from an idea by Sheila Sharpe

In the foul heat and damp and rot and stench
After dusting off 1 the bodies of dead pals
The living and the dead, the living dead
Old Boats 2 lit off a cigarette and growled

“They say this stuff’ll **** ya.”



1 Dustoff – noun.  Dust off – verb with an adverb.  A dustoff is a medical evacuation via helicopter, as in “Doc, your dustoff will be here in three.”  To dust off a patient, then, is to transport a patient, not to tidy him.  I have recently read detailed arguments about the terms dustoff, dust off, and medevac, but no one quibbled about such minutiae along the Cambodian border.  

2 Boats – a boatswain’s mate, the brains and muscle of the Navy.  Boatswain’s mates do it all and are seldom acknowledged in history or art, not even in the recent film about Dunkirk.  A boatswain’s mate is often addressed as Boats, and always with deference, even by the C.O.

On the Packing of Intersectionality: A Cross-Cultural Study

By M. Poncy Hector-Tworbst, B.A., M.Ed., Ph.D. Candidate

Unpack that intersectionality
And privilege transphile autonomy
Unite the paradigm’s hegemony
In the diaspora of agency

Cross-gender all peripherality
In post-colonial diversity
Dialogue augmented reality
And deconstruct avatar identity

All for the cause of authenticity
(But mostly I’m all about me, me, me)

Kingsville, Texas, 1955

A loaf of bread from the Piggly Wiggly
A quart of milk because MawMaw forgot
A Coke and a Mickey Mouse funnybook
A water pistol and Eskimo Pies

A pack of PawPaw’s brand of cigarettes
So he can watch his Yankees this afternoon
On the Sylvania with the rabbit ears
In gloriously static-y black-and-white

Plays called by Dizzy Dean and PeeWee Reese
In our childhood world, forever at peace

Two middle-aged youth ministers (perhaps)
In a convertible babble away
A dialogue but poorly understood
By a seeker wanting a burger and fries
                                                     and truth

Their message seems to be that a pilgrim
In search of meaning might find happiness
                                                     ­     and lunch
At a famed neon-y fast-foodery
And so I gird up my billfold and I go

I push the red votive button and wait
And wait
                    And wait
                                    And wait
                                                       And wait
                                                                ­             And wait

And in the end go empty away

Syllabus for a Summer Day

Awaken with the sun, and while thin mist
Slinks eerily across the fields, step out -
Labor across the dewy grass, near ripe
For the second cutting of summer hay

The lesson for today is clearing brush
Along the fence lines of both fields and life
The attendance check is for needed tools:
Old gloves, old boots, old saw, and fresh new verse

Awaken with the sun, honor the day
With work and play to earn a grade of A

                       Alternative Syllabus for a Summer Day

Ignore the stupid sun; go back to sleep
Reject the chatter of the alarming beep
And waken at a reasonable Christian hour –
Oh, ten will do; earlier is so sour!

Then bathrobe-shuffle to the coffee ***
See what is on the news, or maybe not
And scratch and yawn and look around to see
That nothing has changed since last night at three

Ignore all work; just stick it on the shelf
And for my grade, I’ll happily take an F!

Tollite vobiscum verba, et convertimini ad Dominum

-Osee 14:3 1

Provide yourself with words, with magic words,
And like Old Väinämöinen 2 sing them
Into the air, the wild, clean air, those words
Sing all that’s Good and Beautiful and True

The Sampo 2 of your mind spins not out flour
Nor salt nor gold, but needful thoughts and songs
In words that sing and sail beyond the sun
And back into that Founding whence they came

Write, then, the Good, the Beautiful, the True
And let God write them back again to you



1 Osee / Hosea
2 The Kalevala

His battered old laptop slung across his back
That famous laptop with the sticker that reads
In font Albertus “This Machine Kills Haters”
He poses rustically on a railway line

His happenin’ hipster hat pulled ‘way down low
Over the deep-souled Eyes That Have Seen It All
While his slender, artistic fingers seem
To flutter in search of existential truth

(Or maybe two forms of identification)

While off camera a cop writes him a ticket
For trespassing on railway property

For three Voices

First Voice:

What is an ilk?

