A feast for the eyes/Delight for the nose/A gift and a prize/An iris a rose/A wink and a noddle/A symbol of lust/An apt still-life model/A breeze and a gust
They stem bud and blossom/with petals their head/An odontoglossum/Enwreathed for the dead
[Remainder of poem available on request]
dear diary, i crapped/into my gold toilet as usual. my favorite/way to start my day. then i went/on truth social and it felt/really good to tee off/on the disloyal. i’ll do more of that tomorrow.
can’t wait for day one. it will be to die for.
he warned of a snake/”I’m a snake–wha’d you expect?”/guess who is the snake?
to the victors go/the spoils. victory at all costs. hey–/remember pyrrus?
mass deportation/not only of brown people/but of sanity
i do not have the right/to remain silent in the face/of this travesty
append a footnote to your journal:
yesterday saw infamy.
our vigilance was too diurnal,
attitude too fancy-free.
.
an interregnum looms. smooth sailing
can’t be done in choppy waters.
gallows built and vlad impaling…
pray for sisters, mothers, daughters.
.
Afterword: Donald Trump has just been elected President of the United States. The above poem alludes to some of the consequences I fear.
here we are again/we wrote a po/m on July 25th/and then the rest of july
we wrote a poem every day in august
we wrote a poem every day in september
october too/and november so far
and it’s eight in the morning/and the nagvoice says “now write a poem”
and there’s plenty to write about/it being election day/and the most crucial moment in the history of our country
or if we’re burned out on politics/we could write about our hand surgery/coming up in january
or about the charming kid-drawings our aunt diane found
hell we could even write about how autocorrect just changed hell to he’ll
or how we are one person/but we keep using the “royal we” right now
but let’s talk about what a poem is/and what distinguishes a poem/from other arrays of words
it doesn’t have to be tricky
write something and call it a poem/and behold it IS a poem/and no one can tell you otherwise
it just may not be a GOOD poem/he’ll it may not even be a WORTHY OF READING poem
but in our book of life a poem not worthy of reading (and we have written some real stinkers) is not worthy of posting
the posted stuff has a chance of making readers see or feel or think and be grateful they did
and/dispensing with that pompous “royal we”/you o reader/can read my mind
and that is miraculous
Frenzied state
Floods of hate
Retribution
Execution
Military tribunal
Storms monsoonal
Shadowed valley
Whipsong rally
Viper’s nest…
“Lovefest”??!!
we like to make fun of each other/and the attack of one’s lack of intelligence or sense/is rife
but our vocabulary arsenal is inexact
we could say ‘foolish’/which means ‘similar to a fool/but that really means ‘similar to one/who is easily fooled’/which misses the mark
(sidebar: for a terrific fairy tale written and illustrated by Howard Pyle, find “How Boots Befool’d the King” in his classic The Wonder Clock)
then there’s ‘idiotic’/which is ‘of or like an idiot’ but some do not know that ‘idiot’ was once a legal and medical term/referring to one whose mental development is deemed to be that of a two-year old or worse
(sidebar: the poet John Ciardi made fun of William Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy” in his ambitious, explicative How Does a Poem Mean?)
(sidebar: i must read Fyodor Dostoevski’s The Idiot) before I die)
and ‘moron’ and ‘imbecile’ had similar journeys
(sidebar: i still laugh at thinking of that alt-right protester holding up a sign saying YOU MORANS)
(sidebar: Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who believed in eugenics, wrote the majority opinion for Buck v. Bell, which was about mandatory sterilization of the ‘feeble-minded,’ and includes these exact w.ords: “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” That was less than 100 years ago)
ss for stupid/it should mean ‘in a state of stupefaction’/which is a sort of paralysis/brought on by an unexpected event
but to continue splitting hairs like this/is stoopid
the younger brother waits on the phone/for his older brother to find the word that is eluding him
and after a decent interval supplies the word in the form of a polite question: “whitewater?” “yeah…”
their conversation lurches here and there like a car/driven by someone learning stick shift
it gets smoother at the end with the manly I Love Yous and Keep Punching Buds that slide into well-worn conversational grooves
the younger brother pushes the red Off hangup icon but misses/and pushes again but before he does/he hears his older brother whimper eloquently
he hears frustration and loss in that untranscribable syllable/and more/he hears dim realization/that he is losing his mind a piece at a time/just like mom did
the younger brother feels a pang but does not whimper
not audibly
The painter wiggled two three-foot stretcher bars into two eighteen-inch ones and added a gorilla-glued brace and corner supports. They then used a staple gun and a canvas grip to affix fine linen to the wood. They primed the linen using the centuries-old rabbitskin-glue ingredients and technique.
In light Conté crayon the painter sketched the curvature of the ice moon, the circle of the giant ringed planet it orbited, a hovering spacecraft, and an infant giraffe standing with splayed legs on the ice moon’s surface.
The painter frisketed the moon, planet, rings and giraffe so that they would be unpainted when the spectacular background of stars and galactic band were built from Mars Black, Payne’s Gray, Alizarin Crimson, Naples Yellow, Titanium and Zinc Whites, and Pthalocyanine Blue. The background took a day.
The gas giant and rings and hovering spacecraft took three days. Red Oxide, Burnt Sienna, and Ultramarine Blue were added to the palette.
The surface of the ice moon took twenty minutes. A few dots of Cerulean Blue became streaks with a few deft strokes of a palette knife.
The painter improvised a semitransparent structure near the giraffe, with glowing, flitting shapes that implied small flying lifeforms within. Most of the structural work was done in about an hour but fine-tuning took three.
The giraffe was of Earthly shape but they gave it an unEarthly pelt of circuitry such as is found on a computer’s motherboard. A glowing giraffe’s heart, the color of bright sunshine seen through thin ear flesh, revealed the localized transparency of the giraffe.
Almost finished, the painter added implied distant sunlight, shadows, and a few unifying thisses and thats. They stepped back and wondered why something seemed to be missing, shrugged, and went away and had a meal and a nap. Upon return the painter grinned, nodded, and quickly painted loops of the whizzing lifeforms, in sharper detail than the ones within the semitransparent structure, encircling the giraffe here and there. A bit of glow was added to the giraffe where the forms flew close to the pelt’s circuitry.
The painter signed and dated their finished piece. On the back of the canvas they wrote
“Trojan Giraffe.” 18″ x 36″. Alkyd on linen.
The painter added their right thumbprint, in Alizarin Crimson as always.
Then the painter cursed heartily that neither they nor their painting were anything but a figment of a poet’s imagination. Their last words, making the walls of their magnificent loft apartment ring, were “I deserve to live more than you do, you cheap hack. Painting is HARD WORK. Poetry is lazy daydreaming!”
you can’t get fried/on cyanide
nor run amok/on hemlock
curare? sorry–petrified
snake-bit? don’t spit, nor them mock
.
with cigarettes come sighed regrets
with smack you lose big time
but cannabis in blissful sets
chagrins your gin and lime.
One with Clay, Image and Text 