Friday, August 21, 2020
The Greatest Man I Ever Knew.
a rip in the fabric of interstellar dreams (NYT)
Crazy Henry Fights Wildfires.
Deliver me from darkness
Thursday, August 20, 2020
Unbuttoned.
“Scratch my back” I asked my wife.
But when I turned to her she wasn’t there.
I got up and went into the kids’ bedroom.
“Hey, have you seen your mother?” I asked them.
But there were no kids. And it wasn’t a bedroom.
It was the garage, with a green plastic barrel
Full of greasy washers.
It smelled harsh and cold.
I buttoned the cuffs on my long sleeve shirt.
Propriety is important during a crisis.
But it made no sense,
Since I had to immediately unbutton them
To roll up my sleeves to move the greasy
Barrel of washers into a corner.
So I could open the trapdoor.
At the bottom of the trapdoor stairs
I found a magic abalone shell.
My one wish was to have a clean oven
Again.
The shell spun around, then puffed
Out yellow smoke.
When I went back upstairs to check the oven
I discovered I had no kitchen. Just a hotplate
On a gate leg table on the sun porch.
But the sun refused to shine.
This wasn’t very strange because
A permanent eclipse was taking place --
Congress refused to release funds
To end it.
I guess my mail-in ballot never
Got through.
My back still itched something fierce,
So I found a long shoehorn to use.
It worked fine.
But now I’m worried about that barrel
Of greasy washers.
They don’t belong to me. I have to turn
Them in.
But to whom? I don’t have a receipt.
I could be accused of theft. Or worse.
Of a hate crime.
I’m leaving immediately for Uruguay. They
Have no extradition treaty with the United
States.
I guess it’s a good thing after all
I don’t seem to have any family.
They’d slow me down shopping
For souvenirs.
The Age of Velcro
I never saw a door slammed with such vehemence or cold malice.
It was the end of the Age of Velcro.
For me, anyway.
And my library disappeared with it.
My books were many and dog eared.
Paperbacks signed by the author.
A child’s version of the Necronomicon.
Circus programmes.
The History of Lollipops, by M. Zapruder.
Back issues of the Feldspar Times and Seasons.
The Emmett Till Cookbook.
I became addicted to mumbo sauce.
My teeth fell out and my tongue turned
Glossy red.
Group therapy was a bust;
I just switched to Patum Peperium.
But I went on to win the Chirruper Cup in Hosiery;
The Charles Baumann Award for Superior Grit;
A set of ceramic thimbles from the S.S. Kresge Company;
The 1997 Pinewood Derby Medallion;
A lifetime supply of 3-in-1 oil from the
George W. Cole Foundation;
And was runner up at the 2011 Squab Games
In Basra.
Still, I never got over my childhood trauma.
She was eleven and I was eight.
We never met formally or corresponded.
In fact I didn’t know her at all back then;
But I saw her walking down Hennepin Avenue
The other day -- a perfectly complete stranger.
So beautiful and distant that I knew right away.
We should have been frustrated lovers as children.
I get that way sometimes when I have
Too much peppermint.
In the matter of punctuation I
Always taught my students in Thailand
To leave it alone and let the context
Take care of the meaning//
Unless they wanted to be published
In the Huffington Post//
Then they should hire a plumber?
(in the entire history of etiquette in Thailand no one has ever slammed a door)
For many years I was in great health and poor pain.
Those were the years I grew bushy eyebrows.
Those were the times when I mastered the
Art of Velcro
To such an extent
That I could afford to take a trip
To Milwaukee.
I peddled so much absurdity
That I finally got silliness poisoning.
Forced to retire, I bought a pineapple
In Hawaii.
It’s still there, in a museum.
I’ve found that the only cure
For sleepiness is loneliness.
Or a mop handle between the teeth.
When you write as much as I do
And with so little effort
You start writing in your sleep.
Since you can’t buy a mop handle
For love nor money anymore
I stay lonely instead
By brushing my teeth with tuna fish.
I haven’t been visited by another
Human being in a dozen years.
Excepting the Census Enumerator.
I find this interview is becoming tedious.
Pray, what newspaper did you say you’re
With?
And why am I being singled out for an interview?
My literary work -- my postcards -- or my heretical
Recipe for mumbo sauce?
I don’t believe there’s any such newspaper
As the Marmalade Times.
Please to show me some credentials . . .
Well, as I was saying,
The reason I cover my walls with
Maps is because they keep the flies out.
Have you ever seen a fly land on a map?
No you haven’t.
That’s one of the great secrets I share
Only with my writing students --
And only at the graduate level.
Flies are emissaries of Beelzebub,
And as such want to destroy every
Generous creative impulse in mankind.
All great poets were continuously bothered by flies.
They landed in Byron’s soup, flew into William Blake’s
Inkpot, and crawled into Shakespeare’s second best
Bed.
As you may have heard,
The life of a blurb artiste is a hard one.
I settled into that vocation almost by accident.
Walking past a Walgreen’s Drugstore one day
I swerved to avoid a shih tzu, only to bump
Into its owner -- a comely maiden who immediately
Invited me into Walgreen’s so we could compare
Our blood pressures.
So smitten was I with her loveliness that
I composed a romantic blurb for her on the spot:
“Eyes to bedazzle the sun; a face to steal the heart; and
A suppleness of spirit that suggests much but reveals little
At first acquaintance.”
