Sonnet, my ass, you call this piece of shit A sonnet? Right, a sonnet, oh yeah, sure, sure. To write a sonnet you must be a man or woman of wit – It must be one-hundred percent pure, Cast in iambic pentameter – tick TOCK, tick TOCK – None of this slapdash fill-in-the-blank-piss- ass diarrhetic irregularity. Think clock: Tick TOCK, not TOCK tick, man. It’s got to fit The pattern. Then at the end – swoosh – you swerve the focus, attempt to solve the problem, knit a perfect combination of well-chosen words into a thought that ought to be uplifting Or ironic or aphoristic or clever or droll. You see, that’s a way a sonnet is supposed to roll.
It was my first son’s first birthday After his mother’s Mother’s Day death. I had never Ubered downtown before That windy rain-drenched Wednesday, But I would be drinking, drinking, aiding and abetting Zoloft’s numbing affectless effects.
A warehouse converted into a restaurant, Bricks, tables, a mirror-backed bar, Water dripping from the brim of my fedora, “A Jameson’s on the rocks, please.” Twenty minutes later, the rain still coming down in sheets, She came in drenched and sat down next to me as planned.
Later, we moved to a table, and I shared my guilt, What I had not done in those awful last hours. Shaking her head, she took my hand — Perhaps she took my hand — but I know for sure Word for word what she said — too sacred to share — Seeds of love sown that windswept Wednesday.
Last night, the Moore Brothers, Fleming and Wesley, performed at George Fox’s Chico Feo Music Extravaganza. The elder Moore, Wesley, his head bobbing like, well, like a Bobble Head, recited his poem “Roaring Twenties Redux.”
Wowee, pretty silly.
Roaring Twenties Redux
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— It’s so elegant So intelligent
Once this pandemic is done, y’all, people gonna be hollering siss-boom-bah, packing the tattoo parlors, barbershops and bars, macro-dosing, doing the Hedonism like it’s wa-wa-tusi, dancing on tables, dancing in the streets, there’ll be swingin’ and swayin’ and records playin’, live bands blasting covers past curfew, PO-lice sirens wailing and blue lights swirling, sweatpants discarded, shimmering gowns flowin’, flasks flashin’ in the comet light of the apocalyptic party, alack and alas and all that jazz!
Brother Fleming, on the other hand, teamed up with Robert Lighthouse and David George Sink for a moving tribute to the Charleston Nine.
Here’s an excerpt:
As our late mother was won’t to say “There’s no accounting for taste.”
Once this pandemic is done, y’all, people gonna be hollering siss-boom-bah, packing the tattoo parlors, barbershops and bars, macro-dosing, doing the Hedonism like it’s wa-wa-tusi, dancing on tables, dancing in the streets, there’ll be swingin’ and swayin’ and records playin’, live bands blasting covers past curfew, PO-lice sirens wailing and blue lights swirling, sweatpants discarded, shimmering gowns flowin’, flasks flashin’ in the comet light of the apocalyptic party, alack and alas and all that jazz!
Three months before my wife died of Lymphoma, I began as a sort of mental escape exercise to write a parody of Dante’s Inferno in terza rima, a verse form very inimical to rhyme-starved English. In fact, even though Dante used terza rima in his Commedia, I know of no English translation of that great work that employs it.
My plan was to write nine cantos, each consisting of nine stanzas, to render an abbreviated trip through the nine circles of hell, having as my guide the Roman poet Catullus, rather than Virgil, who led Dante through the nether regions.
Alas, my poem, now two thirds completed with this latest canto, is a failure because – guess what – writing terza rima in English is nearly impossible unless you’re a master like Shelley (see his “Ode to the West Wind”). Some of it comes off as silly, for which I apologize.
Nevertheless, I’m determined to finish it, even though I myself don’t pretend to know what it means, and cast it out into the ones and zeroes of the Internet.
Canto 6
As the rutted road like a corkscrew twisted downward through darkness, the cries of lamentation abated, and a more martial clash we heard
as we entered the circle of anger, an infestation, of spiteful wretches screaming, biting, gouging, their wounds never-healing, a damnation
deserved, according to Catullus, slouching behind the wheel of the hell cab. “Violence is the bane of humanity. See that man crouching
behind the rock there, sliced and bleeding? That’s none other than Pee Wee Gaskins, podunk mass murderer, receiving
forevermore the very same tortures he wrought upon his brethren, and over there Joseph Goebbels, leper-like, oozing sores, with agony forever fraught.
