barley, baby carrots,
and a chicken all in chunks,
mushrooms, and a veg stock,
and some green peas and bell peppers,
don’t forget the onions and some cauliflower hunks,
brewing up a stew that’s fit for anti-vegan monks,
governors and non-contagious medicated lepers,
couriers, deliverers,
and good ole boy forklift shleppers,
metaphoric ferrets
and a brace of almond sliverers.
..
stew to eat
for a brew of folks.
musing’s sweet
if we’re free of yokes.
My Social Media feed has been filled with thoughtful, quietly proud remembrances of family members who were honoring their fallen loved ones. It was a reminder to me, who never served in the armed forces, of the measureless courage and selflessness that is at the heart of the America I have cherished and respected.
I believe that at core this America still exists and I harbor some optimism that this altruistic spirit might be resurrected. Yet the Memorial Day post made by the sitting President of the United States of America reveals what that Spirit is up against. He began with HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY, which is evidence that he either does not know or does not care that Memorial Day was established not for fun and games, but for thoughtfulness, remembrance, and honoring our fallen soldiers; and he heaped more evidence onto the remainder of his text, which said not one word about the heroes who gave their last full measure of devotion to the defense of our country’s ideals, and to the furtherance of the protection of our country. Instead he used the occasion to malign and demean basically everyone who disagrees with his agenda.
Part of his agenda is the erasure of contributions that people of color have made to the defense of our country. So many of the Memorial Day posts had to do with heroic efforts of African American soldiers whose sacrifices went unacknowledged. Just one example is of a soldier who died valorously in World War I and was not awarded the Medal of Honor he absolutely earned…until 1991. There are numberless other examples of this, and the current President would, if allowed, see to it that there will be many, many more.
Also, astonishingly, he is trying to enact a suspension of habeus corpus, a fundamental means of guaranteeing due process by requiring firsthand evidence of guilt before detaining an individual accused of a crime. (That is a reductive and crude approximation of habeus corpus and I invite more legal-minded readers to comment with a better description.) To be against habeus corpus is to be against “liberty and justice for all.”
My gratitude for the fallen soldiers we honor on Memorial Day extends to those who are fighting for the principles and ideals that have in actuality made America as great as it has been in its finest hours. To all those who oppose the corrupt regime conducted by Donald Trump, my profound and enduring thanks.
ESSO is one of my two go-to coffeehouses in the Valley of the Sun, and today I’m treating myself to a peppermint latte and a molasses-based cookie, in the spirit of the Holiday season. The one-man-band on staff, an engaging fellow named Jacob, instantly handed back one of my 20s when I mistakenly gave him two stuck together. He also has superb taste in energetic contemporary music.
In the spirit of Holiday Fun I’m going to have a little fun with this photo I took outside the entrance, specifically with the statue/sculpture of a man who to my negligent gaze looks like he’s in Colonial garb; and you can’t spell Colonial without Colon, am I right?
Dedicated to the memory of Nathan Hellyeah, inventor of the colonoscopic barstool, who famously said “I regret that I have but one lower GI tract to give to the cause of Science.”
‘Tis the season to be Silly, Friends, and at Esso, I feel free to be as silly as I want to be. Kudos and thanks to proprietor Sharon Koger for providing this special place for people like you and me!
she flexed her wings and flew into the sky/and orbited a planet she had known/before she donned her latest flesh. in high/aphelion our sun but dimly shone
but she supplied the radiance the brightness/and dove into the atmosphere a nymph/of firefly glow of first-time-kiss delightness/swift unlymphatic for she had no lymph
from core to ring she sped and danced en pointe/and left a ringdust phosphorescent wake/a kindred soul beheld in lust and want/but she was gone a differed need to slake
through solar wind she fled then bed resumed/through sun’s core in her dream cleansed unconsumed
a dollop of ice cream atop cherry cobbler/a wallop of frost on a jello-y wobbler/a trollop of hotfudgy sundae on tues/are treasures of taste you will not ever lose
a morsel of yolk-soaking sourdough toast/ensorcells the tenderfoot tongue that’s engrossed/endorsing the virtue of taste combinations/full measures of bliss in some well-blent sensations
scorn not epicureans shut-eyed with savor/corn hot dripping butter transports them with favor/pornographied food has transportative flavor/for Pleasures and Freedom are what we are brave for
I acquired the notion “This bein’ free is hard work” over 50 years ago, courtesy of Donn Pearce and his COOL HAND LUKE. My since-then lifetime has completely validated that notion.
Here’s a page where there was no drawing at all with the original, which meant I needed to finish the drawing by starting it first. Had I followed through on the drawing way back when, I have a feeling there would have been a lot more bees and a bit less free-wheeling.
The poem is a sonnet in Shakespearean format. Four-letter words for the acrostic lend themselves well to the four stanzas. Using the same last letter for multiple lines makes rhyming a snap.
