naught need caught freed lot
we were nothingness and then we coalesced
from nova to planetesimal to moms and dads to us
..
then we had need after need
air water nutrition shelter love purpose
..
we were shanghaied into school systems
some thrived in captivity some were warped
..
we were freed when we were graduated
or let slip
..
now we do not tempt fate for fate is indifferent
but we wonder what place we hold
and what will happen
and how long we have
..
soul full ness
long ago I read The Lady Who Sailed the Soul
by Cordwainer Smith (secret identity Paul Myron
Anthony Linebarger), about a woman who had a
starship across a vast distance while her c o n
s c I o u s n e s s was slowed so that it seemed to
her her hair gushed out of her head.
later he began “Himself in Anachron”
but died before he finished. an artificial intelligence
just told me it is about a man who must save his wife
by divorcing himself from time and space,
in the sacrificial sense similar
to “The Lady Who Sailed the Soul.”
the author and editor Harlan Ellison went to some
length to acquire “Himself in Anachron” for the third
volume of his Dangerous Visions trilogy. his effort
was in vain.
today i walked two miles to see the west Toledo
library for the first time. I perused the science fiction
shelves and found Tommy dismay that they had NO
Poul Anderson books, NO Isaac Asimov. But they had
a single volume of Harlan Ellison, copyright 2014:
The Top of the Volcano, a compilation of Ellison
stories that had won awards.
i had read most of them but there was a long story
i had not. in it a man named bailey
had his soul yanked from him to be placed
into the soul of an alien military subaltern named
Pinke, there to cajole Pinke into ending a war that
had gone on for generations.
i have not finished the story. I will leave that
for another visit. rather, now, i reflect on the amazing
succession of life-events: i read Cordwainer Smith,
his story was covered by Harlan Ellison, i found the
Ellison book in the West Toledo Public Library, and
I began to read his story of the abduction and
exploitation of souls…
three weeks to the day
after having arrived in Toledo
from Phoenix, Arizona
in the company of my sweetheart
in an automobile of make Kia,
model
Soul.
while we are praising lords and passing loot/a lute of ancient times is being plucked/and strummed and breezed and giving noise the boot/accompanying states of bliss and…muck’d
’tis played by fate as she three plays us round/she alternates as one plays tunes that hum/another pulls us puppets on the ground/another cuts our strings. we unbecome.
and then the trinity of sisters switch/for they•she need variety of spice/so player has a turn as karma’s bitch/and bitch turns executioner. not nice.
friend, as the lute plays, if you need reprieve
take pen or brush, and Make, and then Believe.
half of yourself had been waiting in your mother’s ovary since some time before her birth. half of you was manufactured in one of your father’s testes some days before your conception. maybe. it is possible that half of you came from a thawed-out sperm donation.
your tadpole half plowed into your egg half. dna from the tadpole’s head did a jackson pollock number on the egg’s inside wall. the wall thickened and became like unto gandalf to the other sperm cells, saying in effect “you shall not pass.”
you developed and became viable.
you passed through a birth canal or an incision and if you did not cry a childbirth attendee gave you something to cry about.
what you are doing here and now is continuing the journey you began, a journey of survival and the satisfaction of your curiosity, now reading the expositive words of a stranger or a friend or both or neither, and this very instant you have satisfied your curiosity by finding out how this poem en
“Tap” is one of those marvelous itty-bitty words that can mean any of a number of things. You may be tapped for a promotion. You may hear gentle rain on your window. There may be a Raven ready to repeat a maddening word, wanting you to let her in. Or you may be out of funds–tapped out. (I just tapped that on my laptop.)
So I have drawn the master of tap dancing, Sammy Davis Jr., doing what he did superbly. Next to him is a tableau vivant of a man walking, and the tap on his shoulder by a lady who is about to change his life. Next to them is the prosaic and eminently useful Water Tap, based on my bathroom-sink faucet.
