---o0o---
Friday, May 10, 2013
Thursday, May 09, 2013
Middle finger of the month roundup
By Mona Goldwater, Signs, symbols, and gestures Ed.
Once again, here is our irregular roundup of middle finger images submitted by readers. . .
Once again, here is our irregular roundup of middle finger images submitted by readers. . .
---o0o---
The other Iron Man
By Jack Brummet
The other Iron Man—in Chisolm, Minnesota, by sculptor Jack Anderson (85 feet high, 150 tons). The monument was completed in 1987.
The other Iron Man—in Chisolm, Minnesota, by sculptor Jack Anderson (85 feet high, 150 tons). The monument was completed in 1987.
---o0o---
Poem: Litany
By Jack Brummet
Let us cut the poets loose
For the earth is trenched with their wanderings
For they trample the blood-waged borders
For their steps bisect old steps
Let them find their way
For they wage tense inner century wars
For they need permission
For they could scribe heartlines
Let them do what they will
For they remember to remember
For they share the common air
For their peopled hearts waltz
Le them praise the little lamb
For the wolf has already been sung
For God said I Am That I Am
For we have nearing the year two grand
Let them dream of a song to leave
For they brood about the blank beside their birth years in books
For the trees don't last forever
For the oysters refuse to sing.
1982-2013
Let us cut the poets loose
For the earth is trenched with their wanderings
For they trample the blood-waged borders
For their steps bisect old steps
Let them find their way
For they wage tense inner century wars
For they need permission
For they could scribe heartlines
Let them do what they will
For they remember to remember
For they share the common air
For their peopled hearts waltz
Le them praise the little lamb
For the wolf has already been sung
For God said I Am That I Am
For we have nearing the year two grand
Let them dream of a song to leave
For they brood about the blank beside their birth years in books
For the trees don't last forever
For the oysters refuse to sing.
---o0o---
1982-2013
Wednesday, May 08, 2013
Poem: Defensive Daydreaming
By Jack Brummet
[revised 5/2013]
Six hours into the surprise visit, he lumbers on.
My brain unsnaps from its moorings
and drifts like a drunken dirigble
into the torrent of everything I've seen,
smelled, eaten, licked, drunk,
smoked, touched, read, watched, and heard.
It's like he's been talking weeks now
and I remember Nikita Kruschev
on the television at the UN, flashing
those bad teeth and that goofy smile,
pounding those oxfords alive.
I try but I can't quite hear him;
I hear my friend narrating himself.
I remember today is Renoir's 164th birthday
and I don't even like his painting,
but, hey, at least he threw in some nudes.
He looking at me! What did I miss?
He looks for a yes and keeps talking.
"Yeah," I say, "right. . .yeah." I think about
Motherwell's Reconciliation Elegy
and how he charged around the studio,
rolling vast turgid highways
of black oil over acres of canvas.
I think about Alice Neel
painting all those people
and what they thought
when they saw the final product
or what people thought when they saw
the first Cubist or Dada paintings.
My friend looks for a show of interest.
Yes! By all means, encourage him.
I cock an eyebrow. He revs back up
and I think about my favorite color,
that mid-palette blue...a blue bisque,
the color of my grandma's cameo brooch...
vibrantly subtle...is that possible?...
yes, it's the color of Della Robbia's Florentine ceramics.
He goes on about old times, about how it was then,
way way way back when when when
when we were all back where, back when, doing what
with, for, and to whom. My brains coughs up chimes,
resonations, cross-references, cerebral links,
odors, tinkles, cues, and subtle whiffs of distractions.
I hear Charlie Parker play Carvin' the Bird
somewhere in my head and it segues into
Black Throated Wind and lurches into
Foggy Mountain Breakdown. He jumps
from childhood to yesterday, in between, and back.
I think of my gal and my pal Keelin Curran and Jan Newberry.