Free Bees
Fate makes a Queen–we kick her to the curb
FORCE breaks a bond–we fund a busy lab
For concentration leads us to disturb
Fair Lady Earth to render olive drab
Reality is cash gone through a grate
Revisionism offers souls to mete
Regard: a grumblestiltskin beast to sate
Remorselessness occurs and he’s replete
Evangelistas seem to think we’re dense
Extracting dollars feeds a vulgar taste
Exposés give detractors recompense
En-garde-ing us from love gifts sent in haste
Engage a pollinator and what Jells
Ensures a newbie Queen–and Life compels
Poor James Caan: I Don-Kinged his hair to enhance his bee-ness. 🙂
Last night I walked into a bar, the Hideaway West, to celebrate the end of a nice, tough workweek in which I racked up some needed overtime. At the bar was one of my neighbors at Northern Chateau Apartments, and someone I’d never met. That someone was doing parlor tricks on the bar surface. He had an accent that sounded Russian-but-not.
He took a cigarette, drew three circles around it with his finger, and then drew his finger away from the cigarette–and the cigarette followed the finger. (Trick: gently blow on the cigarette.) He put a quarter under a glass and got it out from under without touching the glass. (Trick: ask, “Is it still there?” and when the unwitting accomplice lifts the glass to see, THEN move the quarter.)
But some time later, after the tricks and puzzles were played out, he told me about his escape from Romania in 1989 to Yugoslavia and then a refugee camp–and then later returning to become a “coyote,” helping others escape.
I told him I’d once had a co-worker who grew up in post-revolutionary Cuba, who had memories of the family huddled around a barely-audible radio, listening to broadcasts from the “free world,” knowing that if caught their punishment would be severe, perhaps fatal. “I too,” said the Romanian, sadness in his eyes.
What is “freedom,” anyway? Sometimes we can only look at examples of repression and reprisal and know what is not freedom. But last night it became clear to me that I can learn more about freedom from those who have taken fate in their hands, regardless of possible consequence, and pulled themselves free.
The title of this post derives from the splendid, brutal novel Cool Hand Luke. Luke and his fellow fugitive Dragline are on the lam from prison personnel and their vicious, man-hunting hounds. Drag says he knows where they can get ahold of some nice, [generously-bosomed] country gals. Luke avers that they can’t be messing with women when they need to be making good their escape. “This bein’ free is hard work.”
And so it is. For me to be free of the matrix of indebtedness, ancillary guilt from being subsidized, and the various life-sucking distractions this evil world constantly proffers, I’ve taken a small, no-Internet-access apartment and a full-time, low-paying job that I can leave at the end of the workday without it following me. I’ve worn out my shoes to the point of harm, and then got a new pair that abraded the flesh atop my Achilles tendon into hamburger. I buy my toilet paper at the Family Dollar and my dollar-ninety-nine breakfast burrito at the QT.
But life is good. I had a wonderful day yesterday, my daughter Kate calling to ask for a guitar lesson and/or a movie (we saw the execrable FANTASTIC FOUR, knowing it would be bad, because that’s how we roll), and afterward, by prearrangement, I spent the night on the living-room couch of my ex-wife, getting the best night’s sleep I’ve had in many days. And today I had a quick and convivial lunch with the sweet and steadfast Joy Riner Taylor, and tonight we’ll be out on the town, not too lavishly.
While I was at Joni and Kate’s I saw one of Joni’s houseplants–she says a schefflera–in a planter I’d made a long time ago; I didn’t remember exactly when, but guessed ten years, then curiosity compelled me to hoist it up high and read the underside (I sign and date almost all my ceramic works). Sure enough, I’d done it in 2004. I was delighted to see it doing what I’d made it to do.
Bein’ free has been such hard work that my artwork and poetry have been nearly nil of late. (I put in eleven and a half hours of overtime last week, and public transportation and pedestrianism also take their toll.) But, Friends, I am finding my feet. Expect more from this source, well before the end of this month.
Tonight PBS took us to the New York Metropolitan Opera and a performance of THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO. You don’t need subtitles to be able to tell there’s a whole lot of Silliness going on. And yet Figaro and his antics have been gracing stages worldwide for more than 200 years. So I find to my considerable comfort that Silliness and Staying Power are not mutually exclusive.
Here I’ve done something quite Silly. The title’s two puns, there’s a Pathet-ically obscure reference, a human Mickey Mouse wears Mickey Mouse ears and a tie festooned with Minnie Mice, and there’s nothing but name-dropping in the lower right hand corner. But: there’s tricky asymmetric balance. There’s a pulse in it of letter size variance and oddly “coincidental” alignment. And there’s a relaxed unforcedness to it that implies an omnipresence of freedom. There’s subtler stuff I won’t describe but I hope will be discovered. So it exists and I deem it worthy of a viewer’s attention. A few days later, though, I may well wonder what the Hell I was thinking . . .
thyme out
there’s no such thing as the Pathet Lao
howbeit Romeo where art thou
yet SPICE invigorates sweet & tart
mercator fibs but o boy can he chart
enticed inducements wave & dart
tie min
tandy, jessica/novak, kim
ian, janis & hendrix, jimi
elfman, danny or elfman, jen
One with Clay, Image and Text 