Tap TapTapTap Tap
The door goes rat-a-tat-a-tat
To tell a Caller’s on the mat
They may complain about your cat
A dancer taps into nostalgia
And then he has fibromyalgia
As always, Entropy will gouge ya
Penultimately we may gasp
Plead if we hear a gravelled rasp
Perhaps we feel the REAPER’S grasp
Wake (TIME) Rest
“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow…” Roethke
What a restless Night!!! Oh, dear
Ah, well–we will persevere
Keep the fate and make the mess
Ever hoping ever blest
Afterword: What does it mean to keep the Fate and not the Faith? Adam Clayton Powell, long ago, said “Keep the faith, Baby…and spread it gently.” My late, great Outlaw Uncle, Paul, sent me a condolence note in 1983 after my father died, and he hand-wrote “Keep the faith Gary” in it. Keeping the Fate is as close as I can get: keeping vertical, plugging away for betterment, trying to enjoy and engage and become to create the best Fate I can. Here’s hoping you also do joyful Fate-Keeping, Friends.
Some time ago I wrote the three-stanzaed double acrostic that is featured on this page. It needed some visual enhancement, but what? So I put it aside. Then today I was looking for a blank page in my sketchbook and here it was, and it was remindful of the Monty Python “nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more” routine in which Eric Idle was so incredibly smarmy. I ink-sketched my mind’s-eye Eric Idle, but since I wasn’t using a photo source, it looks only vaguely like him. That’s OK. I will do a good job on him some day, and the double acrostic will be ERIC IDLE, because happy Fate has decreed that his first and last names both are four letters long. Meanwhile:
MAKE (over easy over easy) MARK
Mahalo holiday Yom Tov — O
Arthur Clarke & Asimov
Kaput kerfuffle Truth or Dare
Envision Bliss & climb a stair
Omnipotence purports to be
Vociferous as raging sea
Engage an engine in a chassis
Rev up peel out fast-fury classy
Embarrassments may Stunt & Jam
And keep a ❤ behind a dam. A
Sasparilla soda jerk or
Yarrowstalks may do the work
You can seek meaning in these verses if you want, and you will find some, but I wrote it and now enjoy it as if it were a video game with little obstacles and challenges and bad guys to leap over and meet and obliterate. The acrostic is a suggestion to make your mark. That doesn’t and shouldn’t mean to cast a shadow of OMG that the world will never forget. When you make ONE person you love feel a little better for your being here, you have made your Over Easy mark, and bless you.
One reason there are lots of instruments in the cockpit of an airplane is that sometimes pilots cannot rely on their senses. Their semicircular canals tell them one thing, the view out the window another, and the instruments contradict both. To stay alive, a pilot often has to literally fly in the face of what the body says.
In life, a sense of well-being may just mean that the brain chemistry is literally on the high side of the manic-depressive cycle. Ingesting alcohol or other drugs often imbues the user with undeserved confidence. If you don’t have instruments, like a penlight for the Nystagmus test or a Breathalizer for the measurement of blood alcohol, when in doubt, don’t, no matter what wonderful sense it seems to make, whether it be calling that lost love at three in the morning or shaving/tattooing your head or entering the wonderful world of amateur day trading. (Sorry to be so parental.)
Here are the words:
Fate denied me being pharaoh
And you say, it’s best that, Gair-O
Lap up your courvoisier
Lapdogs may include Sharpei
Salvage peace/shalom/La Paz
Serenity is no palazzo
Eternity by daw-do-zen
Ernest earnestly got bent
Rovers flying o’er alfalfa
Race past baffleds on El Al
Many years ago, in Mr. Richmond’s Senior English class at Glendale High School, I wrote an essay in which I admitted knowing almost nothing about the subject. Milnor Richmond, in his profound wisdom, circled the admission in red and wrote “Don’t admit it.” I have never forgotten that…
…but I haven’t always taken his advice, literally, literarily, or figuratively. About this page I wish to admit that it has serious flaws. It doesn’t say all that much; what it has to say is confusing; and the face that is supposed to represent Rage doesn’t: it just looks like a guy about to sneeze.
All that said, I don’t think the page is a waste of time to look at. As another wise teacher, Darlene Goto, former Drawing & Composition instructor at Glendale Community College, would often say to a student, “It has possibilities.” I am creatively arrogant enough to say that if I ever take a decent amount of time to realize the page’s possibilities, I’ll have a text/image for the ages. (Now I hear Mr. Richmond’s gravelly voice saying, “Don’t declaim it.”)
Hear are the words to the two acrostics:
Cold fury’s touch will sear
A blast of HATE is near–a
Lunatic–don’t beg
Methinks Fate will renege
Thoughtful speculators dream
Essays to assay a meme
Many wingbeats tax a swan
Pray consult a clairvoyant [French pronunciation, not American]
End with panicked dash, mach schnell–a
Runaround leaves us unwell
