Guest Ghost
Grab a six-pack or a Marg
Up the elevator: AArrgh
Enter Ectoplasmic Flo
Surreptitious? A p r o p o s
Toooodle oooooh–à bientôt
INKtober 2019: Ghost
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Tag Archives: acrostic poetry
INKtober prompt: Tread
“Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.” Motto of the Baltimore Grotto, a Maryland caving club founded in 1952
Tread Marks
Toes press macadam
Rabbit tracks weave amongst the flora
EXIT signs illumine dusty footprints on the floor
And Every One of us has left our mark
Defining a path through Darkness
Rest in peace, Harold Price Bowers, Sr.
1 9 3 3 – 1 9 8 3
INKtober 2019: Misfit
Gearloose
Many team-ups don’t go off ° Maybe cringing maybe scoff
If you are illuminati ° Instinct says: Avoid John Gotti
So it is with gears to shift ° Some we must assign short shrift
INKtober 2019: Ornament
ornAMENt
osmiCosmos makes us gleam
ring surrounds a worthy scheme
nest-in-spun-gold regimen
amplifies sweet Sentiment
Inktober supplement: Spread Sheets
Long ago, in a century adjacent to our own, I put food on the table of my tiny family by creating, enhancing, and updating Excel spreadsheets for a hospital system known then as Samaritan Health Services. They paid me about three times what I am making now, and in more-potent 20th-century dollars. Nevertheless, I sleep better at night now than I did then. Part of that insomnia was due to Imposter Syndrome, part was Breadwinner’s Burden, and part was the inability to forget about the job in my off-hours. But now I think of that time as vital and productive, and I’m grateful for the insight it gave me into the labyrinthine workings of the financial side of “healthcare.” I did this page with a generous dose of nostalgia.
Spread Sheets
Suspend a disbelief the Moo-cow moos • Present a spirit willing in the flesh • Repeal the laws that make us always lose • Encapsulate a Babe & build a creche • And THEN you’ll pass this arbitrary test • Designed to turn your whole notes into rests
INKtober 2019: Snow
The double acrostic for this one is a single word, PHOEBE. Though Pho and EBE are standalones–Pho is a Vietnamese food, and EBE is Extraterrestrial Biological Entity–let’s ignore the halves and let them be Phoebe. And within this most minimal poem, snow nay be found.
Phoebe
Poet songstress was set free
Heaven knows her F.O.B
O the afterhaps we’ll see
INKtober 2019: Frail
One fateful day in the mid-1970s I had the extraordinary privilege of being in the same room with both Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe. They were in Tucson, where I was a student at the University of Arizona, for the opening of the U of A’s Center for Creative Photography. And they were attending a meet&greet in the lobby of the campus’s Museum of Art, right next door to the Art Building, where I spent a lot of time toiling at Painting and Life Drawing and Printmaking and such.
Ansel Adams was cheerful and accessible, a sort of out-of-uniform Santa Claus. Georgia O’Keeffe was different. Dresed in a floor-length black dress, she leaned tripodally on her blackcane, her deep-set eyes wide and glittering, not saying a word. She was tiny and looked quite frail.
But she did not SEEM frail. She radiated Power. Her gaze was like a wide-beam laser. The vibe was of her being all-seeing and all-knowing.
I was there about half an hour and in all that time the dozens of people in the room respected Ms. O’Keeffe’s space and silence. They made up for that soundless proximal vortex by flocking around Adams and peppering him with questions. He held forth jovially, magnificently. Nicest guy on Earth, in his element and in his moment.
Ms. O’Keeffe was in her element as well, in her realm of observation and contemplation. She reigned.
Not So Frail
Needles point to skin and coif. Omnipresence throws them off. For Truth is Power and talent Soars. A sense of Place is Boat and Oars. I owe this Georgia Peach some Soul.
instead he drank whatter
About fifty years ago I read Cool Hand Luke by Donn Pearce. I was a teenager in Glendale, Arizona. I may have been trying out for the track team at the time. (Alas, I had no talent, but they let me “compete” anyway.) A phrase from that fine, gut-slamming book stuck in my head from that time to this, and I invoke it every time I try to turn over a new leaf and be healthy.
Luke had made a bet that he could eat fifty eggs. Sometime between the time he made that bet and he (spoiler alert) won the bet, he drank water when everyone thought he was going to do something else, specifically vomit. “Instead he drank water…” So when I’m tempted to eat a bag of cookies or a Philly Cheesesteak, I stave off temptation by being, briefly, Cool Hand Luke himself, and have some water instead.
