I am a fan of the woman who was famous for saying “I want to be alone.” She was alive, she was strangely lovely, and she did it her way every bit as much as Frank Sinatra ever did.
Greta Garbo
Grand Hotel had a capital G
RUSSIA begat Ninotchka
Exit the doomed Mlle Gautier
Then exit the self-eclipsed orb
All PRAISE one magnificent solo
Light intrigues, dazzles, guides, bathes. This acrostic says that it may also be mischievous. And there is a sub-acrostic, Flash Light, that is poetically a cousin to Flash Fiction: hit-and-run, quick taste, seeyalater.
Lumen Naughty
Let unsophistication reign
Uncultured juvenilia
Metastasizes slim and smug
Evangelism’s High and Nigh
Now Tyrus has become a Ty
Trivia: Baseball Hall of Famer Ty Cobb’s first name was Tyrus. Ty Cobb was in a way the Pete Rose of his generation.
Flash Light
Fossssil
Lanai
Augmenting
Shibboleth
Hatchet
When I ran across this old drawing with the acrostic “Craz I Ness” my immediate thought was “Needs more Crazy. A LOT more.” So i crzied it up, including having the last two lines cross paths.
Craz I Ness
Cacophonic wail and moan
Rigid blinkless smile of bone
Aerie’s music’s background strains
Zealotries leave marks and stains
Long ago an art professor, Scott by name, declaimed to his class, “When you are painting, it is better to make a BOLD LIE than a Timid Truth.” And there is a bit of Bold Truth to that, though this is not a mutually-exclusive, either/or world.
Long before Stephen King wrote UNDER THE DOME, John Brunner wrote STAND ON ZANZIBAR and briefly mentioned “Fuller domes.” And of course Buckminster Fuller, that exceedingly visionary eccentric, had the original notion.
Gloam & Dome
Gopher holes and fumaroles oft perforated the land
Practicing the underground with furrows Meath the sand
Obelisky business sparks imagination too
All the ancient myths in shadow beckon fleet and loom
Makes a zealot want to beat upon a kettled droome
[Originally published in the Facebook group Poets All Call, earlier today.]
five such things
there are five such things as desire
want
ambition
lust
appetite
dissatisfaction
and there are five such things as death
cessation
mortality
zero
discontinuity
oblivion
but there is only one such thing
as you where you are
receiving this message from me
wherever i may be
telling you that you are loved
and that you deserve
good tears and lusty laughter
and the overhauling
of pain
with riotous joy
there are eleven thousand
nine hundred and thirty-two
such
things
as
❤
The midnight deadline makes for Procrustean design decisions. This page suffers from ten-pounds-of-stuff-in-a-five-pound-bag syndrome. But I will work on it no more, except perhaps one day I’ll use it as the basis from a painting, minimum size 4 feet by 6 feet, so it might breathe.
embryonic relations
embattled loneliness is what we fear
mad circumstances–to be kind–austere
beset, unsettled, nettled, we set sail
receiving imput from both gal and fella
yen-tangled and amiss to cross a t
one fine day one-ll call you mon ami
now comes a kiss or clasp, behold and lo
in time a touch begets a welcome moan
creation’s more than crows and queens and drones
This was the toughest Finishline challenge so far. The image was OK but not great–it wasn’t conveying an Eon except vaguely. And the acrostic demanded 2/3 of unfinished sonnet to be done, to cleave to iambic parameter, and to make at least a little sense. And it was about 4:40PM, and I only had till midnight. And I was falling-asleep exhausted.
So I did a crazy thing. I looked at what I’d done, really gazed at it, and then I took a nap.
And in the nap I had a weird dream. My high school sweetheart, whom I haven’t seen nor spoken to this century, was offstage in the dream, but in some structure and creating something with chalk. Something expressive. And some of that chalk came my way and I began to practice with it–it was tricky stuff.
I woke up. Used the bathroom, washed my hands. And somehow, with little forethought whatsoever, I attacked the completion of the drawing like a house afire. It was like I was handed a ten-pound set of keys. Bright light with an infinity symbol in it somehow becomes Eon. The pig’s ear calls for attention. The letters beg for articulation. The poem’s meaning is cracked open by bookending the lines of species with an ending that throws a million years at OUR species. And here we are, 10:10 PM.
pig/pigeon/eon
profusive species of the universe
perform and propagate and turn a phrase
perhaps a porpoise has a calf to nurse
percussive pelicans may stop and gaze
perverse Corruption plays a 6-deck shoe
permuting variations of your foe
inadequacies get your poor goat too
ineffability guides Silence so
if searching Truth we get a merry chase
o it’s enough to vex Bartolomeo
in finding sadness we do wet our face
o it can be like Vincent’s brother Theo
give us a million years, and in the main
good future kinfolk MAY have cured our Pain
Gesture Drawing
Go Gyrate, Lady, ever onward
Extend & flex in boots of jodhpur
SYMPOSIA that swoop & fly
Draw untold pleasure from an I
Reveal a truth for all to glean
Exactitude to make it sing
The good and the bad news about this one is that it was rushed. I spent the day caregiving for my mother, went home, took care of a few things, felt a wave of exhaustion, took a nap for longer than I intended–and when I woke up, the midnight deadline was staring me down, less than two hours away, and there was much to do. So this is “finished” but still quite raw, but there is energy in the rawness.
pluslessness
pathways are trammels and therefore contain
limits and curbsides to drive us insane
undercut circumstance tends to diminish us
slipped-in obscurity threatens to finish us
Back in the Spring of 1974, if memory serves, I had one semester of Class Piano at Glendale Community College. My recital piece was Bach’s Minuet in G. A few bars before the end my mind blanked and I froze. Almost instantly it cleared. When I resumed, it was on the beat, as if I’d inserted a rest to build up suspense. The relieved crowd applauded heartily.
Backlit Sonatas
Bonus Footage, mete Duress
Brahms and Bach, relieve our stress
Airs as light as toasted Eggo®
Aspirate our woes allegro
Cantos and concertos drawn
Catch the aspect of a Swan
Knowledged folk, from Quite to Nada
Keep–some can, and some cantata
Languid chords with which we’re blest
Let us f l o a t and pass the test
In a world of Pain and Mess, a
Taste of tunes may decompress
Usually when I select words of seven-letter length for the acrostic bookends it’s because I intend to write a sonnet. Sonnets are fourteen lines. I may well have intended to do so when I originally laid out this page, but when push came to crunch today I used the KISS principle. No matter what you’ve heard before, the civilized KISS stands for Keep It Simple, Sweetheart. This layered, necessarily-murky page needed, I felt, all the Simplicity it could get.
There are two awful puns in the poetry. You, dear Reader, are welcome to ignore them if you wish.
One with Clay, Image and Text 