Archive

Tag Archives: acrostic

INKtober 2019: Ring

October 1, 2019
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

2019 1001 ring

For 2019 Inktober 1st, the prompt is “Ring.” Ringing a few changes on Ring proved downright easy. There’s a ring-toss ring encircling a Coke bottle, the Olympic rings, Saturn and its rings, a ringing telephone, a bathtub ring, ring around the collar, ringing in the ears, an athlete on the stationary rings, and a diamond ring. Plus a mutt with a ring around one of his eyes. Plus a hard-to-see Moondog in the upper left-hand corner.

RING ring RING

Rotary tremor
Irenic tintinnabuli
Nascent pattern
Garlanding sprig

Robt MITchum

October 1, 2019
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

20191001_120653

Years ago Robert Mitchum said something I never forgot, though I cannot quote him word for word. He said that he didn’t understand why there was such a thing as acting school. “It’s like trying to learn to be tall,” is close to what he said.

About a week ago I watched his performance in a late 70s version of The Big Sleep that also featured Candy Clark, Sarah Miles, and an ancient James Stewart. There was a lot of cavalier killing in the movie, and a silliness to it that I don’t remember from my reading of the book, but Mitchum made a superb Marlowe, and his face was aptly set in sleepy worldliness and knowledge of darkness. His acting was tall indeed.

Robt MITchum

Roguish slick as MIT

Oh so a.d. h.o.c

Battered flesh

that makes gals hum

Take a fee & fi fo fum

 

coming change/wings climb

October 1, 2019
Uncategorized
3 Comments

20191001 change

Recently the United Nations General Assembly had visitors, youngsters bringing ancient wisdom and youthful defiance. They challenged the status-quoed representatives of countries who were continuing to despoil the Earth. It was magnificent. Mesdemoiselles Peltier and Thunberg were particularly fine.

coming change

catch & sync
out of reach
monomania
intubation
nesting
gusto time
wings climb

weather epic
idiots skeptical
nodes of spaghetti
gleaming maelstrom
strike or succumb

I hope the wisdom turns into action. It is as “almost too late” as can be.

Foil Safe–or is it Saee?

September 28, 2019
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

20190928_000106

Some time ago I was thinking about the versatility of metal foil. If you do an Internet search on “uses for foil” you quickly find that aluminum (aluminium elsewhere than the US) foil alone has at least 15 household uses. And foil may be used for balloons, lightsails, artwork, mirrors, and…

Semiconductor circuits. Gold foil is of particular interest to this discussion because gold is “biologically non-reactive.” When (NOT If; it is starting to happen already) semiconducting implants for human beings catches on, an ultra-thin gold-foil substrate for molecule-width semiconducting silicon will be standard.

Molecule-width–mind-blowing what they’re doing nowadays. There is a photo somewhere of an array of INDIVIDUAL ATOMS spelling out “IBM.” I’m too time-strapped (lazy?) to find and reproduce it here, but I invite you to find it. You see not the atoms themselves but the relativistic effect of their presence, which effect produces a sphere shape. (Sidebar: Ever wonder why “all the colors of the rainbow” don’t include gold, silver or copper? Relativistic effects of metals, that’s why. Which doesn’t tell you much, I know–sorry!)

Speaking of quantum physics (we were?! well, we were and we weren’t. Welcome to Quantum Physics, where things ARE AND ARE NOT what they seem!), my acrostic partakes of the there-and-not-there aspect of the Quantum Multiverse. It is both Foil Safe and Foil Saee. The top bar of the bottom E becomes the bottom bar of the E-wannabe F, which needs to be an E so the endwords will rhyme, but also needs to be an F because “saee” is not a word, and also “Foil Safe” is an ultra-apt, double-meaning phrase. (I have just written what is probably the weirdest sentence I have ever written.)

Foil Safe/Foil Saee

Flexible metals

Oven wrap, petals–

AI gets a pulse

Let’s Anti-Convulse

The last line hearkens back to pre-Jurassic Michael Crichton’s early novel THE TERMINAL MAN, one of the first What-If? fictionals about implantation tech. Seizuring subject was implanted with a device that would sense a seizure coming on and divert said seizure with a tickle to the pleasure center of the brain. (Spoiler alert: it works all too well.)

Someday I’ll dig out my manuscript “The Implant,” which was form-rejected by PLAYBOY and involved a cuckold’s implanting of an apparatus wrapped around the genitalia of the guy who had sex with his wife, set to trigger when the ejaculatory reflex happened. But not today; I’m too lazy (time-strapped?).

Will Wounders Never Cease?

September 25, 2019
Uncategorized
3 Comments

2019 0925 wounders

This is a time of wounds, and wounding, and wounders. It is a time of betrayals and deception. Thank Goodness it is also a time when 16-year-old Greta Thunberg addresses the United Nations General Assembly with a voice of reason and challenge, a clear and direct message to the wounders of the world that the savaging must stop.

The White House just released a transcript of a conversation between Donald Trump and a representative of the Ukrainian government. Trump was soliciting that country’s help in digging up dirt on the son of Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden. Trump offered help from his own resources to backstop the efforts he wanted the Ukrainians to make.

This is all part of the tapestry of wrongdoing that Donald Trump and his administration have woven. They wanted dirt on Hillary Clinton, and they met with Russians–in TRUMP TOWER–to discuss it. Previously, Trump publicly asked Russian hackers to find dirt on Ms. Clinton via her e-mails. And his tweets since before the 2016 to the present day have included wounding swipes at hundreds (this is not hyperbole) of the persons, organizations, and other entities that Trump perceives as either rivals or enemies, including the intelligence community, members of his own political party, and the entire Democratic Party. Donald Trump is the Wounder-In-Chief.

Viewers will notice that this page has a slapdash, hurry-up-and-finish quality to it. I wanted to publish this page so that it would be contemporaneous with this week’s events, and so the last lines of the acrostic are so UNcalligraphic they look practically scribbled. But Thornton Wilder wrote, in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, my favorite book by anyone ever, “Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.” So my page will not be redone…today…

Will Wounders Never Cease?

Wicked-clever weapon-making may use PVC
Wicked-evil felons have gone on a killing spree
Item that is made unsafe may lead to broken tibia
It goes international with rockets fired at Libya
Leave it undecided if Evolving is amiss
Lemon-freshened lab retrievers lend themselves to Bliss
Leprechauns and ne’er-do-wells have tickets on the barge
Low men on the Totem Poles prefer to live it large

SYLLABIC fuzz symbolic DAZE

September 22, 2019
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

2019 0922 syllabic fuzz

Here’s hoping the readers/viewers of this page do not feel completely adrift. Since this is acrostic poetry, necessarily some contrivance was involved in its construction, though I try to keep the appearance of such to a minimum. The Sinéad in question is Sinéad O’Connor, who was unfairly vilified for tearing up a picture of the Pope on the nationally televised American television show Saturday Night Live. Nowadays, given the revelations about the Church’s coverup of child molestation, many have come around to her point of view. Little is as simple and cut-and-dried as we want to make it.

And David Bowie is also mentioned. His lyric from “Ziggie Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” reads

He was a nazz
With God-Given ass…

Bowie is gone now, but he certainly proved that it takes all kinds to make a world, and that Talent Will Out. I am so sorry he is gone. May he rest in peace.

And Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, of course, created Apple and an Oz of their own, which became our own. They were a meld of vision and heart.

Lastly, “Yarrowstalked” derives from the casting of yarrow stalks as featured in the ages-old fortune-telling craft, the I Ching. My coinage boils down to “stalked by Fate.”

