.

the trouble is that food is just meant to

be eaten

and I have forsaken such vices as gambling

so i have what’s fit for a glutton

to sweeten

my near-term desirings as through life

I’m shambling.

**

Afterword: I’ve racked up more than two years of compulsive-gambling sobriety, and I don’t smoke and rarely drink and don’t use any recreational drugs, but lately my eating habits have gotten excessive, which for a diabetic is at its very least mildly self-destructive. At the same time, though, it is hugely enjoyable, so there’s a quality-of-life struggle going on, complete with the creeping guilt that compels me to mutter “You Belly-Worshipper, you” as I waddle away from an all-you-can-eat buffet. So this blog post is my way of naming the beast that I hope to defeat.

a non-search for salvation

July 30, 2024
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the crushing molten slush of earth’s interior

is below

it is not hell

as for above

we see stars

the light of which archivingly records

gravity’s gatherings and cndnsngs

and the siblings HEAT!! and p • r•e•ss•u•r • e

touching off thermonuclear explosions

that endure millennia

but will not last until the end of time

**

save misplaced piety

save misunderstood deities

save your wayward speculations

for a late-life informed knowledge base

here and now you have breath and water

and a moment to share and a voice

and among the billions who surround you

are minds capable of communion

and togethernesses

love less ness

July 28, 2024
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after eliot ness died

leaving his third wife and first

and only adopted son his co-written book

was published and sold a million

and a half copies and robert stack

portrayed him starting in 1959

with walter winchell doing rapid-fire

narration.

the death of eliot ness by heart attack at 54

did not leave the net love felt and expressed

by humanity

appreciably diminished.

the same goes for the net anger

and hatred.

marble loss

July 27, 2024
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marble loss

“lost his marbles”
is idiomatic
for his loss of either sense
or intelligence.

here are two true stories
about childhood loss of real marbles
and one developing story
about my shrinking brain.

the first story is about my brother harold
and his marbles in a popcorn box
and the racecourse known as turf paradise
and its corrugated patio-style roof.

briefly, harold took his box of marbles
to our family outing day at the races
and somehow the box got kicked over
and the marbles rattled down

the corrugated roof
onto the heads
of some of the spectators below.
whoops!

the second story is of my business enterprise
in middle school wherein
i filled a plastic toy gumball machine
with lots of cheap marbles and five good ones.

it was like a slot machine. a kid with a penny
could try his luck hoping to get a bumblebee
but most of the time getting a cateye or clearie.
one fine day i made nineteen cents

which in 1964 could buy you three candy bars
and three bazooka joe bubble gums
and at five percent there was but one cent tax.
a fortune!

and i found a loophole
in the school rule forbidding the stashing
of marbles in your desk
by keeping them ON my desk

in the gumball machine, brazenly showcasing
my wares. sweet, shy miss morse did not
say a thing. i suspect she knew
that my business would soon go bust,

and it did, spectacularly, due to the desktop
being slanted, and young gary being careless
and clumsy: my elbow toppled the gumball
machine, and it fell to the floor and the cheap

plastic shattered, and the marbles
fled like the scarabs
in that movie about a mummy
and miss morse had the marbles brought

to her desk, where they remained
until the end of the school year when she
most graciously gave them back to me
just in time for summer.

we now come to my brain
which has been revealed to be shrinking
(comparison of my 2019 mri to last month’s)
beyond the norm for an elderly patient.

i have lost neurons. the condition is known
as “brain atrophy.” i have what the doc calls
a “neuropsychological test” coming up soon.
i hope i do better than i did

on the cognitive test they’ve already given me.
meanwhile, my way of not going gentle
is by journaling and poetry.
this is both.