At the Viking Poetry Slam

                A mastery of poetry was a must for any young Viking.  A few Viking poems dwelt on love, but the heroes often undermined their happiness by chasing adventures that separated them from their beloveds. 

                                     The Wall Street Journal

“Who’s got the beer cooler?”

It’s 1230, and I don’t mean by the hands of the sundial.  I mean it’s 1230 A.D., and me and my buddies, Gunnlaug Snaketongue and Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, are having our regular Tuesday night poetry session.  We meet at Ericson’s, where they have 20 ounce King Olaf’s for only a clam, and pitchers for five clams.  Let me tell you, we usually set back the progress of Western civilization a couple of decades before the night is through.

Ericson’s:  Get there early for Friday Night Oxen Races.

We roll the bar dice to see who goes first, which is actually not the most desirable spot.  It’s better if your listeners have consumed a little mead before you start to bare the workings of your innermost soul.  Unfortunately, I roll snake-eyes.

“You go first Kormak Ogmundarson!” Hallfred says with glee.  I can tell he’s going to pounce on my handiwork like a blood eagle grabbing a baby chick.

“Okay, here goes nothing,” I say.  I take one last drink to wet my throat, then I launch the Viking ship of my verse onto unknown seas.

That night I dreamt of a maiden fair
whose dress I removed with a flourish.
What I saw underneath was a navel and hair
but a body that looked overnourished.

I looked up from my rudimentary parchment note pad to judge the effect of my quatrain on Gunnlaug and Hallfred.  “You say overnourished like it’s a bad thing, dude,” Gunnlaug says with a look of disapproval.

“But wait,” I say, anticipating twentieth-century cable TV pitchman Billy Mays, “there’s more.”

“There’s more bad poetry where that came from!”

“Let ‘er rip,” Hallfred says as he unleashes a belch that could be heard in Vinland.

“Okay,” I say, then compose myself and start in again.

She could have been my winter consort
if I’d paid more attention to her
But I was consumed by televised sport
and another Vike came to woo her.

Vinland, via the scenic route

I’m surprised to see a look of empathy on Gunnlaug’s face.  “That’s beautiful, man,” he says as he pretends there’s something in his eye in order to hide the fact that he’s wiping away a tear.  “Ain’t that always the way.  You’d like to have a relationship with a woman, but you want some freaking adventure with your guy friends, too.”

Hallfred, on the other hand, being the Troublesome Poet that he is, is unmoved.  “What the hell are televised sports?” he asks.

“It’s an anachronism I threw in for dramatic effect,” I say.  “This is a stupid blog post–you’re going to have to wilfully suspend disbelief if you’re going to get anything out of it.”

He takes this in slowly, and mutters a grudging “Okay–that was pretty good.”  He’s not the brightest shield on the battlefield, if you know what I mean, but he leaves a pretty wide wake at poetry slams because of his brooding good looks and primitive style.  Personally, I think it’s all a facade.  He’s so dumb his descendants will be going bare-chested to football games in Minnesota winters seven centuries hence.

“Show me what you got, big fella,“ I say to him throwing down the poetic gauntlet.

He pops a handful of squirrel nuts into his mouth, and washes them down with a gulp of beer.  “Here goes,” he says, and begins:

My old lady’s quite a dish
if I do say so myself.
She don’t come along when I icefish,
she eats tuna from the pantry shelf.

Gunnlaug emits a tepid grunt of approval.  “I sense the difference between your maleness and her femaleness,” he says looking off into the distance, “but you didn’t do much to establish dramatic tension.”

It’s clear that Hallfred is hurt by this faint praise, and he lashes out, bringing his pickaxe down on the bag of Astrix and Obelix Pub Fries that Gunnlaug’s been munching on.  “Anybody can be a critic,” he fumes.  “Let’s hear some poetry out of you, blubber-belly!”

“Well kiss my ass and call it a love story,” Gunnlaug says with a withering smile.  “Looks like Mr. Brutalist has a sensitive side, too.”

“Your doggerel smells like two-year-old Swedish Fish.”

“Actually,” I interject in an effort to keep the peace, “Swedish Fish stay moist and chewy forever in the patented Sta-Fresh resealable bag.”

But Hallfred isn’t letting his rival go.  “Come on, man,” he says angrily, as other patrons turn their heads in the hope of seeing a senseless killing.  “It’s Rhyme Time.”

