new year’s eve sonnet

(for MKI, as always)

Hey Omicron: the letter of the hour!
You’ve brought another covid Christmas: who’d
have thought lightning could strike again so soon?
but never mind, we’ve foiled your plot to sour
our Stollen — hopped the last of the outbound flights
to paradise, where naked hugs and sweaty
dancing are de rigueur, the restaurants ready
for parties of ten plus, no rez required!

’course we’re not all so lucky: lockdown wounds
are here to stay; while absent friends on screens
remain; let’s hope tonight to drown our blues
in toasts to family lost, who flock our dreams
like larks at dusk, ’til waking see anew
the chance for change in twenty-twenty two.

new year’s eve sonnet

All my brothers locked down, the sound of lighters,
of bottle openers, bottles popped alone
that foam and spill across the empty wide
expanse of kitchen floors unmopped. A home
in name but not in deed, indeed a jail
that native sons know well, a reservation
held in reserve, revisiting the names
inscribed on birth certificates, a nation
of orphans stumbling in twilight. Is hope
obscene to our imagination, or can
we dream a fiery green without dull smoke
and scour clean our hearts, as we have our hands,
’til double twenty penitence is done,
emerge absolved in twenty twenty one?

bhh on shakespeare garden / end of world

dubrovnik

City of cats, spackled by shells
firing the red roof-tiles black
chalk outlines the corpse of a city

risen again, swathed in stone and moated
scene of dragon battles staged
where tourists climb the sides of churches

children hang off bas relief fountains
and swarm, ride scooters through squares
dripping sweat and screaming for pasta;

synth sing-a-long at church, jeans
and bad haircuts, long dresses
cross the chest and shuffle behind pews.

Quiet in a vertical garden, sloping
down to the sea where cactus bulwarks
fortress the cliff against the waves

flecked in cinders, they pixelate a peace
that spreads across the Adriatic’s
azure solace, Croatia

maintains, embraced by octopus
split by former comrades, edge that
boomerangs Westward to Europe.

new year's sonnet

At turn of year, some doors are closed forever
while others open new on gleaming halls
in mansions bright; as prodigals we find
this welcome hearth unearned, yet still endeavour
to prove our worth.
                                       The gloom of winter falls
away before the flame of spring; tall pines
embroidered in fragrant buds bend to fawn
upon our hopes and teach how nature solves
the puzzles set to life. We read these signs
as affirmations: tracts that note the songs
of seasons past and clear the undergrowth
for blooms of May.
                                   A year to nurture time’s
long generations into future dawns
upon the hidden glades where saviours spawn.

frog mating season

frog calls pepper the night;
sounds like sweaty farts,
lava bubbles bursting lazily—
constant sporadicity.



insomnia animated
bed pirouette against the
pockmarked sonic mate-scape—
auditory nightlight.

mori no ando

~ Takashi Taniguchi

trochaic haiku

freshly trimmed beard
snags on scarf of Scottish wool
velcro's out the cold

pigeon foot

In Edinburgh, I often see,
a Pigeon with a twisted foot.
Is it birth defect or injury?
Or maybe hereditary,
each sighting a different squab
of a long-lived clan
of Edinburghian club-footed pigeon.

tools of life

Art Installation Seen in a Dream

The installation is distributed around the edges of a large hall. Every 10 feet or so is a life-sized statue of a famous historical figure: Gandhi, Qaddafi, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Obama, Ghengis Khan, Jesus, Muhammed, Chairman Mao, Andy Warhol, etc. Each one is clothed in their single most famous and frequently depicted garb—these are famous figures not as they are (or were) but as they are famous.

In between each figure is a set of tools of life: the everyday trappings of some distinctive cultural time and place; the workaday tools, accoutrements, and furniture of some typical person fulfilling a standardized cultural role. Items include bits of furniture and representative features of domicile or workplace (a chair, a hearth, a doorframe, a countertop, a grass hut, an obelisk), clothing (an apron, clogs, hats, a pipe, jewelry, . . . ), and tools of work (a typewriter, a gun, musical instruments, a broom, . . . . ). Representative cultural roles range from a 1950's American housewife (a kitchen counter, baking tray, vacuum cleaner, duster, . . . ); a Papua New Guinea tribesman (penis sheath, spear, drum, ceremonial mask, . . . ); an Eskimo (igloo, mukluks, spear for ice fishing . . . ); a citizen of ancient Rome (toga, chariot, tile flooring, . . . ); etc.

The alternation between historical figure and tools of life is completely random.

Each life size historical figure is fully posable. Visitors to the installation are encouraged to move them and pose them amongst the tools of life: Ghengis can may be decked in 1950's housewife apron and posed in the act of vacuuming the living room, for instance; Gandhi arrayed in flight controller's chair with headset poised to speak into a microphone; Mao wearing a horned viking helmet, standing majestic at the prow of a longship.

dowland ~ fantasia

"soccer world cup"

What better demonstration of the truth,
That every race, if given half a chance,
Has strength, and natural talents that, forsooth,
Transcend the bigotry and circumstance
Of unkind history. Aggressors fight
To dominate a color, creed or race,
But when East, West, North, South, Black, Brown or White,
Meet on a level, equal, playing space,
With rules, traditions, referees to keep
Them honest, competition beautiful,
That sets at naught, the history of sheep
Oppressed by wolves, gives a most bountiful
Display of passion, rivalry, and skill,
Amid the wild beauty, of Brazil

~ Maurice Isaac, Gray Flannel Tramp

salvador dali e manitas de plata

how it's done

england, 1802

It is not to be thought of that the flood
Of British freedom, which, to the open sea
Of the world's praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flow'd, 'with pomp of waters, unwithstood,'
Roused though it be full often to a mood
Which spurns the check of salutary bands,—
That this most famous stream in bogs and sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever. In our halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible Knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.—In everything we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

~Wordsworth

orange ripper

Start with a large, preferably chilled, champagne glass;

Add:

1 oz. sharp gin, e.g. Bombay Sapphire East,

one squirt agave nectar or other unprocessed sweetner,

3–5 dashes Peychaud's Bitters,

Vigorously stir ingredients until thoroughly mixed;

Fill glass 3/4 + full with dry champagne,

Top off with 1 oz. orange juice and a small ice cube:

Enjoy.

See also the orange zipper.

moebius, rip

2008

2008

1992





2007

tosefta

lynch the icons

6:00 pm

I will inquire into no man's reasons for taking a drink at any hour except 6:00 P.M. They are his affair and he has a rich variety of liquors to choose from according to his whim or need; may they reward him according to his deserts and well beyond. But when evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn. The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost, or, if lost, then not altogether in vain. But it cannot make the grade alone. It needs help; it needs, my brethern, all the help it can get. It needs a wife (or some other charming woman) of attuned impulse and equal impatience and maybe two or three friends, but no more than two or three. these gathered together in a softly lighted room and, with them what it needs most of all, the bounty of alcohol. Hence the cocktail. After dinner you may, if you like, spend an hour or so sipping a jigger of whiskey diluted to any attenuation that matches your whim with soda or branch water. But at 6:00 P.M. we must have action. When we summon life to reveal forgotten benisons and give us ourselves again, we do so peremptorily. Confirm that hope, set the beacon burning, and be quick about it. So no water.

~ Bernard DeVoto (1948) The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto