Here’s some whimsical fun. Grinning unicorn and guy with eyepatch. Nuff said?
The whimsical words to the acrostic:
O don’t fuss don’t bother if it’s bee ay ess eye cee
Rigmarole and rigidness can soon uncalm a sea
Dice are tossed with some decisions darers then go far
Explanations pale before the red meat flipped and charred
Roasted flesh attenuates extenuated swards
When I was a freshman college student in the early 70s I took a class called CRITICAL AND EVALUATIVE READING. The class required the reading of five books of our choice, and our assessments of those books on 3″ x 5″ cards. I only remember four of the five books I chose. They were Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, A Patch of Blue by Elizabeth Kata, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. The last was far and away the densest, most difficult of the books, and I struggled to get through it. Midway I thought I needed some help and so I bought the Cliffs Notes (or it may have been a different study guide; the bookstore had two) plot summary/analysis of Portrait. But I quickly became skeptical of the analytical integrity of the thing. Near the very beginning Joyce writes
When you wet the bed first it is hot then it gets cold.
According to the “analysis” this occurs because Joyce is riffing on the dichotomy of Heat and Cold as a theme for the book.
I didn’t buy it. I think Joyce was reporting a tiny child’s experience, one I remembered myself. It’s true, especially in winter, that the blood-temp urine starts hot and cools quickly. And the “analyst” also didn’t pick up on the growth of the sophistication of the language of the book from the very beginning, which if memory serves is
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down the road…
to the very end, which I think is
Old friend, old artificer, serve me now and in good stead.
So I ditched the Notes and struggled the rest of the way through the book solo. I can say with confidence that I did not fully understand the book and was often baffled by what was being described, or emphasized, or driving the behavior of the principal characters. My assessment was fudgy and deliberately vague so as not to be wrong. C’est la vie.
More than 40 years later, on a different index card, I’ve brought something into existence which would baffle almost anyone, and I don’t exclude myself. A person looking like a blend of Charles Laughton and Eleanor Roosevelt stares over the right shoulder of the viewer, not quite stupidly. He or she is flanked by two dichotomous (perhaps) acrostic poems, transcribed below:
go away
got a pair? well ha ha ha
get a REAL life–it’s the law
only when it’s time for tea
one might stir things gracefully
STAY HOME
Soothing makes a baby Oooooh
Touching when unwelcome: shoo
Adding moisture gains a gleam
Yawning oft subverts the theme
The good news is these are two poems in trochaic tetrameter, with perhaps perfect rhyme and rhythm. The “go away” poem does seem go-awayish, and the “STAY HOME” poem seems to have the lulling comfort of home.
The bad news is it’s hard to tell what has been accomplished here. Some meaning had to take a back seat to the puzzle-solving of the acrosticization. As Chief Dan George says in Little Big Man, “Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
I conclude that its entertainment value is chiefly in the niftiness of the acrostic construction, and may be enjoyed in a similar way that a Lego sculpture might, when all the pieces fit together just right. But, dear Reader and friend, please don’t struggle overmuch with the extraction of meaning from the content. It may remind you of little life moments, or it may seem off the wall. With Acrostics, a perfect blend of content and form is sometimes unattainable.
Here is an “alternate Universe” version of a thing I did just shy of five years ago. It was in pencil and little of the acrostic poem was done. I made a copy of it, did some more peripheral drawing, inked it up, and added the complete (if occulted) poem and spot color.
Here is the poem, hidden lines and all, and acrostic line breakage disregarded for clarity:
Save the Lama for the Drama
Sown, when our flags and hearts are at half-staff
And self-appointed enemies would laugh
O, vested interests give pause. What for
Each involvement spawns esprit de mort
The Tragedies of living make us sigh:
How often pain seduces us to die.
E’en worse: to odd destruction we are led.
Lo: then more pained apocalypse ahead
Or altered consciousness or Disser A
Make head-in-sand-impostures take their aim.
A LOT of Aitch Why Pea Oh Ex Eye A.
Note: Aitch Why Pea Oh Ex Eye A spells Hypoxia, a condition of not enough oxygen delivered to the brain, inducing symptoms of blue-faced hallucinations.
In his famous novel 1984 George Orwell imagined the countries of the world reduced to three. They were named Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania. They were in perpetual conflict. Two of them would gang up against the third, and seemingly win, but then a different two would form an alliance against the new third country, ad infinitum. All conflict benefited the real movers and shakers of the world. Their machine turned misery into wealth and power. No one knew who these very powerful, very wealthy people were.
Part of the perpetual shame of being a citizen of the United States is that the United States benefits enormously from conflict. Huge corporations euphemistically named “Defense Contractors” work with the military to create more effective means of ending lives. Little research and development is devoted to defense; much is devoted to offense.
The current President, when a candidate for the office, when asked how he would handle a certain collective that has been described as a “Terrorist Group,” replied, and this is as exact a quotation as my memory provides, “I’d bomb the shit out of them.” As President, he has caused to happen a certain amount of bombing that has resulted in the deaths of noncombatants. These deaths are euphemistically called “Collateral Damage.”
In the movie VICE, based on the life of former Vice President Dick Cheney, there is a scene that occurs during the Nixon presidency. Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are near a closed door to a room where Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger are discussing their plans to carpet-bomb Cambodia. Somehow Cheney and Rumsfeld knew this. Years later, Cheney would be instrumental in compelling the US to invade Iraq, while the “Defense Contractor” Halliburton, which formerly employed Cheney as Chief Executive Officer, benefited from enormous, no-bid, cost-plus contractual work. For further information please run an Internet search on “sailboat fuel.”
