Category Archives: poem

May 11, 2024 · 12:08 am

Cloudscapes

Once upon a time, the English poet and, I would argue, cartoonist, William Blake once said, “You look at the sky and see clouds, while I see the assembled heavenly host!” This is why my literature class in college about the Romantic Poets of his day made him out to be a certifiable nutcase who probably belonged in in a mental institution. (And back then, in the 1800’s, the sanitarium was a place where inconveniently crazy people went to die.)

Look at a couple of my cloudscapes. Do you see angels?

Cloudscapes (a poem)

Blue and white and filled with light…

The cloudscape burns with angels…

And wholly bought with grace unsought…

I long to fly with angels…

Are they really there in the cloud-filled air?

I see them there, they’re angels!

So, there you have it. I’m a loon. I don’t even have the excuse of being a Romantic Poet and well-known for my poetry as a defense against the loony bin. But as the matter stands, I am fully willing to accept the consequences. Creativity has its price. And, while you may not agree that I am somewhat creative, I am swimming in a vast ocean of perceived revelations that enriches me and fulfills me at the very same moment that it drains all the energy from my soul. If that is not what it means to see angels… then I do not know anything of use to anyone but me.

The word “angel” (according to Wikipedia, the source of all true knowledge) comes to English via Late Latin and the word “angelus” which the Romans stole from the Greek ἄγγελος ángelos, The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh denoting simply “messenger” without specifying its nature. (Notice, I am giving full credit to Wikipedia because it is far more all-knowing than I.)

I have many atheistic and agnostic notions in my ultimate belief systems, but still, I claim to be a Christian and believe in God Jehovah… within limits. I still communicate with God on a daily basis, and while I don’t publicly pray anymore (a notion promoted by the Biblical Jesus) I find answers to my questions and solutions to my problems from the observable universe around me.. the messengers of God. So, now that I have fully rationalized being crazy as a loon, I am going to tell you where that craziness is taking me. I started a new Paffooney for one of the books I am working on. Here is the pencil sketch;

This will be a picture of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, the farmer Kyle Clarke. In my fiction, Kyle loses his farm to the bank (in the Family Farm Crisis of the 1980’s) and believing himself incapable of any longer supporting his family, kills himself. But the thing is, the love of his daughter transcends death for Kyle. She is able to reconnect with him time and again because the angels work for her as well as for Kyle. I may be loony and ill in real life, facing the Angel of Death myself, but I am not done doing God’s work… not yet… not for a long time to come.

The finished picture.

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Filed under humor, Paffooney, poem

Tagged as angels, creativity, goofiness, humor, metaphor, novel writing, paffooney, pencil sketch, philosophy, photo Paffooney, poem, poems, poet, poetry, religion, William Blake, writing

February 6, 2024 · 3:00 am

Re-Minders

Lately I have been having memory troubles. You know what I mean, when you walk through a doorway with a definite purpose in mind.and then, on reaching the other room, you have no earthly idea what that purpose was. It happens to me regularly. In fact, I can even start writing a sentences, and then I… What was I talking about? Oh, yes. I need to practice writing some more spectacularly bad poetry, before I forget how to do it.

Why did I use this picture? I don’t know. I have forgotten.

Re-minders

Sometimes…

My mind slips out of my left ear…

And I can’t remember things.

So, I have to search under the table…

To find my mind…

And then I remember that that’s not how a mind works.

Forgetfulness

Tell me now, before I forget…

What was I supposed to remember?

Was it something religious, important, and good…

That comes towards the end of December?

Was I supposed to buy something for somebody then?

I wrote a note to myself in September…

Oh, gosh! How could I ever forget that?

Now the fire is nothing but embers.

Finding Fairies in my Hair

Why do I have elflocks all snarled up in my hair?

Surely some fairies have been twisting it up there.’

But if I can catch one and make him confess,

He claims I don’t comb it, and that’s why it’s a mess.

**********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Doofy Me

If I forget everything I ever knew,

Would it be possible that I am still smarter than you?

Old Socrates said he knew nothing at all.

And so he asked questions from Winter through Fall.

I hope I retain enough brain to remember

That everyone needs to wear clothes in December.

Yep, I still obviously remember how to write spectacularly bad poetry. It is my contribution to literature. Virtually all poets will be able to say, “At the very least, I am a better poet than Beyer.”

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Filed under autobiography, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, poem, poetry

January 18, 2024 · 2:51 am

The Philosophy of Bad Poetry

I do write poetry. But I must admit, I am not a serious poet. I am a humorist at heart, so I tend to write only goofy non-serious poems like this one;

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So here is a poem that rhymes but has too much “but-but-but” in it. A poem about pants should not have too many “buts” in it. One butt per pair, please. So this is an example of spectacularly bad poetry. Why do we need bad poetry? Because it’s funny. And it serves as a contrast to the best that poetry has to offer.

