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the tall, tired-looking, overcoated man/walks with a slight limp up the sidewalk/on the east side of the bridge/that goes over the surging river

near its apex he stops and opens the box he has carried/and pulls out the drone it contained/along with its controller/and sets them both on the sidewalk

he puts a pale blue dot the drone will sense/in the middle of his forehead

pulls cut-resistant gloves from a pocket/and draws them on

picks up the controller/and punches and slides and joysticks the controls/and the camera-laden drone/stirs and rises and positions itself/a foot above and three feet away from his face/its bright green RECORD light gleaming

and the man says, “My name is Olaf Lindberg.

“I am a frustrated inventor. [pause]/I  am about to perform a demonstration/For which I will require more strength/than I normally have.”

dr. lindberg puts his gloved  hand in a pocket and pulls out a large spansule of deep green/pops it into his mouth, and swallows it.

he looks at the drone’s camera lens/and says, “I am not suicidal, but what I am about to do/ carries a moderate risk of injury,/and a slight risk of death.”

with that he jumps four feet upward/and grabs the chain-link fencing/arcing over the sidewalk/above his head.

the drone whirs upward in sync/guided by the pale blue dot.

(end of part one)

in 1958 a family of five/one infant two toddlers/and a heart-tuggingly young couple/moved from the Los Angeles megalopolis/to arizona’s valley of the sun/and bought a house that hadn’t quite been built yet/with saplings in front yard and back/and a floor plan identical or mirror-imaged/to thousands of those that would surround them

dirt roads got graded/old barns torn down/and concrete and asphalt were poured across an expanse/of former farmland

it was called the baby boom/and it made housing developer john f. long his fortune

aerial photography over midvalley over this fervent time/showed the valley residences spreading like a fungus/or an aboveground ant colony/growing everywhere but especially west

phoenix population more than doubled/glendale’s went up by an order of magnitude/and peoria and buckeye and avondale and points west o my

and we made stuff up as we went along/not as blazingly as the pioneers of a century back/but valiantly enough here and there

it doesn’t quite feel like history when you live it/but looking back/at all the violence and miracle and new language/wow

I grabbed a ball-point pen/And then untied a shoe/Unclad my foot and then/Inked up my archeroo.

“Step lively,” I affirmed/Near nail and metatarsal/In cursive supradermed/”If Wit won’t do, a Farce’ll,”

I wrote behind the heel,/And then be-ringed the ankle/”Brace. Let.” And then “Pig deal”/And asked, “Foot Odor rankle?”

Reshod, I walked untrippingly/And grinned, O Me-O, My-O,/I’d added, sanity-tippingly,/Some Footnotes to my bio.

fedoraku

headwear for gumshoes/impractical and stylish/some banded some plain

fedoraku2

on redondo pier/my then love fedora’d me/so adorably

capku

seed corn politics/ball teams philosophies all/on billboard foreheads

roundwearku

oliver hardy/wore a derby but patrick/macnee a bowler

tangentialechoku

a bowling champ goes/to the kentucky derby/and says “whoops–wrong hat”

Money stuffs a wallet,

Pizza stuffs a face.

Most downtowns are overstuffed

With hurting human race.

Pillows have their eiderdown

Turkeys breaded sausage.

Bonnie had her Clyde. A frown

Is stuffed with soured tossage.

Alveoli plump with oxy,

Peppers, Spanish rice.

Is this Stuff and Nonsense?

Maybe. Ain’t it nice?

**

Questions for the reader:

Do lines 3 and 4 serve the poem, even though their tone is more serious? Why not or why?

Is Line 7 necessarily lascivious? Does a sympathetic yet prudish reader tend to perform mental gymnastics to un-lasciviize it!

Did the reader see the “punchline” final lines coming? Are they off-putting in their self-servitude?

Do these questions themselves become a second poem?

