this mother is an epic
it's an extravaganza with casino light displays
it's a daddy in pictures blown with a bubble wand
a flying squirrel loops in the air between stanzas
a dachshund will snoot a theme
soap bubbles pop in the primal breeze
bookend skunks
moldable polymer clear tint skinks
flying reptile erasers on wands with lead inside
in the white slat ranch house
eeee gads a pencil with a fright mask
the biker coat made out of cow hide
it gots chrome studs and rings
objects around the stud animate
there's a surge in sales of Wishnics
voodoo dolls
ratfinks
thing makers
the story of it extrudes and molds
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Summer Blue Balls
this season is eating itself like a digital antagonist
days pass across aching tendons
strings in the thigh
plucked like a harp string
old enough to die
I haven't yet met the protagonist
this may be a bad play for the humid blend of endings
spring past
listless
barely remembered
no heros emerge this haggard June
days pass across aching tendons
strings in the thigh
plucked like a harp string
old enough to die
I haven't yet met the protagonist
this may be a bad play for the humid blend of endings
spring past
listless
barely remembered
no heros emerge this haggard June
Monday, June 1, 2009
Local History Piece
The legs were fucked from about twenty miles of biking all over the west set of hills, not sure if there's a name for the whole deck of trashy mountains, but I cruized the West End, South Side, did the crack pot of side walks along Route 51, other crazy quilts of bad road, when I stumbled onto Boggs Ave.
Boggs is in no way ugly, unless you are too analytical to live there. That's likely, but it's a good place to see while walking the jangly touring bike 50 degrees up the cacks and pot holes. Even, and I say especially, if little kids are out in a stunted front lawn, working on their futures like Harvard freshmen.
........
The ancient Hebrews were aware that there was an advantage in stationing high on the hill side. The mob of brats was aware of it too. Not that they planned to be where they were, they just knew my legs were fucked because I was walking my bike straight up the hill, like the last poor asshole they saw doing likewise, looking too weak to out run a zillion rotten kids.
It's trade offs in life, like the black eye for the team, that keeps the legs fucked up for the true runner's high. Bike riding heightens the senses. The gangster babies were all working together on something, on someone's sloping stump of lawn between a house and Boggs with it's pot holes. They were enunciating the phrase, "Hey Asshole."
None of the brats was more than three feet tall, yet they were organized and orderly in front of the shitty ranch house, with no grown ups around to tell them to shut up or to teach them something even filthier than what they already mastered.
Just the term 'ranch style' brings out the worst in my thoughts when it has to do with shitty frame houses glued into rock and more little brick and shingle dumps. It's still no reason not to like this particular part of town. I'd be proud to march down the street any day with the locals carrying rakes and torches. The kids could help by throwing rocks at people from out of town.
They were taking turns saying, "hey asshole," all smiling like mindless adult convicts who thrived on boiled cabbage and kielbasa. Most of them would be aquiescing to exactly that, but this scene was so fucking adorable it almost took my mind off how bad my legs hurt.
...........
One of my former girl friends from when I was in college came from this part of town. She told me once that her mother taught her to take her earings off before getting into a cat fight in a bar, and her mother taught her how to call someone an asshole. Mom said to emphasize the second syllable if you really want it to hurt the other cat. The phrase 'hey asshole' is almost always used to convey authority, like saying 'attention' over a loud speaker. There ain't no fucking loud speakers, if I may sort particulars with the brats. 'Hey asshole' is used like a Crescent wrench in the tool box of pranks and intimidation. It's used a lot all around town, so I had to see the kids as being off to a good start in the whole mess. Somewhere about the tenth time one of the brats staightened shoulders and said, 'hey asshole,' a little girl who had been showing top drawer leadership in the excercise took notice of me, the bike, and two fucked up legs not liking to push the bike. I could see she hatched an idea.
This kid had the genes that made the place what it was and probably still is. She picked up this hard thin tree branch about as long as her height, and ran at me with it raised, stopping just short of me. Looking up, smiling, she said directly, "Hey asshole," and then tried to whack me with the stick. I caught the end of it with my hand and held onto it for a few seconds. While she pulled on her end, leaning back and still smiling victory and the kill, she said like Edith Wharton, "let go of my stick, you asshole." It's what Edith might of said to someone if she grew up on Boggs.
With my legs hurting again by this this time, runner's high running thin, I was getting a wee bit demoralized by the vitality of a she-thug the size of Thumbellina. I let go of my end of the stick, and she fell on her ass on the pavement, but she got the better of the fight. I kept walking my bike up hill, with all the kids together reminding me how I was perceived by them.
