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President-Elect Donald Trump (not a Hoax! not a Dream! not an Imaginary Tale!) now warns…

Drum-roll and eye-roll, please…

That unless the Biden Administration acts to address the debt-ceiling issue before he takes office in three weeks and a day, there will probably be a Depression.

Some people still take him seriously, even though “baseless claims” is one of the favorite ways journalists describe things he says.

Oh, by the way, in case you didn’t notice, he wants to buy Greenland and make Canada the fifty-first United States of America. And just in case you didn’t notice the historical record, this is consistent with the dark side of American History known as Manifest Destiny. Thieves in power have throughout American history stolen or swindled or otherwise indecently acquired just about all of what is called America. The short answer to the question “Why, in the name of all that’s decent, do they do this?” is “Decency has nothing to do with it.”

He is also reported to be “walking back” many of his more apocalyptic campaign promises.

And his bromance with Elon “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Musk continues, enraging a few of his minions.

And George Stephanopoulos apologized to him for calling him a rapist and not merely a sexual assailant.

There is poetry in this. After all, “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg is considered just as much a poem as is “To My Daughter” by Weldon Kees, which follows the Sonnet format down dark, corrosive corridors. And Ginsberg started his poem by asserting that good minds have been driven mad.

I don’t know how good my mind is, but I do know that I am a lot madder that I was half a year ago.

Writing a screed about the Great American Come-On is the least I can do, since I am anti-violence but am just as virulently anti-being-violated, both as an American and as a child of Mother Earth.

And, speaking of Mother Earth, does everyone notice that the land Trump covets will be the last havens north of Antarctica from the ravages of global warming? The same global warming that “Drill, Baby, Drill” will exacerbate?

Coincidence, Friends…or Co-Incidents?

Literally, and urgently, I implore all with a conscience and courage to get The Hell out of Here

before it’s too late.

with one hand we can speak. with two we can applaud. a surgeon cited hands as proof

of the existence of God.

a hand with age might hurt and hurt. arthritis, carpal tunnel. but a chrono-synclastic infundibulum

is a fictitious, time-warping funnel.

that last may seem quite off-the-wall with from-the-subject strand, but it all ties in when you are told

that this arthritic, Carpal-Tunnel-Syndrome-blighted admirer of Kurt Vonnegut wrote this thing you are reading just to give Kurt a posthumous

hand.

.

Note: The Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum and its fascinating properties may be found in The Sirens of Titan, one of the richest, most entertaining flights of imagination I have ever read.

A Touchdown is Attainment of a Goal.

There are many ways to describe the gaits we have used in the course of a long lifetime. No single word can capture how a marathoner whose calves cramped up at the seventeen-and-a-quarter point of the race and who wrestled with despair and dehydration the other nine-plus miles of the footrace at last crosses the finish line, but the invented word Trudgedown is a fair approximation.

A Trudgedown is Redemption of the Soul.

a baby sobs uncontrollably after unrequited hunger or hurtful startlement smite her.

a young lover sobs unrelievedly in the face of permanent, preventable, hormone-driven loss.

a soldier sobs for the rest of his life, haunted by the phantasms of life-changing mayhem.

ah, but the ocean throbs and sobs with the orphaning of her children and the unsustainable slaughterhouse her depths have become, and she weeps more tears than ever humanity has.

let us not sob for that. let us atone.

Fun Fact: the WordPress Free Photo Library offers this pic as a search result for “Fluff.”

four-eff means unfit/for military service./hannibal lecter.

(If closed captioning transcribes the bone-chilling sound Anthony Hopkins improvised in Silence of the Lambs, I suspect it would read “F-f-f-f.”)

.

fluff a pillow/to enable attainment/of its potential.

.

festival vestments/and their divestiture/invest foofoorah.

.

freelance fred free-falls/fleeing felonious/fierce flighty fighters.

.

compassionate giant/hesitates whilst Jack escapes:/”fee, fie..foe….fumfuh…….”

(one nifty aspect of the use of lowercase in poetry is that when you throw in something uppercase it becomes oddly emphatic. Since Jack is the star of the fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk” it’s appropriate to emphasize him.)

(Grateful acknowledgment to the late author Harlan Ellison for using the Yiddish-derived “fumfuh” in one of his talking-to-the-reader introductions. It is more commonly spelled “fumfer” but I like Ellison’s variant better.)

.

“fini” means The End./”Finito Mussolini”/may well describe…

(The ending of the final ‘ku is left as an exercise for the reader. [smiley face])

hey there–

don’t you hate catchy titles that just bait to switch? we get roped in again by some son of a bitch who knows our curiosity’s worse than a cat’s so they lay down a briar of thisses and thats.

but this right jolly fellow with gray hair and wrinkles with a grin that is crooked and a left eye that twinkles now ceases the nonsense and staves off attack having baited and switched why he switches right back.

there was a calm scientist aaron by name who sought not only knowledge but fortune and fame and his pigeon chest swelled even more with the pride that his asthma was cured and he’d taken a bride.

they lived well off his royalties and truest love and they searched here and yon and below and above for the best installations of magic and light that would make perfect rainbows by day dusk and night.

so we now close the curtain on aaron and djenn the pragmatic asthmatic and his sacred wren and imagine prismatics that let our eyes feast on genetic æsthetics that soothe savage beasts.

thanks to the hershey folks

even an old mateless man

can get a kiss on christmas eve

.

and he can pour himself christmas cheer

into a lovely goblet of his own making

and with the seagram’s v o in the cupboard

he can toast the spirit of his deceased father

with the spiritous liquor

that was his father’s favorite

.

by now you may be feeling sorry

for this lonely old codger

having been emotionally manipulated

by said codger

but you need not be

all he needs for all the unloneliness he wants

is to get off his fat ass

and go out into the world

call a pal or a gal or a gal pal

and see if a christmas movie is viewable

go to the dive bar across the street

or better yet a coffeehouse

with a cheerful barista

who knows him by name

and ask for the usual

shoot a text to a faraway loved one

or a joke to a nearby old friend

.

but before this old myself does any of this

i’ll have another so delightful kiss

and kiss you, my cherished reader, as well

in a way appropriate to the both of us

and urge you to celebrate in your way

what you find most fittingly celebratory

and i raise my goblet to you

and wish you the best

first let’s establish what SOTM stands for/and later i will beg for it to stand for something else

SOTM stands for Show Ourselves The Money

and is pronounced, unsubtlely enough, Sodom

I felt SOTMized this last election cycle/because i wanted a few candidates to win so badly/that i contributed modest amounts to their campaigns

and to this day, almost seven weeks after the election,/ALL of those candidates,/and some of their pals as well,/are hounding me/and pleading with me/and guilt-tripping me/and badgering me

to Show Ourselves The Money/(the Ourselves being the candidates, of course)

to give them more for next time/because the bad guys are outspending us

i want this bloodsucking buggerish nonsense to stop

because the implication is Whoever Has The Most Money Wins

and Decency and Right vs. Wrong do not seem to matter

so i am begging everyone to change the paradigm

and please make SOTM stand for Something Other Than Money

.

other more civilized countries put money in its place/and limit campaign spending

let us learn from their example

for i cannot sit comfortably with this going on–

can you??