Please feel free to use the Comments section to post your answers.

as is common in the primordial early morning/i was draining an old man’s bladder/after having blown my nose

there was a sensation of my nose starting to run on the left side/but what fell from my nostril and into the bowl/was a fat wobbly raindrop/of blood

then there was another one

so I pulled up my underwear/flushed and unrolled a few squares of tp/tilted my head back/and staunched

it took a while/but the toilet paper squares finished their job/spotted but unsoaked

and now a video loop plays over and over in my head/of that first fat blooddrop going from my nostril/in super-slow motion/and splashing into the bowl water

see it wobble/mildly elongate/touching down with a splash like a space capsule/with three parachutes

a little, nay, micro, ocean filled with corpuscles and plasma/platelets/and all kinds of information/about my recent drug and alcohol use/(zero, he says smugly)/and cholesterol level/glucose and blood gases/forecast for probability of survival five years hence/(guessing 40% plus-or-minus ten)

and then it splashes into the already-splashed-into water/and is flushed away

and the city’s sewage is further enhanced/with a geezer poet’s blood and urine

you want a piece of me, phoenix, Arizona, usa?

here ’tis/with my best regards

at work/handshaking and high-fiving are rare/but hugs amongst females/and knuckles amongst all/are common

the modern knuckles greeting/also known as bumping fists/will also involve the adjacent forearms/if the greeters are extra friendly

there is more of an energy exchange

camaraderie is a nice part of the work experience/and the technology exists/for the user interface to enable knuckles/even unto the forearms/to be administered remotely/in the augmented reality of modern computing

which leads to a sneaky question…

will ai entities/do knuckles/to fool humans/or each other?

boy meets girl is obsolete/two entwined’s still incomplete/souls a-melding might encompass/permutative joins and rumpus

dovetail joints can be most durable/furniture and loves referrable/metronomic • syncopated/relatively cross-related

just don’t be a gropy mutt/creeply inappropriate/mindfulness of situations/leads to gleeful destinations

patience pays and may well deal you/into hands of kindly milieu/don’t forget to breathe and grin/if the fun and games begin

share a gaze and up the voltage/help reduce the feather’s moltage/loneliness evaporates/doves entail the coo of mates

Hi, I’m a Writer, and that’s a fact you can take to the bank, because you are reading some of my writing. You’re a Writer too, and you can prove it to me by leaving a comment. You can also help boost the net compassion in the world by leaving me a Like, and saying something nice about me in the comment that proves you’re a Writer.

Gullible people are more compassionate and worthy of existence than those cynical and nasty murderers out there. Gullible people know that when a word starts with a capital letter it means it is more Legitimate and Important. And even though they know deep down that the main reason a catchy title invites you to click a button is that someone wants you to buy some stuff, or at the very least become more aware of the stuff, that has nothing to do with the catchy title, the compassionate, Important Gullible Person will click it anyway, because they will learn that one irresistible Thing that the Title promised them they would learn.

Except sometimes the title cheats. For instance, Yes, there are 145 facts about gullibility. A few are described here. The rest of them, you Magnificent Reader and Writer, You, are rattling around in your own Sub-Subconcious, waiting for You to dredge them up. It will be hard but by the time You are done, O Illustrious One, YOU will be completely cured of Gullibility…

…unless the next clickbait you encounter has either a kitty-cat or a young female Human Being with a huge pair of hemispherical Glands.

Buy my stuff, wouldja please?

In the last few seconds, you drew breath,/Moved blood,/Built a thought.

You have decided to do these things/For your betterment/And to see what happens. Soon you will review/Plans for the maintenance of your livelihood,/Appeasements of the wants and aches that drive you,/And speculative wanderings/That lead you to places/Where you feel more welcome/And less wrong.

There are things you must fight for./You have decided to fight,/But you have not decided/How fiercely.

When you have decided/To channel your fierceness/Into that battle with that part of yourself/That has been wheedling you astray/In the name of Not-Ready-Yet…

And I-Shouldn’t-Have-To…

And I-Can’t…

When you have silenced that constant/Seductive whisper of doubt/Of distraction from your truer/Striving self…

Then all your other decisions will follow

Organically.