september
eleven
two thousand
and one.
dismember
unleaven
arouse and
be done.
smash into
a tower
and then do
its twin.
begin to
feel power
let hurtyou
begin.
persuant
to orders
subdue two
more crews.
be truant
of borders
in queues to
bemuse.
the bleeding
is crippling
the pain takes
its tolls
by leading
the rippling
of hatred
in souls.
Gamblin’ Fool and the Lucky Ladies
The Valley of the Sun in Arizona has casinos
And some of the Blackjack tables have a side bet called Lucky Ladies
Bet a buck or more on the Lucky Ladies
And if the two cards you are dealt total 20
You have won at least four bucks
Even if it’s an ace and a nine.
If the two cards are the same suit you have won at least nine bucks,
If the two cards are identical face cards you have won at least nineteen bucks,
And if the two cards are both the Queen of Hearts,
You have won
At Least A HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE BUCKS.
But if
The Two Cards
Are BOTH QUEENS OF HEARTS
AND THE DEALER HAS A BLACKJACK
You Have WON
A THOUSAND DOLLARS
FOR EVERY DOLLAR YOU BET.
It is called a “Sucker Bet”
Because the odds are much against you.
(Let’s have a brief interlude into Probability;
Please skip this stanza if uninterested.
For a double deck, which is close enough for our demo,
The odds are two in 104, or one in 52,
of you getting the first Queen of Hearts,
And the odds are one in 103
Of you getting the second Queen.
So already you’re looking at odds of one in 5,356 of getting those Queens.
Of the 102 cards remaining,
Eight are Aces
And 30 are face cards.
So of the 10,202 ways the dealer can get two of the remaining cards
There are eight ways he can get an Ace on the first card,
30 ways he can get a face card on the second card.
So, of course, there are 30 ways to get a face card on the first card
And eight ways to get an Ace on the second.
So 240 times two is 480 ways she can have a Blackjack.
Divide 480 by 10,202
And you get odds of a little worse
Than 1 in 20.
So the odds of you getting two Queens of Hearts
And at the same time the dealer getting Blackjack
Are less than one in 107,120.
That means they pay out less than 2 cents on the dollar
Of the true odds
That it happens.
Sucker!!)
But sometimes Suckers Win.
And the Gamblin’ Fool
On this auspicious occasion
Had not one but THREE dollars bet on the Lucky Ladies.
He let out a Whoop when the Queens appeared,
And felt light-headed when the dealer, in a sweet conspiratorial voice
Said “I do have the Blackjack.”
So there he was, winner of THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS…
Or WAS he?
First they called Upstairs
To run the vid
To establish that everything was on the up and up.
The Gamblin’ Fool had to fill out a couple of forms.
One was a W-2G
Which meant the three grand was Taxable Income.
Another was an Agreement
With the option to let the Casino use the event and his likeness
In promotional material.
(He passed.)
When the smoke cleared the dealer,
A sweet person of color,
Who seemed genuinely thrilled for him,
Handed the Gamblin’ Fool
Six purple $500 chips
And he in turn handed her a hundred-dollar bill as a tip
Wondering if he was being a Cheapskate.
When he turned in the chips he tipped the cashier $20,
Saying “My lucky day.”
He left the Casino with his head held high,
Finally Walking Away A Winner,
Two ghostly
Lucky Ladies
By his sides.
Here’s a Valley poet who’s been a part of the scene far longer than I have, going back to Willow House, which I never had the pleasure to attend. “I have dozens of Ted Christ stories,” he says with glee in his voice. I have about three Ted Christ stories. I envy Perry.
Perry and I both love both reading and concocting Bad Puns, so I threw in some Punnishment in the acrostic poem. And in a phone conversation just a few minutes ago, when I scored his permission to do this blog post, I told Perry there’d be a Bad Pun in the annotation, a mangling of a line from a Bruce Springsteen song. Asked him to try to figure it out, giving him an ETA of an hour and a half to do so before I published. But I’m going to pull a fast one and publish in far less than an hour and a half. That way Perry will rightly say that I didn’t give him enough time.
The mangled line, which will now refer to my friend and me:
“. . . Because Scamps Like Us, MAYBE we were BORN to Pun . . .”
Cheers to you, Perry Sams!!
Sams Club
Subverse in fun with kitsch & sync
And Pun in hand estop & THINK. You’ll
Meet a Queen & she will dub U
Sir Thickwicket so save your stub
On Saturday, August 14, Banner Urgent Care called me to let me know I had tested positive for Covid-19. Pfizer vaccinations had in April were an insufficient bulwark for the ravaging hordes. So from that day to this I have dealt with a debilitating fatigue and up to two days ago there was also a dryish, yappy-dog-persistent cough.
A few days ago I received a monoclonal antibody infusion, intended to keep my mild symptoms from worsening. I had no side effects and my cough went away. Coincidence?