Part of human nature is a desperate need to feel like one of the “good guys.” “Good guys” cannot exist without “bad guys.” In my lifetime, according to my ever-evolving government, the “bad guys” have included ex-Nazis, organized crime, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Ku Klux Klan, Communists, North Vietnam, “Red” China, the U.S.S.R., the Palestinian Liberation Organization (“P.L.O.”), Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Iran, Iraq, Daniel Noriega, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, ISIS and/or ISOL, Saddam Hussein…Moammar Ghaddafi…Osama bin Laden…so many more. Ironically, many of these enemies were created by the zealous efforts of the US Government to effect regime change, ostensibly for the good of the world.
The way to avoid Pushback is for the initial Push not to have occurred in the first place.
The words to the acrostic:
Post this suspect’s APB
Unto dog comes tick & flea
Shave it burn it write it: Bic
Have a prospect take a pick
Part of my morning routine is to work on unfinished poetry and drawings while having my first cup of coffee. Today I was picking at two Acrostics, ODD HIS SEA and TAPE PEST STRY, I’d started long ago. The lower third of the paper I had them on was blank, so I bookended it with PUSH BACK, which had been nagging at me for some weeks. (“Pushback” is a term used to describe a reaction of a political faction’s forces when their opposition has said, or accomplished, something that seems to have done some damage to their cause. Here and now, government shutdown, tweetstorms, and propaganda blizzards are Trump Administration’s pushback against opposition to the Trump Wall, the Mueller Russian investigation, and miscellaneous callings-to-account.)
My acrostic-composing reverie was interrupted when my gaze fell on a corner of paper. I recognized it as the printed material that was given to mourners at my Uncle Paul’s funeral last February 23rd. It was wildly improbable that it should be on my dining room table, buried under a pile of stuff, but there it was. And on it was a photo of Paul with humor, grumpiness, and a defiant gleam in his eye. “Draw me NOW, Nephew,” he seemed to be saying.
So I did, and I did a better Paul in ten minutes than I’d done in hours a few years ago.
“Sign it, but don’t date it.” I did.
“You’re done.”
What with the total eclipse of the Moon coming in scant hours, and my recent acquisition of black paper and white chalk, it seemed time to draw with light.
Here are the words to the double acrostic:
Night Light
Now we were wombed in waters warm and still
In peaceful amniotic near-lanai
Go down where water gives you Zero G
Henceforth let velvet DIMNESS see us through
To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt
This is a non-rhyming poem, so I didn’t begin composing it with the end-words. Instead, and since I wanted to wrap my spot illustration of mother and child with a sort of uterus of words, I wrote the last line, “To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt,” first. And so, curiously, the poem also makes sense from the last line up, if we just change one word on the new last line:
To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt
Henceforth let velvet DIMNESS see us through
Go down where water gives you Zero G
In peaceful amniotic near-Lanai
Now we are wombed in waters warm and still
Writing poetry last-line-first is just like the way Mickey Spillane wrote his Mike Hammer mysteries. He claimed he always started with the ending, then figured out how to get there. Poets, if you ever find yourself running dry, you might do worse than to give the Spillane method a whirl!
I have not played chess for a long time. At my best I wasn’t very good. But Chess is great subject matter, 2D or 3D. When I was heavily into ceramic sculpture I made several chess pieces with human heads and sometimes limbs; and I made at least two chess sets. I’ve wanted for a long time to draw or paint all the moves of a chess match in comic-book panel continuity, warping the board and pieces with each move to show the drama that was going on. But that is a MAJOR project and will have to wait.
Life and Chess overlap in the realms of Conflict, Positioning, Caste, and Planning. With chess AI proving sufficiently good to defeat chess grandmasters, it has become apparent that the ability to exhaustively review all possible moves “checkmates” ingenuity and intuition. Perhaps we will be humbled enough to move on to endeavors that are not combative. Therein lies Peace On Earth, my friends.
Life & Chess
Loose astringents may be styptic
Tight dual portraits form a diptych
Friend turned foe may grip may seize
Even with bewobbled knees
& find looseness holds the keys
Notice the mistake I made in line 2. I forgot the second letter was an I, and looking at it thought it was an T, the base of the L doing double-duty as a crossbar. It’s an easy fix–change “Tight” to “Inked” and it even makes more sense, although we lose the dichotomy from line 1’s “Loose”–but let’s let it be. It’s Human.
It is a new year. What better way to start a healthy culinary journey than at the all-Vegan café Urban Beans?
Here is Pumpkin Curry with a side of brown rice. The urban-beaned Coffee is laced with almond milk and plain granulated sugar. The book is by world-renowned health guy Andrew Weil, M.D., and I intend to live, breathe, and, yes, Eat it until I know it backwards and forwards.
I could not remember if I’d done a double-acrostic Urban Beans before, but was sure I’ve never done “urban vegan beans,” so
urban vegan beans
unbound flavor comes to b
renaissanced to taste & see
boosting pepperminted tea
absent sausage veal prawn
nutrients and RUSH°LeMans
Happy New Year, Friends!
oddie ology
o the Darkness in my soul / o
dear Heaven is my goal
dæmons dance a tango tho
i, a b c deffy g
excorcize Mortality
gone home
geez ah ooh
o god too
now the dream
ends with heme
One with Clay, Image and Text 