Dallas…
The city of evil wizards
Think T. Boone Pickens
Think H. Ross Perot
A Red Neon Pegasus
Flies among the high-rise tops
Downtown
The Medieval Times Castle
Holds jousting tournaments
Alongside Interstate 35E
The Once and Future King
Was slain in Dealy Plaza
And Camelot was no more
Filed under autobiography, poem, poetry
…Ideas come out of nowhere, and fit together so easily.
…People can laugh at almost anything, and for almost infinite reasons.
…Ugly things can contain great beauty, and beauty can conceal great horrors.
…Songbirds can be everywhere that there is life.
…You can live many lifetimes if only you allow yourself to be fully absorbed by books.
…You can be more confident and bold when you are naked in the world than when you wear suits of armor behind castle walls.
…When people get what they wish for, it never works out like they thought it would.
…People will often let others tell them what to think, but still won’t listen if you tell them they are wrong.
…You can learn wisdom from satire and foolishness from a philosophy teacher.
…Gravity works even when your brain doesn’t.
…We survived even when the clowns ran the circus.
…We didn’t really learn about the problems with drawing in our textbooks, until we became the teacher.
…Bananas do the Tango when the grocery store is closed
(Now, there’s an idea with real a-peel!)
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;
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.
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.
Filed under humor, insight, irony, philosophy, poem, poetry, Uncategorized
Found poetry begins with three found things
Picked up at random
Like three pictures from my internet gallery
Plagiarized from somebody’s fandom
And then you have to sit and have a thought
About how it fits together
To make a stupid poem you’ve wrought
That’s not about the weather
You must pretend the very best you can
There’s sense in what you’ve found
And it fits together as if you had a plan
That was always quite profound.
———————————————————————————————–wow!-a-weird-divider————————-
Writing a found poem
Okay, this is the essay part. That first part is a terrible poem written by me to illustrate how to make your own found poem. Of course, you should know that I was not a natural-born poet. I am among the lower percentages of America’s worst-possible poets. Right there somewhere between the poetry books of Farley Bumbletongue and the Collected Musings of Hans Poopferbrains of Snarkytown, Wisconsin.
But I take great pride in my abilities as a terrible poet. You see, what I mainly was, truly was, was an English teacher of middle school and high school kids. And found poems were an activity in the classroom intended to teach writing skills, creativity, and an appreciation of what a poem actually is.
I needed a large usable picture file cut out of Christmas catalogs, Walmart advertisements, newspapers, magazines (“What are those?” is the most common comment you would get out of today’s classrooms,) grocery-store bargain flyers, outdated calendars, and any other non-pornographic picture sources available.
I would hand out three random images pulled out of the picture file without looking at them to each student (or small groups of students) and then require them to create a poem of at least twelve lines with an optional rhyme scheme and rhythm.
I would have to remind them not to eat the pictures, even if they were pictures of food. And with middle school students I would have to have extra pictures for the next class to replace the ones they ate anyway.
I would tell them there was a time-limit, specified to be much shorter than the actual time I planned to give them, and then let them create horrible poetry. Near Vogon quality in its horribleness.
When all of this was done, we would have a good long laugh by sharing the pictures and poems, and find out who the truly wacky and perverted poets were.
Now, don’t go telling parents that we teachers are wasting their children’s precious learning time this way, but it is not I lesson I created. Simply a lesson I used at least once every year.
But the real question on my mind is, “Given three random pictures, what kind of poem would you write?” Feel free to share.
When the old mind wanders…
They tell you you’re just too slow.
But thoughts like mine drift everywhere,
And the edges of the universe… are a place to go.
Maybe I should write in red.
And argue with the voices
That rhyme inside my head.
And break the rhyme scheme
Here and there
Because of what they said.
Or maybe I should write in blue
Because I’ve been thinking in the nude
And laying all my secrets bare
Which really might be rude.
But the old mind wanders…
In the form of a poem,
And breaks and squanders
Tallest waves in mere foam.
Filed under artwork, clowns, goofy thoughts, humor, nudes, Paffooney, poem, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life
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
I’m a Mickey, yes, indeedy…
Foopty-Hoopty-Hoodilly-Hoo!
Chicken-ninja throwing stars,
Hit their targets thrown from Mars…
Foopty-Hoodilly-Hee
And when the pandas drive their cars,
Their tire treads are candy bars!
Take that truth from me!
Foopty-Hoopty-Fiddly-Ho!
Being a Mickey is a rabbity thing…
As if it were Bugs who taught us to sing,
And unmusical music we all start to bring…
Because we use only the words that we know!
Foopty-Hoodilly-Fling-a-ding-Ding!
Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, Mickey, Paffooney, Paffooney cartoony, poetry, rabbit people
As a boy, drawing girls was always important to me. I didn’t understand them. I couldn’t control them other than to make them dislike me. I couldn’t get away from them… but I could draw them. I could completely control what the picture looked like. And I could make them be whatever I wanted.
Mysterious… inscrutable… attractive… weird….
Infuriating… beautiful… sassy… and rude.
Sugar and spice, they say…
With everything nice, they say…
Yet still with the power to kill and to eat me.
Cute girls and sweet girls…
The proper and neat girls….
Girls with no clothes on…
And girls I’m afraid of.
I have to draw girls just to understand me.
I tend to draw and photograph and make artistic images about the things that I love.
Swashbuckling adventure.
Magic.
Scantily dressed young girls.
Iowa landscapes.
Forgotten dreams that came back to me in the night.
Spaceheart and Mai Ling.
Stories with amazing features and paintings with soft sable brushwork.
Revealing who I used to be…
And who I still am.
Songs sung with paintbrushes.
And colored pencils.
Drawings done with syncopated tunes.
And full-color half-notes.
The people and places and faces…
Of who I am and who I love…
For life is a poem sung out loud.
And to live is an artform.
So we must make art to live.
Short and Sweet
No, I am not talking about a midget girlfriend today.
I am talking about brevity.
Some of the best writing gets directly to the point.
You have to know how to say exactly what you want to say.
Then say it.
Like, “Tootie is a Cutie.”
And once said, the point made is…
Sheer poetry.
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Filed under commentary, goofiness, humor, poetry