The Inktober prompt for October 31st is “Mask.” Here was my response:
I thought it fulfilled the requirement but that there was more to say. So here is another take:
Indeed–Happy Halloween, friends!
The Last of Inktober
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Tag Archives: poetry
Inktober 25-30, 2017
Coming into the home stretch. Tomorrow is Halloween, and the last prompt, “Mask,” will have a post all its own.
At the request of Nikki A. Holmes, a lively friend of mine, I also did a page with the prompt “Epic.” Here’s Epic Nikki:
It’s been fun, Inktober, but what with work and 3D Design class and the Senior Center’s walking program and the World Series, it’s sometimes been tough fun. I’ll be glad to be taking a break–HOLY MOLY!! November 1st starts National Novel Writing Month! It never ends!!! 🙂
Inktober 13-18, 2017
Here they all are at once, Friends, with a bonus origami crane to boot. The prompts: Teeming, Mysterious, Fierce, Fat, Graceful, and Filthy. As to the last, the portrait is of you-know-who but is unlabeled and meant to be more generic, because there are SO MANY creeps like him out there, proving that not only does power Corrupt–it Engorges.
Inktober 1-6, 2017
Pencil is my favorite medium eleven months of the year. Inktober is a different story!
Stan, Rice and Salt
Today started well and then got better. Eight hours and thirty-one minutes of sleep. Spinach omelette and coffee. Cardboard serial-plane sculpture of a gorilla well started. Then the capstone: Phoenix Art Museum presented best-selling, Hugo-winning Kim Stanley Robinson, who spoke with eloquence and humor about climate change and comedy.
I had met Stan more than twenty years ago. His mother-in-law and copy editor, Dorothy “Dot” Morrison, was a friend and co-worker with my then wife, Joni. For about fifteen minutes I had the privilege of talking to Stan about his novelette, and Robert Heinlein and his Scribner’s editor Alice Dalgliesh, and hiking, and stuff I no longer remember. I asked Stan which sf authors he admired, and he mentioned Edgar Pangborn, whom I had never read.
In the years between then and now, I read Stan’s THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT and 2312. Â I didn’t get too much into his Mars trilogy, for which he is most famously known, intending to binge-read it the way I did LORD OF THE RINGS one Christmas break in the late 60s.
Stan is a fantastic storyteller and exceptionally intelligent and imaginative. And here he was in town again, about to sign my copy of NEW YORK 2140. He looked up at me and I said, “I was a friend of Dot Morrison. I’ve met you.” He offered his hand to shake and I shook it. Then I showed him the page I’d worked on before and during his talk. It is festooned with quotes from the talk. “Hey, look what you inspired. Double acrostic.”
He half grinned and said “Right on,” his self-confessed Old Hippie coming out.
I didn’t want to Bogart my time with him, so after confirming that Dot, whom I’d lost track of, had passed on, and Stan signing my book, and my telling him I admired his use of the between-lives Bardo in THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT, I said thanks and goodbye. He said he’d be sure to tell his wife about me, friend of her mother.
Here are the words to the double acrostic:
Resisting the lure of exclaiming HĂ©las
Incepting a zep’lin as Candle or Bra
Conceiving a model who posed for Maillol
Existence ain’t in the Bardo with Bardot
eclipse calypso
Today Greater Phoenix became the Valley of the Partially Eclipsed Sun. I poked a pencil-hole in a sketchbook page and viewed the eclipse indirectly, sketching the nonshadowed part of the page. The time was 10:38 AM, which according to an online source was close to the ideal viewing time.
After calligraphing the double acrostic, which seems sexist but is double-straitjacketed by the acrostic format and my notion of Calypso-esque lyrics, I had the left third of the page to fill. It occurred to me that the Jackson Browne song “Linda Paloma” refers to the corona of the Sun, which is viewable at totality sometimes. This yielded the image-notion of a white dove against the disk of moonshadow.
Words to the acrostic:
Erin go braless all to C
Cali go kitnish at high tea
Lolly go pop! at sound of bell
Iris go eyeroll and send us to hell
Please pretty Ladies I love you–don’t stop
Send me to heaven and then call the cops
Ever so often effacement will go/Wit’ an eclipse and Calypso like so
JA Jure: Sojourner
She says to pronounce her first name Jay. She tells me her life took a turn in New Mexico. She lays five bucks on a kid soliciting for his youth group, and he tells her a joke. She speaks of life casts she made at the former arts venue Paper Heart. Phrases like “trying to impress the Universe” and “never drive faster than your angels can fly” come easily to her. She went from taste-testing soup to test-driving cars. She is a broiler chef, a mother, a force of nature, an outlaw, and a hell of a woman.
Words to the double acrostic:
Jaunting through a lifelong Hajj
Juxtaposng wound and badge–U
Are the Broth–no soup du jour
And have the instinct to be sure
Honesty & Decency Honored
It is the first day of the month. It is my personal superstition that it is important to do things on the first day of the month that I want to, or ought to, do every day. It has been a long time since I did a blog post. This First of August ends the drought.
The United States of America, personified by the incompetent, incoherent President Who Would Be King, Donald Trump, has lost its honest, decent way. Incompetent and incoherent as this illustrated sonnet may be, the acrostic of it has its heart in the right place: Let us honor Honesty and Decency.