Gunnlaug looks Hallfred up and down, then a frosty snort of Arctic air escapes from his nostrils.  “It ain’t bragging if you can do it,” he says, then clears his throat.  The silence in the room is broken only when he speaks in a low voice steeped in regret:

I once got a peek of a wench’s breasts
that made me forget I was a Viking.
I’m telling you man, they were the best–
I gave up my Harley and biking.

An audible gasp rose from the crowd.  The ultimate aesthetic error of Viking poetry–to succumb to the wiles of a woman!  How was Gunnlaug going to get out of the lyrical gulag he’d wandered into?

She had a big hat with horns festooned
and said “Dear Vike, please impale me.”
But a friend had some tickets to the Wild vs. Bruins
“Stay with me,” she cried, “and don’t fail me!”

Now it was Hallfred’s turn to snort.  “The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole,” he said with a sneer, “is to stop digging.”

“Hold your freaking reindeer,” Gunnlaug said.  “I ain’t through.”

He took a deep breath, then began again.

I looked in her eyes, both drowning in tears–
Though watery, they still looked nice.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll make it up to you dear–
I’ll take you to Smurfs on Ice!”

Available in print and Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection poetry is kind of important.

The People Who Won’t Get Back to Me

Literary agents, also editors,
But most assuredly not my creditors,
Someday they won’t mean jack to me—
The people who won’t get back to me.

Old girlfriends I find on the web—
One’s named Robin, the other’s a Deb.
I wonder whatever attracted me—
To the women who won’t get back to me.

Publishers, magazines, infamous authors–
I’ve sent them all emails, they can’t be bauthored.
Their silence speaks loudly this fact to me,
The people who won’t get back to me.

The people who’ve said to me “Let’s do lunch!”
Over the years I’ve collected a bunch.
There may be a hundred, I don’t know exact-i-ly.
The people who won’t get back to me.

Prospects to whom I’ve sent urgent wires
Urban mass choirs that I’d like to hire
Black, white or brown, they all turn their backs to me,
The numerous people who just won’t get back to me.

The Sure Cure for Writer’s Block

She takes her lattes extra skinny.
She drives a Cooper, it’s a Mini.
But when she takes pen in hand to put black on white,
the sad truth is—she can’t write.

His political opinions are properly aligned
towards the conventional wisdom, he’s inclined.
But as much as he tries to get his sentiments right,
His problem is—he can’t write.

They’ve taken the courses, responded to “prompts,”
you’d think that the scribbling part would be a romp.
But as much as they look like writerly types
They’re incapable of what’s known in the trade as “sitzfleisch”:

The ability to sit for hours on end,
to ignore dog, cat, internet, family and friends,
with your butt in your chair,
while your head’s in the air–

that’s what it takes if you want to give shape,
to airy nothingness, not a mouth all agape,
and an eye towards fashion and the au courant dance,
it’s the very opposite of ants in your pants.

Do I Hear an Alarm, or is Someone Reciting Free Verse?

          Evelyn Waugh gave Edith Sitwell a pocket air-raid siren, which she would set off when people asked her whether free verse is more truly poetic than rhymed.

                The Letters of Nancy Mitford & Evelyn Waugh

Edith Sitwell

 

As I turned the lock on the vault at the First Third Short National Bank, I could tell I was thisclose to realizing my dream; rolling in piles of dough, rifling safe deposit boxes for jewels and rare baseball cards, maybe even finding a pen in a bank that worked.

“You’re a freakin’ master,” my getaway car driver Mitch said. “It’s like watchin’ Einstein play the piano or sumpin’.”

I smiled at him and said “Thanks,” but held my finger to my lips. “I’ll need absolute silence.”

“You got it pal.”

Click-click-click I heard through my stethoscope. One more turn to the right and the tumblers would all fall into place! I held my breath and eased the dial ever-so-delicately with my fingers, but jumped back startled when I heard an alarm!

“What did you do?” I asked as I turned to look at Mitch.

“Nuthin’–I didn’t do nuthin. Except . . .”

“Except what?”

“Well, I did mumble a little sumpin’ to myself . . .”

“You fool!” I screamed, packing up my safecracking tools. “What was it?”

“Roses are red, violets are blue,
I like chocolate, and you can’t skate.”

……………………………………….

The sky was dark and foreboding. There was a stillness in the air, an eerie calm that seemed to presage an unseen, unknown calamity.

The wind picked up a bit–I could tell by the way wisps of grandma’s hair were blowing where they came loose from her bun.

And then I heard it. The tornado warning siren from the National Guard Armory. There was no time to lose!

“Papa-daddy!” I shouted to my father. “Tornado’s comin’!”

