These Riffs I Have Shored Against My Ruin
for David Connor Jones
Outside that rococo room
in the Waste Land
where in sad light
a carvéd dolphin swam
the cock crew
co co rico
co co rico
While beneath the laqueraria,
you and I cut the rug – jug jug –
u and i
travel to the beat of
Oed’ und leer das meer
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag
It’s so elegant
It’s so intelligent
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Drip
drop
drip
drop
drop
drop
drop
I subscribe to an internet entity called “Poem of the Day,” which provides me each a.m. with a dollop of verse to go along with a cup of whatever ground coffee is on sale at Harris Teeter on the previous Senior Citizen Discount Thursday.
This morning’s poem, Copyright © 2025 by Jessica Abughattas, has a title guaranteed to perk the interest of anyone interested in verse. It’s called “Failed Poems.” It’s one of those works where the title serves as the subject of the first sentence. To wit:
Failed Poems
will crawl out of the drain and try to kill you
like some 80s horror flick.[1]
I like the poem, its witty catalogue of unpleasant analogies. Bad poems are like “a black widow creeping/from the mound of linens still warm from our bodies.” They “steal your breath/ when you wake parched, hungover, emptied,” etc.
What really caught my attention, being a fake artist and all, were these lines describing another, much more successful fake artist:
Once, in Zurich, we were served rabbit paella at a party
celebrating an exhibition of an artist from Venice Beach
who used to be homeless but drinks $25 Erewhon smoothies and paints
hundreds maybe thousands of happy faces with his feet. His canvasses
go for $25,000. Toe paintings are better or at least significantly
more profitable than failed poems.
This really hit home because the day before yesterday I got a text from a number I didn’t recognize with this message:
“Found some ‘fake’ art at goodwill today. I’m going to buy it as an investment.”
I responded, “Who in his right mind would give a masterpiece like that away?”
But to be honest, I did know. It was the fellow who won it at Chico Feo’s annual Canine Halloween Costume Contest. Harlan, the organizer, asked if I would donate a print, and I thought it was one of the better prizes, but as luck would have it, the winner is an actual artist who upon receiving it asked me if I’d seen any of his works.
I hadn’t.
But I’ll also admit it would take a certain, rare art lover with a funkadelic sensibility maximus to want to hang the print above the mantle.
Anyway, the poet nails it when she whines about the unprofitability of writing poems vis-à-vis creating pictural art. In fact, believe it or not, despite receiving a rave review from Kirkus Reviews and having appeared on a local television show and several national podcasts, my novel Today, Oh Boy has provided me with less income than my fake paintings.[2]
Already this month, I’ve received two commissions and sold another print, not including the secondhand Good Will purchase.
Anyway, I’d say that creating these canvases is more fun that writing fiction and certainly more fun that going over the “corrected proofs” of a manuscript that soon will be bound and sold in bookstores and online, which I have been doing of late.
I don’t have a pub date yet for Long Ago Last Summer, but I’m guessing late spring or early summer.
PS. Speaking of commissions, Caroline and I have commissioned the unfake funkadelic artist Thom Piragnoli to create a sign for our driveway to alert visitors where our hidden house hides.
You can check out Thom’s art at Chico Feo. The one above is called Galaxy Gals. Check out this LINK for more on Thom.
[1] Rather than cutting and pasting the entire poem, I’ll provide a link because non-poetry lovers, i.e., 99.97% of people, would abandon this post for the greener pastures of a TikTok video. Here’s the LINK. You can read along while Jessica Abughattas reads it in a rather pleasant regionless accent.
[2] To be honest, this was not the case in 2023, the year Today, Oh Boy was published.
Certainly, as several cultural critics have pointed out, Yeats’s magnificent poem “The Second Coming” expresses powerfully and concretely our current situation, what TS Eliot abstractly described as “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history.”
Yeat’s poem is brief; therefore, I’ll quote it in its entirety:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
***
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Does the description “a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun” remind you of anyone?
Of course, the Founding Fathers feared the rise of an American despot, so they counterbalanced the executive with Congress and the courts. Unfortunately, the lines “[t]he best lack all conviction, while the worst/ [a]re full of passionate intensity” aptly describe the Republican controlled House and Senate, Nancy Mace, full of passionate intensity, Lindsey Graham lacking all conviction.[1]
The Republican Senate certainly abandoned their responsibility of advising and consenting when they confirmed a vaccine-denying former heroin addict who literally has had worms eating his brain as Director of Health and Human Services and an alcoholic sexual predator who has absolutely no experience running a large enterprise as Secretary of Defense.
This idea of citizens lacking conviction is also powerfully rendered in TS Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” whose final lines have become almost a cliche:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The hollow men of Eliot’s poem are scarecrows, heartless, “behaving as the wind behaves,” going with the flow, their “dried voices [. . .] quiet and meaningless.”
Like Senator Susan Collins, for example.
At any rate, in both poems we see Christianity breaking down, as the Antichrist slouches towards Bethlehem and in Eliot’s poem when the “Lord’s Prayer” breaks down into gibberish.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
[1] Both hail from a state “too small to be a country, too big to be an insane asylum.” – James Petigru on South Carolina.
Uthceare[1]
Please tell me this: is
a mourning dove’s mating call
actually a lament?
To me it sounds like
a woebegone train whistling
on its weary way
through highland thistle
on a sun-starved, loveless day
in late December.
