This is the first Valentine’s Day since 1988 that I wasn’t part of a couple. Naturally I feel a little strange. The strangeness transliterates into the above page.
valentine-ku for the once-loved
the hole in the heart
is another heart. it makes
sense and yet doesn’t.
Better times are ahead, though, Friends. Happy Valentine’s Day to all!
Right now, September 10, 2014, I am in the moment of having a Sweetheart about whom I am head over heels. In the wee hours of this morning, thinking of nothing in particular, I did most of this sketch by the seat of my pants. It is full of drawing errors and clumsiness, but it also has life and love.
usku
undoing lifelack
salvaging hope in the dark
striving i and thou
Unfurled, it is your private shield, protection on a pole
Much needed in a downpour or to give Romance some Soul
Bestow a small one on a drink & let the good times roll
Regardless of how much you’ve had, you’re gonna want Samoa
That last-word Punchline Pun owes something to my college days in Tucson in the mid-Seventies, and a TV commercial for a Pacific Islands restaurant called Kon-Tiki. They had a Big-Kahuna-type guy say stuff like “Little Chief LIKE Kon-Tiki!” in a fake Polynesian accent. His next to last line was “Little Chief misses his island home!” and the curvy hula-skirt-clad girl by his side asked, “Samoa?”, whereupon Little Chief grabbed at a goodies-heaped plate, dropped the Polynesian accent, and said, Texas style, “Ah don’t mahnd ef Ah DO!”
When is a Poem not a Poem? When it’s a Poem Made Into An Image. This poem-plus begins “over coffee this morning you basked in the undeniable fact” and it ends “superb weekend.” The rest is up to you do decipher, or not–enjoy the image alone if you wish. It all started by speculation on what the opposite of that “lost weekend” was. See THE LOST WEEKEND starring Ray Milland for more information.
SYNOPSIS: Your narrator began composing a sonnet that had the further restriction of the double acrostic QUINTESSENTIAL BREATHLESSNESS. Four lines into the sonnet he questioned the wisdom of continuing, citing “wonkiness.”
Fourteen lines into the sonnet, it is finished, and I am glad I saw it through, though seeing it through involved a partial de-wonkitization of the fourth line. Nor am I at all certain that this is the final version; but there is enough good in it as is to make me proud and happy: it makes ultimate sense, it all ties together with the final couplet, and it tells my peculiar truth.
Again and again I learn that to see an attempt through to a state of completion is valuable and important. Why do I keep UNlearning it? Probably because it is so often easier to quit than to continue. “Who needs THIS [stuff]?” we are so prone to ask, and it is important to ask; but this time the answer was, “I do.”
Here is a transcription of the words:
Quick learner, thou art never long a newb
Upscaler, we must bid thee au revoir
Inamorata, neither time nor tube
Needs mention when you meet a partner’s Ma
There’s more to life than having needs be met
Encyclicals have ne’er made turmoil smooth
Strife’s ruled the rooster; Inquisition, shtetl
Some hurts may take a Miracle to soothe
Ephemeral events may carve out basins
NOW is YOUR time, you whose desire grows
The chest of hope has room, so put your lace in
It’s HEART that puts the Romance in the rose
As Living teaches, we’re conferred degrees
Lush vistas will reward the one who Sees
We human beings must love rectangles. We make so many of them! Plate glass, envelopes, stamps on envelopes, sheets of paper to stuff in envelopes, cross-sections of containers, garage doors, non-garage doors, dominoes, playing cards, and on and on. Thinking outside the box is also thinking beyond the rectangle.
But rectangles, or near-rectangles, do occur in nature: cell formation, muscle striations, constellations, fault-slipped rock formations, and on and on. Some eye sockets are more rectangular than circular.
When I was a kid my mom collected S&H Green Stamps, filling in rectangular arrays with the rectangles-with-punched-out-semicircles of the stamps. When she turned them in for merchandise, it was a form of rectangle redemption; thus does my seemingly-random acrostic have some basis in fact. But it’s a tenuous stretch. Luckily, when you stretch a rectangle, it remains a rectangle…
Here are the words:
Romance wears her nylons sheer
Eco-Friendly’s more austere
Creature comforts may be weird
Take an object choose a theme
Tell a truth that makes us beam
Any shape provides a step
Necessarily adept
Given one who wears a kepi
Leaps & bounds’ll come & go
Even-keelers use the known
This post will be a blast and a half from the past. Above is the first blast, intact; the remaining half-blast will come from below, which sounds hellish, though I trust it will only seem hellish to those for whom incompleteness is maddening.
The words to the above are these:
Signore Klein, acquitted in absentia
Significantly troubled w/Dementia
Called 4 his fiddlers 3 and scribing ruler
Consanguinizing Euclid Bach and Euler
Encephalitis roped his oblongati
Ensuring flood of each syn-aptic wadi
Now he’s Semi-Conducting Impresario
Near-virtual-almost-but-for Lothario
To my current shame, at the time I made this I thought Ruler and Euler rhymed. They do not. If I ever do a remake of this page (and there are several reasons to do so. One reason is the right half of the acrostic, Ario, doesn’t “lay down” worth a darn) I’ll have Signore Klein call for, not a scribing ruler, but a double boiler, or somesuch.
The words of the half-page below follow, Why only a half-page, when I have the page complete? Because the page entire is too big for my scanner, and after I scanned top and bottom as separate files, I loved the “fade to black” aspect of the top half, and realized that leaving something out gave the page a needed visual and cerebral boost. If any reader just can’t stand not knowing how the sonnet (it is a sonnet, an acrostic sonnet, and the acrostic is An Intersection) turns out, I will supply the rest of the words in a subsequent comment. But I invite anyone with a poetic bent to complete the sonnet her- or himself; perhaps it will be better than what I came up with, which begins
A many of us tend to be half nervous
Near crossing paths with those we hadn’t met.
It’s anxiousy, proximity; a pet
Needs toothsinks–or her lips are ultracurvous–
Then as we reach the overlap of X
Essential tension rises to a spike;
Reactiveness depends on if we like
Such eye contact as is. It’s quite complex…
.
One with Clay, Image and Text 