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Blog Post #500

May 31, 2014
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003

It is a day like many others. Denise and I went to pick up her Bountiful Basket order and then we went to the gym nearby and then we went to restaurant nearby and then we went home. She took the recycling to the recycling bins on Camino Real and I worked on five-minute portraiture. Ultimately we went to our respective caves to work on art and Art. She has published her latest post, “Mandalas,” and I am working on mine, “Blog Post #500.” The software is taking forever to upload my image, though it is a mere 150K or so.

So I’ll save this in draft after finishing the text, which includes this transcription of the post’s eponymous triple acrostic:

Bedeviled by the Telescum–perhaps they have my number
But here’s a fine true path to keep to boast a most high number
Loose fingers take me to a parlor shopping for a new five
Let’s do licentiousness 4 times–God knows you cannot do five
O do not look for Rhyme nor Rules: for you will find here zero
Got Truth? Got lots, good friend, but Hitting Home I put near zero

Later: opened the saved draft; used “Add Media” to upload the image, which seems a bit blurred but that’s OK; added tags that included “truth,” “rhyme,” “creative process,” and “blog posting,” but not “Telescum,” for that is a word I made up, though it may already have been created unbeknownst to me. Will now post this historic piece, Share it on Twitter and Facebook, and then invite my dear Denise to celebrate life and love.

NaPoWriMo Poem for April 43rd, 2014

April 30, 2014
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goldibear & the three glocks

one was a flaxenpelt child of the woods
one was a fabled land far & away
one was a weapon well favored by hoods
one was a thin-metal tonic array.

she played the third glock* sadly–golden yet blue
and daydreamed she lived on the shore of the first**
the second*** she shot in an old switcheroo
on film and in cinemascope: “i could burst.”

in the tradition that scholars call oral
stories are told to your children for teaching
this tale’s for grownups & here is the moral:
“old switcheroos are ofttimes overreaching.”

THE END

* glockenspiel
** glocca morra
*** glock 9mm

This is a happy day, Friends. It’s the LAST DAY of National Poetry Writing Month, and with this poem I fulfill the requirement I set for myself of writing at least one poem each day of the Month.  I feel like I am crossing the Finish Line; even so, I might try to squeeze off seven more poems/posts for a nice round 50. (Or might not. [smiles])

 

NaPoWriMo Poem Pair for April 31, 2014

April 23, 2014
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tableau vivant

taxes levied leveled Levi
blimey barney’s stoned but viva
eager beamers roar & win
ukuleles sound like mint

TAB LOW/WE WANT

The candidate survived the peer review
And then her father died, as if on cue
Bulimia & travel left her raw

LOVE set her world aright & flipt her shwa
Obsessing over Style & cred & thin
Will make us OVERLOOK a crucial hint

I don’t want to clutter up the post with annotation, but I will say that Bulimia and Depression seem highly correlative. Also: I think the image has good potential for snap/crackle/poppery that has not yet been realized. I did two other scan/edits that were even less successful:

001

002

 

NaPoWriMo Poem Trio for April 16

April 13, 2014
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Here are three poems I wrote this weekend to answer a challenge by my friend Joseph A. in our Facebook group Poets All Call. Joe’s challenge was threefold (four, if you count “Have fun!”):

Write an adult version of a childrens’ poem/book.

Write about a really bad cup of coffee.

Write about a cold, rainy spring day.

Have fun!

And here was my response:

the feline in the fedora

two children watched the raindrops paint the window
they sighed with boredom aching for a change
they hadn’t had their fun thus knees unskinned though
they’d trade unscrapedness for something strange.

as if in answer to a summons in came
an oversized and overtopped old cat
and jazzed their glazed expressions when his grin came
to prove contagious making cheeks unflat

he doffed fedora in the act releasing
two things called things who ran the household ragged
and carved the kitchen air with lightning greasing
the wheels of fun though sloppy paths went jagged

the things dived in the hat hat went ahead
and out the door of destiny cat fled

grounds for complaint?
 
i like my coffee liquid,
and non-corrosive too,
assertive but not armpit-strong.
unmerrily we scald along:
the serpent’s fang, the pitchfork’s prong,
the muck from cheech & tommy’s bong,
the nether regions of king kong.
this coffee makes me sick, kid,
but wakes me up, for true.
 