[1] An Old English word that means to lie awake and worry before dawn.
A Moon, Washed by Time’s Waters
I love this rising waning moon
a week before the equinox,
Christmas and Hannukah
on the horizon,
the earth turning,
the moon rising, but waning,
melting oh so slowly as she climbs.
.
photograph by Rachael Harstad
Him Plenty Dead, Kemosabe[1]
Curmudgeon iconoclast that I am, I’ve decided to ask my loved ones that my memorial service be dubbed “an acknowledgement of death” as opposed to “a celebration of life.”[2]
Look, I get the sentiment, know Ecclesiastes/ Byrds song — a time to be born, a time to die and all that jazz. Focus on life, not death. Dear departed Uncle so-and-so did some good things, navigated life okay, so let’s reminisce, let’s celebrate the years at the Navy Yard but not mention the racist jokes.
But here’s what I really bugs me: the phrase “Celebration of Life” is clunky, wordy, awkward.
“Hey. Josh, let’s go surfing.”
“Can’t, dude. Gotta go my Uncle Tims’s celebration of life ceremony.”
“Bummer, dude.”
What’s wrong with calling the postmortem get together a “memorial service?”
BTW, I hate fucking euphemisms, especially fucking Chamber of Commerce euphemisms.
So there!
Emily Dickinson, First Year Medical Student
their Nightingales and psalms
Far removed from vanity
The old man lies exposed,
His organs sporting flags
Like holes of a golf course.
Nose and Ears are hairy;
He used to be a Man
Who ate beets – burped – blinked in the Sun –
It used to be Man.
Now disarticulated,
The antithesis of sentimentality,
Resting in pieces
Like left over turkey.
Yes, I have become accustomed
To hanging out with the Dead,
Assuming a cool, ironic air,
Pulling intestines like thread,
But when I die, I want my Lodging
As plush as plush can be,
For I have learned this lesson
In Gross Anatomy:
In spite of all
The noble palaver,
It’s impossible to respect
A desiccated cadaver.
[1] a line from Tonto from an episode of the Lone Ranger circa 1958-ish
[2] I wish I could demand it, but I realize that corpses are in a weak position as far as negotiations go.
The Flip Side of Marcus Aurelius
All I want to do is sleep,
to keep my
ailing thoughts
at bay,
to enter the cinema
of a dream
that will take me far away
from dripping faucets,
twisted sheets,
branches scratching
at the windowpane.
But no such luck.
Sleep, like a bitter divorcee,
has packed her bags
and moved away.
Lines Stolen on a Gloomy Sabbath after Being Led Astray
Do you know the New York Times game Connections?
If not, in the game, you’re presented each morning with a square consisting of sixteen boxes, four up and four down. The object is to discover an affinity of four of the words/terms that appear in the boxes, in other words., to find a common thread. Essentially, if you correctly identify three groups, you win because the final four you didn’t choose, will form the last group.
Here’s today’s puzzle:
Frost Beach Pump Pope
Race Bishop Pet Shop Pound
Hardy Beat Prior Bake
Throb Bad Preheat Pastor
The first category that came to my mind was poets’ surnames.
(Robert) Frost
(Alexander) Pope
(Elizabeth) Bishop
(Ezra) Pound
(Thomas) Hardy
This seemed unfair because there are five obvious choices, but not to worry, poets weren’t a category, and I almost botched my 48-day streak, missing my first three guesses but somehow managed to get the blue category (the second to the hardest), then the green (the second easiest), and finally, the yellow, the easiest, third, which left the purples, the hardest, now a gimme.
So I decided in protest to construct a poem by lifting lines from the poets that appeared in the puzzle. Here it is:
Lines Stolen on a Gloomy Sabbath
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Down their carved names the rain drop ploughs.
One tear, like the bee’s sting, slips.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
And sport and flutter in the fields of air.
Sources:
Robert Frost, “Directive”
Thomas Hardy, “During Wind and Rain”
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Man Moth”
Ezra Pound, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”
Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock, Canto 1”
So thank you, whoever, constructs Connections, for leading me astray.
Back Then, Right Now
When you face the preacher, there’s only one thing to say:
Just skeep-beep de bop-bop beep bop bo-dope skeetle-at-de-op-day!
Cab Calloway
Back Then
In the1950s version
of yesteryear
beatniks all hepped up
on goofballs
snapped their fingers
in the wee hours
while
Cub
Scout
den
mothers
slept.
Secondhand smoke thick as pre-EPA Pittsburg smog.
Dizzy, Bird, Trane,
blowing their horns,
Roy, Max, Billie Higgins beating their drums.
But then what?
The next day,
the unforgiving light,
and then another day . . .
Right Now
In the 2020s
not much linguistic abracadabra,
but on the other hand,
I can hook up with Lester Young and Lady Day
on YouTube
and snap my fingers
all hepped up on
my very own
garden variety
brain chemicals in a
smoke
free
space.
It ain’t all bad – not yet.
Flailing
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can . . .
WB Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”
In the not so good ol’ days of yore,
the heyday
in my blood
untamed,
I’d tap out trite love poems
on a typewriter.
Frustrated, I might snatch the paper from the machine,
ball up the
the aborted Petrarchan
bellyaching,
and fling it across the room –
as if I were a protagonist in a film,
not a melodramatic nobody
all hepped up on hormones
sitting at a desk
flailing.
You Do Hoodoo 