My mom emerged from the kitchen, where she’d been canning okra and rhubarb for the winter. “Gramma!” she shouted, “into the root cellar–tornado’s coming!”

Grandmother turned her face to the wind and tilted her head towards town, the better to hear.

“We’re all gonna die!” my little sister Baby Elizabeth cried.

“No,” my grandmother said, slowly and thoughtfully. “That’s not the tornado alarm–”

“It’s not?” I asked as I tried to pull her out of her chair.

“No, sweetie,” she said. “That’s the siren they blow when a surrealist poet commits the pathetic fallacy.”

…………………………….

It was time for our monthly “duck and cover” drill, a routine we were all growing a little tired of. Yes, the Russians had the atomic bomb, yes Nikita Khrushchev had threatened to “bury” America, but still, the silly routine of getting down on the floor and covering our heads to protect ourselves from nuclear fallout had grown tiresome. We were all hooked on phonics, and would have much preferred to practice our “th” and “ph” sounds. Besides, I was tired of looking at Timmy Rouchka’s butt.

And then we heard it. A low moan at first, rising in pitch until it became a horrid scream–this time it was for real!

Sister Agnesita drew the blinds, the better to keep out radioactive isotopes such as strontium 90, the secret ingredient that enabled kids who wore Poll Parrot shoes to run faster and jump higher. “Hit the floor, kids!” she yelled as she comforted Susan Van de Kamp, whose show-and-tell presentation on the dikes of Holland would have to be postponed for the nuclear armageddon.

Just then the classroom door opened and we saw the principal, Sister Mary Joseph Arimathea. “Back to your multiplication tables,” she said brusquely.

“What happened?” Sister Agnesita asked with a mixture of relief and confusion.

“Some dingbat named e. e. cummings tripped the alarm.”

Available in print and Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “poetry is kind of important.”

My Poetic Nemesis

April is the cruelest month, wrote T.S. Eliot, and as a poet he knew whereof he spake. (Archaic past tense provided at no extra charge.)  April may be Poetry Month, but April is also the month in which the rejection letters and no-you-didn’t-win-the-Alice-Wambsley-Memorial-Poetry-Competition notices from the autumn submission cycle arrive in the mail.

Eliot: “Darn it—I lost again.”

But I’d been through all that before, so last fall I put on a Bush-Obama-Petraeus Verse Surge, sending out over 400 poems. I would become a published poet before turning–well, I won’t tell you what I’ll be turning–or expire tragically trying.

The fruits of my labor arrived yesterday. “We are pleased to inform you that your poem Thoughts on Waking After Spending the Night at a Kosher Vegetarian Commune has been accepted by plangent voices. Due to our extensive backlog, it is anticipated that publication will not occur until the fall 2025 issue.”

A (much) younger Hazel Flange

This, I thought, called for a celebration. I got in the car and headed over to the Coach & Four, the faux-colonial watering hole where the elite of our little exurban town—insurance salesmen, CPAs, the local zoning attorney—meet to eat and greet. And to confront my poetic nemesis, Hazel Flange.

Hazel has been lording it over me for years. She’s got all the good accounts in town: McBride’s Super Market, where she composes rhymed couplets for the flyers and paper shopping bags (“Looking for something to eat on Easter?  Our ham and lamb will make a feaster!”); Olney’s GMC-Chevrolet (“If you’re going to a gala, best that you should buy Impala!”); Muckerman’s Funeral Home (“We’ll bury your kin with quiet dignity—we promise our bill won’t be very bignity.”)

Then there are the special commissions—birthday, anniversary and pet poems. Have to hand it to the old girl, she was the one who came up with business model. Go to another biddie’s house for bridge club, compliment the household dog, cat or goldfish, write a poem about it for the local paper. Then, when the owner is basking in the reflected glory of compliments from all her friends, offer to make her a laminated copy, suitable for framing—for twenty bucks. “I just love your little Poodie, he is such a darling cutie!” Gag me, as the Valley Girls used to say, with a spoon.

But now the shoe is on the other foot. With Kosher Vegetarian Commune I’m not only published, I’ve introduced a genre of my own creation to the world of verse; poems whose titles are at least 75% as long as the poems themselves! Count them off:

This is kosher, this is trayfe,
One unclean, the other sayfe.
All day long we work and slayfe
Keeping kosher from the trayfe.