At that point in the afters, they were yelling at me together, Hey Asshole. Been losing most of the fights I've been in, last twenty years in Pittsburgh. Not a good place to outsiders.
Boggs is in no way ugly, unless you are too analytical to live there. That's likely, but it's a good place to see while walking the jangly touring bike 50 degrees up the cacks and pot holes. Even, and I say especially, if little kids are out in a stunted front lawn, working on their futures like Harvard freshmen.
........
The ancient Hebrews were aware that there was an advantage in stationing high on the hill side. The mob of brats was aware of it too. Not that they planned to be where they were, they just knew my legs were fucked because I was walking my bike straight up the hill, like the last poor asshole they saw doing likewise, looking too weak to out run a zillion rotten kids.
It's trade offs in life, like the black eye for the team, that keeps the legs fucked up for the true runner's high. Bike riding heightens the senses. The gangster babies were all working together on something, on someone's sloping stump of lawn between a house and Boggs with it's pot holes. They were enunciating the phrase, "Hey Asshole."
None of the brats was more than three feet tall, yet they were organized and orderly in front of the shitty ranch house, with no grown ups around to tell them to shut up or to teach them something even filthier than what they already mastered.
Just the term 'ranch style' brings out the worst in my thoughts when it has to do with shitty frame houses glued into rock and more little brick and shingle dumps. It's still no reason not to like this particular part of town. I'd be proud to march down the street any day with the locals carrying rakes and torches. The kids could help by throwing rocks at people from out of town.
They were taking turns saying, "hey asshole," all smiling like mindless adult convicts who thrived on boiled cabbage and kielbasa. Most of them would be aquiescing to exactly that, but this scene was so fucking adorable it almost took my mind off how bad my legs hurt.
...........
One of my former girl friends from when I was in college came from this part of town. She told me once that her mother taught her to take her earings off before getting into a cat fight in a bar, and her mother taught her how to call someone an asshole. Mom said to emphasize the second syllable if you really want it to hurt the other cat. The phrase 'hey asshole' is almost always used to convey authority, like saying 'attention' over a loud speaker. There ain't no fucking loud speakers, if I may sort particulars with the brats. 'Hey asshole' is used like a Crescent wrench in the tool box of pranks and intimidation. It's used a lot all around town, so I had to see the kids as being off to a good start in the whole mess. Somewhere about the tenth time one of the brats staightened shoulders and said, 'hey asshole,' a little girl who had been showing top drawer leadership in the excercise took notice of me, the bike, and two fucked up legs not liking to push the bike. I could see she hatched an idea.
This kid had the genes that made the place what it was and probably still is. She picked up this hard thin tree branch about as long as her height, and ran at me with it raised, stopping just short of me. Looking up, smiling, she said directly, "Hey asshole," and then tried to whack me with the stick. I caught the end of it with my hand and held onto it for a few seconds. While she pulled on her end, leaning back and still smiling victory and the kill, she said like Edith Wharton, "let go of my stick, you asshole." It's what Edith might of said to someone if she grew up on Boggs.
With my legs hurting again by this this time, runner's high running thin, I was getting a wee bit demoralized by the vitality of a she-thug the size of Thumbellina. I let go of my end of the stick, and she fell on her ass on the pavement, but she got the better of the fight. I kept walking my bike up hill, with all the kids together reminding me how I was perceived by them.
At that point in the afters, they were yelling at me together, Hey Asshole. Been losing most of the fights I've been in, last twenty years in Pittsburgh. Not a good place to outsiders.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Solving Like Man
If it was given to me free, was brand new, clean and it fit, I would gladly wear a Jack Kevorkian tee shirt. If such a garment exists. Haven't seen one, but I wish I had. I'd like to see people walking around downtown with the euthenasia advocate's pic on their chests hanging over designer jeans.
Hermit crabs are known to trot out of the calcite spiral campers on their backs, and when one does, it is to advocate for fringe causes like euthenasia. The right to decide for oneself, the right to privacy applied to private decision making, the humanitarian view of quality of life.
But even poet/folk singing types like me can be brash. Don't take today's poem too literally. It's merely to state a view point that may or may not be helpful to this or other societies and cultures. It may be a bad poem. If it's that bad, it can be deleted.
