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Tag Archives: wordplay

pander money yum

pompous bums are acting cadly

and the world looks on so sadly

needy men from lsu

designate a parvenu

energetically some serum

rounds up yahoos to de-leer ’em

..

Title: a warpage of Pandemonium.

The Pompous Bums are certain fascistic politicians.

The regard for the United States of America has taken a tragic nosedive.

LSU may stand for something different, but Line 3 was inspired by Randy Newman’s lyric “College men from LSU/Went in dumb, come out dumb too.”

Parvenu: upstart, arriviste, someone desiring undeserved respect.

Serum: A formulation intended to correct an undesired condition.

De-leer ’em: Wipe the smugness off their faces; a warpage of Delirium.

a hub is a radial fulcrum of sorts

a city or hive or hq

a bub a generical person who snorts

or imbibes or’s on wolverine’s crew.

when this bub sends a package of boxer/brief shorts

via amazon or u p s

it will go through a hub-maze that squirms and contorts

and’s addressed the logistical mess.

it is networking guiding a shipment with quartz

wirelessly informing the bub

and bugs bunny bronx-cheering passage through ports

as the hubbubbed bub rustles up grub.

..

Sidebar: Reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man helps a bit with the density of Ulysses, and reading Ulysses helps a bit with the incomprehensibility of Finnegans Wake, but since I only got through some of Ulysses, and almost none of Finnegans Wake, the frustration I felt wrestling with Joyce led me to resolve never to task any readers or viewers of my creative works with excessive obscurity. But if you, the reader, didn’t know that in the Marvel Comics canon the adamantium-laced mutant Wolverine dismissively addressed friends and foes alike as “Bub,” and/or if you didn’t know that the shipping entity UPS calls major cities “hubs,” and/or if you didn’t know that Bugs Bunny, whose accent was crafted by Mel Blanc to be an aggressive blend of Bronx and Brooklyn, and who often asked a character “EEEeeehhh…What’s all the hubbub, Bub?!” you would have a tough time making ANY sense of this cobbled-up Cobb Word Salad of a poem, let alone the little sense it has.

new pain awakens you. its stamp/impresses in the form of cramp.

the lamprey sucks. the hamptons bask./do lamps when clamped on desk-edge ask/enlightenment of us? they don’t./they have no will; they have no won’t.

slow down the car. the exit ramp/says k o a, a place to camp,/to sample nature and relief/and tamp down stress and angst and grief./the scampering of squirrels calms/and wine and amped-up tunes are balms.

this launch has not achieved ignition/with syllaballic repetition/we therefore move to cut the crap/and bid the grampa take a nap.

whirrd

“The right word is the unexpected word.” Frederik Pohl, introducing The Best of Cordwainer Smith

three caffeines and i am wired/good to go no longer tired/let my wordsmith’s finger wield/this touch-sensitivish field

word be whirrd near-homophonic/aspirate that aitch atonic/ascertain a certain smuggish/air when jazzed-up coffee-muggish

tighten up those loosish ens/comically let’s be frenz¹/tragic cali mourn our bros²

we may see them

no one noes

..

¹Ron Frenz. “Ronald Wade ‘Ron’ Frenz (born February 1, 1960) is an American comics artist known for his work for Marvel Comics. He is well known for his 1980s work on The Amazing Spider-Man, particularly introducing the hero’s black costume, and later for his work on Spider-Girl and Thor…” Wikipedia

²Along with my nuclear family, I have lost brotherly cousins of the Householder clan who lived in California.

an is an indefinite article of a vowel-first noun

and it used to mean if

and is the first syllable in annihilate

and anhedonia

and launches both the short word ani

and the long word antidisestablishmentarianism

..

it is two-fifths

of the title of the heartbreaking stones song “angie”

..

it is nested in nana

and ends authoritarian agrarian and septuagenarian

..

is it a backward negation?

na.

chicken chakra choker check

c h k is rife as heck

and among the heys and watch-mes

you might even find some tchotchkes.

chalk it up to odd occurrence

twixt agreement and demurrance

even when you kick the bucket

“chk!” may throatnoise when you chuck it.

that is all quite well and morbid

thirty wanted twenty-four bid

let us close with holstered trowels

“sm lst wrds my hv n vwls.”

Afterword: smh! 🙂 But the real goal was to use “tchotchkes” (first time ever in one of my poems) such that it contained an “Easter egg.”

The bustard’s an exquisite fowl/With minimal reason to growl/He escapes what would be/Illegitimacy/By grace of a fortunate vowel. Winning entry from 10,000 entrants of a limerick contest judged by Isaac Asimov

sixteen pieces in a chess set but for color

and four and four and four and two and two

and sixty-four

and the answers of multiple-choice tests with perfect scores

but it is the near-identical

the not-quite-identical

that gives a field of flowers charm

that enriches speciation

that makes one coin worth a penny

and its near-twin worth a mint

ah mints

junior mints are corpuscular

andes mints are sandwiched planks

and there was a place called Luigi’s on sixteenth Street and Glendale fifty years ago

a delicatessen that sold french mints

and i would get some for my then-sweetheart

because she loved them and i loved her

.

isn’t it startling that a group of vastly different people can have identical names?

isn’t it more startling that you can view a group of vastly different people with identical names within seconds by conducting a search on that name and selecting the Images subset of the search?

or that by changing a t to a d

you change Mint to Mind?

and then ditch the d for an e

and you become Mine.

bwahahahaha!!!

(near-identical to bwajajajaja!!!)

So glad to be making acrostic poems again!

Ogee Whiz

Old fine Edifices glow

Gingerbreading quells uh-oh

Edgy edges end ennui

E-Z …dubya ex wye Z

One type of Ogee is a cutout shape involving both convex and concave curvature. The ogee arches sketched above have apical points.

Gingerbreading is use of a motif for trim to enhance windows or ledges. Some older architecture in downtown Phoenix features gingerbreading.

“Ogee Whiz” is pun-translatable into “Oh, Gee Whiz.” That’s a Bad Pun, but a worse one would be if I tagged a snowblank with the contents of my bladder with the monogram “OG.” It would not stand for “Original Gangsta” nor “Old Guy” but would be simply OG, and since it would be made from urine, colloquially known as Whiz, it would be OG Whiz.

it’s never too late

to perpetrate

never too soon to scheme

if you lean alee

perpetrationally

as the subject of meme

play it strait

take the right-angle beam

on the bright angel trail

and extract from the fiefdom the fief

and a raging spring storm’ll

re-angle you normal

and the angel will wail

stop

that

thief