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personal anarchy

to my friends Anita and Eric Mahaffey

when i was young and uneasy/in arizona’s glendale elementary school district #40/the regimentation was constant

chorus teacher miss heath/a good-souled if misguided pouter pigeon of a lady/had us sing “this is my country”/and march in place while singing “you’re a grand old flag”

and of course we said the pledge of allegiance/first thing every school day

and our newspapers were the arizona republic/and its sibling the phoenix gazette

both published by eugene s pulliam, rabid anti-communist and anti-bureaucrat

we also read the more provincial glendale news-herald/which was indeed heraldic

and as a consequence/the rules were deeply ingrained in this schoolchild/in the land of barry goldwater

(fun fact: i have grown to admire Mr AuH2O)

and you don’t just shrug off such insistent, relentless regimentation

but you resist/you fight back/even many decades later/to dethrone the despotic beast within

you learn to make functional pottery/and you make yourself an Anarchy Cup

and you learn to prepare food for yourself/and you make your meals anarchic

go on the griddle to go off the grid

buy yourself a halfloaf/of batter than none sourdough/extra sour and lumpish

use its stevedore heel/to have mayoed tuna with dillpickle/for an open-faced breakfast microsandwich/and eating it

then you spread the same tuna on the next, larger slice/and sprinkle sunmaid raisins/on the tuna substrate/and eat that too, washing the bites down to gulletsville/with black sumatran coffee in your Anarchy Cup

and then let sanity prevail, drawing the line/at spreading blueberry yoghurt/on a third, mayoed-tuna slice

instead pouring a second cup of coffee

sweetening and blondiefying it/with half&half and blue agave sirup

and give thanks to Sweet Anarchy

and being kingless, queenless and rookless

and ready to burst from the early-day’s starting gate

with intolerance for caste-based bigotry

and a fierce passion for fairness

The soup is turnip and yellow and bell pepper and barley and vegetable stock and three carrots, softened to succulence in a crockpot overnight

The coffee is from Sumatra, recommended by a magnificently tattooed artisan who makes bells as part of one of Arcosanti’s revenue streams

The coffee is in a mug that the maker calls “The Anarchy Cup,” inspired by a former co-worker who denounced all politicians

And is flavored with half&half and blue agave syrup recommended by an architect friend whose designs were incorporated into buildings made throughout the Valley of the Sun over forty-five years

The bowl of soup is gone but there’s more in the crockpot, cooling

Dessert is Whoppers with the coffee that helps the chocolate dissolve to uncover the malted-milk core

And the Whoppers remind the bachelor of going to the movies with his daughter, now estranged

It is a layered breakfast laced with memory and reminder

Unconventional unto weirdness

Richly satisfying

There’s a sort of warning in the background of this image, a sampleresque homily which has been, to my knowledge, as yet unwritten. It says “Ambiguity S O C K S.” it is sort of self-demonstrating.

I got ambitious, and my have overreached my ability –I KNOW the viewer needs all the help she or he can get, yet there’s a lot of chaos here. The double acrostic poem, “Kitchens Sync,” gives another clue as to why. A lot is thrown in.

2020 0526 kitchens sync ii

kitchens sync

kundalini yoga sends
intimation to yr friends
take a ride on grammerly
challenge all yr fammerly
help a sea or gutter urchin
end a quest 4 what yr surchin
need of job r wife r clinic
seeds yr future megacynic

When Kitchens Sync, i.e. become synchronous or achieve synchronicity, the phrase “everything but the kitchen sink” expands to become “everything INCLUDING the sinks of more than one kitchen.” I hope and trust that some enjoyment of this poem/image may be derived by looking for patterns. One example that may be missed if I don’t mention it is that the poem has one instance of the shorthand word “yr” (for “your”) in every other line of the poem. That wasn’t done gratuitously. It’s intended to reinforce the connection between the reader and the poem’s arc.  Whether it works or not is a matter of opinion–YOUR opinion.

The center figure seemed to me to look a bit like the late Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson once ran for public office, and used a symbol of his own design for the political party he was trying to get off the ground, of a two-thumbed hand gripping a peyote button. My guy doesn’t have two thumbs on his hand, but including the thumb there are six fingers. I think I owe the whimsy of that to Marc Chagall, who once gave one of his figures a seven-fingered hand. After I post this page I’ll see if Chagall had any other reason for doing that other than the sheer anarchic joy of it. If not, that was plenty–doing a little time in the Anarchic Circle is good for an artist’s refreshment. 🙂

20190620_050857

This image will probably make more sense if you have “Love Shack” by the B-52s playing in the background as you view it. Or “Rock Lobster.” The image is a tribute of sorts to the anarchic energy and sensibility that that band brought to their music.

LOVE GEEK

Lord love a duck & golly G

Oviparous we are with gleE

Velveeta Fireball Daisy MaE

EureKa with a capital K

coronation

This was written and performed at the {9} Gallery for the Caffeine Corridor poetry event last night, May 10, 2013. Judy Green-Davis gave me the word Coronation and I wrote it about six poets before my Open Mic performance of it. (This is the capsule version; a previous post of mine seems to be lost to the ethersphere.)