Loch Raven Review

Two of my poems appear in the Winter Issue of Loch Raven Review.

"Yukon" is new, while "Lifeline" was first published at Peeling Wallpaper in February 2005.

Quality Time

I like to read poetry on the toilet. In fact, it’s the only place I read poetry. No other spot in the house feels quite right. And I only read poetry in the morning. There’s something quite nice about starting my day with a good strong cup of coffee, a healthy constitutional and a couple of quality poems. I’m always on the lookout for a poem that will set the bar, challenge me to have the kind of day the poet obviously had in order to achieve that level of brilliance. Not that this happens often. Usually, the poem falls short or my day does.

Sometimes I wonder how the poets I read would feel knowing just where I read their work. Funny, though, I only think about that when I’m reading living poets. Dead poets, I’m quite sure, would be happy to know they are being read at all.

Speaking of dead poets, I just finished reading “Slouching Toward Nirvana,” by Charles Bukowski. This is Bukowski’s twelfth posthumous book of poems. The guy’s been dead since 1994 and he’s still averaging just under a new book a year. I really wish he would knock that off. Doesn’t he know how much of a slacker that makes me feel?

Here’s a little gem from Bukowski’s poem “you can’t make a lion out of a butterfly” about a boxer friend of his:

in the ring
right after the fight
Butterball had told me:
“that guy couldn’t raise half a
hard-on in a high-class
whorehouse.”

And this from “to hell and back”:

Once you’ve been to hell
and back,
you don’t look behind you
when the floor
creaks and
the sun is always up at
midnight
and things like
the eyes of mice
or an abandoned tire
in a vacant lot
can make you smile.

Start your day with a good poem. Just don’t sit too long. It leaves a ring.

The power of 5

Two years ago I posted a story about receiving a free razor in the mail from Schick. It was the Quattro. Four blades. I remember thinking, "How many more blades do we need on a razor." I mean, you put enough blades on a razor cartridge and you'll start splitting atoms! Well, today, I opened my mailbox and there was a brand new trial razor waiting for me. I knew right away. It had to be. Five blades. And I was right. It was the Gillette Fusion. Five shaving blades. But wait...there was more. A bonus blade on the back side for trimming sideburns and under the nose. Gillette skipped right over the Cinque and went straight to the Sei!

I simply can't believe this. I am afraid to try this razor. It is quite possible that I would lather up and, with one swipe of the razor, cut my head clean off - a scene right out of Monty Python. This particular razor doesn't take batteries. That would be the Gillette Fusion Power - 5 blades and vibration. There is nothing more absurd in my mind than a vibrating razor. I can only hope the man responsible for the battery-powered razor is being kept safely out of a laboratory environment. He should never invent again!

Now, having had my rant, I will say that the power of advertising can be persuasive. Maybe if instead of my mailman delivering my free razor...


...the Gillette Fusion Girls had dropped by and enticed me to give it a try, my response might have been a little different. I am a team player, after all.

On the cover of the slick, brightly-colored insert that came with my free Gillette Fusion razor were just these words: "It's Time." My question to Gillette is: Time for what?

"I'll Never Sleep Again!"

Clearly shaken, those were the words my 11 year old son used to describe his first day of Family Life education (aka Sex Ed) at school yesterday.

Really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree

The other day I was driving along, listening to a classic rock station on the radio. The Joker, by Steve Miller was playing. I was about to click it off (I’ve never been particularly fond of the song), but before I could do so, this familiar line caught my ear:

"Some people call me the space cowboy…Yeah! Some call me the gangster of love…Some people call me Maurice…Cause I speak of the Pompatus of love."

Pomatus? I hadn’t thought about that word in years. I am old enough to remember when The Joker first hit the airwaves. It was 1973. In fact, I was old enough then to really care about music. Steve Miller wasn’t a musician from my parent’s generation. Glenn Miller was! Steve Miller was on the bandstand of my ge-ge-neration!

Pomatus? Well, frankly, when I first heard the song, I didn’t know what the word meant. And being fifteen, I guess I was a bit too self-conscious about my vocabulary to ask someone. So I let it go. Quickly, I grew tired of the song and stopped caring that I didn’t know.

Fast forward to 2006. It struck me listening to The Joker again that I still didn’t know the meaning of a pompatus of love. How ridiculous was that? I went home that night and did a search on the internet. Turns out the word doesn’t exist in any legitimate dictionary. Steve Miller made it up, based loosely on an R&B song from the 1950s. It’s kind of an interesting story. There’s a good write-up about it here.