The druggist on duty overheard my blurb,
Phoned it into the head office,
And the next thing I knew I was ensconced
In a cushy office writing blurbs about Epsom Salts
And nail clippers.
As for the comely maiden,
We parted amicably enough
as vice presidential
Candidates.
You keep harping on my political views.
Why?
I never form an opinion on things
Until after I write something about them.
As I was saying,
Once my library was gone
And I had come to terms with
My addictions and inner Elmos,
I settled down to the writing of blurbs
Until the embargo on chindles began.
It was then impossible to continue,
So I got a grant from the Ronald McDonald House
To stay at home quietly minding my own business.
A little known fact is that these grants, amounting to
Millions of dollars each year,
Are available to just about anyone who is
Literate and a native born American citizen.
Life has been good since then.
I’ve switched from blurbs to platitudes,
Which are easier on my throat and impressive
To teach.
And now you want my mother’s maiden name?
You’re absurd, you are!
This interview is over. Get out.
Oh, I see . . .
Not a newspaper at all.
You’re National Security.
And I’m a threat. A small threat.
Who can be dealt with kindly.
But firmly.
Yessir. My mother’s maiden name
Was Bedell.
Can I just say I really don’t have any addictions.
Not as such.
Mostly I have obsessions.
With Velcro. Anchovies. Yiddish. Peonies.
And houses with orange tile roofs.
There’s something compelling yet suspicious
About a house with bright orange colored
Roof tiles -- don’t you think?
They ought to be investigated as some kind of threat.
I mean, really, won’t airplanes get distracted by
Their unusual color and go off course,
Crashing into mountain sides?
Has anyone done a study of that?
I’d be glad to do it for you,
Free of charge of course.
And who needs a lot of books lying around,
Cluttering up the place?
They smell of stale wood pulp.
They’re an invitation for silverfish
To take up residence.
Some of them contain strong ideas
That children cannot digest.
I’m actually glad I lost all my books.
Now will you take those baggies off my
Hands and feet?
Monday, July 27, 2020
The Abandoned Glass Factory
Near my boyhood home in Southeast Minneapolis there was a railyard that harbored half a dozen dilapidated grain elevators, several cadaverous warehouses that no longer did any business except as condos for pigeons, and an abandoned glass factory.
At some point before I was born the glass factory had partially burned down, and was not reopened. The derelict building stood on a rise of ground, giving it a sort of collapsed cathedral radiance in the sunlight.
My mother told me that under no circumstances was I ever to cross the railyard to the abandoned glass factory. She painted a grisly picture of railyard hobos lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce on disobedient little boys and eating them up like Twinkies. All the glass in the abandoned factory was tainted, poisoned by toxins so powerful that should I slice my pudgy fingers on a discarded piece of glassware my hand would blow up like a dirigible and explode in my face with fetid black pus.
So naturally I had to go exploring there with my pals as often as possible.
It was only two blocks away, and my pals, incipient hooligans like myself, relished the thought of trespassing; and what was even more tantalizing, after our first clandestine visit, was the demonic joy of hurling clots of melted glassware at the factory windows. Watching the glittering shower of powdered glass from a desecrated skylight was all the bliss a nine year old boy like me could handle.
In front of the abandoned glass factory was a small pond of black water. Like a black hole, it absorbed light but gave none out. A slick of oil on the surface gave it a surly rainbow color when the light was right. Using splintering pallets, we managed to sail out into the middle of the festering pool, which smelled of an evil and sour disapproval of all lifeforms. Inevitably, I fell into this cesspool one fine day. Thrashing around in terror, I discovered the whole pond was only about three feet deep. When I dragged myself to shore I reeked so bad that my pals -- fair weather friends to a man, curse them -- hightailed it out of there, leaving me to slog home by myself.
Hell may have no fury like a woman scorned, but a mother confronted with a child whose summer wardrobe is ruined, and who smells like a mothball factory, runs a close second.
My memory may be a bit fuzzy after all these years, but it seems to me I was grounded through the entire administration of LBJ.
Since then the only abandoned buildings I have ever felt like exploring are made of Legos, and constructed by my grand kids.
I wrote some light verse about America's faltering foreign relations for the New York Times.
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According to NYT Peter Beinart, The Real Reason Biden Is Ahead of Trump? He’s a Man.
"What has changed radically over the past four years isn’t Americans’ perception of Mr. Trump. It’s their perception of his opponent."
Defining Mr. Trump is hard/'twould take the talents of a bard/or madman or perhaps a chimp/He's Huey Long and Colonel Blimp/Both Peter Pan and Donald Duck/And maybe even Friar Tuck/Some say a whiff of brimstone hangs/around his head and yellow bangs/His accent reeks of Brooklynese/Inscrutable as Japanese/As volatile as Etna, yet/immune to ev'ry single threat/A body fat; a mind so thin/it's like the string of violin/He's worshiped by the chinless mob/To others he seems quite a snob/Contradictions in him fester/Partly Stalin, partly jester/His own party can't decide/if he's Jekyll or else Hyde/So any other candidate/is bound to be a heavy weight/Good luck, Joe Biden; just be cool/and you'll defeat that fossil fool .