At-Brisk Children
(to the memories of Ogden Nash and Shel Silverstein)

April Showers are sometimes cold.
Take umbrellas unless you’re bold,
Watch the puddles; they’re full of sloshes;
No one any more wears galoshes.
Feel the wind going through your cloth.
Wish your face felt the steam of broth.
Go inside to relax and thrive.
You’ve been COLD, but felt So Alive!

 

Peace Whip? No, PS WIP.

April 7, 2014
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Image

After nine and a half hours on the job, the next five-at-least better be in Slumberland.

PS WIP equals Patrick Stewart Work In Progress. I tried doing a PS a few years ago; people thought the drawing was good, but they couldn’t tell who it was.

Remember That Work In Progress? It’s Done…

March 28, 2014
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…sort of. I intended to overlay it with an acrostic poem, but reconsidered.

Had I done so, the double acrostic spelling OFF THE/GRID might have read like this:

O wish us well who have an other Calling
For we are out, at risk, and fun to slur
Forthrightness none too often gets one Hi
The sad fact is that most think it’s absurd

Would the image have been better off with these words overlaying it? Probably not; it’s busy enough; but words and image may one day share a page in a book of my illustrated poetry.

ank is to ankh as let is to lett as acorn is to oak (part five of seven)

February 25, 2014
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Image

Creation begets digression begets more creation. You want to know more about Latvia. You find a map of Latvia. It occurs to you that the curvature of a bisque-fired teapot might suit a drawing of the map of Latvia more than flat paper would. You draw Latvia and surrounds on your teapot. Lacking a good camera, but having a webcam that works if you record video, you do so. You do a print screen of a still from the video. It is none too good, but intriguing. You click “New Post” and copy and paste the title of the previous post. You tweak the title, which itself a tweak of the one before that one. Here we are. No guarantees that we’ll be stopping at “seven of seven.” There may well be an “eight of eight” or even an “eight of seven.” That’s Creation for you.

ANK(H) : ACORN :: LET(T) : OAK (part two of seven)

February 21, 2014
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The title for this series owes its colonscape to the Miller Analogies Test, Interested parties may quickly find a website that has the lowdown on the MAT, and free sample tests to boot, but all you need to know here is that ” : ” means ” is to ” and ” :: ” means ” as “.

:: you may recall, the double-acroticist looked at his (my) ANK LET beginning, and quickly epiphanied  opportunity toappend aitch and tee, yielding ANKH LETT and enabling a DOUBLE Double Acrostic, which is not to be confused with a Quadruple Acrostic. The twin-twin challenges remaining were to 1) finish the acrostic a) so it would makes sense either way; and 2) do the illustration, which must b) incorporate the acrosticization in a single image. The above study is a possible serving suggestion, imagining a Lett woman (identified through her choice of having the flag of Latvia on her ankle) wearing an anklet that bears amongst its links an Ankh. What about LET? some astute observer may ask. Well, my Sweet Girfriend, who shall go named–Denise–LET me take a photo of her lower leg, and I based my drawing on the photo.

Two parts down, five to go. See you fine folks in a couple of days!

ANK(H) : ACORN :: LET(T) : OAK (part one of seven)

February 19, 2014
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ImageIndex cards, four inches by six, ruled on one side and blank on the other, are the antibane of my existence. A few dozen of those babies and a couple of sharp Ticonderoga Black pencils and I can fly intercontinentally and be kept engaged and amused throughout the flight. Get a hundred-pack at any office supply and for less than four cents each you have the ideal unthreatening Idea Playground. Bad ideas can be tossed, good ones added to the uncut-diamond pile.

Today I have the acorn of what I hope will sprout into the oak of an exemplary journal page. I started with ANK LET, perhaps a next-in-the-series to my previously posted GOB LET. As I was working out end words ANK and LET were staring me in the face and ANK started hankering for an aitch at the end: ANKH. Ankh: powerful life-symbol from ancient Egypt. “Spirits of ancient Egypt..,” Paul McCartney sang once.

But what about LET? Well, add a tee and you get Lett, which means Latvian. This can go any number of good ways.

End of Part One