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Poetry Month, day 21: Pie-Dye Day

April 21, 2025
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On Everything Road someone stuck a giant spoon in me

I was, honestly, bestirred

Extracting the spoon, I gripped it, weaponized it, stirred things up

Waving the spoon through the body of an approaching prostitute, I gave her the face and demeanor of Meryl Streep

She thanked me and said she always wanted to be a Streepwalker

And at the intersection of Everything and Trapezoid Circle

The light turned purple and the pedestrian sign said both DONT WALK and RUN!!

And the cars hopped on their tires instead of rolling

And I hopped too when I tried to walk and was able to bound over the cars like I was jumping over pieces in checkers

People pointed at me and laughed and I looked down and found that I was dressed as a carhop

The light turned mauve and the cars turned to cages with odd creatures inside wearing buttons saying I AM A ZOID

And I thought, Well, that is one way to trap a Zoid

But then all the cages disappeared

And in the middle of the intersection was a gigantic piece of lemon meringue pie

And it looked gloriously delicious and I still wielded my giant spoon

So with one last mega-hop I bounded right into its fluffy center

But as the spoon touched the meringue the harangued meringue changed in color from snow-white to slurpee blue

And the pale-yellow filling turned to hooker’s green

I licked the pie-clumped spoon edge and it still tasted like pie

But something in either the danged meringue or the unwilling filling transformed me into an enormous bullfrog

Still wearing a carhop’s uniform

Except with a cowboy hat with tassels

And the magic spoon disappeared

And I thought, What could be worse??

Then found out I couldn’t hop anymore

So I bullfrog-trudged down Everything Road in my carhop uniform with the long tassels hitting me annoyingly in the face with every trudge and weird-colored giant pie residue all over me

And tried to hop again and couldn’t

And shrugged as best a bullfrog could and said croakingly Well,

At least this story has a moral:

The ultimate absurdity of the Universe

Knows no bounds.

NaPoWriMo 2025, day 17: Moe’s Ache

April 17, 2025
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Moe missed his or her or their friend.

They had excursed in shared dream bubbles

And danced a labyrinth formed of a snake of near-infinite length

And had their passports stamped in principalities where it was impossible not to belong.

One horrid day though

Moe’s friend asked to express their friendship with a name change

And became Eom,

Thinking they would reflect,

Would harmonize;

But a cruel hit-and-run spirit told the two

That due to Eom standing for End of Month

Their friendship would end at midnight

Three days hence.

Over those days Eom transformed

Into an Aleppo Pine tree,

All but their mouth

Which lamented, “O! I am losing you. I am losing our memories. Where have

Adventures Six and Seventeen Gone??”

And that last day

Eom’s voice became ropy

With emotive sapdrops

And right before the bells of Midnight tolled

She wrestled out “Farewell, beloved…”

And her mouth barked and hardened.

Moe was inconsolable.

Her friend had pined away.

bowl/nest

February 9, 2022
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2022 0209 bowl nest

Last I heard there were five different kinds of Life–Plants, Animals, “Protists,” and two kinds of algae. Maybe. Probably not. My brain is in cognitive decline, and I don’t have time to look it up, and the point anyway is that within the strictly-biological definition of “life” some enormous variation is possible.

But there’s non-biological life too. Human beings have developed a self-replicating form of mechanism. Maybe. Probably not, but something like that. My dim memory says it’s chimerical, and much like the “biots” Arthur C. Clarke presciently described in his rollicking, imaginative novel Rendezvous with Rama.

We also speak of artwork as if it were to some degree alive. We use words like “vitality” and “animated” to codify our viewing expderience. If the work of art is representative of wildlife, we may judge is in comparison with what it is meant to represent.

So we come to this, one of my recent creations. It began when I finished my oatmeal and took a second spoon and put it in the empty bowl with the first. I liked the way the spoons and bowl looked, so I took a pic and made a drawing based on the pic. It seemed to want a bone, so I drew a bone, and shadows. I decided to construct a double acrostic, “bowl/nest.” When I came to the second line the word “owlish” suited the meter, and it was an easy link to the endword “scene.” (Acrosticist’s Tip: ALWAYS start with the endwords, if you want your poem to rhyme AND scan AND make sense!!)

And then I looked at my drawing again, and I saw that I could make bowl, spoons and bone a literal manifestation of an “owlish outlook.” BOOM, I was in Surrealsville, where dwell Auguste Redon and Sal Dali and Tanguy and other guys and gals. And I’ve had years of sculpting birds of chimerical DNA. So, to use a wretched pun involving a letter of the Greek alphabet, a Chi-Miracle occurred, and suddenly the bowl/nest was nested in the eye socket of an improbable owl. I made the other eye a teakettle to preserve kitchenality.

Weird? YES, WEIRD.  I’ve laid the foundation for Weirdness in my first paragraph: LIFE IS WEIRD. And Art sometimes demands creation beyond the initial notion of the artist.  Here we see what happens when we let Art call the shots.

bowl/nest

bone & spoons & mindset clean
owlish outlook makes the scene
when the Elements amass
link your arms & hold on fast

there now here then

August 20, 2015
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in the dream, the sad-eyed cyclops welcomed the dreamer/tourist.
the room was spacious, but the dreamer found it abutted a long corridor

that bent at slight angles at every door,
and the only way out of the ground floor
was through the dreamer’s room.

as if in apology, the cyclops handed the dreamer
a huge fistful of coins of his realm,
and the dreamer struggled

to look into the gentleman’s eye
with neither pity nor fascination.

the cyclops left and the dreamer was alone,
but he knew he had better wake up soon

or the dream would ossify
into the real.

Thought Balloon

September 27, 2014
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001

Some day we’ll have a thought-recorder (though it may be argued that stuff like the above image IS a thought-recorder) and people will be astonished to read the transcripts of their own thoughts, let alone those of others. The Surrealists, I think, were on to something.

Forget Me Not

July 31, 2013
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Image

Here I imagine the eponymous flowers with a mist of free-floating memories, hard to see but there.

Words to the triple acrostic:

FORMERLY: meant something then
O so BE IT: means Amen
Recently I dreamed an auto
Got a winning numbered Lotto
Ending strife without complaint
Takes an easy-tempered saint