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apple oat barnacle muffin

May 21, 2019
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I was in the middle of a much, much longer version of the poem I’ve done here, typing directly into my timeline on Facebook–when all that I had written just winked out of existence. I tried to get it back but no dice, and probably no big loss. It went into detail about the Vegan restaurant, and its cuisine, and the foam-heart on the mocha’s surface that I destroyed with spoonful after spoonful of sugar; and it had a couple of word-choice startles and an Indiana Jones metaphor, but I was taking forever to get to the point.

apple oat barnacle muffin

my teeth–

two in particular–

were endangered by the

barnacle crust of the

“apple oat muffin.”

but the spongy interior was my

s  a  l  v  a  t  i  o  n  .

go away/STAY HOME

April 28, 2019
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2019 0428 go away STAY HOME

When I was a freshman college student in the early 70s I took a class called CRITICAL AND EVALUATIVE READING. The class required the reading of five books of our choice, and our assessments of those books on 3″ x 5″ cards. I only remember four of the five books I chose. They were Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, A Patch of Blue by Elizabeth Kata, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. The last was far and away the densest, most difficult of the books, and I struggled to get through it. Midway I thought I needed some help and so I bought the Cliffs Notes (or it may have been a different study guide; the bookstore had two) plot summary/analysis of Portrait. But I quickly became skeptical of the analytical integrity of the thing. Near the very beginning Joyce writes

When you wet the bed first it is hot then it gets cold.

According to the “analysis” this occurs because Joyce is riffing on the dichotomy of Heat and Cold as a theme for the book.

I didn’t buy it. I think Joyce was reporting a tiny child’s experience, one I remembered myself. It’s true, especially in winter, that the blood-temp urine starts hot and cools quickly. And the “analyst” also didn’t pick up on the growth of the sophistication of the language of the book from the very beginning, which if memory serves is

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down the road…

to the very end, which I think is

Old friend, old artificer, serve me now and in good stead.

So I ditched the Notes and struggled the rest of the way through the book solo. I can say with confidence that I did not fully understand the book and was often baffled by what was being described, or emphasized, or driving the behavior of the principal characters. My assessment was fudgy and deliberately vague so as not to be wrong. C’est la vie.

More than 40 years later, on a different index card, I’ve brought something into existence which would baffle almost anyone, and I don’t exclude myself. A person looking like a blend of Charles Laughton and Eleanor Roosevelt stares over the right shoulder of the viewer, not quite stupidly. He or she is flanked by two dichotomous (perhaps) acrostic poems, transcribed below:

go away

got a pair? well ha ha ha
get a REAL life–it’s the law
only when it’s time for tea
one might stir things gracefully

STAY HOME

Soothing makes a baby Oooooh
Touching when unwelcome: shoo
Adding moisture gains a gleam
Yawning oft subverts the theme

The good news is these are two poems in trochaic tetrameter, with perhaps perfect rhyme and rhythm. The “go away” poem does seem go-awayish, and the “STAY HOME” poem seems to have the lulling comfort of home.

The bad news is it’s hard to tell what has been accomplished here. Some meaning had to take a back seat to the puzzle-solving of the acrosticization. As Chief Dan George says in Little Big Man, “Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

I conclude that its entertainment value is chiefly in the niftiness of the acrostic construction, and may be enjoyed in a similar way that a Lego sculpture might, when all the pieces fit together just right. But, dear Reader and friend, please don’t struggle overmuch with the extraction of meaning from the content. It may remind you of little life moments, or it may seem off the wall. With Acrostics, a perfect blend of content and form is sometimes unattainable.

 

fossil fools

April 22, 2019
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NOTE: This poem was first written earlier today in the Facebook group Poets All Call, managed by Socorro Olsen. Group member Bob Kabchef, a car-loving friend of mine, posted title suggestions for the group earlier in the week.  I used his title “Fossil Fools” but took it lowercase, as is my habit. Grateful thanks go to Socorro and Bob, without whom this poem, and MANY others of my best, would never have been written.

Have a good Earth Day, Friends. Be as kind to the environment as you can, please.

