I’m embarrassed, but not quite ashamed, to publish this one. It was done in haste and the drawing is crappy, but the idea is OK and the pun, though I say so myself, is elegant.
Here are the words:
Motivations vary. Some will give it tooth & claw
Even laying down a life for Flag & Ma & Pa
Money, bragging rights & buzz are ways of keeping power; breathe our last & always there’s a whiff of sweet & sour
I keep trying and missing with Spoon-capture. A spoon can be a wonderfully reflective surface, or it can be a real mud-dog, depending on a lot of drawing choices. Before the year is over, though, I think I’ll have a good one.
Here are the words, followed by a couple more spoon studies.
Sacred to our folklore is the sacrificial lamb
Poisonous the notion lives are set upon a trammel
Overlooked the making active use of déjà vu
One must wonder what we’d change to make it non-ensue
Never going backwards means that everything is news
Here’s to Tim Curry then and sooner. His sheer talent and brass helped make THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW not merely a cult favorite, but part of the matrix of the Mainstream–an astonishing feat, given the homophobic culture it was created in.
Alas, the media reported that he’d had a major stroke last May. And Lou Reed, another out-there genius, has died. The passage of time is ever scarring, and scary.
This page came to be because last month I did a quickbunny page just to do a page, and the acrostic happened to be TIME WARP. I’d intended to publish it today, but could not find it. So, “Well, why not do a page on Tim Curry?” So I did. So THEN I found the TIME WARP page. And since my Canadian friend Michel Lamontagne had admired a post wherein I combined 2 and 3D, I repeat, with an old, baggy-wrapped self-portrait sketch of mine that is apropos because it’s sort of like the Picture of Dorian Gray now:
Words to the first one:
Concupiscence compel’d the Dr. so
Unglaublich hijinx did seem apropos
Recumbent S Sarandon lets him ski
Rococo-outre suits him to a T
Yet he’s pre-served his equinimity
Words to the second:
Those who reap B4 they sow
If away but get Samoa
Milliseconds from afar
End unweaving-unpluck’d harp
This page was twinly inspired by the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and by my wish for a good night’s rest for my Girlfriend, Denise.
Words:
Come we to see the fall of Dusk benign
And on a slumbered Dream-repast we dine
Lash-fluttering & rest: a night’s success
Mementos that the sainted Martyrs bless.
Good night, my dearest Denise…
This is a genuine 15 by 15 diagonally symmetrical crossword puzzle, constructed by my genuine self after two days of tribulation. It is now seven minutes to midnight, and I’m determined to publish today. If it is too hard to read, please let me know and I will transcribe post-publication.
Here’s a clean grid for solvers:
I wrote the poem below in the waning hours of 2012. At the time, I was able to work, seeking work, but unable to find suitable work–the Economics 101 definition of Unemployed. Now I’m working full-time and have gallery space in the Village of Oak Creek to boot. I just finished my shift and have an hour and a half to put to some use before I open the doors at the Village Gallery. How this poem suits me now–better than when I wrote it!
if i’m going to be depressed, reaps, i’m taking you with me
i was walking down e. tonto in sedona, solo, but then the grim reaper showed up to walk beside me.
just a social call, it said.
(you thought the reaper was a he or a she?)
ok, i said, my voice connoting annoyance.
yeah, it continued, because you’ve been dwelling on death again lately.
well, reaps, i rejoined, you would dwell on death too if you had a heart that keeps spontaneously leaping around,
and if, further, you had a history of heart disease in your family,
and you’re in the health insurance donut hole, and the doctors will have little incentive to save you,
and your dad died at the san francisco age of forty-nine of
(fibrillative drumroll please)
massive myocardial infarction,
and you’re fifty-eight and more overweight than your dear old dad was at shuffle-off,
and if you had enough imagination to realize that even a billion-year lifetime
is a mere keratosis on the flesh of eternity,
and ownership of physical flesh is an increasingly losing proposition,
hardly an in fee simple arrangement,
and one unfine day the flesh will either be incinerated, or a feast for lower-order creatures, squatters all,
and…
and i was alone once more. the grim reaper didn’t want to hear any more.
good riddance, i italically thought to the cosmos.
but i was mocked in italic echoish audio:
you wish.
