Poem spent the day interviewing
          a spoke from a bicycle wheel that was all
          that was left of a Schwinn he’d had ten
          years ago.  He was interested
          in the spoke’s relationship
          to quantum mechanics
          considered chromatically.
          This caused a flap.

          His present bicycle went nowhere.                             
          Criticism intervened, trying
          to rescue the incredibly dead patch Poem
          had gotten himself into by
          using it to illustrate his thesis
          that little boy blue’s absence
          was impossible for any poem
          to overcome.

Yes, I am as out of it as I’ve ever been. I was hoping my non sequiturs would get close enough to sense for me to do something with them. They never did. But behold: I still eventually steered my text into an at least slightly intriguingly unsettling epiphany. Not that it makes up for the badness of the rest of the poem. But wait.  So this entry won’t be 100% worthless, here’s my “Cursive Mathemaku No. 2,” again. While going through my 2011 entries I came across this and changed my mind about it: it suddenly seemed to me the best version of the poem, not the third-best. So I’m using this entry to make public its officially being granted the title of “Cursive Mathemaku No. 2.”  Weird how much I prefer it to the one I once greatly preferred to it.

I really like the black lines, I don’t know why.  They’re very simple.  I think they give the thing thrust, they increase its seeming to be going somewhere.  Aside from that, spirals are always a plus.

Note: the yellow cursive reads, “any preposition whatever.”

.

PerfectMatch

     Poem’s Retreat

     The small charity of
     the imaginary summer breeze unclanking
     Poem from his tired rants against
     the undefeatable liturgy of the certified
     was enough: he retreated into the splendor
     of words mathematics had re-thundered
     a hundred colors beyond the
     repeatedly-beloved-when-required
     solutions on the walls of the academies.

Diary Entry

Thursday, 5 January 2012, 9 P.M.  I played a match in my senior men’s tennis league and was terrible–so bad, I’m close to giving up the game.  I don’t know what was wrong with me.  Well, we played at noon with an overhead sun right in my eyes when I served.  But I was otherwise bad.  I was seeing the ball double, too.  That’s happened to me a couple of times in practice; this was the first time it happened while in league play.  I don’t know what causes it.  Stress?  Easy answer.  The good news of the day is that I got a good near-final draft of my reply to Jake done.  I don’t think it’s quite right, but I don’t think it’ll take much more work to make it pretty good.  I had nothing to post for my blog entry, so took a paragraph out of the response to Jake and posted it.  Meanwhile, I got into a new game of Civilization after winning my previous one yesterday or the day before.  Whee. 

.

Discount Toy Coupons

        Bored by a long spell
        of inactivity, Poem conceived
        the idea of creating an alter ego,
        thinking the alter ego of an
        alter ego would be amusing.

        It would allow him a vent
        for some of his frustration
        as an under-used, and too
        often weak alter ego.

        At first he thought he’d call
        his alter ego “Bob,” but
        that almost at once seemed
        too clever, so
        he called him “Brick.”

        Unfortunately, Brick was
        very stupid. “Gimme a beer,”
        were his first words.
        Poem had no beer, so he
        wrote Brick into a poem set
        in a beerbar, remembering
        to give him several hundred dollars.

        Brick quickly got so drunk
        he passed out.
        Poem blamed that on the seagulls
        continually flying out of
        his keyboard.

* * *

Yes, another near-null day for me.

Diary Entry

Sunday, 25 December 2011, 8 P.M.  I touched up my reviews for Small Press Review and printed them out.  Spent most of the day at Linda’s with her and and her friends, Sandy and Joel.  Very nice Christmas dinner.

 .

Low Cost Travel

                                 Poem Becomes Another Person                 

                                 One day Poem spontaneously
                                 became another person, Problem.
                                 He shrugged it off.  His author no doubt
                                 no longer had any more chores for
                                 him as a combination poem/alter ego.
                                 He assumed he was still an alter ego–
                                 his author had never shown any ability to create
                                 a human being of any complexity at all
                                 that wasn’t 97% himself.

                                 Problem wandered around for several lines
                                 without being or encountering anything
                                 problematic. 

                                 Was that a problem?  He quickly
                                 spiffled a gumshoe, rhinestones
                                 being out of fashion. 