Pretty neat, huh? So it is with a new confidence that I stroll into the bar at the Coach & Four.  It’s not Les Deux Maggots, or The White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death—but it will do. Except for the bathroom stalls—you know the one that begins “Here I sit all broken-hearted” don’t you?—the only poetry in the house is composed by Hazel, recited to a table crammed with her fawning sycophants.

I wave my hand as I stroll up to the bar and make the announcement I’ve been dying to proclaim for lo these many years. “Marty,” I say to the bartender, “potato chips and snack foods for everybody—and see what the boys in the back room will have!”

With that a scramble the likes of which have not been seen since the Oklahoma land rush begins; there are only so many bags of Cape Cod Parmesan & Roasted Garlic Chips on the Snack-Rack, and it’s every man for himself.

Eyes on the prize.

I order my usual—a Smutty Nose Elderberry Lite I.P.A.—and lean back to take in the room, holding the tall-boy bottle Jeff Bridges-style, oh-so-casually around the very tip of the neck. I cast a glance in Hazel’s direction—she gives me the steely-eyed gaze that has caused so many budding young aesthetes to realize there’s room for only one poetess in our town, and she’s not going anywhere.

I stand up and begin to work the room—suddenly I’m every man’s hero now that the out-of-work “consultants” and “advisors” in town are chowing down on Andy Capp Pub Fries on my nickel. After many slaps on the back and congratulations, I mosey over to Hazel’s table and, with an affected look of surprise, greet her.

“Why, Hazel,” I say, beaming, “fancy meeting you here! How’ve you been?” I don’t try to party-kiss her—in her dotage she has taken to applying rouge to her cheekbones. She read in Marie Claire that Celine Dion does something similar to make her nose look smaller.

“Hello,” she replies in a measured tone and just the hint of a combination smile-sneer—a “snile,” a “smeer”?—on her lips. “I see you have something to celebrate—finally.”

That hurts. Hazel had her first poem published when she was in fourth grade. I spotted it for the Christina Rossetti rip-off that it was—“Who can see the wind, neither you nor me, but when the wind is blowing, it tickles both my knees”—but apparently the editors of My Little Messenger weren’t as well read as me.

“Yes, yes, that I do,” I reply, trying hard to retain my composure. “Of course, it’s nothing to compare with the success you’ve had. Writing rhymed couplets for discount tire and battery stores.”

“Whence from your car you do dismount, check our snow tires at deep discounts.”

There is a collective intake of breath by the circle of admirers at Hazel’s table, but she’s as cool as a poker player sitting on pocket aces. “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” she says, going all Dr. Johnson on me.

The flow of air is reversed—the little group explodes with laughter—but I ignore the obloquy they think they are raining down on me. I’m after the Big Tuna Salad on White Toast Sandwich her own bad self.

“How’s about a little mano-a-womano verse battle—right here, right now, you and me?”

“Une petite slamme de poesie?” she replies, using up all the French she knows outside a Chef Boyardee can.

“That’s right. Winner take all. Must be original, spontaneous work, rhymed and metered.”

“My apartment has a separate meter,” one of her followers says, displaying the level of ignorance that is required in order to appreciate Hazel’s verse.

“Stifle it, Maeve,” Hazel snaps at the woman, and then says to me—”You’re on.”

“Peachy,” I say with a smarmy smile. “Ladies first—and no crib notes.”

The room is so quiet you can hear a chip drop, and from the bar I detect that Bob Muldowney, head of the Public Works department, has let one fall to the floor.

“If I’m not mistaken, that was a Cool Ranch Dorito?” I say with a note of expectation in my voice as I wait upon the answer, showing off my ear.

“That’s amazing,” Muldowney says.

“That’s the kind of ear it takes to be a first-class poet,” I say smugly. “Hazel—your serve.”

The dowager versifier clears her throat. She cocks her head a little to one side, like a parakeet—my guess is what she comes up with will be as derivative as “Polly want a cracker?”

She steadies herself by putting her fingers on the table, closes her eyes, tosses an errant spit curl aside and begins.

How lovely to be a poet
How wonderfully rewarding
It is like a free vacation trip
On a cruise ship you are boarding.

But each night when I’m finally done
I brush my teeth and floss.
A poetessa’s job is this:
To pluck wheat from the dross.

I’m tempted to yell “mixed metaphor,” but it’s the playoffs, and I know I’m not going to get the call.  No ref wants to blow a freestyle poetry battle in front of a big crowd and I have to say, even though it’s against my interests, that I agree—let ‘em play.

Woman with distaff: Whence it came, hence the name.