Syllabic Fuzz

Sussurent Surf
Yon freshmown Turf
Lo Mein Lao Tzu
Lost Cause found You
Lest Razzmatazz
And all that Jazz
Besettle Bowie into nazz
Invigorate both Jobs and Woz
Cruise from the boonies into Oz

Symbolic Daze

Sing O Muse of doomed Sinéad
Yarrowstalked and cruelly played. A
Mind in flux a Soul at sea
Betokens Trouble A to Z
Omens make us mutter Geeeez
Less of these Sacrificials, Please
It makes for victim bolt or freeze
Can NOTHING stem this harsh disease?

 

LOFTY aspiration

September 17, 2019
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Liftoff! and bye-bye duress. A lovely Sky, a lack of Stress. Observe the Earth and smile and weep: on wings of Breeze your heart will keep. I find a spirit light if higher, for Altitude will slake Desire. A tidal current may well fit the stratosphere from where you sit. I yearn to ever upward go. You see a Glory freshly known.

The above paragraph is the prose form of my acrostic poem “LOFTY aspiration.” Sometimes at poetry events I will recite the words of my acrostic poem, then do a “reveal” of my page with the poem on it. So here is this post’s Reveal. Soar serenely, Friends!

20190917_110427

 

Auld Time Sake

September 15, 2019
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

20190915_144525

Artists need to push themselves, and push the boundaries of the possible, but it’s not always particularly exciting, controversial or wrenching to do so–sometimes it’s even mundane, as you see. I’ve got this genre niche, acrostic poetry with a graphic component, and today it was time to have another go at minimalism. The triple acrostic reads “Auld Time Sake.” There is one word per line.

Amateurs are people who devote time to doing something they love. Ultimata are declarations that things must happen a certain way or there will be dire consequences. Leemerik is an odd spelling of Limerick that is a near-anagram of Lee Remick. Demesnée is a woman’s name derived from Demesne, defined as land adjoining a mansion that is owned and enjoyed by the mansion’s owner. Demesne is pronounced dehMANE, phonetically similar to Domain, which I’m guessing isn’t a coincidence.

This all may seem random, and the word selection odd, but a sizable amount of deliberation went into the acrostic’s construction. “Auld Time Sake” is phonetically nearly identical to “old times’ sake,” but now the words are of equal length. Each line has two characters between “Auld” and “Time,” and three between “Time” and “Sake.” This is a more pure-acrostic approach than I usually take.

Of these seven words together like this, endless collage-like images may come to mind, and limitless storytelling along previously unexplored avenues is possible, just as a selection of three main ingredients and four subordinate ones might keep a chef busy for years.

I placed the sketchbook containing the page in front of an image of Emma Thompson and John Lithgow embracing as they perform in the recent release LATE NIGHT. Their tandem performance in this scene brought tears to the director’s eyes, and to mine. The addition of that frozen frame in the background somehow added a good context to my page.

moonbeam embracer and friends

September 14, 2019
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

2019 0914 moonbeam embracerA special friend of mine seems to live by the Moon. At any given moment she knows its phase, and whether it is on the wax or on the wane. She inspired the card on the left.

A special friend of mine seems to draw energy from felines. She encourages them to congregate near her, and invests them with lavishments of love and exotic dining. She inspired the scrap on the right.

A special friend of mine fades out of view, then in. She seems to appear when I need a boost, then evaporate when I am on the up and up. I have sought and found her now and then, but hesitantly: I am afraid too much of a touch would attenuate the magic.

Words are left out of “moonbeam embracer,” yet the words displayed make sense of their own. I will show with ciphers how the missing words are placed, but revealing them would be too much of a touch. Also, there are many “solutions” to this “puzzle.” For you “solvers” out there, the poem is in trochaic tetrameter.

moonbeam embracer

maiden, 000 00000 000000 extreme
o how photons 00000 000 teem
omnipresent 00000 orb
never 000000 0 metaphor
beckon 000000 00 rca
endochronic 000 archaic
ah, 0000 000000000 guinevere
maiden, 00000000 00 000 sheer