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A bit shy of 17 years ago I did this portrait of Bill Campana;

Here are the words of the triple-acrostic poem:

BILL CAMP ANA

BLUFF, & stand-up comical, & full of manic Manna

It’s a wonder he’s still local — catch him if you can

Laudably SELF-AMPLIFIED: you WILL hear from this man

Las Vegas at the Palace or perhaps the Tropicana

..

I was 54 then. I am now 71, soon to become 72. Today I did this:

Here are the words of the double-acrostic poem:

FUNNIEST MAN ALIVE

Fastest wit of us & them

Undeterred by raw dilemma

Nifty beard & acid pen

Needs no compass nor antenna

If/Then/Else on even keel

Edgy as a blade of steel — I

Savor his raw P.O.V

Then scorn the morn’s abyss I see

..

Between the two portraits, Mr. Cpana has published about half a dozen books and performed his hilarious poetry about half a thousand times. Long may he astound!

Sad news: Joe Biden’s Stage IV prostate cancer condition is worsening. Comment from the White House: “I don’t feel sorry for him.”

Joe, you were there for us in our darkest hour, and you turned our wayward nation around. When we needed coolness under fire you were the coolest guy in the room. Thank you.

J and the Legal Heineken

Once upon a couple months ago I was working

And I was in a time crunch

And my co-worker Jalen

Sometimes known as J

Dropped what he was doing to help me

And I was grateful

And I asked him what his favorite beer was

And he said “Heineken”

And I told him

There was a Heineken in his future

But there’s a (completely reasonable) rule

Forbidding employees to bring alcohol

To the workplace

So I mulled it over

And got the notion

That the Heineken in J’s future

Would be in the form of a DRAWING

Of a Heineken

So I drew it

And J next to it

And it looked OK but not quite right

And the oinner voice that tells me what to do said

“Draw his hand holding up the bottle”

So I did

But the pencil’s eraser didn’t erase right

Smeared rather than erased

Being old and oxidized

So I said the hell with erasure

And that’s why the hand is a little ghostly

But J still liked the drawing

And gave me permission

To post it on social media

Like this.

..

He’s a good guy.

swollen eyelid

an eye is awry.

its lid hoods and occludes the iris

and tickles the lachrymal duct so that it weeps

and the tear-filmed pupil makes for blurrish vision

and the man who owns the eye

feels like quasimodo or someone

even more grotesque. he worries

that it may be a staph infection

or, worse, some flesh-eating parasite

chewing his head away.

..

he tries to dismiss such foolish thoughts

by reminding himself

of a lifetime of hypochondria

and the many oh-i’m-gonna-die episodes

that turned out to be laughably untrue.

..

a visit to urgent care

would be a resounding smack in the pocketbook

even if they don’t upsell him like the charming lady

doc who said “you have earwax. want me to

take care of it?” and that two-minute tune-up

cost forty additional out-of-pocket bucks.

..

he looks in the mirror and smiles

with the half of his mouth on the unaffected,

uninfected side.

tries to, anyway.

he wanted to make a comedy/tragedy mask

out of his single face but the other half of his mouth

insists on half-smiling too.

now he half-laughs at his melancholic vanity.

“That’s Life,” he murmurs,

and feels better.

A man in a flimsy T-shirt and polyester running shorts and running shoes affixed to snowshoes with circular-shaped surfaces runs

On a two-inch blanket of freshly-fallen snow  on a flat two-acre field on a farm whose owners have given him permission to run for an hour on their land.

He is also wearing glasses that provide a visual readout of what the drone flying overhead is recording. The drone moves according to his voice commands. His last command was for the drone to maintain a position twenty meters over his head, focal point the surface of the snow, field of view to include the running man and a circle of ten meters’ diameter with him at the center.

The conditions are ideal. The temp is just at freezing and it is windless and the snow is doing a remarkable job of retaining the impressions of the snowshoes.

What the man is doing is drawing. He himself is the dot-drawing stylus. An inset in the views reen in his glasses shows him the entire field on which he is running, with his position on the field represented by a green dot, and with his footstrikes trailing him represented as blue dots.

He has not been running long, but he is already on the second iteration of the array of comic-book-style panels that will contain the images of real-time running that he is doing now. An hour will give him enough time to fill in the panels with line drawings with enough detail to discern his facial features.

“Bogie, I want a drink,” he says, and the drone swoops down and dangles tubing connected to the modest water supply it is carrying. Three swallows is sufficient.

“Resume position above my head.” Bogie whizzes upward.

“Play ‘Running On Empty’ by Jackson Browne, any live version with David Lindlay,” he tells his audio feed.

The music starts.

“I effing love technology, I do I do I do,” he exults as he runs, his breath making a puff-pattern of condensation.