Hazel’s toadies are applauding politely but this is a bar, the audience is disproportionately male, and most of the guys are sitting on their hands, waiting to hear something from the non-distaff side.

“Great stuff, Hazel,” I say magnanimously. “I’ll give you the email address for The New Yorker when we’re done.” This is known as “trash-talking,” and as a Celtics fan during the Larry Bird Era, I learned from the master.

“Shhh—Larry’s going to recite now!”

The guys at the bar are looking at me with a mixture of hope and trepidation. They’re the ones who’ve been scratching doggerel on the walls of the stalls in the men’s rooms, inking haiku above the urinals, suffering under the yoke of genteel feminine poetry for so many years as Hazel asks them to turn down the games on the four giant-screen TVs so her umpty-dumpty-dumpty/umpty-dumpty-dump lines can be heard. If I can take her down, it will be a Spartacus-like moment; the joint will once again be free for belching and bad language worthy of Dizzy Dean, who drew the scorn of St. Louis English teachers for saying “He slud in there” on the Baseball Game-of-the-Week.

Dizzy Dean: He really said it.

“Hazel,” I begin with an off-hand, informal air that catches her off guard,

this is stupid stuff;
your pansies and violets—
your fairies at dawn or later in
the gloaming.

what the hell is a gloaming anyway?
and why would you bother to use it when poeming?
I do not like it, and no man could;
find another word please, if you would.

but in the meantime, hear me out;
the matter, we say, is free from doubt.
a bar’s not the place for poems like lace doilies,
and also I noticed your nose is quite oily.

Kudos!

I hesitate to use the word “claque,” but the guys are behind me all the way on this one, and the place erupts with a noise not heard since Jason Varitek stuffed his catcher’s mitt in Alex Rodriguez’s mug. They don’t call it “home court advantage” for nothing.

The ladies’ table is a bit taken aback by the rough tactics and the thunderous acclaim, but Hazel recovers like the pro that—I have to admit—she is.

“Nicely done,” she says, although I can tell that it pains her to put a smile on her over-glossed lips.

“Thanks—you’re still my favorite poet named Hazel,” I say. Good sportsmanship is contagious, I guess. “Have a drink on me, okay?”

Hazel considers this for a moment, then says “Yes—I think I will,” and advances to the bar where Marty says “What’ll ya have?”

“I think,” she says as she eyes the racks of expensive liquor behind him, “a Brandy Alexander—with Courvoisier VSOP Cognac.”

“Hey,” I say quickly before Marty can pour. “I meant anything under five bucks.”

Available in print and Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “poetry is kind of important.”

Apologia for an On-Line Flirtation

(pace Matthew Prior)

You say you saw what I said last night
to a woman whom I’m not married to;
a quip on a social media site
dear, that’s what people—when on-line–do.

This sort of thing has happened to wits
since before the internet was invented.
Their women object to the things that they’ve writ
overestimating what was intended

by a fillip, a lagniappe, a mere bagatelle
that’s tossed to an acquaintance casual
of the opposite sex, who for all they can tell
is a rival, a lover quite actual.

The mistake that is made, by those not in the trade,
of stringing together words idly,
is to think the facetious one wants to get laid
by flirtations the poet casts widely.

At the end of the day (as the business drips say)
I always return home to you, dear.
And along the way, I never stray
I really have too much to do, dear.

You get my paycheck by direct deposit
you can see on-line all my expenses.
If it’s an affair of the heart you’re trying to posit
The facts rebut your inferences.

What woman would go with a man so cheap
that he’d only pay cash for his wooing?
If another woman I wanted to keep
lack of funds would be my undoing.

So let us end this tiresome strife,
it’s consumed too much of our night and our day.
I’ve many girl “friends” but only one wife
And believe me, I want to keep it that way.

 

 

The Gertrude Stein Look-Alike Contest

We’re getting up in years, we few forthright men who revealed to each other that we wanted to write back in our youth.  It takes a lot for a guy to open himself up that way to another man.

Is it Ed, or Gertrude?

 

There’s the odor of the effete about sitting down, waiting for inspiration, then scribbling your purple prose out on the blank page.  And there’s the sin of ambition.  You’re not content to become an accountant or an actuary–you want to become famous, huh?  You think you’re better than everybody else?

But we stuck with it with varying degrees of failure, and now find ourselves looking back on what we haven’t accomplished.  It’s about this time of year we get together for some wistful bonhomie as we slyly check out each other’s bald spots and paunches.