We were in the small intestines of hell, as it were, the stench overpowering, the horrors too horrible to tell
with words, the previous circles towering above us, the worst still yet to come. I closed my stinging eyes, myself cowering
in the backseat of the cab. “Oh, for a drop of rum,” I sighed, and Catullus smiled, pulled out a flask, “Here,” he said, reaching back, “please have some.
It’s not much to ask after what you’ve been through, donning the sackcloth with a mouthful of ash.
Rush Limbaugh has succumbed to cancer, He who often spoke ill of the dead. Will our comedians do him justice Or bite their satiric tongues instead?
Deep in the heart of frigid Texas, the unregulated grid is on the fritz. So, Ted Cruz packed his bags for Mexico, And booked a suite at the Cancun Ritz.
In other news:
US Covid cases are on the wane, The Reaper taking a bit of a breather, Which, of course, is very good news For maskless frat boys and grizzled geezers.
So that’s it for this episode of the All News That’s Fit to Spit, brought to you, as always, in doggerel. See you next week, same time, same blog site. Have a wonderful weekend, y’all.
[1] The day after Kurt Cobain committed suicide, Limbaugh said, “Kurt Cobain was, ladies and gentleman, a worthless shred of human debris.” After Jerry Garcia’s death, Limbaugh called him, “just another dead doper. and a dirt bag”
Dear Abby,
My girlfriend disses me
when I put “thee”
in my confessional poetry.
“So Seventeenth Century,”
she says, “the antithesis of hip, old-fashioned, out of time.”
which triggers
Bill Wyman’s bass line
in the juke box of my mind.
You’re out of touch my baby,My poor old-fashioned baby,I said baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time.
“No way you can publish this rubbish,”
she says, “too loosey goosey, sugar britches.
“Try not rhyming every other word.
The syllables should interlock
like a choo-choo train,
and go chug-chug-chug-chugging,
in a straight line,
not go staggering
all over the page,
like a sentimental drunk
smashed on Toostie Roll wine.”
Otherwise, she’s sweet as pie, my girlfriend,
and treats me nice.
Any advice?
Signed,
Stuck Inside of Peoria’s Suburbs with the Arden Forest Blues Again
Dear Stuck,
A wise man once wrote:
A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit,DumbAs old medallions to the thumb,Silent as the sleeve-worn stoneOf casement ledges where the moss has grown—A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
So, yeah, your GF has a point.
What harm? Men die — externally — It is a truth — of Blood — But we — are dying in Drama — And Drama — is never dead — Emily Dickinson
The dream done, my eyes open, it hurt to be awake.
Outside my bedroom window faint predawn light seeping through the dark fabric of the sky.
My late wife had been alive just now, in the dream her death merely a dream.
I had held her in my arms, explaining to her that I had dreamed she’d died, but she hadn’t, no, she was smiling, warm, lying next to me in bed,
so lifelike, so palpable, I thought as I lay there afterwards that her spirit had come to me.
I closed my eyes and fell asleep again, and, as if in a new episode of the ongoing series of my sleep, she reappeared, sitting in a chair in an unfamiliar room.
Not smiling now, possessing the wisdom of the dead, she explained in her soft Georgia accent that we were out of synch, that our ages no longer matched, and it was true, she was young again, in her twenties, but I was old and stiff.
[poof]
I rose from bed, and looked down upon sleeping Caroline, lying there beautiful, a breathing angel, her hair luxuriant, disheveled, cascading over the pillow that she embraced, like a lover in a Leonard Cohen song.
The light strong now, the sky outside the window bright blue, my dead wife, like Eurydice, tumbled back into black oblivion.
I struggled into my corduroys, puddled on the floor next to the bed, and tiptoed out, quietly opening and closing the bedroom door.
Descending the stairs, I shook my head, waved my arms, to buck myself back into the land of the living.
Time to brew a pot of coffee and retrieve the morning paper, which lay where flung, next to a clump of lantana, the newspaper sheathed in plastic, protected from the dew, which had evaporated, had disappeared into the seeming emptiness of air.
You Do Hoodoo 