More interesting to me, though, is that I could wait 33 years before I cared enough to look this up. Thirty-three years! You’d think I’d be pissed off after all that time, that I’d been duped into believing a word was real when it wasn’t, a word made up by an artist I never really cared for. But I’m not. The sum total of my reaction was: “Huh, interesting, well, I wonder what the weather is supposed to be tomorrow…better head over to weather.com.”

Here’s the best part. In another 33 years I’ll be old and senile. I’ll probably forget that I ever looked up the meaning of pompatus. So I’ll do another search. And buried in those search results will be a link to this story – that I wrote! Won’t I be surprised.

Beta bits

I just switched over to Blogger beta. It was one of those impulse things. I was signing on to my regular Blogger account when this pop-up box appeared asking if I wanted to try out the new Blogger in partnership with Google. I had no idea that Google bought Blogger. No matter, the pop-up box said there were lots of new features at my disposal with Blogger beta, so I said yes.

What the hell was I thinking? I don’t need new features. I need to stay away from new features. New features are bad. New features will steal your time and suck the life force out of your body, turn you into Kevin Costner.

People have been technology-challenged since the VCR. And yet we keep buying more stuff, trying to keep up with the times: DVD players (now with Blu-ray), computers with wireless home networks, surround sound systems, digital music players. Face it, we don’t understand any of this stuff beyond the bare bones knucklehead features. On/off? Yeah, sure we can handle that. Set time? Probably, but the daylight saving component is iffy. Choose your digital music format buffering level? Uhh, yeah, right.

There is no way that I am going to use any of the new features I just signed up for at Blogger beta, and yet I just couldn’t bring myself to say no. Have you seen those new Jessica Simpson ads for Directv where she plays a dumb but extremely hot blonde waiting tables at a bar? In one of the ads, Jessica-of-the-impossibly-short-short-shorts asks her audience if they wouldn’t rather be checking her out in high definition 1080i. Her punchline, delivered in a perfect southern belle drawl, is brilliant: “I totally don't know what that means, but I want it.” (Those last two words pronounced “woe nit.”) Yeah, Jessica, I can relate. My new drag-and-click template editing capability at Blogger beta? Don’t have a clue how it works, what purpose it serves, or even if I can figure out how to use it, but I totally woe nit.

Oh, I do love a good tagline

Like this one from the cover of the November 2006 Smithsonian magazine...

From Beloved to Beheaded: The Real Marie Antoinette

(You've got to admit it has a certain edge to it.)

Coming Soon...

I have started pulling together a book of poems from Peeling Wallpaper. My plan is to organize the best ones into a chapbook. I am motivated to do this for two reasons. One I just love the word chapbook. It is so pretentious and snooty. “Yes, my chapbook ‘The Curves of a Rectangle’ will be published next month by The Bloated Nymph Press.” Can’t you just see it? It is so me. My second motivation for publishing a chapbook is that it will be out in time for the upcoming holiday season. I hate holiday gift shopping. This way I can sit down with a stack of my chapbooks, inscribe each one, wrap them up in shiny holiday paper and ship them off to everyone I know in place of the Spencer Gift quality crap I usually send. It will be nice to know that a chapbook I wrote and published is now shoring up the short legs of wobbly tables all over the world. Rest assured, my chapbook will be published on only the finest parchment. Should you find yourself in your library with a little piece of something stuck between your teeth and no toothpick in sight, look no farther than the cover of my chapbook. Maybe I’ll even make my chapbook mint flavored.

Nexus

I'm going to hang out here at Something Itches while I take a break from Peeling Wallpaper. This picture that I put up over at PW before hastily closing the door and turning off the lights is a vintage postcard from Crystal Cave in south-central Pennsylvania. I visited this tourist Mecca for my sixth grade class field trip back in...well, let's just say this vintage postcard was a new release when our class roamed the gift shop at Crystal Cave. And what is that old coot pointing at in the photograph, you might ask. Could it be a wad of chewed up bubble gum stuck atop of that stalagmite by an irresponsible grade-schooler? I'm not saying a word. Not a word.

The End

I'm finished writing this blog. Two blogs is one too many for me. Thanks for coming by. I hope you will visit me at my other blog: Peeling Wallpaper.

Cheers!