2019 0422 silver arrow

fossil fools

“wise men say”
sang the king
“only fools rush in”
but
what about the oklahoma land rush?
what about the california and then yukon gold rush?
and what of standard oil?

getting in on the ground floor involves rushing
many processes are best breakneck-sped
opportunity knocks AND THEN GOES AWAY

and fortunes are made
rumrunners
gunrunners
numbers runners
runners to your marks

speaking of marx
he wrote DAS KAPITAL
and changed die Welt
and decades later
MAD magazine publisher william m. gaines
took some of his crew to russia
as an incentive vacation
and people followed him reverently
because he looked exactly like karl marx

i don’t digress
his dad max gaines made a pile
being in on the ground floor of comic strips
and then comic books

and he
and john d. rockefeller
and henry ford and edsel ford and henry ii
and olds and pierce-arrow and hispano-suiza
and many others (cough*studebaker*cough)
co-created capitalism’s answer
to those godless commies

and behold we did consume
we did demand we did sign up
we did see the u s a in our chevrolets
and we spread the word about burma shave

and fossil foolishness spread its fog machine
far wide and deep
and corporations became predatory
and fed on the bottom line

and now we want…sustainability?
listen to the c-e-o-ish laughter
sustain this you m—–f—–s they sneeringly reply

and behold we do sustain them
we pay their bloodmoney bonuses

and we lonely few
taking hours on public transport to get across town
weep

Manage

 

formy diablo

April 7, 2019
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20190407_193409

formy diablo

life for them began
on a batt on a potter’s wheel
spun from lumps of clay
into a semblance of symmetry

attention was then paid to lips and feet
the ones smoothed the others trimmed
one gained a handle
one was knifed into body and lid
one was left alone

they were baked
then they were dipped twice
sponged free of excess emulsion
baked again

now they are three (or four)
imperfect yet functional vessels
one will hold coffee
one will hold pencils and pens (perhaps)
one will hold secrets
and its other when lifted will reveal them

the diablo is in the details
this handle is clumsy
that lid is harsh
those glaze jobs are uneven

a french speaker says something like formydahbluh
and spells it <<formidable>>
and means it forceful/nontrivial/significant

these are too flawed to be formydahbluh
but the flawed human who made them
is happy he made them

 

Putting Out My Shingle

March 31, 2019
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Today I made some business cards. I made only eight, because there were horrible consequences to not manually feeding the label stock into the printer. The printer decided to teach me a lesson by mangling three pages of stock and leaving variously-jammed, hard-to-remove stock-sections hither and yon. Somehow some printing ended up occurring on that green-feltish roller thing inside the printer.

So I spent much of an hour opening front and back and top and drawer pulling out little accordions and rectangles and origamis of stiff paper. I THINK it is all out but I’ve had enough for one day and will do no more printing.

But pictured here is one intact card and two recent ceramic creations. This is a baby step toward the goal of monetizing my fine-arts efforts to the point of being able to fully retire from day-jobbing. Not that I don’t love my day job. It is just that I have three lifetimes-worth of important things to make, and only at most twenty years to make them.

Why twenty? Well, I’m sixty-four right now. My mother is a bit less than twenty years older than I am, and though she is still able to enjoy life, her memory and other faculties have declined sharply in the last couple of years, and my DNA is half her. The other half came from my father, who left us via myocardial infarction on January 5, 1983, at the tragically-premature age of 49.

So, Friends, my meter’s running.  If you’d like an original creation of mine at an astonishingly reasonable price, please shoot me an e-mail using my onewithclay@hotmail.com address. Include the amount you are willing to spend, and a headshot and personal philosophy if what you want is a custom portrait. No job too big, nor small!

Save the Lama for the Drama

February 18, 2019
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save the lama 2019 0218

Here is an “alternate Universe” version of a thing I did just shy of five years ago. It was in pencil and little of the acrostic poem was done. I made a copy of it, did some more peripheral drawing, inked it up, and added the complete (if occulted) poem and spot color.

Here is the poem, hidden lines and all, and acrostic line breakage disregarded for clarity:

Save the Lama for the Drama

Sown, when our flags and hearts are at half-staff
And self-appointed enemies would laugh
O, vested interests give pause. What for
Each involvement spawns esprit de mort
The Tragedies of living make us sigh:
How often pain seduces us to die.
E’en worse: to odd destruction we are led.
Lo: then more pained apocalypse ahead
Or altered consciousness or Disser A
Make head-in-sand-impostures take their aim.
A LOT of Aitch Why Pea Oh Ex Eye A.

Note: Aitch Why Pea Oh Ex Eye A spells Hypoxia, a condition of not enough oxygen delivered to the brain, inducing symptoms of blue-faced hallucinations.

‘kē•tøn

February 16, 2019
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20190216_165409

Once upon a time, in the William C. Jack Elementary School library, there was a book of mysteries for children that was edited by Alfred Hitchcock. In it Mr. Hitchcock stopped a story in the middle and told his readership that they had just been given a clue. That’s all I remember about that book, but it did lead me to another, also edited by him: STORIES THAT SCARED EVEN ME. For some reason, after I “not finished/finished” this drawing, I thought of that book. I also thought of my friend Manuel Paul Arenas, whose writings favor the macabre. I thought that it would be nice if Manny wrote a story for which my drawing is the perfect illustration. I haven’t asked him, and he probably has better things to do, but that was my thought.

