Yggdrasil’s new leaf
Of tats and wild ‘do
Unlikely to crawl
Nor at challenge balk
Give them the keys
Young Folks
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Tag Archives: poetry
tooth techtonics
with faultlines and slippage and cracks in the crust,
our toothscapes erode and degrade–for they must.
When Piestewa Peak was Squaw Peak, the footstrikes of thousands of hikers accelerated the erosion of the mountain, especially at the base. When this became a safety issue, concrete was poured over the eroded ground in certain places. It was analogous to a dentist putting fillings in a tooth.
My own toothscape includes gullies where four extracted wisdom teeth once resided, a years-in-the-making buildup of plaque that is disgustingly visible in the front lower teeth, and the shattering and/or calving of three broken teeth. My investment in tooth care has been restricted since 2006 to dental floss, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and toothpicks, incorporated into a rigorous schedule of personal oral hygiene. I don’t eat anything harder than a crisp apple, and I must always chew carefully, and mostly on the right side.
“Get thee to a dentistry–go!” you say? “No thanks,” I reply. I know a good-souled woman whose tooth-investment since 2006 is in the tens of thousands of dollars, and issue after issue with her much-tinkered-with mouth has come up. And my long-suffering, breathtakingly-brave younger brother Brian has had not a tooth in his head for years.
I will see a dentist, probably within the year. But not now and not soon. My toothscape helps me take nothing for granted.
much else is going on . . .
metastasizing ego
ululates in the zoo
c s lewis, big on sin
held position at the inn
he insisted on design . . .
risk/reward (A.F.U.T.T.S.)
The 2016 Presidential election in these United States is the most important in American history. Heaven help us, we have two nakedly-ambitious candidates and a refreshing and visionary, yet big-odds-against, third. So I called upon all my acrostical skills to convey the embedded message: AMBITION FORCES US TO TAKE STOCK.
The words:
Rising AMBITION makes one thing so clear
Ideological FORCES adhere
Siphoning lifeblood and rubbing US raw
Sinking significance down TO a shwa
Knowledge of power can TAKE us so far
Kow-tow to no one and STOCK every shard
Finally, a humble request to the Great Undecided: Please vote for Bernie Sanders.
Do-ality (THUS)
In the rock opera JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR there is this exchange between Jesus and Judas:
JC: Why don’t you go do it?
JI: You want me to do it!
JC: Hurry, they’re waiting.
JI: If you knew why I do it–
JC: I don’t care why you do it.
JI: To think I admired you. Well, now I despise you!
JC: You liar – you Judas
JI: You wanted me to do it! What if I just stayed here and ruined your ambition? Christ, you deserve it!
JC: Hurry, you fool, hurry and go. Save me your speeches, I don’t want to know. Go! GO!!!
As presented in the drama, both Jesus and Judas are conflicted about their roles, one raging, the other despairing to the point of suicide. Yet they did their jobs for the sake of the story.
Do-ality
The World of ones and zeroes
Has Ne’er-do-wells and Heroes
Ubiquitously interactive
Symbiotic/trans-enactive
(THUS)
foot wear
Our poor feet step on the ground while the whole world steps on them. They are put in torture devices and their often-overweight owners demand they trudge all over Creation. Truly, it is They who are the Downtrodden.
“Tatum and Shea” is an intersection near where I had my taxes done. Perrier is a naturally effervescent water, which I imagine would at 104 degrees be a perfect dipping sauce for a pair of tortured feet.
w a n d
a smiley face, a manifesto,
doodles comic, deathscenes tragic,
a recipe for lime-green pesto,
you wielding Pencils make some magic.
Arizona Poet Laureate Alberto Rios once pointed out that there were 35,000 words in a single pencil. Bless him!
Few of us use the word “wand” without front-loading it with “magic.” What wand isn’t?
cereal really/really cereal
The word cereal comes from a Goddess. The word really is an offshoot of Reality itself. As I poured myself a bowl of raisin bran, I thought it would be nice to marry them, bookending some ordered-chaos words with a quadruple acrostic.
creation’s non-arc
eerily evokes a tree
radiation stellar
elevates its clientele
alleluia to the hula
lyric-etched vinyl
This may remind a few of a large drawing I made over a year ago. That drawing, alas, seems to be lost forever. This may be the start on a replacement.
dinner at midnight, and bless her heart
i was the host at an airport restaurant
i sat her at the communal high-topped table
she must have watched me while she ate
there was one large man who didn’t want to wait to be seated
and there was a sneaky pete who wanted to eat his wendy’s at our table
and there were others in twos and threes and ones
all rushed all with a plane to catch soon
on her way out she transfixed me with her wise tired eyes
“you have the patience of job,” she said
“i want you to have this,” she said
“it isn’t much,” she said with regret
and she pressed three dollar bills into my hand
i told her truly that her words meant so much
while touching my heart through my sternum through my shirt
with three fingers as i said it
she brightsmiled and left
after i clocked out at 9:25
and walked and skytrained and escalatored to the lightrail station
and got on the lightrail at 9:58 or so
and off at montebello and 19th ave at 10:44
i walked north to northern and west to 31st
where there was a circle k
i bought two burritos for $2.22
and a 99-cent circle k water
and plain m&ms
(“dinner! drink! dessert!” coquelin as cyrano once declaimed)
took them to my apt
microwaved one of the burritos and ate it
washing it down with the circle k water
and then i ate one of the m&ms
a blue one
but i was not blue
an elegant, gracious lady had just bought me dinner
Freehand/Gridluck
For the last couple of months I’ve been dismayed by the seeming decline of my drawing ability, even to the extent of wondering if I’d had a mini stroke or some other debilitating event. This morning, though, I had a blinding flash of the obvious: I just haven’t been drawing enough! I’d been comparing what I’ve done lately to a year ago, when I was drawing every day for hours on end. All I need do now, I think, is string together some hour-or-more days.
So today I returned to freehand acrosticizing and gridding. The words are odd, but make some sense. “Freehand” describes a lactating woman’s seduction of her primary care physician. “Gridluck” describes his education.
Very weird, eh? But so is this lyric from then Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam:
Mary dropped her pants by the sand/and let a parson come and take her hand/but the soul of nobody knows/where the parson goes . . .
One with Clay, Image and Text 