I think about the family
we built in Brooklyn and Manhattan and how often
every single one of them--Mel, Keelin, Jannah, Nick, Kevin, Jan, Miya,
Colin, Tony, Cheryl, Pinky, Fuzzy, Dot, 'Moto, and all our side friends--
shoot across memory like blazing comets, like right now.
See? He keeps sensing me drifting and dreaming but
I nod and wink and pick up the reverie, falling, falling
back, back, back to the night my daughter was born.
It was as quiet as a painting in Berkeley,
driving at three a.m. on Telegraph Avenue
toward Oakland, to the delivery room.
I saw a new moon hung on our old sky.
We watched the monitor and waited.
When her robber-stockinged face came down,
one bleat to the rafters started us all breathing again.
He's buzzing in my left ear
and the rhythms say I am safe.
I think about dreams--not drifting
like this, but real R.E.M. dreams:
I don't know which is better,
to dream it or see it,
to see it right now,
or to have seen it.
I don't know which is better,
the memory or the thing itself.
The memory can be repeated forever
but loses fidelity like an old record
and the fictions your mind confects
start filling in the gaps
until the memory becomes a framework
for what we wanted to be, or what should have been.
He nudges me, waiting for a yes, the go-ahead sign.
Yeah baby, take it on home. I think about Casey Stengel.
He suspects I am drifting over the hills and far away.
I nod "um." It is the sun's birthday
and where did the crows go? When he jumps to El Toro,
my mind starts sleepwalking from Boot Camp.
I wonder if I will ever get to Palestine,
or if there will ever be another Palestine,
or if I will get back to Seville or Tetuan,
Chora Sfokion or Brooklyn, Heraklion or Hoboken,
Vinaroz or the Delaware Water Gap, if I will ever see
Leningrad or Katmandu, and I wonder
if I would want to see Calcutta, Johannesburg,
Bhopal, Cleveland, Camden, or Port-au-Prince?
I don't know which is easier:
to listen or pretend to listen?
I think about bottles of beer
chilling in a tub of cracked ice.
Sexy rivulets of water fall down bottles
glistening in the hot sun.
Even my nose is tired.
Should I pee, or hold it?
Should I hold it and focus
on the distraction?
What did Gertrude Stein mean
when she wrote about those
"Pigeons In The Grass, Alas?"
Was it the pigeons or the grass
or the pigeons and the grass aggregated?
I want to bang my head on the wall
to dull the pain between my ears,
and he's warming up for the stretch.
A pipe doesn't slow him down and the wine
just keeps his throat supple, his voice nimble,
and the memories and word torrent flowing.
He talks about the Marines
and six years marching, marching marching
on the parade ground erect and spit-shined,
marching, saluting, dreaming, marching, yes-sir-ing.
I remember Nick Gattuccio's name
means Sicilian Dogfish and the time we drained
a demi-john of Chianti in Florence.
He tells me twenty things I don't want to know
and ten I'm indifferent about for every one I do.
He remembers where he left off
and murmurs a bridge to the next installment.
I think about the firefall of light I saw that day
on a rising skyscraper.
The welder is a star thrower, and constellations
of pale yellow sparks tumble from a heaven
of beams and girders strung with wire and pipe.
Those sparks are like his words, falling down iron bars
to disappear like fugitives in a white lake of sparks.
---o0o---
[revised 5/2013]
Six hours into the surprise visit, he lumbers on.
My brain unsnaps from its moorings
and drifts like a drunken dirigble
into the torrent of everything I've seen,
smelled, eaten, licked, drunk,
smoked, touched, read, watched, and heard.
It's like he's been talking weeks now
and I remember Nikita Kruschev
on the television at the UN, flashing
those bad teeth and that goofy smile,
pounding those oxfords alive.
I try but I can't quite hear him;
I hear my friend narrating himself.
I remember today is Renoir's 164th birthday
and I don't even like his painting,
but, hey, at least he threw in some nudes.
He looking at me! What did I miss?