 

Pushback

January 26, 2019
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pushback 20190126

In his famous novel 1984 George Orwell imagined the countries of the world reduced to three. They were named Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania. They were in perpetual conflict. Two of them would gang up against the third, and seemingly win, but then a different two would form an alliance against the new third country, ad infinitum. All conflict benefited the real movers and shakers of the world. Their machine turned misery into wealth and power. No one knew who these very powerful, very wealthy people were.

Part of the perpetual shame of being a citizen of the United States is that the United States benefits enormously from conflict. Huge corporations euphemistically named “Defense Contractors” work with the military to create more effective means of ending lives. Little research and development is devoted to defense; much is devoted to offense.

The current President, when a candidate for the office, when asked how he would handle a certain collective that has been described as a “Terrorist Group,” replied, and this is as exact a quotation as my memory provides, “I’d bomb the shit out of them.” As President, he has caused to happen a certain amount of bombing that has resulted in the deaths of noncombatants. These deaths are euphemistically called “Collateral Damage.”

In the movie VICE, based on the life of former Vice President Dick Cheney, there is a scene that occurs during the Nixon presidency. Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are near a closed door to a room where Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger are discussing their plans to carpet-bomb Cambodia. Somehow Cheney and Rumsfeld knew this. Years later, Cheney would be instrumental in compelling the US to invade Iraq, while the “Defense Contractor” Halliburton, which formerly employed Cheney as Chief Executive Officer, benefited from enormous, no-bid, cost-plus contractual work. For further information please run an Internet search on “sailboat fuel.”

Part of human nature is a desperate need to feel like one of the “good guys.” “Good guys” cannot exist without “bad guys.” In my lifetime, according to my ever-evolving government, the “bad guys” have included ex-Nazis, organized crime, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Ku Klux Klan, Communists, North Vietnam, “Red” China, the U.S.S.R., the Palestinian Liberation Organization (“P.L.O.”), Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Iran, Iraq, Daniel Noriega, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, ISIS and/or ISOL, Saddam Hussein…Moammar Ghaddafi…Osama bin Laden…so many more. Ironically, many of these enemies were created by the zealous efforts of the US Government to effect regime change, ostensibly for the good of the world.

The way to avoid Pushback is for the initial Push not to have occurred in the first place.

The words to the acrostic:

Post this suspect’s APB
Unto dog comes tick & flea
Shave it burn it write it: Bic
Have a prospect take a pick

Night Light

January 20, 2019
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night light 2019 0120

What with the total eclipse of the Moon coming in scant hours, and my recent acquisition of black paper and white chalk, it seemed time to draw with light.

Here are the words to the double acrostic:

Night Light

Now we were wombed in waters warm and still
In peaceful amniotic near-lanai
Go down where water gives you Zero G
Henceforth let velvet DIMNESS see us through
To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt

This is a non-rhyming poem, so I didn’t begin composing it with the end-words. Instead, and since I wanted to wrap my spot illustration of mother and child with a sort of uterus of words, I wrote the last line, “To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt,” first. And so, curiously, the poem also makes sense from the last line up, if we just change one word on the new last line:

To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt
Henceforth let velvet DIMNESS see us through
Go down where water gives you Zero G
In peaceful amniotic near-Lanai
Now we are wombed in waters warm and still

Writing poetry last-line-first is just like the way Mickey Spillane wrote his Mike Hammer mysteries. He claimed he always started with the ending, then figured out how to get there. Poets, if you ever find yourself running dry, you might do worse than to give the Spillane method a whirl!

Life & Chess

January 3, 2019
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life n chess 2019 0102

I have not played chess for a long time. At my best I wasn’t very good. But Chess is great subject matter, 2D or 3D. When I was heavily into ceramic sculpture I made several chess pieces with human heads and sometimes limbs; and I made at least two chess sets. I’ve wanted for a long time to draw or paint all the moves of a chess match in comic-book panel continuity, warping the board and pieces with each move to show the drama that was going on. But that is a MAJOR project and will have to wait.

Life and Chess overlap in the realms of Conflict, Positioning, Caste, and Planning. With chess AI proving sufficiently good to defeat chess grandmasters, it has become apparent that the ability to exhaustively review all possible moves “checkmates” ingenuity and intuition. Perhaps we will be humbled enough to move on to endeavors that are not combative. Therein lies Peace On Earth, my friends.

Life & Chess

Loose astringents may be styptic
Tight dual portraits form a diptych
Friend turned foe may grip may seize
Even with bewobbled knees
& find looseness holds the keys

Notice the mistake I made in line 2. I forgot the second letter was an I, and looking at it thought it was an T, the base of the L doing double-duty as a crossbar. It’s an easy fix–change “Tight” to “Inked” and it even makes more sense, although we lose the dichotomy from line 1’s “Loose”–but let’s let it be. It’s Human.