Above is a playful riff-o-rama on the Probabilistic Quantum Multiverse, wherein for every way things CAN happen, they DO, and each possibility gets its own private universe. There is no one acrostic poem above, but here is one variation:
Grant this logorithmic soul
Righteous lack of wrongish troll. O
Isthmus straitens bric-a-brac
Deviathan devoids the rack.
I thought I’d coined a new word with Deviathan (quickdef: Deviant Leviathan), but I find to my dismay there are over 13,000 search results. [sad face]
Though this is playful, it is also a try at Art with a capital A. The illustration is a visual pun for Gridlock. It is a forbidding, Cartesian-coordinated box, and visual pun #2 is that all my subversive/versive thinking is done outside the box. Plus, the bottom row of boxes is a wordless, step-by-step lesson in how to draw a 15 by 15 grid freehand with nothing but paper and pencil. This is handy for crossword puzzle constructors who want to go Commando.
How? Why? Let me close both wordlessly and wordfully with this work in progress:
As of this writing, I’ve been a front desk clerk working the Graveyard Shift, 11pm to 7am, for a bit over nine months. There’s a great upside: it’s quiet; my supervisor has no problem with me sketching, reading or writing to stay awake and alert; there’s about three and a half hours of work, emergencies excluded, to get done in an eight-hour shift; a chef-prepared meal is provided. There’s a downside as well, but let’s accentuate the positive.
Here are the words to the double acrostic:
Nocturnality’s not pyrotechnic
If the a l c o h o l is isopropyl
Given processed dew on tension’s surface
Haste is wasted whist if you’re a slow peer
Take a moonlight shave & risk a neck nick
Flash explication:
Line 1: Being up all night might be boring…
Line 2: …if your fluid of choice is isopropyl alcohol and not booze alcohol.
Line 3: How is dew processed? Through evaporation or consumption. Watching dew evaporate is tiresome…
Line 4: The line riffs on “haste makes waste.”
Line 5: Don’t shave on shift under penalty of flaw.
There was a reflection in Metal, which meant
Half-haloes of light-sourced utensil gave flash
Engrossing attention through elegant sense
Maintaining the contra to All flash is CRASS
And lifting the energy drabness let drop
New angles enable new viewpoint: hey presto
If grabbing the O makes a Cap of a Capo
Now what might become of a Halo? Some question
Here is a work in progress. It is Stuck, has been for over a month, but it is a good Stuck. There’s a book by the brilliant physicist Freeman Dyson called Weapons and Hope, now dated in a way but still vital and worth reading, that spoke of Stuckness. He also wrote Disturbing the Universe, which rocks autobiographically.
One hand Gives, the other Takes. What is Given is a blank check. It may represent indefinite wealth or unlimited potential. (To further digress, the awesome meteor-logical Stephanie Abrams, viewable in the wee hours, is often partnered with Al Roker. I wonder if she’s ever deconstructed the word POTENTIAL to POTENT-I-AL. She well could.)
A woman torques and cracks a bone in her foot. That Hurts. She then goes to an Urgent Care center and gets support-booted and caned in the nicest possible way. That Heals. (That’s based on the real event in the real life of my real girlfriend, who rocks every bit as much as does Freeman Dyson, inventor of the Dyson Sphere.)
This is catch-circling and confusing, so it perfectly fits what Cyndi Lauper sang, once upon a time after time:
Caught up in circles
Confusion is nothing new…
My thoughts have wanderlust. And wonderlove. I am unshaven, but even after I shave I’ll be a work in progress at least as long as I live.
One with Clay, Image and Text 