Second Voice:

Well, they got ‘em up in Montana, you know,
And Canada, and them countries like that
And they got horns and stuff; you can hunt ‘em
They make good eatin’, or that’s what they say

Third Voice:

Naw, man, ilks is what attaches to boats
That’s why you got to scrape the hulls each year
They’re kinda like sea urchins or barnacles
They make good eatin’, or that’s what they say

First Voice:

I read about ilks in the op-eds each day -
They make good eatin’, or that’s what they say

The Farmer to Saint Swithin

O good Saint Swithin, please, to you we pray,
On this your high-summer rain-making day –
Of your blest kindness send us sweet, soft showers,
The kind that gently fall for hours and hours,

To heal the sunburnt land of thirst and drought
And nourish the corn that sees the winter out;
And if you grant the boon we humbly ask
We’ll work the harder on each rural task:

We’ll ditch and fence and plough, and milk the cow,
Share with the widder-folk, and feed the sow,
Count out some plantful seeds for poor folks’ needs,
And daily tell God’s Mysteries on our beads.

Pontius Pilate was probably being flippant
When he asked of a prisoner, “What is truth?”

But he was an administrator, and so
He possibly did not know

for Crazy Diamond Kristy, who makes life fun...

One exclamation mark is right and proper
Add any more, and your thought comes a cropper!

:)

Cheers!

Non Draco Sit Mihi Dux 1

That wicked liar offers us a poisoned cup
In whose sheeny surface we see ourselves
Reflected in his cold imaginings
And not our own, in what we ought to be

There is another Cup for us, not this one
Just as there is a stone that must be moved
A bird of night to be repudiated
A thorny bush that burns, but not itself

A blessing breaks that false and bitter cup -
We share the one that God has lifted up


1 In English, let not the dragon be my guide; it appears on the medal of Saint Benedict as NDSMD.

Children shot daily despite our stern laws
But at least they are safe from plastic straws

Children shot daily, caught in street-gang fights
But at least they are safe from 100-watt lights

Children shot daily, high death rankings
But at least they are safe from parental spankings

Children shot daily, murdered by crooks
But at least they are safe from The Little House books

Children shot daily, may God bless their souls
And too our regulated toilet bowls

O Dear Heart...or pancreas...or some vital *****...

When I gaze into your ear canals
And cuddle you in my comforting feet
Oh, yeah, I wanna hold your earlobe
You make my sella turcica skip a beat

Your nostrils are so very soft to the touch
Your toenails are like silver-pale moonlight
Your elbows smell like roses in the spring
Your hair follicles are so sunrise bright

And when I meditate upon your liver
Cupid shoots every arrow from his quiver!

That lopper-thingie on the end of a pole
Indelicately intrudes among the leaves
Telescoped out, its harsh geometry
Unnatural among the greenery

There seeking out an elusive apple spared
The nightly browsings of the day-shy deer
Or the nightly pillagings of raccoons
Who destroy more than they will ever eat

But there’s that apple – careful, careful – snip:
And down it falls, with an apple-saucy flip!

Let the childhood dose of cod liver oil
Perish from its own sour smell and foul taste
Send yellow squash to the poor children in China
May Popeye keep his spinach to himself!

But not bananas!

The appeal of the peel, yes, what a deal!
A wrapper that children may throw away
A summer-yellow star sky-spiraling
Onto the garden grass (it’s good for the soil)

Alas, poor banana, joy to eye and tongue:
Why is it that the Cavendish dies young?

Marlowe!  Dark and dangerous Kit Marlowe
Whose hooded eyes, like a subtle serpent’s, held
In mysterious charms Hero, and too
Leander, perhaps, in the ways of night

And in the councils of foul Walsingham
Where innocence and guilt knew not each other
Through sly reptilian tangles of false oaths
Among the pale queen’s writhing coils of shame

Beneath which altar, then, or perhaps none
Was the famous reckoning paid, and done?