He looks for a yes and keeps talking.
"Yeah," I say, "right. . .yeah." I think about
Motherwell's Reconciliation Elegy
and how he charged around the studio,
rolling vast turgid highways
of black oil over acres of canvas.
I think about Alice Neel
painting all those people
and what they thought
when they saw the final product
or what people thought when they saw
the first Cubist or Dada paintings.
My friend looks for a show of interest.
Yes! By all means, encourage him.
I cock an eyebrow. He revs back up
and I think about my favorite color,
that mid-palette blue...a blue bisque,
the color of my grandma's cameo brooch...
vibrantly subtle...is that possible?...
yes, it's the color of Della Robbia's Florentine ceramics.
He goes on about old times, about how it was then,
way way way back when when when
when we were all back where, back when, doing what
with, for, and to whom. My brains coughs up chimes,
resonations, cross-references, cerebral links,
odors, tinkles, cues, and subtle whiffs of distractions.
I hear Charlie Parker play Carvin' the Bird
somewhere in my head and it segues into
Black Throated Wind and lurches into
Foggy Mountain Breakdown. He jumps
from childhood to yesterday, in between, and back.
I think of my gal and my pal Keelin Curran and Jan Newberry.
I think about the family
we built in Brooklyn and Manhattan and how often
every single one of them--Mel, Keelin, Jannah, Nick, Kevin, Jan, Miya,
Colin, Tony, Cheryl, Pinky, Fuzzy, Dot, 'Moto, and all our side friends--
shoot across memory like blazing comets, like right now.
See? He keeps sensing me drifting and dreaming but
I nod and wink and pick up the reverie, falling, falling
back, back, back to the night my daughter was born.
It was as quiet as a painting in Berkeley,
driving at three a.m. on Telegraph Avenue
toward Oakland, to the delivery room.
I saw a new moon hung on our old sky.
We watched the monitor and waited.
When her robber-stockinged face came down,
one bleat to the rafters started us all breathing again.
He's buzzing in my left ear
and the rhythms say I am safe.
I think about dreams--not drifting
like this, but real R.E.M. dreams:
I don't know which is better,
to dream it or see it,
to see it right now,
or to have seen it.
I don't know which is better,
the memory or the thing itself.
The memory can be repeated forever
but loses fidelity like an old record
and the fictions your mind confects
start filling in the gaps
until the memory becomes a framework
for what we wanted to be, or what should have been.
He nudges me, waiting for a yes, the go-ahead sign.
Yeah baby, take it on home. I think about Casey Stengel.
He suspects I am drifting over the hills and far away.
I nod "um." It is the sun's birthday
and where did the crows go? When he jumps to El Toro,
my mind starts sleepwalking from Boot Camp.
I wonder if I will ever get to Palestine,
or if there will ever be another Palestine,
or if I will get back to Seville or Tetuan,
Chora Sfokion or Brooklyn, Heraklion or Hoboken,
Vinaroz or the Delaware Water Gap, if I will ever see
Leningrad or Katmandu, and I wonder
if I would want to see Calcutta, Johannesburg,
Bhopal, Cleveland, Camden, or Port-au-Prince?
I don't know which is easier:
to listen or pretend to listen?
I think about bottles of beer
chilling in a tub of cracked ice.
Sexy rivulets of water fall down bottles
glistening in the hot sun.
Even my nose is tired.
Should I pee, or hold it?
Should I hold it and focus
on the distraction?
What did Gertrude Stein mean
when she wrote about those
"Pigeons In The Grass, Alas?"
Was it the pigeons or the grass
or the pigeons and the grass aggregated?
I want to bang my head on the wall
to dull the pain between my ears,
and he's warming up for the stretch.
A pipe doesn't slow him down and the wine
just keeps his throat supple, his voice nimble,
and the memories and word torrent flowing.
He talks about the Marines
and six years marching, marching marching
on the parade ground erect and spit-shined,
marching, saluting, dreaming, marching, yes-sir-ing.