Faulkner:  Gave up a promising career as a postmaster and took the easy way out to become a Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

 

There’s Ed, the guy who was smitten with William Faulkner as an undergraduate and almost allowed his infatuation with the Mississippi Master’s stream-of-consciousness style to ruin his career as an air traffic controller.  There’s Rob, the Hemingway fan who had cosmetic surgery performed on his cat to add a toe to each paw.  And there’s me, the Fitzgerald nut with my inflatable Zelda love doll.

Regardless of whom we modeled himself after, we had to admit that four decades later we’d been worn down to the same nub.  When we hit our fifties, we all started to look not like our Lost Generation heroes, but like . . . Gertrude Stein. Stoop-shouldered, thick about the middle, not much hair.

“It was *sniff* cruel what he did to us!”

 

At first we joked about it in a nervous manner; keeping the horrible consequences at bay.  But after a few years of channeling the woman known for her sophisticated baby talk, we embraced our inner Gertrudes.  We turned competitive–as men are wont to do–and began to hold annual Gertrude Stein Look-Alike Contests.

When word got out there was the obligatory human interest story in the local paper, which got picked up by a wire service.  The next year we were overwhelmed, like Yasgur’s Farm by Woodstock.  Our little burg of twenty-some-thousand was transformed in a day to a mid-sized city five times that size by 80,000 grumpy, stocky, cross-dressing guys with close-cropped hair wandering around in baggy skirts muttering stuff like “I like this town but I don’t like that I’m in this town.”

You had to work to get it just right.  Some of the younger squads would come into town with fancy matching embroidered loden coats–”Milwaukee Gertrude Brood”–and then crap out when it came time to complete the phrase “a house in the country . . . “

“Is not the same as a country house!” I’d fairly shout at the laggards from the provinces who thought all you had to do was skim “Tender Buttons” the night before “Stein Time.”  Fat chance.  As the Great Lady herself said, “Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know?”

You’d hear guys at the cash bar complaining about the judges as they hitched up their loose-fitting dirndl skirts.  “Gimme a break,” I said to one loudmouth, and it wasn’t the absinthe talking.  “What did Gertrude say–’The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of bad luck that follows boasting.’”  That shut him up.

Best buds!

 

We went into the men’s room to relieve ourselves before we went on, and I caucused with Ed and Rob at the urinal.  “You’ve got to remember,” I said as I cleared a path through the knee-length scarf I’d added to my outfit that morning, “be paradoxical, obscure and repetitive.”

“What was the last one again?” Ed asked as he shook himself.

“Repetitive,” I replied.  “Like ‘I who am not patient am patient.’”

“Can I write crib notes on my sleeve?” Rob asked.

“NO!” I snapped, then lowered my voice when heads turned.  “The essence of a good gertrudesteinism is errant, antic circularity.”

“Okay,” Ed said over the roar of the hand dryer.

“You guys ready?” I asked.

“I guess,” Rob said.

“You guess?” I straightened him up with a stiffarm to the shoulder.  “‘It is funny that one who prepares is not ready.’  Got it?”

“I just don’t ‘get’ this Gertrude gal!”

 

A look of enlightenment came over him, as if he finally understood calculus, or Avogadro’s number, or the appeal of Kathie Lee Gifford.

“Got it,” he said.  “The one who ‘gets’ something is the one who is gotten.”

“Attaboy,” I said with a grin.  “Let’s go–in a direction we don’t want to go.”

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Dead Writers Make More Money.”

Don’t Go Breaking My Artichoke’s Heart

You’re so cruel, I can’t stand you.
You dip the leaves in butter when I hand them to you.
Then you pull them slowly though your teeth.
I’d hate to see what that looks like from underneath.

Don’t go breaking my artichoke’s heart—
I can’t stand to see how you tear them apart.
You peel off their petals, one at a time–
And then you act like you’re a friend of mine.

You eat them whether hot or cold.
I sit and watch you, it’s getting old.
I offer you zucchini and you say no thank you.
If it weren’t frowned upon I’d spank you.

Don’t go breaking my artichoke’s heart—
You treat it like a science when it’s really an art.
You dip them with care, then you eat them,
that’s no way for a human to treat ‘em.

Personally, I can’t stand the fuzzy center.
It’s in a place I don’t want to enter.
I think it’s disgusting how you savor the heart–
That’s got to be the most emotional part!

Don’t go breaking my artichoke’s heart—
Not if you want to be my only sweetheart.
It’s a thistle that’s also a vegetable–
I find that totally unacceptable.