For Connie, a Friend Indeed

There are no pictures of poker-playing dogs!
The health certificates make for dull reading
And last month’s issue of Texas Monthly
Has not the old cache’ of Field and Stream

There are no pictures of poker-playing dogs!
Among the snaps of Baby’s First Haircut
Children and grandchildren in cute little frames
And lovely young girls all styled for the prom

There are flowers and scents and catalogues

But –

There are no pictures of poker-playing dogs!

                                                          ­ Woof!

1.

Stuffed men who never made a single day
Of training make brave speeches on this day

Surely each one of them has his reward -

A government SUV
And bodyguards
And a household staff
And a clean, dry place to sleep
And an income
And medical care
And a pension
And a book deal
And a library
And maybe an eternal flame

2.

And the nation’s enlisted daughters and sons
Who sweat among the rocks, not on the golf course

Have their reward from a grateful nation -

Taking cover behind a blown-up Hummer
They are the bodyguards
They dig holes in the rocks and sand
MREs contracted by the lowest brother-in-law bidder
They stand-to all night under fire
They are paid something less than the president’s special, um, assistant
They will be ignored by the DVA
Their eternal flame is the memory of a death-burnt friend
They are dismissed as millennials and snowflakes
          By the Keyboard Kommandos who learned about war
          Just like our stuffed men in Washington
          By watching Patton over and over

The stuffed men bray every hollow cliché,
But this is what the stuffed men really say:

“Thank you for your service; now shut up and go away
Until we want another photo-op on Remembrance Day”

Some prophets spoke before the thrones of kings
And others at the gates of Jerusalem
One stood upon a rock and split the sea
And others heard God in the soft, soft wind

A prophet of our time at a table stood
Before a cafeteria table draped in cloth
Fronted a trinity of microphones
And split complacency that rainy day

Umbrellas were dripping, the sky was low
A prophet spoke to us, and we did not know

A woman. A knife. A very sharp knife.
She has waited for this hour, this moment
Her eyes – they gleam with passion dark upon
A figure recumbent upon a slab

She is not alone; she is being watched
But no one will dare cry for her to stop
They have all made their agreement, their bond
And now the woman lifts the knife…she strikes…!

She has cut the heart from an artichoke
And the studio audience applauds

Canada Day?  Just One?

With love from an ‘umble Yank

But every day is Canada Day!

The afternoon plane lands in Halifax
When the hatch is popped, cool air rushes in
Even the fog is happy in Canada

The Muskogee 1 never made landfall here
And so we pilgrimage for her, completing
Her voyage from ’42 to Canada

Wolfville, Grand Pre’, Le Grande Derangement
The Deportation Cross and beer cans
Well, God forgive the Redcoats anyway

Newfoundland
Is a bold
Anapest

The church spires in a line, the light is green
The bold young captain shoots the narrows wild
Can you find your way to your painted house?

To walk again the cobbles of Ferryland
And smell the very blue of the Atlantic
The sea-blown wind is cold in Canada

Blue Puttees and a mourning Caribou
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord
Good children sing “We love thee, Newfoundland”

Quebec – royal city of New France
May Le Bon Dieu bless the Plains of Abraham,
And may God bless
The signs an English driver cannot read

The Coca-Cola streets of Niagara Falls
Yanks laugh at made-in-China Mountie mugs
And buy them, happy to be in Canada

A cup of Toujours Frais from – well, that place
But to us in your southern provinces
Below Niagara, Tim too is Canada

Though Canada goes on, these scribbles must not –

Your grateful guest wishes only to say
That every happy day is Canada Day!

