It is June 22, 2026. Eight days from now I will leave Phoenix with a car full of my possessions. I have decided to take at most a dozen of my ceramic works.
This a table of about half of my ceramic works. The more to the left you look, the more likely it is that a given piece will end up in the dumpster.
It is no tragedy. Most of the pieces were done in haste and are consequently flawed; and this photo preserves the ideas behind the pieces. If I do a “remake” of a piece, it is guaranteed to be better than the original.
It tickles me to think that an archeologist of the future might find my work in a landfill.
As the proverb has it, “In the course of a long lifetime a wise man will find it necessary to abandon his baggage several times.”
The Crack in the Sidewalk by Ava Neiss-Tripp (illustrated by C. U. Nicks-Fall)
But now this fastidious brain demands a plot, so let’s cook one up.
Joe dragged his feet, or anyway didn’t lift them enough. He was inventive enough to imagine a device that would help him avoid sidewalk cracks, and before he knew it he had had shoes made with toe cameras and imminent-crack-detection AI, and so he heard an alarm-sound when a crack candidate was two steps away. At the same time, in the same city, an equally inventive Molly Siefer Coddle, similarly crack-trip-prone, solved the problem with compressed-air footlifting-assist tech, and a geneticist named Noh Pronouns published a paper describing a modification to the human genome that would make humanity more graceful. Then a materials engineer perfected “the sidewalk of the future,” which had self-healing cracks. Two months later there was an extinction event, so there was no one around to trip over sidewalk cracks, which evolved sentience, and the wise cracks lived happily ever after, cracking each other up with stupid-human jokes.
Next time you stroll on a sidewalk, remember: if you step on them, you won’t trip on them.
disposable razor at the ready/gushing water warming/the old man blearily splashes his face/and fills his hand with gooey gel/and rubs his hands together/and rubs the goo al over his face
the foliage has spread down to his throat/and up to his upper cheekbones/and it is more bristly/more slice-resistant/yet still hasn’t filled in/still makes him loirsok like a candidate/for the drunk tank/if he lets it abide for three days or more
he rinses the slather off his hands/starts at the sideburn wannabe on the left/slaloms down the dizzy-gillespied cheek to the knot at the clenched jaw/and beyond
zambonis his left neck up to the jawline/cenerslices from larynx to chin/zambonis the right neck/then up the face over the puffed right cheek/to the other quasimodo sideburn/and then skates around right cheek and left/feeling with his non-razor hand/for random rogue hairs
now the under chin/with its special jowl-sector problems/requiring taut stretching of the sagflesh/and several special swipes
the chin has a tricky grain requiring up down&sideways/and the underlip is a mutant jungle/needing micro-machetes
now it is time for mustache removal/with the worst hairs catching and snagging the blade/and inflicting little wounds over the lip
the mouthcorners/pushed from within by the tongue/ seem so often to have ONE recalcitrant hair/that refuses to release its follicular grip
at long last the faceflesh is smooth
he likes to wipe the remaining foam off his face with his vanity towel/it looks so cool in the movies when the rugged hero does it/but it yields a gummy soap-residue towel/so he splashes and splashes it off
then the towel and the bits of toilet paper to stanch the tiny wounds
A few weeks ago superstar Valley poet Bill Campana, knowing that I was leaving Phoenix at the end of June, gave me three sizable U-Haul boxes that he had used during his own recent move. And on Memorial Day he and I had breakfast at the Ranch House Grille. I had this strawberry crepe there.
Then some days later my friends the Plaskos and I had a delicious meal at Dos Los Molinos. I wrote about that at some length in my post “Phoenix Memories.” Here’s a member of the delightful trio of ectoplasmic scamps known as The Deeminz–a Plasko creation.
On the first Friday in June, at the open-mic poetry event at Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe, I began my performance by announcing my imminent move to Toledo, Ohio and made a light-hearted reference to my appearance at CHB as being part of my “Farewell Tour.”
My friend of many years, former Arizona State Poetry Society president Christy White, saw the reference to my Farewell Tour and, to my delight, let me know that she wanted to get in on the Farewell Tour too. At her suggestion we went to the Phoenix Art Museum, mainly to see an exhibition of ceramic works by avant-garde female clay artists, and afterwards we had an exotic meal (Thai Shrimp Curry for me, a brie&apple “handheld” for her) at the museum’s café. We also goofed around with pics at a quasi-installational Florentine Baroque gilded frame/stand.
Moving Day is June 30, a mere 17 days from this writing. There is at least one more Farewell Tour event scheduled, the last Esso Coffeehouse Open Mic on June 21st. I hope there will be one or two more.
Beef broth, orange and yellow peppers, diced sweet onion, stew meat,Yukon Gold mini-potatoes, coarse kosher salt, fine-ground black pepper
one hour on high and the potatoes were still hard and woody. two and a half hours and the onion was caramelized and the potatoes were softish but firm.
with each successive bowl the broth became more agreeable. even the meat softened and chewing ceased to be a chore.
the ingested broth is becoming a part of me. of course it became non-broth as i ate it; became an acidic slurry and was enzymed and shunted over finger like absorbers,
and its warmth dissipated delightfully, euphorically;
and a search was sent to my brain;
broth. comic books.
and it turns out that in the comic book
Fantastic Four
Stan Lee
had an Irish doorman think about Ben Grimm,
The Thing,
some wistfulness including the phrase
“…what a fine
broth of a bhoy
he would be.”
even in my tweens,
though i loved comics and read them voraciously,
i thought Stan’s characterization of the doorman
hackneyed, a rather god-awful caricature.
the storytelling was superb, though,
thanks to the plot-assists of illustrator Jack Kirby.
(dnfs stands for did not finish and a dnf can be devastating for a long-distance runner)
and on a report card the letter f is a failing grade
(the student of sufficient shame may also think of f for fool, for frustrated, for feeble-minded)
there are divorces and bankruptcies and estrangements and mass shootings
..
there are creative failures
but we can turn them into misfires if we try try again and pay attention to concept and execution
..
there are also melting glaciers
cardiac arrests
but the mother of all failures is cowardice
(failure of nerve)
and in this year and last we have borne witness to cowards in power cowed by a presidential coward who in turn kow-tows to a muscovite who has enthralled him
and this has engendered a failure of national enlightenment
the silencing of the voice of America
death and destruction abroad
and everlasting shame
..
but some few of us fight against and fight whole-heartedly
stansbury of new mexico
king of maine
schwartzenegger of california
valenzuela of washington state
..
so let’s not call a time of death on this beloved nation just yet
One with Clay, Image and Text 