I remember Nick Gattuccio's name
means Sicilian Dogfish and the time we drained
a demi-john of Chianti in Florence.
He tells me twenty things I don't want to know
and ten I'm indifferent about for every one I do.
He remembers where he left off
and murmurs a bridge to the next installment.
I think about the firefall of light I saw that day
on a rising skyscraper.
The welder is a star thrower, and constellations
of pale yellow sparks tumble from a heaven
of beams and girders strung with wire and pipe.
Those sparks are like his words, falling down iron bars
to disappear like fugitives in a white lake of sparks.
---o0o---
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
Poem: The Marriage
By Jack Brummet
Two
tattered mannequins
Prop each other up
In the Salvation Army Store window
---o0o---
Prop each other up
In the Salvation Army Store window
---o0o---
Poem: Bad Timing
By Jack Brummet
He buys a coffee,
Using his last seven words.
He slyly eyes
His last pair of stunning buttocks.
He has zero orgasms, songs and movies,
Two red lights, six blocks,
13 minutes and 993 heartbeats left.
Every millisecond adds up:
Every variable conspires
To remove him from the census.
He steps in front of the car
Three seconds early,
Or two seconds late.
---o0o---
He buys a coffee,
Using his last seven words.
He slyly eyes
His last pair of stunning buttocks.
He has zero orgasms, songs and movies,
Two red lights, six blocks,
13 minutes and 993 heartbeats left.
Every millisecond adds up:
Every variable conspires
To remove him from the census.
He steps in front of the car
Three seconds early,
Or two seconds late.
---o0o---
Poem: The Cover-up
By Jack Brummet
[image from coloringforadults.com]
The logical beauty
Of cover-up theories
Is they can never
Actually be refuted,
But snowball
With every new telling.
The absence of facts
Further inflames
The conspiracy theory:
The lack of facts
Points to the utter and diabolical
Efficacy of the cover-up.
---o0o---Of cover-up theories
Is they can never
Actually be refuted,
But snowball
With every new telling.
The absence of facts
Further inflames
The conspiracy theory:
The lack of facts
Points to the utter and diabolical
Efficacy of the cover-up.
Monday, May 06, 2013
Painting: Tilt-A-Whirl
By Jack Brummet
[Acrylic, pen, and pencil on 24" x 36" stretched and primed canvas]
[Acrylic, pen, and pencil on 24" x 36" stretched and primed canvas]
click to enlarge
---o0o---
Poem: Joshua Brought The Jericho Walls Tumbling Down
By Jack Brummet
Jericho was locked down
tighter than a submarine.
It made Helms Deep and
Fort Knox look porous.
Joshua studied the walls,
trying to find a way in,
When a man with whirling
gaslight eyes appeared.
"Hey you! Spook! Are
you for us, or against us?"
The spook whirled around,
rattled his sword
And grew ten feet tall and
five feet wide.
"I am the General of
all Generals."
It was The Lamplighter
himself. "Take the shoes
From your feet on my holy
ground,
And follow the ark, with
seven priests with seven trumpets.”
Joshua told the peasants, "All
right, beat feet!”
Seven priests tooting
seven horns led the parade
Around and around and
around Jericho
Like Sambo marched the
tigers around the tree,
Or the way the earth spins
in the dark around the sun.
They marched in silence
six long days.
On the seventh day they
lit out at dawn
And marched around the
city seven times.
After the seventh orbit,
the priests blew a cadenza
And Joshua said to the
people, "Shout"
They roared louder with
each passing minute,
And the walls came
tumbling down.
They destroyed everything
with a heartbeat:
Every man, woman, animal
and bug,
Young, old, red, yellow,
black and white,
Fell on the sword.
Joshua was the Lord’s boy
now.
He became famous
throughout the country
And put the hairy eyeball
on anyone
Who even thought about
resurrecting Jericho.
----o0o----
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