She is a 10,000-year-old girl
Although she is rather younger today
Only 240 or so
While taking coffee with James Madison

She has discussed the weather with Gilgamesh
Given Keats her handkerchief for his cough
Danced with the fairies on Midsummer Eve
And captured the castle with Cassandra

Because she has listened when the Nine have sung
An old soul she is, and so
                                                         forever young

In the end, they had to break into his room
He was dead in his chair, and quite alone
Self-exiled from his family for years
Alone in a shell, silent, and alone

The accidentals of life were cast away:
A coffee ***, a coat over a door
His schedule for the methadone clinic
A note to meet with his parole officer

But the pathology tox screen was clean -
Better than most of us, he went down fighting

Cicadas contribute to the silence
With their impious reproductive racket
A cloud of whistles, whirrs, buzzes, and clicks
In the otherwise still and stiller noon

An old man rests his shovel and himself
And sits in the flickering shade awhile
To think of nothing while sweet incense rises
Up from the sacred bowl of his Peterson’s pipe

The Eternal breathes silently over all
(Them cicadas sure is noisy, though)

Suggested by a Thought from Temporal Fugue

Because we respect words, we wrestle with them
And because they respect us, they wrestle back;
We shape them in order serviceable 1
And they refuse to be pinned as cliches’

We fling a needful verb against a noun
To make a thought complete, but then adverbs
And adjectives begin cluttering lines
And then we all must take a coffee break

Because we respect words, we wrestle with them
For every scrap of story, verse, or hymn


1 Cf. John Milton, “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”

Well, okay, it’s out there in the back yard
Where on display you’ll see: old boonie hats
Uncool, but good when working in the heat
And cotton khakis from the discount store

Just washed, and drying in the summer sun
Admired by every Merry Little Breeze 1
Skivvies and socks sewn in Cambodia
And work shirts stitched together in Viet-Nam

Nothing by Versace or Calvin Klein
Just old clothes drying on the old clothes line


1 Thornton W. Burgess’ Mother West Wind stories

Someone demands an immigration czar
Which could be interesting: a crown, a throne
A double-eagle flag, the border guards
Singing a Troparian while on patrol

On the Steppes of Central Texas 1
The Czar in progress royal comes to see
His happy villagers waving MREs
From behind the merry Potemkin wire

The Czar, contented, turns his escort then
To Petersburg, and lunch at the Little Red Hen

1 Cf Borodin's "On the Steppes of Central Asia"

When the kitchen staff did the washing-up
They could not but notice, among the bowls
And serviettes, spoons, knives, pitchers, and plates,
One of the best silver trays, blotchy with blood

And scraps of vertebrae, ruining the shine
“Oh, bother; these stains will never come out,”
Muttered the old woman in charge of such things
But she scrubbed and polished, did a good job

With that and with each costly silver cup
When the kitchen staff did the washing-up

The First Blast of the Trumpet 1 (if not the Trump) Against
the Monstrous Regiment of Social Media

V: Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
R: No.


1 No apologies to the odious John Knox

In my religion we're taught that every living thing, every leaf, every bird, is only alive because it contains the secret word for life. That's the only difference between us and a lump of clay. A word. Words are life, Liesel.

- Max to Liesel in Markus Zusak’s *The Book Thief

We cannot walk with Dostoyevsky as
Guards drag him chained before a firing squad
Comfort Saint Joan against the English flames
Or pray with good Saint Thomas in his cell

We cannot slosh through sodden trenches in France
With Lieutenant Lewis on his birthday
Argue with Akhmatova at The Stray Dog
Or with Frankl at Auschwitz bury dead friends

Unless we read, and then through words we see
The morning sun upon Byzantium

Sunlit sailboats in daubs of orange and red
And mass-produced impressionist barn owls
In flight above an unsecured wire rack
Of greasy copies of Reader’s Digest

Behind the receptionist’s hole-in-the-wall
Children of the Cornbread centered in plastic
Jesus-frames grin against their will, freeze-posed
Among department-store studio trees

Across the walls some glued-on murals roam
(But at least this isn’t the funeral home)

One might as well call this an equinox
For night and day are equinoxious now:
Mosquitoes, soul-withering heat and damp
Itch-allergens and rattlesnakes not featured

In advertising fantasies about
Bugless, unbitten happy families
Posing with plates and carnivorous smiles
Before neighbor-envious chromium grills

And playing free of heat rash and pustules
Around surgically sterile swimming pools

Don’t bother about being a saint so rare-y;
They’ll make you one in your obituary!