* * *

Wednesday, 30 November 2011, 4 P.M.  A pleasant-enough day.  I ran around seven this morning, planning to cover a mile but only was able to run half that.  I blame it on going too fast to begin with–after not having run for two or more weeks.  Not that I start all that fast.  After walking a little, I ran a little, and felt good.  I ran a hundred yards or so after that, feeling almost like I was really running.  After breakfast, I got another exhibition hand-out done, and worked some on my Hardy Boys mathemaku.  It’s not framed, so I’m replacing a framed one with it–mainly because I want to get the framed one unframed so I can scan it into my computer.  I have to have a computer copy of it somewhere but haven’t been able to find it.  Its framing was professionally done, so I don’t want to mess with it.  I’ll take it to the frame shop I’ve done business with and have the guy there switch poems.  Along the way, I had two short naps.  I feel pretty okay now.  I’ve done all my chores, getting a short blog entry out of the way a little while ago, and not having work on the book to do for a few more days.  Reading–another Clancy (mainly)–and A new game of Civilization, with my Civilization winning streak up to 3.

Later note: I wrote a second exhibition hand-out for the day, a little commentary on my Hardy Boys mathemaku.

.

Blue Nile Discount Codes

                    Poem Spoils a Poem

                    Poem took a break
                    from the literary magazines
                    he’d been reading,
                    tired of the lives
                    their poems were invariably about.
                    Hardly anyone builds poems anymore,
                    he thought, imposing
                    an opinion on a poem
                    which may well have become
                    rank upon rank
                    of blithe summer clouds better
                    if it could have been,
                    rather than served.

Poem’s Boringness

Poem was well-aware
how boring he was, but
how could he be otherwise,
alter-egoing for
a sickness so wholly
over-burdened with ambitions
to which it could only get close enough
to pule its futility about into texts
like this . . . for some for
ever incomprehensible reason?

.                     Poem hesitated at the inter
.                     sect
.                     ion of lunch and blue eyes
.                     hard
.                     ly conscious of the thesis
.                     he had nimbled sweetpeas into
.                     while the alley wheezed toward Oz.
.                     Reminders of Hamlet
.                     made him cough.
.                     Flies.
.                     A mistaken sky, as well.
.                     Wine.

Yes, once again I throw a Poem poem together to make a blog entry, too blahhed by another day I’ve been fumbled into to put anything better in.

.                Leaving behind his collection
.                of unshelled stars, and an unopened who,
.                Poem left for parts unverbal.
.                He had tired of imagining vapid
.                life-evasions for his author to
.                carry out his idea of gardening in,
.                using him to scare insights away,
.                or as an attempt to disguise his
.                opinions as reasons for a sky.
.
.                Three women got off the bus before it
.                dissolved
.                the slow opera constantly audible
.                in the room next to
.                the one Poem had vacated.
.                Miles away he
.                could hear one of them laugh warmly
.                into a coherence begun as falling leaves
.                in the woods of his best autumn
.                many years before.

Yes, I had nothing worth posting today. One small bit of news, though: I saw my hip man, and will probably have hip replacement surgery in two weeks. He thinks recuperation will take three to six months. Ugh.
.

.            Poem in last the Where Yellow

.            When sky Poem club over
.            sundry conniving. chain Last; exceptions.
.            Witheringly so so so, so example for
.            doesn’t? It. instants and below.
.            shifted candy bellowing bulge ‘s, s,o
.            with her wristle
.            exceeds which whistley love.
.            Parties never part am he.

Don’t worry, this is not to be taken seriously in any way whatever.

]]> http://poeticks.com/2011/03/08/entry-400/feed/ 0 http://poeticks.com/2011/03/06/entry-398/ http://poeticks.com/2011/03/06/entry-398/#comments Sun, 06 Mar 2011 05:00:21 +0000 Bob Grumman http://poeticks.com/?p=4244 .            The Tide

.            A long stare smelled its way
.            past the lantern’s purpled lisp
.            against kerosene mares radiant in
.            the prenatal barn storm
.            that Poem
.            was tearing the petals off of.
.            Behind him, the Hawaiian sidewalk
.            sidled dangerously into a canasta game,
.            like misspelled lemonade
.            remembering where the jewels were.

.            The tide was later than usual.
.

I threw the above together so as to have something here.  Believe it or not, I then revised it!  I only changed a few lines, though.

I’m beginning to think I’ll never have a blog entry with any real content again.  A real disaster, Kevin Kelly is now prowling this here territory, lookin’ for poems to throttle, and he’s brutal.  I could deal with him back when he lived in or around Port Charlotte, but he’s gotten a lot meaner since he moved.