Anti-Nouns

Pronouns may be well and good, 

But anti-nouns are best. 

In English you just pin a "not" 

Upon a pronoun's chest. "

Not me" is my favorite anti-noun 

When accusations fly: 

Who did this stupid thing? I'm asked. 

"Not me!" is my reply.

Going Rogue

Going rogue

May be in vogue,

But if everyone does it,

It wasn’t rogue, was it?

Rhinitis in Pachyderms

When an elephant has a cold,

I bet that that gets old…

Real fast. Who wants a trunk

That’s stuffed with gunk?

The Beats

In my youth, I always liked the way

Beat poetry cavorted on the page...

Rhythms all irregular, of course,

And not a rhyme scheme there to save your soul!

But with a chanting quality - unprosaic -

Of never becoming merely a boring stream

Of less-than-consciousness lined up discreetly

To please a crowd of academic critics,

Instead, an onslaught of outrageousness

Up in your face and catching at your ears.

With zero fear of speaking loud and clear.

Pennies

I find pennies on the street 

And I toss them in the fountain. 

This makes my luck complete 

In some mythical accounting.

Stoicism

Stoicism has its virtues

But it certainly asks a great deal

When it asks you to suppress

The way that you naturally feel.

Possible

It’s possible to write a sonnet which is so prosaic in its subject matter, that though its meter flows without a hitch, it sounds so much like ordinary patter that if you write it without breaks in lines the unsuspecting reader may not see the format follows classical designs, quite suitable for soaring poetry, but here constricted to dull observations about the fact that verse forms without feeling do little to ignite imaginations and nothing to set tender spirits reeling.  Real poetry requires a certain drive, a pulsing power to make you feel alive.  

One Hundred Feet

How do all those wiggly legs

Fit inside of centipede eggs?

Admittedly, they can run like champs,

But I bet they’re all born with a bad case of cramps!

On the Audit Trail of Kitties

 Yes, Excel was used. Computers leave such nice audit trails of when things got written.

Last night I reviewed how Kitties got written,

How it all started off as a ten minute kitten,

How I soon began to try to extend it

Without much of a clue as to how I might end it.

Feeling my way, an uneasy man,

Writing chunks out of order without a real plan,

But with some vague sense of a story arc

Glimmering distantly in the dark.

Moon

Moon, you hunk of rock, 

You spin around the earth 

Like a big old monthly clock, 

Like a finely tuned machine. 

And… for what it’s worth, 

It would be a nasty shock 

If you altered your routine!

Misleading

I believe that lying by statisticians

Often depends on judicious omissions.

Blocked

When a play is “blocked” that’s good - it means 

The actors know how to move through their scenes.

It’s one of those things that directors do

To make the story and meaning come through.

Kitties and Crumb

I came across this quote from the cartoonist, R. Crumb: "All that stuff I did in the late '60s... I didn't really know what it was about when I did it. It was all very instinctive. Somehow, the L.S.D. liberated me in this way... that allowed me to just put it down and not worry about what it meant. I had some vague idea that it meant something... but it's only later that I'd look at it and kind of analyze it and see what it's about." 

I had been thinking about Crumb, because he wrote and drew the original Fritz The Cat cartoons, which involved a misbehaving humanoid cat in adult adventures. Because it bears a sort of family resemblance to my characters in Kitties In Space, who are also poorly behaved humanoid cats. No one has ever mentioned a resemblance to me. But I've thought of it. 

But, really, it was his reflection on HOW he wrote that struck me, because how I wrote my Kitties was something like that. I did it without benefit of LSD. My imagination is wild enough without adding chemicals to the cauldron. But, nonetheless, Kitties was written in a way where I didn't worry much about what it meant. I felt what I was writing was idiotically silly. So I'd have a strong plot line, and silly characters who took themselves very seriously, and I'd just charge ahead with the humor. 

It often seems 

That serious themes 

Pop out in humorous plays. 

You can argue about them for days, 

Or just accept that it's funny 

And stupidly punny.

The El

Train tracks built

On iron stilts

Let you loop around 

Chicago’s downtown. 

But the track’s clatter

Makes it hard to chatter

Beneath the El. 

You have to yell!

Or else, just wait

Till the noise abates.

Meditating on the Declaration

There's no guarantee of happiness, 

You just get a right to pursue it - 

But when given a chance to grasp it, 

I recommend that you do it.

Denial

I am not a robot

But sometimes I wish I were. 

I wouldn’t need to sleep

Or shave my facial fur.

Ursine

The lair of a bear 

Is a where to beware.

Hard to Describe

Words which once spilled out of my brain 

Onto a page, where they sat, very plain, 

Are played with by actors, and rapidly change 

From familiar... to charmingly strange.

Helpful Advice

Told my doc I had insomnia,

The worst I’d ever had!

He said don’t lose any sleep over it,

It doesn’t sound that bad.

4D

Mathematicians sometimes speak 

Of 4-D Euclidean space

But nowhere in Euclid’s Greek

Can we actually find any mention 

Or diagrammatic trace

Of figures in four dimensions.