Hepcat Herb Clark, Bongo-Playing Poet-Narc

“Beatnik” George Bermudez, an undercover narcotics officer, learned to play the bongos, memorized Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” and became a published poet in order to infiltrate drug rings.

Review of “St. Marks is Dead” by Joel Millman, The Wall Street Journal

“After I finish my solo do you guys want to buy and sell some drugs?”

As I rang the bell to the “pad” where I was told a crazy drug party was in progress, I gulped to clear my throat–I didn’t want to sound nervous when the host answered the door.  “Beatnik” George Bermudez had had his cover blown the Saturday night before, and I’d been called in to replace him while he went into hiding for awhile.  There was no telling what the beatnik drug “kingpins” would do if they caught a “rat.”  Make him watch an entire Professional Bowlers Association tournament–they were kingpins, after all.  Or it could be something worse, the ultimate in hepcat punishment: force me to listen to an entire evening’s worth of beat poetry.

I checked my shirt pockets; in one I had a voice-activated recorder to collect incriminating drug slang–“Mary Jane,” “weed,” “dope”–as evidence.  In the other, a Sony Walkman with a tape of Oscar Wilde’s “Amor Intellectualis” that I could listen to surreptitiously if anybody challenged me to recite one of his poems.  It was kind of a shibboleth among the druggie crowd; you had to know an Oscar Wilde poem by heart to make it into the inner sanctum, the room at the back of the apartment that had strings of beads hung from the lintel of the door frame to better conceal the illicit activity going on inside.  “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was no good anymore since Hernandez had been reverse-busted, and anyway, I could never figure out how you were supposed to get “jail” out of “gaol.”

Wilde:  “Please–leave me out of this post.”

I heard footsteps coming down the stairs and, when they stopped, I assumed I was being examined through the peephole.  The door opened just a crack–the “dealer man” didn’t unhook the safety chain–and I heard a voice say “Who’s there?”

“It’s me,” I said.

“Who is ‘me’?” the voice said.

“I think you mean ‘Who am I’–don’t you?”

“Don’t go all existential on me.”

“It’s not existentialism,” I said, bristling a bit.  “It’s just good old-fashioned grammar.”

“I had quotation marks–inverted commas–around the ‘me’,” the voice said.

“Oh, well, in that case, everything’s ‘cool’ man,” I said.  “I’m ‘Hepcat’ Herb Clark.”  I could have added the rest of my moniker–“Bongo-Playing Narc”–but I was undercover, and so was allowed to conceal my identity to the ‘perp.’”

I heard the chain scrape back through the lock, then the door opened and I saw him: Frankie “Skitch” Mayerson, kingpin di tutti kingpins.  “Who sent you?” he said.

“You’ve got to get inside the druggies sick, demented heads!”

“Bongo Players Local 148,” I said.

He looked me up and down with a skeptical gaze.  “Lemme see your bongos.”

I pulled my bongos out of my rucksack.  It was usually full of rucks but I had tossed them onto the ruck pile back at my “crib” before coming over.

“Skitch” looked them over, nodded and twisted his mouth into a little moue of approval.  “Not as good as the ones George ‘Beatnik’ Bermudez used to play, but I guess they’ll do.”

I started to step in the door but felt the shock of a stiff-arm to my chest.  “Wait a minute,” “Skitch” said.

“What?”

“Are you a published poet?”

He must have thought he was dealing with a real rookie.  “Of course I am.”

“Show me your publication credits,” he snapped.

“A day at the beach,” I said with a contemptuous grin on my lips.  “Like fallin’ out of bed.  It’s like takin’ candy from a . . .”

“Enough with the lame figures of speech!”

I reached into my rucksack and fanned my published poems in front of him, like a poker player showing a royal flush.  “Light, plangent voices, Spitball . . .”

He didn’t seem impressed, so I turned over my hole card.

“The Christian Science Monitor.”

I heard him exhale involuntarily.  “The same rag that published Sylvia Plath’s first poem?” he gasped.

“The same,” I said, and rather smugly.

“Then you’re jake with me,” he said.  “Come on up.”

I climbed the steps behind him and when we reached his second floor apartment, I entered a den of iniquity.  Once you walked through it, you got to the living room of iniquity, then the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom of iniquity.

“Everybody,” “Skitch” said.  “I’d like you to meet ‘Beatnik.’”

“Hey, Beatnik,” everybody said.  They were slovenly dressed and had bad posture, but each one kept their quotation marks on straight.

“Are you going to play the bongos for us . . . like the last ‘narc’ did?” a guy named “No Nickname” said.