The second most creative-energetic thing I did during this episode was this Covid Edition To-Do list. I never got around to that Laundry Prep, but I’m doing the blog post now.
As for the most creative-energetic thing, here it is. On an index card I describe what has happened to me and advise myself not to succumb. I didn’t.
If I can get to noon tomorrow without a fever, my quarantine ends and I will totter back out into the world, overjoyed to be among the living. Be CAREFUL out there, Friends!!
your noodle is a wonderland
of fixt intent and reminisce
of journeys by the lump and strand
and newfound hope and longlost bliss
so treat your noodle with respect
and seek new treasures for its store
be caring kind and circumspect
and own your deeds and go for more
A few days ago I got a dry-erase board and some markers from the office-supply chain Staples. Every day I erase the board and repopulate it with new items. (Tomorrow, though, a few items may carry over!) And every day I challenge myself to draw something–today it’s a motorcyclist defying death the way Evel Knievel used to do.
My friend Manuel Paul Arenas, whom the poets of the Valley of the Sun call Manny, with his poetry and fiction tills many of the same fields as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and, last but first, Shirley Jackson. Manny’s work may be found in Spectral Realms and other…ah…spectral realms.
He is a soft-spoken and gracious man with a good, however dark, soul, and I am lucky indeed to call him Friend. When I texted him about doing this acrostic, I told Manny it might be fun to substitute “Pall” for his middle name. He texted back “Sure,” but I think he was being too nice to object. I ditched the idea, partly because there is a real apostolic quality to Manny. His Facebook video recitations have a velvety-voiced quality of arcane proselytization.
Manuel Paul Arenas
My friend explores an Area
Across the Primal barrier
Necropolyptal mise en scène
Undoes accursive Lion’s Den
Endearing ghoulish Shangri-La
Lets serve a plate of moist foie gras
tonal range
torch’s blaze to darkest char
oleo to chop-fraught sea
new-paint-glisten on a barn
amateur but p.f.g
let the graphite SMILE & be
“P.F.G. stands for Pretty Good. 🙂 And the original meaning of Amateur is someone who does something for the sheer love of doing it. I love to draw.
It had been bugging me that I hadn’t done a segment of my n.e.s. series for a long time, so here we are. Again we see Good Idea, Slapdash Execution, but I kind of like the primitivity this time.
The “Gare Bear Lines” emblazoned on the plane is an inside joke for those co-workers, starting with Katie Hoffman and most recently with LaShawna Douglas-Muhammad, who call me Gare Bear (or Gair Bear, as some would have it)–I am grateful for their easy-going affection. If I ever own an airplane something like this will be going on the fuselage.
This page began in May, and I dinked with it and dabbed at it till today, when a little voice said, “You haven’t published anything on your blog in July, and it’s July 3rd. Now or never, dude.”
It’s mostly an idea: Write a bit of narrative and embed in it the opening lines from “If I Only Had a Brain,” in the film version of The Wizard of Oz. I’ll describe one motivation for doing so before we are done here. Meanwhile, here is the bit of narrative:
A quorum gathers for thematic scarification. We’ve a farce to throw: Throw on some ribeye styeaks/Pour Julep mix that slakes/No knowing what is true/Or what we might could do while the metaphorical cat’s away and we analogous mice savor the unsupervised hours
Iconic discoveries caressing us with their mmind-tickling delights
As the ideas flow some of the others convened in insulated waiting rooms, with plenty of fodder for the Truth-thirsty brain…
The embedment:
quoth the scarecrow:
i could while away the hours
conversing with the flowers
consulting with the rain…
Why did I do this? Several reasons. I wanted layering–several related things going on at once and overlapping, because that is sometimes a closer approximation to Reality than a static, one-thing-going-on illustration. I also wanted to pay tribute to the amazing lyricist, Yip Harburg, the amazing composer, Harold Arlen, and the amazing Ray Bolger, who brought Harburg and Arlen’s song to life. And I wanted to challenge myself with a word-puzzle with a high degree of difficulty.
But the BIG thing I wanted to do is a takedown on a book called The Bible Code. Published in 1997, The Bible Code is a piece of flimflam that purports to reveal hidden prophecies the the Old Testament, using equal-spaced gridding of certain texts. It was a New York Times bestseller and so was its sequel. People believed that the author was sincere, and brilliant.
But he wasn’t. He was a puzzle-creator, just as I am. He dinked with and dabbed at certain Scripture until he got certain patterns to emerge, which is exactly what I do with my acrostic poetry. And then he sold it as Cosmic Truth.
Shame on him. And shame on the people who believe not the Truth but what they want to believe. (Shame on me too. I do that. I am All Too Human to that extent.)
In the Wikipedia entry on The Bible Code, this delightful passage appears, under the heading “Criticism:” “The general construction of alleged “Bible Codes” and Drosnin’s methodology in particular have been criticised by mathematicians and others.” Bless the Mathematicians, and bless the Others, for knowing Hooey when they see it!
One with Clay, Image and Text 