Pen and pencil on Stonehenge drawing paper, 5″ x 15″.
unbidden
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a dysfunctional dynamic
Res ipsa loquitur, I hope. But just in case–in the United States there are some people who cannot bring themselves to say “Black Lives Matter.” In my experience all of them have been white people. They would rather say “All Lives Matter.” They are stubborn, even though many of them have no problem saying “Blue Lives Matter,” meaning the police. If Dr. Seuss were alive, he could have a field day with this. 🙂
I put a smile-emoji in there, but believe me, this is no laughing matter.
Black Lives Matter, Friends.
the power the diskie gie us
Disks are not everywhere, but they are manywheres. Most coins are disk-shaped. Before solid-state storage came along, disks held all our computing data. Frisbees, 12-Step medallions, pupils, irises, the Sun and Moon from this distance…it’s Disk-O-Mania.
Long ago Robert Burns took his Scots dialect to this subjunctive couplet:
O wad the power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us…
The dialog I have my sketched characters say in this images comprises two couplets, and they comprise a small poem. It goes like this, and though it’s untitled, it’s all about disks:
sing o muse of a held up earth
of memory and what it’s worth
of need and want that drive our dreams
of nothing being what it seems.
Anyone care to estimate the total number of disks in this image? Don’t forget the red corpuscles coursing through the circulatory systems of the characters, nor the follicles from which the wild-haired dude’s hair springs. 🙂
Enigmatism
(First published, sans illustration, on July 7 in Facebook group Poets All Call)
Enigmatism
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They ate me alive yet I live. It’s perplexing
To walk and draw breath though in stomachs digesting
I guess it’s a metaphor pho, sis, and flexing
Reality’s shape just for grins and for cresting.
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Before ’53 I was nutmeg and veiling
Then half of me swam to the other half waiting
And storming the cellular castle assailing
Exploding within for the DNA mating.
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I don’t guess I’ll be here in tangible form
A half century hence, and that gives me the shivers,
But the Universe leaves me to stray from the norm
And I eagerly wait to see what She delivers.
Are ya ready fa some foot! Ba’al!!?
At top is a drawing exercise–the task I assigned myself was to do foot studies without looking at any feet. As I was working on it the singing voice of Hiram “Hank” Williams Jr. cued up in my mental jukebox, doing his Monday Night Football theme song, which begins, “Are ya ready fa some FOOTBAAL?!” (I have spelled it the way I hear him sing it.)
Then my scattershot memory took me back to Vacation Bible School, where my parents stashed me and my brothers one afternoon long ago as they went off to have some fun with their high school friends, the Olafsons. The Bible reading mentioned Ba’al Peor, one of the “Thou shalt not have other gods before me” gods of the Old Testament. So I did an Internet search on Ba’al Peor, and a fountainhead bust caught my eye. It looked a little like a nuclear bomb had just been detonated in his skull. I sketched from the photo some and then closed the site and let the drawing tell me what to do. Some of it was blind-sidingly unexpected.
Atlas on an Atlas
On Facebook there is a poetry group called Poets All Call. I am one of the group’s moderators, and I contribute with my poetry and with a weekly feature called Title Tuesday, in which I provide five titles and invite the poets to use the titles as prompts.
It’s Friday, and there hasn’t been much activity in the group–perhaps a sign of these pandemical times. So, since I think both writing poetry and reading poetry is good for the soul, today I tried to lead by example by starting a poem without any inspiration whatsoever. As the poem unfolded I got some illustration notions, and I went back and forth beteeen the poem and my drawing.
Here is the poem that inspired the drawing.
grab those bootstraps
(to my fellow Poets All Call members)
i have nothing to say
and only the vaguest set of urges
chief of which is the fear
that my word-engine will heave
a sputtering sigh and die
if i let it idle too long
hey, i just said something
this is first gear
and i remember thinking
about atlas this morning
atlas according to greek myth
supported the entire Earth on his shoulders
and i was thinking cmon greeks
any five-year-old would know that that
is stupid
what’s HE standing on when he does it?
why doesn’t he just rest the Earth
where he is standing?
and why isn’t there a theme park
where his beyond-gigantic hands are?
