Given the lackadaisical nature of this blog, the lazy updating, the boring personal updates, how all the titles are just the 'blank entry' and so on, one might get the idea that I was writing this more for myself than for any online fans. Right on the money. Not that I am not happy whenever someone views my page, but just keep it in mind and try not to think that I am trying to saidstically torture my audience, okay? Okay.
I'm in Dallas, my hometown. Something about this place just makes me never want to write a poem again, which is probably why I left. Even though, to be honest, I miss it terribly and want very much to live here again.
Also, I'm working back at my old record store while I'm here, which makes me happy to no end. And I wrote a record store geek quiz today because I was bored.
Take It!
http://www01.quizyourfriends.com/yourquiz.php?quizname=050716125054-418302
Anyway, this is a twenty I wrote right before leaving Philadelphia. The title is based on an old advertising mural on a building in NYC.
Here's my poem:
LOOK FOR THE CLOTHESPIN TAG!
To look at me, you would never know that I've invented.
Look at the 248 products I've made for use in your home.
At the inventor's junket last fall Ron Popeil gave me the silver cross.
The sky was advertising jingle blue and I switched my radio on.
Sky from Guys and Dolls was asking something specific of Lady Luck.
From that I invented the showtune simulator and retired early on the profits.
That invention earned me a reputation as an intellectual troublemaker.
Invention is the mother-in-law of intuition, but we're not related.
Is this too unclear for you? Let me paint you a picture.
This is my other hobby, painting, although I'm no Rembrandt.
Is this painting your cup of tea? I was attempting a still life of it.
This doesn't look anything like your cup of tea, cest la vie, right?
Doensn't the frame look nice though? I invented the picture frame.
The sides are made of weapons grade plutonium making this invention 250!
Sides of the record of Guys and Dolls contain both the first and second acts.
Of Marlon Brando: he has never enjoyed my inventions or still life experiments.
Marlon, why won't you return my politely phrased phonecalls?
Why I may just invent a disparaging still life of you, sir!
I also invented a new way of spelling disparaging, it's spelled DIs(PARE)a[JING}.
Also, I invented a Marlon Brando simulator who makes still lifes of teacups.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Sixteenth Entry
So here I go again on my own, sorry about the complete lack of updating, but as you might have guessed, I only update when I have a poem to produce, and I hit a bit of a dry spell. Some writers believe in writer's block, I do not, which means I often just write bad poems. I feel it is better than not writing at all, at least you're keeping your chops fresh. But life overtook me for a little bit and I wasn't even writing bad poems. I'm in Philly right now with my friend Elizabeth, and in two days I'll be back in Brooklyn. The day after that I will be going back to Dallas for the first time in almost a year, by far my farthest away from with home without even visiting. That was a particularly chewy sentence. Elizabeth has several vintage typewriters which always inspire me to write something, so there I went.
Here's my poem:
LITTLE PIECE OF HEAVEN
When I was watching daytime court TV, i could hear gray rain
tapping the window's shoulder. Looked in the depths of my jean
pocket, dark like a denim cave, where scummy yet erudite prisoners
hold out till the law forgets and goes back to their second floor
halfway houses with their semi-estranged families, hands red and raw
from baking endless parades of mirthless breadcrusts, sunny
and unpleasantly warm, prisoners in striped pajamas, licking
their nicotine stains on their banana-yellow fingers, wringing
sweat out of their once-blue bandannas. The tall one with
the reddish beard starts inventing adjectives to pass the time,
frabgenuous, jocumential, rendulent, and locuknojical.
The prisoners start imagining an allegorical novel about
American sailors left ashore at a nameless port in China,
who walk from Hainan through Laos, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal
and Bhutan. Among the many valuable lessons they learn
in these foriegn lands is that you can die all too easily from disease
so brush early and often and that, for Americans, they know little
of the world and it's various forms of little regarded traditional music.
One of the sailors, who mysteriously died in the Algerian badlands
years later, wrote a science fiction novel that I am currently
formatting into a screenplay, and I would like very much to use
Walter Carlos's SWITCHED ON BACH for the soundtrack but that's really
not my call. The screenplay is titled Lady Be Good after the flying fortress
crew that got lost after their bombing run (for reasons historians are still
unable to deduce) and crashed in the Northwestern Sahara,
going blind from sand blown sdaistically in their eyes before dying painfully
and one by one from starvation and/or exposure. This title is admittedly
TANGENTIAL, but I and several other more respected artists say
that the accidental is just as valid as the pre-programmed. Ask
my mother for an explanation, and she will likely in grand and pleasant
detail tell you that I was born prematurely, and that my birth was
"the best thing that ever happened" to her, although I
have seen no documented proof of this.
Here's my poem:
LITTLE PIECE OF HEAVEN
When I was watching daytime court TV, i could hear gray rain
tapping the window's shoulder. Looked in the depths of my jean
pocket, dark like a denim cave, where scummy yet erudite prisoners
hold out till the law forgets and goes back to their second floor
halfway houses with their semi-estranged families, hands red and raw
from baking endless parades of mirthless breadcrusts, sunny
and unpleasantly warm, prisoners in striped pajamas, licking
their nicotine stains on their banana-yellow fingers, wringing
sweat out of their once-blue bandannas. The tall one with
the reddish beard starts inventing adjectives to pass the time,
frabgenuous, jocumential, rendulent, and locuknojical.
The prisoners start imagining an allegorical novel about
American sailors left ashore at a nameless port in China,
who walk from Hainan through Laos, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal
and Bhutan. Among the many valuable lessons they learn
in these foriegn lands is that you can die all too easily from disease
so brush early and often and that, for Americans, they know little
of the world and it's various forms of little regarded traditional music.
One of the sailors, who mysteriously died in the Algerian badlands
years later, wrote a science fiction novel that I am currently
formatting into a screenplay, and I would like very much to use
Walter Carlos's SWITCHED ON BACH for the soundtrack but that's really
not my call. The screenplay is titled Lady Be Good after the flying fortress
crew that got lost after their bombing run (for reasons historians are still
unable to deduce) and crashed in the Northwestern Sahara,
going blind from sand blown sdaistically in their eyes before dying painfully
and one by one from starvation and/or exposure. This title is admittedly
TANGENTIAL, but I and several other more respected artists say
that the accidental is just as valid as the pre-programmed. Ask
my mother for an explanation, and she will likely in grand and pleasant
detail tell you that I was born prematurely, and that my birth was
"the best thing that ever happened" to her, although I
have seen no documented proof of this.
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