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Of America Merrill Edge Tyson
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Keep it Real Keep it Tyson Is This Sequence
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Correct? Luminosity Zenni Slide
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Belts American Red Cross Let Palmolive
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Socks to Relieve Pain Coflex® Interlaminar
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Stabilization Menard’s Dedicated
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
To Service & Quality Leg Cramps at Night
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Brian Tracy International Bank
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Of America Merrill Edge Tyson
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Keep it Real Keep it Tyson Is This Sequence
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Correct? Luminosity Zenni Slide
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Belts American Red Cross Let Palmolive
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Handle the Mess Hole Leather Sandals Ad
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
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Stabilization Menard’s Dedicated
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
To Service & Quality Leg Cramps at Night
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Brian Tracy International Bank
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Of America Merrill Edge Tyson
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Keep it Real Keep it Tyson Is This Sequence
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Correct? Luminosity Zenni Slide
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Belts American Red Cross Let Palmolive
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
Handle the Mess Hole Leather Sandals Ad
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
By Revcontent Newchic AOL Computer
“We’ll Try Not to Show That Ad Again”
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Shhhhh - Titanic was Sunk by a Bilderberg

Albino rabbis, the Illuminati,
Protocols of the Elders of Zion -
The evidence seemed a little spotty
‘Til a radio guy had us wonderin’ and sighin’

Fluoridation by the New World Order
Backed by the Trilateral Commission
A scheme to open our southern border
To crop circles – that’s his suspicion

Area 51, the Templar Knights
FEMA lurking in the Bohemian Grove
Perfidious Rothschilds through menace and fright
Guarding a Jewish-Viking treasure trove

Poor Newfoundland is Occupied by ****** rats
Who scheme in secret tunnels beneath St. John’s
Brewing magic potions in Macbethian vats
In Rodentian rituals from the Age of Bronze

The Priory of Sion, runes, swastikas, the Vril
Roswell and the Thule Society
No wonder the air is darkly chill:
We all live within a conspiracy.

Our fathers told of hard times on the farm
Of walking barefoot down the road to school
And walking home again to get the cows back up
From woods and fields to the old dairy barn

And joining the Army at seventeen
Sleeping later in boot camp than on the farm
Coming home from the war to look for a job
Thirty years at the sawmill – then laid off

And in his turn a New Man proudly says:

I scored real high on Minecraft on my ‘phone
While standing in line for my free school supplies

Shall I Compute 1 Thee to a Summer’s Day?

                              A Lament for the Unlettered

They launch no voyages of discovery
To sail beyond the sunset 1 of their dreams
No pages open to them; no books, no boots,
No paths lead them to Constantinople or Rome 3

For the horns of Elfland 4 they listen not
Nor for the unheard pipes on a Grecian urn 5
The Red Book of Westmarch 6 is forever closed
And lines of lyric verse sing not to them

They cling to their precious palantiri 7
And launch no voyages of discovery


1 As Shakespeare did not say

2 From Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Heinlein used the phrase as the title for his final novel.

3 Patrick Leigh Fermor and Hilaire Belloc

4 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

5 Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

6 Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

7 Tolkien again

Saint Seraphim among the birch trees, bent
In penitential pain – O pray for us
A thousand souls depending on your peace
And then a thousand more for each, and more

Saint Seraphim among the birch trees, bent
And leaning on your axe-stave now become
Your staff of office among foxes and bears
Please consecrate in us your Spirit of love

Saint Seraphim among the birch trees, bent -
Dear friend of penitents, dear Heaven-sent

The dachshund loves her kiddie pool
The honeybees love theirs
The dachshund splashes to get cool
The bees mind their affairs

Drunk girl crying in the parking lot
          Always begins her ‘plaints with “I”
Dull boy whining on an email screen
          Always begins his notes with “I”
Mean girl screaming in the shopping mall
          Always begins her rage with “I”
Sad boy ******* on a cigarette
          Always begins his verse with “I”
‘Lone girl staring at a tv set
          Always begins her sigh with “I”

And why?