Words:
Have Love and Care, should Uh-Oh morph to Oh.
Horse fed and curried–curry on, O Pooh.
Omit!! and disregard downed Jericho:
Omniscience and egocentrists do.
No Hands on deck means mutiny anon
Nor strand induces cries of oui, c’est bon
Etceteras and gestures Ă la Bono
Etch handiworks pegged by both Pegg and Ono.
Since candied snow does not exist,and deer
See thousands of near misses, the affair
That grandees of Compulsion make cohere
Tell sandy waves of crazies not to stare.
Yet fake and zany posts unstay the staid
Yield fine fandangos for the Chambermaid.
My thanks to my marvelous new Girlfriend, Melony, for providing on request a word to get me going on this post. The word she gave me was “Honesty.”
pattern goddess
I know a goddess. That sounds presumptuous or delusional, I know. But there is a goddess in human form who walks the portion of the earth known as the Valley of the Sun, and it has been my honor to spend some time with her.
Her hegemony in the pantheon of personifications is Pattern. Of the more than 37,000 images in her smartphone, never mind her thumbdrives and computers, many of them reveal something mortals such as myself usually miss. Some day, if you are lucky, you will visit a museum to see the latest collection of astonishing images she has compiled. I will not deprive you of the “shock of the new” thrill you will get by posting any of what she has done here.
Many people can say that they have had a sonnet written about them. She has had at least two, done today, and the day is far from over. Here is the non-acrostic one:
Pattern Goddess
A Goddess strolls the earth in human form.
Her bailiwick is Pattern—its discernment,
Appropriateness, shift, free flow or storm;
Disorder’s secret orderly internment.
A lizard’s swept his tailtip through the dust.
The goddess reconstructs the “crime” (it’s not
A crime at all: he’s doing what he must)
And wishes Brother Lizard all he’d sought.
Awareness of her Earthly limitations
Enhances her awareness of the lunar
And its ellipsoid mood-shift imitations,
For Mood is Pattern too, and she’ll attune her
Sensorium to guide her through each strait, sure
To hone her stewardship of Unforced Nature.
Those last two words–“Unforced Nature”–well describe her interaction with the environment. She visits but does not impose beyond the level of rubbing a leaflet to get its scent, as she did on a hiking venture I asked her to include me in, so that I could see through her eyes. We did two hikes that day, and between hikes I did a two-minute drawing of her hand. Later she disclosed that while she liked ladybugs, “it is the cute & curious jumping spider that really calls my name.” So I finished the drawing, with either fakery or “artistry” depending on who you talk to, and included a hand-evoking jumping spider:
There is also her hand, holding an alginate CAST of her hand, in the circle on the life-modeled hand. Such is her influence that I am more aware of the pattern inherent in motif.
Here is the second, acrostic sonnet:
pattern goddess
paved parking lots have rendered her agog
piled branches give her thrill and chill and zing
a shadow stripéd path’s a travelog
and cracks evoke the dynasty of Ming. o
to be a light-ensorcelled see-er, led
through labyrinths of fractals on a strand
then dot-connect, dispelling woe and dread
the message clarifies and takes a hand
eureka! (“I have found it!”) word or phrase
epiphanatic—it’s the Great Because.
regardful of the Moon, she marks her days
refractively—reflecting what she does.
new wisdom of her making aids our Gnosis.
no wonder she’s attained Apotheosis.
And here is my portrait of her, based on a photo I took of her at dusk during a subsequent outing:
Somehow, almost against my will, a cat snuck into the drawing. (Sylvia does cohabit with three cats. I haven’t met them.) The Moon over the cat’s ear is easy to understand, though. Sylvia keeps track of moonrises and moonsets, and occasionally informs her friends of ideal viewing times.
I do not Live Each Day As If It Were My Last. As mentioned before, I’d be a weeping mess, shrieking that I didn’t want to die, if I did. But every visit with Sylvia, I treat as if it were my last. A, you never know; B, you just don’t take a Goddess for granted, Friends. 🙂
Chelsea (latest of a series)
Our server Chelsea warmed my old man’s heart not long after she started working with us. It was a particularly busy day, and we were up to our patooties in alligators trying to keep up, and as always, everyone had a plane to catch and needed to be sat to eat NOW. So I was in overdrive, doing dignity-free bussing, bobbing and weaving, seating, wiping tables, saying Hello to the invading hordes and Thank You to the satisfied pussycats on their way out. Toward the end of the day Chelsea said three words to me that everyone I can think of loves to hear, as long as their name and not mine is the first word: “Gary, you’re amazing.” Well, so are you, my friend.
Here are the words to the double acrostic. As I indicate in the image, I’m grateful to Joni Mitchell, who wrote “Chelsea Morning” more than four decades ago. I have it playing in my head this very minute. And I am grateful that titles of creative work are not subject to copyright. “Chelsea” is seven letters long, and so is “Morning,” and “Morning” has an O in it, which enables me to rhyme-cheat a little.
clock in at dawn a. m
how Diners haw & hem–O
extracting wishes for
lean lusciousness this morn
see someone fine as Princess Di
ethereal as she’s benign
and Time is worth the whiling/when teaming brings the smiling
My old man’s paternalistic, patronizing, mansplaining awfulself comes up with this additional description, which is patently unfair: “She’s a good kid.” No. She’s a fine person, appreciative and kind.
