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rare earths

September 9, 2014
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As this is written, today is still Title Tuesday, that day of the week when I usually provide five prompting titles to my fellow Facebook members of the poetry group Poets All Call. Today I went metal:

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Title Tuesday for September 9, 2014

Here are titles for them as wants them:

Goal Digger
Silver Dogger
Bronze on Blonde
Brass Ear
Tincompoop

Gonna take a Sentimetal Journey? Hope so, and with YOU, my Friends!

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My friend and colleague Bob Kabchef responded, not with poetry (though he would soon write some), but with these additional titles:

Cad me chum
Steely eyed
Iron or
Rare earths
Fools goaled

I wrote “cad me chum,” and the curious may see it in Poets All Call. Then I wrote “rare earths,” and I struck gold, because my poem was a long and elaborate setup for an exotic pun, about which later. First, here are the words:

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rare earths

please mock me not nor sneerium
there’s sugar on my cerium
and though it’s not eye candium
i’ve nudified my scandium
heaped praise on praseodymium
pee-ohing neodymium
lathed lanthanum bathed yttrium
egad that gadolinium
must not disturb my terbium
in suburbs with my erbium
to rope-a-dope europium
takes thulium with opium
perhaps a good samarium’s
promethium’s aquarium
ytterbium’s symposium’s
discussing our dysprosium
while promising lutetium
though last she’s not beneathmium

the rarest earth of all (just one)
swings with the moon around the sun

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As for the pun, it is a pun of omission. I deliberately left out the Rare Earth holmium. I was hoping to be asked why. Had I been asked by Emily Watson (sigh), my reply would have been, “Element-ary, my dear Watson. Since it was Holmium, I felt compelled to make a . . . deduction.”

I do not apologize.

Brigand’s Mortar (Brick & Mortar)

September 9, 2014
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Brick and Mortar, and equivalents thereof, are fine in moderation. Are we as a species moderate? An Internet search on Dubai buildings will provide a fun answer. Not that I’m knocking Dubaians and their innovative excess. If I had more money than I knew what to do with, Cutting-Edge Architecture would be a great place to throw it.

But Urban Sprawl, made possible by that “I claim this land in the name of Spain” mindset that is this-century obsolete, made of the Valley of the Sun where I grew up a fungus of humanity, spreading up and over the mountains every which way, and far beyond the Valley’s borders. “Brick & Mortar” is now recognized as a largely unnecessary venue for business. Let us move on.

Here are the words to the double acrostic, making Ands of the ampersands for the sake of clarity:

Bursting out- and upward, our explosive growth goes boom
Reaching for the brass ring’s old–we charge like raging sumo
Instant towers scrape the sky where once was merest rumor
Clearing forests calls for disregard of owl and wombat
Keeping books reduces Life to uptick and pro rata
Andes-climbing’s easier than knowing what should matter

 

Geek-A-Rama

July 3, 2014
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The Urban Dictionary’s #1 definition of Geek is “The people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult.” The kids I drew on this page are still being picked on, but they know they rock.

Here are the words to the triple acrostic:

Good LORD–feel that enthusiasm–each a superstar
Enjoy our radiation: safe enough for Gramp & Gamma
EnDANGERment is mocked–we use a Death’s-head-grin alarm
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar holds court within our diorama

Note also the hidden message via blacked-up letters: “THUS–ugh–Death holds our wit.”

Speaking of the awesome, starring-in-AIRPLANE! Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who just wrote a guest column about racism in a major publication, long ago I made up this riddle about him:

Q: What should you sing if Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has his thumb in your coffee cup as he’s handing it to you?

A: “You’re the Kareem in my Coffee…”

Yes, I’m a Joke Geek. And vice versa.

Picasso was a Jerk

July 2, 2014
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Recently TIME Magazine profiled a retrospective of Jeff Koons. Mr. Koons is a good four months younger than I am, yet he’s seen work of his sold for a cool 58.4 million dollars. Once I sold a piece of mine for $250.00, but then the gallery took its 20%. Sigh.