Because they overdose on I, ME, MY

Thesis and antithesis became one
And synthesis became thesis again
Another synthesis antithesis
And they became a higher synthesis

And the higher truths rose higher and higher
Higher and higher in a spiraling spire
Of conceptualizations like holy fire
Thoughts far above all earthly muck and mire

until

Until Mrs. Hegel told Mr. Hegel
That he ought to get off his lazy geist
And begin helping out around the house,
And set the weltseele out on the curb

The Bedrooms of Thirty-Year-Old Children

“I am looking for a some what tactical bible cover. I would prefer that it have hook and loop some were on it, so I can put moral patches on it.”

-https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/-/135-1549758/

Each tactical gun and each tactical knife
Made in China by tactical slaves
Tactical gear for tactical strife
(Tactical guys to their tactical graves)

Tactical ****** and tactical pen
Tactical chocolate and paintball paint
Tactical everything for wannabe men
Desperate to be whatever they ain’t

Tactical shelters for when it’s raining –

But

They never made Day One of army training

Someone once burned down the White House!
Someone who was wearing a red blouse
The British claim it loudly
But others more proudly:
“We Canadians burned down the White House!”

In 1812 Congress declared war on Britain, thinking that the several provincial Canadas of that time (Canada did not become a Dominion until 1 July 1867) would be easily conquered and absorbed.   During the campaigns United States forces burned York (now Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada, and in 1814 regular British forces in their turn burned much of Washington. Apparently there were no Canadian militia units involved in torching our capital. Canadians claim the honor anyway, and since they were part of the British Empire, one can with a grain of salt and a cup of Tim Horton’s coffee admit their claim.

God bless Canada.  Let’s drop the tariffs and the passport requirements, apologize nicely for ill manners shown to this nation’s best friend, shake hands all ‘round, and go catch a Toronto Blue Jays game.

Astride his horse, the gift-shop blisful martir
Raises his glov’ed hand in priestly blessing
For those who wear his token in evidence
Of a devout pilgrimage to Canterbury

By tour bus those who wolden ryde there
To seek a blessing (and a souvenir)
In brass Saint Thomas and his horse and groom
Forever stand; Saint Thomas asks of us:

“Sin you have seyn the paving wher I deyd –
Let now Iesu forever be your gyde”

Alienation is the constant theme
A child for whom the family dinner table
Is the scene of nightly interrogations
Can never be at home outside himself

Alienation is the constant theme
When every word is dissected by others
For any taint of beauty, love, or truth
And any deviation from today

Alienation is the constant theme
When trust is but a morning-broken dream

Windows 10
Fails again



I was an hour or so sorting out the mess made by the latest Microsoft update.  In the end, the only remedy was to purge the update via the control panel
  
Beware of progress.

Scorn not the printed word, O thoughtful soul,
As Wordsworth 1 did not say, and do not set
An electric machine to grind through files
In search of gobbets all thinky and stuff

For Shakespeare set in iambs clean and neat
All the transcendent ideas of the good,
The beautiful, and the eternal true
Sustained in meters of steel and words of gold



Shakespeare never

               wobbled
                                                all over the paper in unmetered *******
lines
of disconnected babble about stars and selves 2 without any citations for verification
                                       stirred around in a sort of it-sounds-like-Shakespeare-kinda-sorta-they-won’t-care-anyway soup to be copied and pasted onto sheets of 8 1/2” by 11” fake parchment woodpulp because, like, y’know, that’s what you do for graduation ceremonies



1 Wordsworth, “Scorn not the Sonnet”
2 Possibly a misremembering of Cassius' words to Brutus in Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”  If so, the quotation has been, like Caesar, assassinated.

For thirteen years one’s life is organized
By Mom and Dad and the glorious state 1
Passive behavior rewarded and prized
Just work your sums on an electric slate

Bubble in circles with a number two
Glitter-glue posters for every right cause
School’s all about state scores, not about you
And state exams, according to state laws

For thirteen years you were controlled and toyed -
Today you’re just one of the unemployed



1 You are the state. A school will be exactly what you and the other citizens want it to be. Always vote in your local school board elections; self-government is not a spectator sport.

A proper English Communist, I say,
Should drink only that tea called Comrade Grey