This is not actually a picture of Boogendorf, this is Toonerville where the clocks are wrong and a giant Mickey Mouse lurks in the foothills beyond.
Today I mean to justify my existence before God and everybody. Apparently in the modern world you have to be certain things in your basic foundation to justify getting travel visas, citizenship, and a basic right to continue to exist unmolested. We apparently elected a new leader, the Mad King of Boogendorf, to make sure all Boogendorfers are suitably qualified to live in Boogendorf. So this is a brief photo essay to justify my case for why Boogendorf should accept me as a citizen and not execute me outright.
First of all, I am not one hundred per cent crazy. You can tell from this photo, can’t you?
This kooky dorfleflop can’t be any more than 65% crazy because his pin head is not large enough to harbor more than 65 out of every 100 truly derfy and sanity-stealing notions. (What is a dorfleflop, you say? Well, dorf is a German word for town, and dorfleflops flop in a dorf and think they belong like everybody else who has flopped there before.)
But using the Mad King of Boogendorf as a measuring stick (an orange measuring stick with an extra-long tie), that is clearly not crazy enough by half.
What’s the deal with the clocks always being wrong in Boogendorf?
I have always heard it said, “It takes a village to raise a child”. And I think that saying I heard is probably true. I was raised by the village of Rowan, Iowa in the 60’s and 70’s. I learned to draw there. And I can draw real cartoon human beings.
Of course, one must be careful to note that if you could actually draw real cartoon human beings they would be alive after that, and that would make you like God, able to create life from nothing more than pencil, pen, and paper. And in Boogendorf there is only room for one God. That, of course, is the Mad King of Boogendorf. So I guess that is a disqualifying quality too.
And that saying about a child raised by a village is a saying somehow connected to Hillary Clinton, and Hillary Clinton was defeated (I have also heard disgraced, demoralized, and denounced) in the last election by getting more votes than the Mad King of Boogendorf. So I am judged lacking by my upbringing too.
I am also undeniably guilty of playing with dolls. I mean, I collect them, I comb their hair, dress them in different clothes, take them apart and repair them, and pose them for pictures. That can’t be normal. But is it abnormal enough to make me qualified to be a Boogendorfer from the village of Boogendorf? Maybe if I plated them in gold or something, or had enough money to go to “golden shower” extremes? I guess I don’t understand how to be Boogendorfy enough to live in Boogendorf. The “Boo” in Boogendorf proves that you have to be pathologically afraid of things more, just like other Boogendorfers are. I am sure the average Boogendorfer is afraid of people who play with dolls. Especially if those weird people don’t own any guns and don’t like to kill stuff. That just ain’t natural. You even need to give guns to little girls to make them safe against those evil anti-Boogendorfers.
So, I guess I am doomed to live a life outside of the walls of Boogendorf (and they are really great walls, too). I should be grateful that the citizens of Boogendorf have only rejected me and not used their sacred second-amendment rights to execute me. For now, I am simply not a Boogendorfer.
Catch a Falling Star 
Get Up and Do!
It is daunting when bad fortune comes in waves, drowning us in debt, suffering, disabling illness, financial reversals, and so many more things I have been through this last year personally, so that we want to lie down and never get up.
But, I am not dead yet… and there is poetry to be lived.
I say that as one of the world’s fifty worst poets who ever lived. (In my defense, I am a humorist, and I write bad poetry on purpose.) My inspiration for the living of poetry comes from reading and living good poetry. I live because there is poetry by Walt Whitman. Of course, also Shakespeare… whoever he really was. And I understand that much of what I have learned in my brief and stupidly-lived 61 years comes from the poetry of the visionary poet I pictured above. Do you know him? If you have never read his poetry, you haven’t truly lived the poetry you need to live.
This poet taught me that “Being, not doing, is my first love.” Of course, if I am satisfied with just sitting on my bed and “being” through most of my day, I will starve to death and not “be” anymore. But he has taught me that what is essential is already within me. There is wisdom and power in Uncle Ted’s poetry. (Yes, I know I am not really related to him, but that’s only physical and overlooks the spiritual.) I must partake of it to live.
If you are bored by poetry about plants in a greenhouse under bright lights, or you can never understand what the poet means when he says, “My father was a fish”, then you need to practice reading poetry more. You don’t truly understand what poetry is, and what it is for… yet.
And I am sure you have probably concluded from all of this that I am a fool and a bad poet and I have no right to try to tell you who and what a truly great poet is. But, fool that I am, I know it when I see it. It is there in the verse, the hideous and horrible… the beautiful and the true. And if I know anything at all worth telling about the subject, it is this; Ted Roethke is a great American poet. And he writes poetry that you need to read… and not only read but live.
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Filed under artists I admire, commentary, insight, inspiration, poetry, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as living poetry, poetry, Theodore Roethke