The acrosticist’s problem, though, is that “instead” has seven letters, as does “hedrank”, but “water” has only five. So to fulfill an outlandish acrostic requirement my drinker is drinking “whatter.” I was forced to conceive a backstory about a sports drink called “Whatter You Waiting For?” rich in electrolytes and laced with a psychotropic substance that enables focus and intensity.
instead he drank whatter
it pays to hydrate–ask athletic people in the know
needs include an anaesthetic dream of sandra oh
suck down that nutriented drink that you may be grade a
then find a righteous probiotic product like yoplait
ecclesiastes says to eat and drink as if au fait
and merriment is on the menu lest the tempers flare
delicious drink and kitchen sink make such a lovely pair
Apologies to Yoplait and to Sandra Oh. I am a big fan of both but consulted neither. Yoplait helped restore my digestic tract’s “good bacteria” after I was bombed with antibiotics. Sandra Oh was a huge reason I got such a kick out of the movie Sideways. Also she had a minor but unforgettable role in the pornstar-funeral episode of Six Feet Under. She is gifted indeed. –So my hope is that both parties consider my reference to them respectful and admiring. (Realistically, though, this post will overwhelmingly likely be unnoticed by both.)
CATastrophic CAT acrostics #1
This was hard enough to do in itself, but there is more rough road to bump over, because this is just one acrostic, yet the acrostic is “Catastrophic Cat Acrostics”–plural. So at least one more is forthcoming.
The other issue is “Catastrophic.” Where is the catastrophe? Well, the default will be that Cats have a reputation for living on the edge They are rumored to require nine lives because of their endangering curiosity. In this version of the poem, the third line reads “Tomcats who leap off a roof so often land intact.” But in an early draft the line read “Toss Tomcats off a roof and they so often land intact.” Catastrophic scenario, but what a horrible thing to do!
CATastrophic CAT acrostics #1
Collectors know that Kitties go beyond mere bric-a-brac • And soothsayers regard the Black-Furred key to the Arcana • Tomcats who leap off a roof so often land intact • And Prowling after Plummeting becomes a tom’s Nirvana • Successful integration of a cat in story’s arc • Takes understanding of the Cat as Empress/Angel/Boor • Rejuvenator/Savior yet a l o o f when you embark–O • Oui is Yes & Non is No & Always is Toujours • Peut-être is Perhaps and fot Eat Well Bon Appetît • Here almost endeth our leçon for Boredom is Ennui • It suits a Cat as does most French for there Cats are très chic • Comprenez-vous Lautrec, Toulouse un chat avec précis
Another three arguments for the Catastrophe of this acrostic is the degenerative use of the French language, the clumsy sometimes-iambic-sometimes-trochaic septameter, and the stifling crowdedness of the text. As to the first, French is useful when an endword must end on a certain letter AND rhyme.
The good news is the next one can’t help but be better.
neat heat feat. heat neat
Modern music of the Hip-Hop variety will often see one artist enhancing another, as for instance “Eminem feat. Rihanna.” “Feat.” is of course short for Featuring. Since this page is one acrostic enhanced by another, and all the acrostic words rhyme with “feat.”, it was irresistible to use “feat.” in my title. There’s also the tendency in poetry events to “feature” one or more poets, with or without “open mic,” which is of course short for “open microphone,” though often there isn’t a microphone.
The stereotype of Canadian speech is to end a sentence with “eh.” Comic book legend John Byrne, himself a Canadian, once quoted another Canadian who scorned that stereotype, but he said, “We don’t talk that way, eh.” Canadians also have a perhaps deserved reputation for being quite nice and quite polite.
There is a Canadian whiskey called Fireball, laced with cinnamon and like the alcoholic version of Red Hots, a hard candy popular when I was growing up. So a subfeature of this page might be called “heat neat feat. Fireball.” When a drink is ordered “neat” it means don’t add ice nor water nor a mixer to it.
“Cafe au lait” is French for “coffee enhanced with milk.” On the page I made circumflexes and accent marks, but writing in English we often do without. “Santa Fe” is sometimes written with an accent mark over the e–Aldous Huxley did so in Brave New World–but overwhelmingly its written form dispenses with the accent mark. It would have stuck out like a sore thumb on the acrostic.
The Seine is a river running through Paris, France. Once upon a time “the Left Bank” referred to creative types, because they tended to congregate on the left bank of the Seine.
A lot of people from France ended up in Canada. There is a ghost of a chance that “eh” is a direct descendant of “n’est-ce pas?”–French for “Is this not so?”
.
neat heat
nylon in Toronto, eh
eagle feathered Santa Fe
ash on 56th and Shea
time for some cafe au lait
heat neat
h i j k l m n
eventide upon the Seine
a b c d c b a
taken with cafe au lait
One with Clay, Image and Text 