As a teacher I remember requiring students to memorize and recite Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”. Now this sort of assignment is a rich source of humorous stories for another day. Kids struggle to memorize things. Kids hate to get up in front of the class and speak with everybody looking at them. You get a sort of ant-under-a- magnifying-glass-in-the-sun sort of effect. But in order to truly get the assignment right and get the A+, you have to make that poem your own. You have to live it, understand it, and when you reach that fork in the road in your own personal yellow wood, you have to understand what Frost was saying in that moment. That is the life experience poetry has a responsibility to give you.

roads-diverging

Hopefully I gave that experience to at least a few of my students.

Bad poetry makes you more willing to twirl your fingers of understanding in the fine strands of good poetry’s hair. (Please excuse that horrible metaphor. I do write bad poetry, after all.)

But all poetry is the same thing. Poetry is “the shortest, clearest, best way to see and touch the honest bones of the universe through the use of words.” And I know that definition is really bad. But it wasn’t written on this planet. (Danged old Space Goons!) Still, knowing that poetry comes from such a fundamental place in your heart, you realize that even bad poetry has value. So, I will continue writing seriously bad poetry in the funniest way possible. And all of you real poets who happen to read this, take heart, I am making your poetry look better by comparison.

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Filed under humor, insight, irony, philosophy, poem, poetry, Uncategorized

Tagged as Robert Frost as good poetry

January 12, 2024 · 2:56 am

Edwin Arlington Robinson, the Sardonic Poet

Born in Maine a boy, when his parents wanted a girl,

They took a full six months before they gave his name a whirl,

And they drew Edwin from a hat drawn by a man from Arlington Maine

And the remainder of his life, “Edwin Arlington Robinson,” gave the poor boy a pain.

And as he grew into a man of letters, he wrote some fine poems at school,

But the woman he most loved in life married his brother, a fool.

And so, he showed a pessimist, in poetry ever mocking and darkly cruel.

And Pulitzers he won three times, the man could write a jewel.

To write such poems as Robinson’s, you must learn what “sardonic” means,

And suffer a lot in crisply-writ verse that tastes mostly like baked beans.

……………………………..

Okay, I know this evil Mickey poem does not do E.A. Robinson justice. He was a fine master of verse-craft. It has been said (by an Iowa State American Literature professor, so I know it must be true) that Robinson, when asked what he did one day, said, “I studied my poem all day, and then added a comma.”

Surprised by the answer, the questioner then asked what he did the next day. ”I studied the poem all day again, and took the comma out.”

Recently I read his book of poetry called The Children of the Night. It is a fine book of sardonic poems (here meaning; poems that are mocking, pessimistic, and cynical… in case you didn’t look up “sardonic.”) He often writes in this book poems about Thomas Hardy and the poems written by Matthew Arnold and other dusty old writers of the late and early 20th centuries. So, I have given old E.A. the same honor in Mickey’s book of poems as he gave them.

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November 25, 2023 · 2:08 am

The Reds and the Blues

Lord, grant me peace

In times of great violence

Grant me wisdom

As everything around me burns in ignorance

Let the cold blues

Be tempered with warm reds

Let me juggle life’s fortunes and misfortunes alike

Red balls over blue balls

Yellow, purple, and green

Over and under

The spiraling path

I’ll keep written records

In journals with pictures

And share my discoveries

With any who’ll listen

And I’ll always keep close in my heart

The people and places and memories

That mattered and shattered

The whole color wheel

Because Shakespeare once showed us the whole color wheel

Is necessary for magic to form on the page

And though yellow is also a primary too

It’s the reds that warm life as the color of blood

And the blues let us chill as the deeper color of ice

But let there no period be

To stop the color progression

Of this warm/cold blank verse

Nor rhythm or rhyme sully

The Reds and the Blues

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Tagged as Saturday Art Day

November 24, 2023 · 2:35 am

A Frosty Full Moon in a Pink Dawn Sky

Under the Full Moon

The air is cold in the age of old.

We’re no longer brave, in the moonlight wave.

Day has ended, night impended,

And darkest dawn looms for the faun.

We cannot wake with a sudden shake.

Our sacred lore responds no more.

Silence abounds on the frosty ground.

And the final score has left us poor.

A more reasonable paragraph;

This is actually a 2019 post from before the pandemic. The creepy poetry, however, still applies.

I am not, at this writing, feeling very spry anymore. I substituted for an ESL teacher in Irving yesterday. I enjoyed it. But the frosty cold weather took its toll on me, as did the misbehavior of clownish 11th graders. I am left exhausted and thoroughly convinced that huge high school classes averaging thirty kids in them are not something I am well enough to deal with anymore. I probably need to decide against taking any future high school sub jobs. They make me deathly tired and inspire creepy poetry about mortality in me. Anyway, it caused me to do some picture-making, and some silly poetical complaining.

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November 23, 2023 · 1:16 am