It reminded me of this page, of a pioneer of not only Art but of an artist’s self-promotion:

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Here are the words to the acrostic sonnet, with apologies for the clumsiness of Line 5:

What Picasso Had

Well, Pablo had a round head–that’s for starters;
His Bald and Bulbous Noggin was a Moon;
A gorgeous Harem–Demoiselles & Martyrs;
The cheek to make a napkin-drawn cartoon

Pay for three demoiselles’ Euro-Vacation;
Intensity of Focus . . . FEAR of Death . . .
Chicago’s streets to sculpt a Big Sensation;
A knack for Marketing with Every Breath.
Some envy his long life, his wealth, his Women,
Success like that some Art aspirants strive for;
Oh, nothing’s wrong with Fame to smile & swim in,

However, it’s unseemly to connive for.
Ahhh–I’ll not judge him. ART’ll; FATE’ll; GOD’ll;
Don’t know–but I won’t use him as a Model.

(Of behavior, that is. He was a real and true Jerk. See SURVIVING PICASSO for a taste of his Jerkiness, not to mention a stellar performance by Sir Anthony Hopkins. Quoth Wikipedia: “Picasso is shown as often not caring about other people’s feelings, firing his driver after a long period of service, and as a womanizer, saying that he can sleep with whomever he wants.”)

 

Involvements

June 30, 2014
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Here is another finally-finished page.

The words to the single-word double acrostic are these:

Index cards & social meme
Novice hack or reader’s dream
Voices shrill can drill to bone
Orders strict tell despot’s notion
Lavish love creates its quotient
Vortex waves have force of oceans

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The meaning to this one is less elusive if you think of the words with the image as not describing a universal truth, but one person’s relationship/maturation journey, and that person someone you’re just getting to know.

grasp of air/Three With Background

June 25, 2014
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Double Feature day, Friends! First a poem:

grasp of air

the air touches and pushes against my hand
but will not be held by it
eludes my desperate grasp

and the same odd silly desperation obtains
when i try to hold time stiller than one second per second
time pushes against and touches my life
but will not be held by it

instead it mocks with the irony
that i was drooling
and dazed and clueless
a few weeks out of the starting gate
and will be drooling
and dazed and cashing in my last clue
a few weeks before the finish line

it is sixtwentytwofourteen twelvefiftyfourayem
it is sixtwentytwofourteen twelvefiftyfiveayem

seize the day? good luck with that

forge memories? yes you can
some of them will mock you with their irrepetition
some of them will sting you with a new context
some of them will settle you down
some of them will undissolve you

don’t grasp air with your hand
grasp it with your lungs

make memories your art form
your mind the lungs that grasp time

it is sixtwentytwofourteen oneohtwoayem
over but not out for it is and isn’t was

Completing the double feature is the image “Three With Background”:

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Desperate But Sequel

June 24, 2014
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Here is something I started over a month ago and invited collaboration (see the post “Seven, Eight–Collaborate”). One brave soul told me there would be a try; that I have not heard from the brave soul since casts no aspersion on said soul. Collaboration is tricky.

Indeed, collaboration ended up being the theme of this, now finished, page:

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And here are the words of the triple-acrostic sonnet:

Desire may ebb when disillusion flows
Endangering stability, which flees
Each time de-Liberation strikes a pose
Some issues turn to Beasts none may appease
Proceed OUTSIDE the box, and P.D.Q.
Example: cure your Beef with B.B.Q.
Rescind your doubt! Do what WILL do for you
And with each therapeutic molecule
Add TLC that’s stubborn as a Mule
The optioned limitation with accrual
Ensures the Trust that leads to Love’s renewal

“Desperate But Sequel” hearkens back to the bad old days of “Separate But Equal.” Alas, Racism is still alive and “well” more than a half-century later. Not much more we can do about that but get our own houses in order (see Avenue Q’s “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”).

The image is a four-shot sequence wherein two people are irritating each other’s stiff backs, then find a synergistic solution when they loosen up a little and rub together. I am ridiculously proud of this metaphor for relational friction. Honest to Goodness, I have no memory of ever seeing this bit of storytelling before–but I suspect I’m not the first…

tragicomedy masks

June 23, 2014
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The late Martin L. Stoneman loved comedy and tragedy masks. On the offchance that his consciousness is still attentive to the Earthly folk he left behind, I did these for his possible entertainment. He well knew that Life is never as cut and dried as comedy Here and tragedy There. Now, “if the accident will,” he has that illustrated.

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