I was doodle-sketching a man looking vaguely like a bald Vincent Price. He looked like he needed a friend, so I added a waifish-looking woman, scaled differently so she would fit, and that enabled me to put her right arm around his head, rather protectively.
Then came consideration of a double-acrostic poem to go with the drawing, and “Scale Model” came quickly to mind: a Model built to Scale, punnish but (I hope) not too punishing.
I have done four acrosticizations of “Scale Model” and they all miss the mark but all have merit. If I did a dozen more I’d undoubtedly be nearer the mark, but there would go another few hours. I have a few other projects trying to be done, so the ghost of Robert Frost whispers
“Oh, I marked the first for another day!/But knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted If I should be coming back.”
I’ve been chipping away at this work in progress a bit at a time for about three weeks now. Today I put in a good hour and a half. It would be thrilling to be done with it by a week from today, but as always with a more ambitious work, the drawing starts taking control and making demands. That is a superb problem to have!
[The MYSTERIOUS WOMAN swings her arm downward, and the sign she is holding changes as she says “SLOW & Yield & STOP.” SAje then gyrates with increasing frenzy as she says “DANCE until you Drop.”]
Last night I made my Toledo, Ohio open-mic debut at the First Base Lounge downtown.
I had brought my whiteboard and a dry-erase marker, and when I signed up I was the fourth name on the list, so as the first performer was singing and guitaring I calligraphed the acrostic poem I intended to do, and then I drew the guy in the upper left-hand corner. I hadn’t noticed his name so I labeled him “1st guy.”
Next was Alex, another guitar musician, and he had a nice set of family-themed original songs, of his wife and daughter. One song likened his home life to a ship and his wife as the captain.
Then came Taylor and her ukulele, starting her set with a cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” Her other songs were melodic and sophisticated, I could tell, but the tricky acoustics and her delicate voice and my quasi-deafness only allowed me to understand random phrases here and there.
I thought I would be called next, but guitar musician Steve came up instead. He must’ve signed in the gap above my name. One of his songs was a cover of that catchy tune about a time well before Steve was born–the summer of ’69.
“Gary Bowers will be with us in just a couple of minutes,” said the announcer. I went up to him and told him I was a poet, not a musician. He said the open mic was for musicians, poets, comedians, and any other performers, and that I could use the mic Steve had used to sing, and detach it from the mic stand if I wanted. Isaid it was fine as is and asked for and got ausic stand for my whiteboard.
“Next up…is Gary.”
I told the dozen-or-so that I was open-miking for the first time in Toledo, having moved here in early July, and that yesterday was my seventy-second birthday [applause] and my first poem would be what I wrote for the occasion, an acrostic poem called “7ty Two” of only ten words, and I held up my whiteboard to show them as I read the poem, which even with pauses and the after-applause took less than thirty seconds.
I then realized that I had more performance time on my hands than anticipated, and I had better do more than “ope,” so I dragged from memory Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” an 1820 poem I’ve known by heart for more than 40 years. It occurred to me as I intoned “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings!” that it might be a better, more eye-opening performance if I imitated Donald Trump’s voice as I quoted the words on the pedestal. Next time I might, but it will need work.
I finished my set with “ope,” ostensibly about the young Ronny Howard’s role on The Andy Griffith Show but ending up being a bouquet of riffs on Ope the Syllable.
Before I got offstage I told the audience that I had drawn the performers who’d preceded me, and anyone who cared to could take a photo of my whiteboard before I left. And I did leave not long after, because the paid parking time I’d bought with my coins had lapsed.
As I drove home in the light rain I felt not exactly exhilaration but a pleasant well-it-coulda-been-worse satisfaction.
Microwaves containing messages and other information pass through our bodies an uncountable number of times a day, thanks to cell-phone technology and radio and stars. Though the above “jumbletron may seem busy unto incomprehensibility, it is laser-neam coherent compared to what a cell tower handles in a single second.
The “Rest Stop” rectangle is the simplest–one word per line, the last one hyphenated.
Ramifications
Entitlement
Seraglio
Two-step
Within each word a smaller word is emphasized.
IF
EME
RAG
OS
The word Eme is “chiefly Scottish” for Friend, according to the Scrabble Dictionary. The word Os indicates a bone, e.g. “os trapezium.” It might also mean the left eye, Oculus Sinister, or Operating System.
Discussion of the other rectangles will probably occur if my manuscript-in-progress ever see the light of day.
I love the look of land shifting beasts, and when one of them parked in front of the house I took a picture of it, and have started a sketch of it, and now I have the spine of an acrostic poem about it. The sketch and the poem will come around in due time, but when they do these early stages, fresh with undeveloped DNA, will be gone. I thought the balanced simplicity of them was worth preserving, just as photos are taken of a construction sote’s groundbreaking ceremony.