I glared at him.  A few of the other “Bohemians” in the room stifled laughs.  For a group that thought of themselves as “liberated” I thought it was hypocritical of them to stifle stuff.  But that’s how the “beat” crowd was; self-proclaimed non-conformists who dressed alike, talked alike and thought alike.  A bunch of malcontents who were only happy when they were unhappy.  So-called “rebels” who went out of their way to . . .

“Why don’t you stop your internal monologue and . . . like play something for us–‘Beatnik’,” a willowy blonde named “Venus” said.

“Crazy, man!”

“I’ll see you and raise you,” I said, narrowing my eyelids to grim little slits.  “I’m gonna play a bongo solo and recite a poem at the same time.”

There was a gasp from the assembled multitude of attitudinizing post-adolescents.

“That’ll be wiggy!” a woman in a French sailor’s shirt said over the shoulder of the French sailor inside it.

“It would be like breaking the sound barrier, Daddy-O!” a cool tool in a beret said.  “But . . . can you really do it?”

I snorted at him with disdain, and recalled a homely expression from my days of manual labor in one of the “m” states in “flyover country” unknown to these East Coast “sophisticates.”  Out where men were men, women loved them, poems rhymed and jazz had a melody.  “If you don’t think I can do it,” I said, “just hide and watch.”

A few of the crazy cats and kittens heeded my warning and crouched behind the second-hand furniture and coffee table.  “5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1” I counted down, like some mad German scientist about to launch a rocket Americans needed foreign help to build because of the over-emphasis on social skills to the detriment of math and the sciences in our K-12 education system.  And then I fired my jets and achieved lift-off:

Yeah, bongo-crazy baby . . .
You’re the one for me, oh yeah!
You’re oh-so-bohemian baby
Not at all meh!

I looked at the disaffected youth before me–they seemed to be “digging” my “groove.”

Everything’s ‘cool’ baby,
Although you lit a flame with your sparks!
I like your groovy nickname baby
which is held in place by your quotation marks.

Available in Kindle and print format on amazon.com as part of the collection “poetry is kind of important.”

For Contestants in National Haiku Writing Month, Focus Is Kind of Important

SOMERVILLE, Mass.  Jayne Eisenstadt will be the first to admit that she’s not the world’s hardest-working writer.  “I took an independent study because I get freaked out by the deadlines in creative writing classes,” she says as looks off into the distance, searching for inspiration.  And how did she do, this reporter asks.  “I guess I’m too independent for independent study,” she says with her lips twisted into a little moue of chagrin.

But Eisenstadt made a New Year’s resolution that she was going to change her laggard ways, and began to search for a writing competition that wouldn’t tax her tender literary constitution.  “A month to write a novel is way too short,” she says, referring to the NaNoWriMo, the contest in which budding authors write a novel in a month.  “I thought I could handle a write-a-short-story-in-a-month contest, but I froze just as I was about to click on the ‘Enter’ button.”

After scouring various free listings of open calls, she was about to give up when a friend told her about “NaHaWriMo,” a contest that only requires contestants to crank out a single haiku in a month, albeit February, the shortest month on the calendar.  “Now that, I thought, was more my speed,” she says, referring to the seventeen syllable Japanese poetry form that is like writing with training wheels for blocked, buzzed or busy budding poets.

But as Groundhog Day rolled by and Valentine’s Day approached, Jayne found herself coming up short on her haiku, which she describes as a “work in progress that’s not progressing much.  Tell me how you like it so far,” she says, as she shifts gears to the elevated tone commonly used by poetry slam contestants:

I think of you all
the time. Do haikus have to
rhyme?

She grins sheepishly, but Steve Alfrond, another blocked writer who signed up to be her “writing buddy” in the contest, gives her a little “tough love” of the sort that her less engaged friends can’t provide her.  “I think you should try harder,” he says, looking into her eyes but maintaining a cool, professional distance.

Jayne, who is known in writer’s groups she’s quit or been kicked out of as overly sensitive to criticism, responds defensively.  “Let’s hear what you’ve written before you dump on me,” she huffs.

“Okay,” Steve says a bit warily, since he’s notorious among his friends as the “author of seven unfinished novels.”

Moon out my window
on the snow. Where does it go
during the day?

It’s Jayne’s turn to smile as she counts the syllables in the last line on the fingers of one hand.  “You came up one short, dubohead,” she says with a superior air.  “You only have four.”

Steve looks down at his pad, rests his chin on his pencil, then scratches out the question mark and re-writes the last line to read

during the day, huh?