(the word-engine is revving)
(rev is short
either for reverend
or revolutions per minute)
(there are reverends
and then there are right reverends
but none will admit to being
a wrong reverend)
(another way of abbreviating
revolutions per minute
is rpm
pronounced arpeeyem
and easy to say fast
as befits an abbreviation
that an inebriate
can abbreviate
and not deviate)
speaking of deviate
we did
we were speaking of atlas
the laughably improbable
and got sidetracked
but it all ties in
an atlas is a collection of maps
in other words it holds
all or part of the earth
and the earth spins
at approximately 1/1440 rpm
for 1440 is the approximate number of minutes
in a day
as for the poetic nonsense
of certain reverends
it neverends
but this little poem
this bootstrapping jaunt
must end
i will snip its umbilicus
and send it out into your eyes
for i am its mother
literarily speaking
and the being of a mother
is so sacred
it has raised empires
and flared hope
with the promise of renewal
you might enjoy some motherhood yourself
if not tomorrow (who knows?)
then right now–yes, now!
you have a notion
knocking about in your fanciful head–
i know it!
please share it!
start from scratch–
grab those bootstraps!!
coin fix n flip
There is a coin shortage in the United states of America. Less commerce is being conducted on the premises of brick-and-mortar establishments, and when there is commerce, debit/credit card use is encouraged, in order to reduce personal contact and maintain social distancing. This is yet another facet of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unbidden, the acrostic “COIN FIX& FLIP” came to me. “Fix and flip” is a term usually applied to cheaply-bought houses or automobiles. The faster a house or car is repaired and sold, the more Flippy the Flip is. But when it comes to the coin shortage, you get extra mileage out of the Flip aspect, if you are as miserable a punster as I am. To complete the wretchedness, the spot illustrations are all coin-related bad puns.
coin fix n flip
change CHANGING from Cha-CHING as if
one pops anon before it snaps. i’ll
in FILTRATE explain the diff — i
need to CEDE & cut the CRAP
This mostly makes sense if you are a Southwestern American on the vulgar side. “Change” is short for “pocket change,” which is coins.”Cha-CHING” is onomatopoetic slang for making money. “Pop” has a moiney connotation. “95 cents a pop” means 95 cents each. A Filtrate is the stuff that’s being filtered, in this case coins being filtered out of circulation. To Cede is to give way to pragmatism. “Cut the Crap” is vulgar Americanese for “End this nonsense.”
If you find it dense or difficult, Friends, try James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Mercy!
obelisky business
Here’s another drawing exercise, graphite on Stonehenge sketchbook paper.
As Dawn resolves
As Dawn resolves/the forest wakes//The boy repents/of his/mistakes//A leaf/a bird/a boy/enthralled//A creaure/by no/known name/called
Stop•Look•Listless
During the two official World Wars people made huge sacrifices for their country, and that not only included life and limb, but also road trips, certain foodstuffs on certain days, and–alas!–liberty, in the case of many Americans of Japanese ancestry.
During the Cold War, when there was fear of nuclear war, some people built fallout shelters and stocked them with canned goods and water, prepared to “shelter in place” until the devastation had ceased. And kids and adults alike were trained to “duck and cover” if they saw a blinding light. Never mind that this strategy was demonstrably ineffective–it was better than nothing.
But now, with a highly contagious and potentially deadly virus infecting all corners of the Earth, many of my fellow Americans cannot even be bothered to put on a sputum-blocking mask. The masks cost anywhere from near-nothing (a bandanna and two rubber bands) to a hundred-plus dollars, depending on how effective and/or fancy and/or stylish you want them to be. And many establishments give them away to their paying customers.
There is a direct correlation between the enforcement of mask-wearing and the halting of the spread of COVID-19. That many in the US ignore the correlation is partly due to the maskless example President Donald Trump sets. He has turned a public-health issue into a political issue, even though back in February he scorned the Democratic Party for “politicizing the Coronavirus.” Sadly, even his detractors have been so desensitized by his daily-basis hypocrisy that it is hard to work up outrage any more.
This has been a year of such bombardment of calamity, in fact, that people are flat-out getting used to apocalyptic conditions. As so today, triggered by a childhood memory of a “Safety Walk” in which we grade-schoolers were encouraged to “Stop, Look, Listen” before crossing the street, I flashed on the phrase “Stop/Look/Listless” as being more endemic to our situation now. And so this acrostic came to be.
So GROUNDLINGS gasp & swell
Succumb to slouched ennui
Tympani BOOM? O wells
Tsk not, mon cher petit
Oppression’s Oddly DULL
Oft RUMOR ONLY, see
Per PELIKAN & gulls
Pretend a keepsake frees
Those last two lines are a bit obtuse. Pelikan is a brand name for the India ink I used when learning to draw with a crowquill pen. “Gull” is not only a bird but a verb that means “to fool [someone].” And what kind of keepsake makes someone feel free? Could be a St. Christopher medal, popular in the late 1960s. Patron saint of Travelers. Don’t leave home without him! 🙂
Stay Safe, my friends. Fighting Listlessness will help.
One with Clay, Image and Text 