Solving Like Man
circumstance
oily as the nads
should make you roll out your rug
and end the conflict like a man
on the knees like a short prayer
thrust your gleaming banana
your polished steel corer
in gracious asking labunza
Hermit crabs are known to trot out of the calcite spiral campers on their backs, and when one does, it is to advocate for fringe causes like euthenasia. The right to decide for oneself, the right to privacy applied to private decision making, the humanitarian view of quality of life.
But even poet/folk singing types like me can be brash. Don't take today's poem too literally. It's merely to state a view point that may or may not be helpful to this or other societies and cultures. It may be a bad poem. If it's that bad, it can be deleted.
Solving Like Man
circumstance
oily as the nads
should make you roll out your rug
and end the conflict like a man
on the knees like a short prayer
thrust your gleaming banana
your polished steel corer
in gracious asking labunza
Saturday, May 9, 2009
The Secret Ingrediant In a Dentifrice
There is a method to mystery, and a road map to fascination. Both can be discussed in terms of ingredients. The harder it is to scare up all the spices, the more people prick up their ears when you describe the soup. People open their wallets without resistence when they are trying to obtain some intangible thing that important people have. Mystery is as much in the description of objects associated with power as it is in assembling the graven images that look like the supernatural.
The property of being clandestined figures neatly into the occult. The secret ingredient in Crest. Here, one of my favorite limericks from a National Lampoon bought in the 1970s:
A hygienic young woman out west
asked the cowboy who sat on her chest
will this cause tooth decay
why no mam I've heard say
it's the secret ingredient in Crest
For mystical reasons, this dumb limerick still makes me laugh.
The property of being clandestined figures neatly into the occult. The secret ingredient in Crest. Here, one of my favorite limericks from a National Lampoon bought in the 1970s:
A hygienic young woman out west
asked the cowboy who sat on her chest
will this cause tooth decay
why no mam I've heard say
it's the secret ingredient in Crest
For mystical reasons, this dumb limerick still makes me laugh.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Pig Trouble
Pigs. First it was trichynosis, and now it's swine flu. That's a lot of guilt for the farm animals to have to carry around. You have to remember that they didn't mean to contract a disease and spread it to people. Yet they have to carry the social stigma, as if they were all one collective Typhoid Mary who should have had the decency to wash her hands more often.
But to get down to the cases of how bad life is, my new dilema is that Jews asperse the character of pigs and won't eat them, and Christians eat all the ham they can choke down, so love it or hate it the pigs get either eaten or looked down upon. Or blamed for the latest bio-engineered virus.
So like people, chipped or sliced.
But to get down to the cases of how bad life is, my new dilema is that Jews asperse the character of pigs and won't eat them, and Christians eat all the ham they can choke down, so love it or hate it the pigs get either eaten or looked down upon. Or blamed for the latest bio-engineered virus.
So like people, chipped or sliced.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Fiction Fragment from a Novel I'm Writing
...........................
We could of all been mean and selfish about this wild fire of law enforcement that put all of us together in a syphlitic make-do world in rural West Virginia. The 1980s did us all in, and in the late 90s we wound up living all close together on the same dirt road. But we're not too down about it.
Sharing music among friends is redeeming. No matter where you sing. Some nights Rosie takes out her violin and lays down a clutch of partitas by Bach. She's no slouch about the things for which she keeps the passion, and some of her perfomances put the shadow of J.S. Bach in Rosie and my living room, listening proudly with his feet comfy in the chicken shit and straw.
Clyde Smith was pretty sharp on our spinnet piano, sort of a jazz standard machine from the cold war era, and when Bonnie sang along, it was hard to fathom that trained and lovely voice coming from a woman who might resemble Joe Stalin if she grew a mustache. You can see how any place can seem like middle America when music is part of the daily routine. It says everything about the natural goodness in people.
We could of all been mean and selfish about this wild fire of law enforcement that put all of us together in a syphlitic make-do world in rural West Virginia. The 1980s did us all in, and in the late 90s we wound up living all close together on the same dirt road. But we're not too down about it.
Sharing music among friends is redeeming. No matter where you sing. Some nights Rosie takes out her violin and lays down a clutch of partitas by Bach. She's no slouch about the things for which she keeps the passion, and some of her perfomances put the shadow of J.S. Bach in Rosie and my living room, listening proudly with his feet comfy in the chicken shit and straw.
Clyde Smith was pretty sharp on our spinnet piano, sort of a jazz standard machine from the cold war era, and when Bonnie sang along, it was hard to fathom that trained and lovely voice coming from a woman who might resemble Joe Stalin if she grew a mustache. You can see how any place can seem like middle America when music is part of the daily routine. It says everything about the natural goodness in people.
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