Springshots.

Ah, spring! What joy! How well the great poet Chaucer put it: 

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, 

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, 

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur 

Of which vertú engendred is the flour; 

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth 

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne...

Yeah, dude. Righteous.

You gotta love spring, if only because winter sucks so much. Yeah, the bugs are back, and some of the birds make a lot of noise, and some of the neighbors make a lot of noise, but it's okay. Why, I saw a pileated woodpecker the other day, not twenty feet away! Almost fainted with excitement. 

The bird was camera-shy, alas, but I offer these simple pictures of spring in her splendor. 

Okay, so this doesn't look like much. But when I see long, dead grass strands under my deck, I know what it means...

Construction time for the Robins again. 

The blooms look so wonderful that I hope we don't get snow in May again this year. Kills flowers dead.

The dogwood's already losing its petals. Lazy, that's what I call it. Well, let sleeping dogwoods lie. 

The maples are finally unfurling their leaves. Baby steps, maples. 

This tree always looks great. Except the year we got a late blizzard and it had so many leaves up already that the weight tore down several limbs. But it bounced back after a decade or so. Can't kill this guy.

And finally, daffodils. Maybe my favorite flower.
You forget the bulb is there and suddenly: Bing! I'm back!

The sunlight colors always look like hope. 

AFABs and AMABs.

Five years ago, this blog joshed about California outlawing gender-reveal parties as part of a "Gender Prenatal Nonassumption Act." Well, we're not there yet, but we're getting closer. 

No less a popular authority on medicine than the Cleveland Clinic is tying itself in knots over having to use terms like "man" or "woman," lest they offend women who think they are men and vice versa. The problem is, they're trying to write about health concerns that may only affect one gender or the other, and it's making them crazy. Pity them: Here they are trying to educate the public for its own good about, say, prostate cancer, but they can't say this affects men (although women have no prostates) because men who call themselves women will be offended and -- I'm not sure what. Ignore the advice? Be angry because it applies to them (they, having prostates)? 

One way out of this inability to tell the truth is the "assigned" gambit. Instead of calling human beings men and women, which has worked pretty darn well through history, we now can say "assigned male at birth" and "assigned female at birth." As if the obstetrician just made some arbitrary decision when yanking the baby from the mother (or "birthing person"). Even the baby has to be covered by gender newspeak. As the Cleveland Clinic writes: 

"The fetus gets its assigned sex around nine weeks of pregnancy, although your healthcare provider can’t detect it on ultrasound yet."

In other words, the growing baby's sex organs are showing at nine weeks of pregnancy, but they cannot be seen yet on ultrasound. Does the Clinic have any idea how weird their phrasing sounds?

If these geniuses have their way, we'll all be known as AFABs and AMABs -- Assigned Female At Birth and Assigned Male At Birth. Of course, it won't stay there -- it never does. Remember, terms like "handicapped" and "colored person" were once the polite terms, but once they became common they became insulting, and new terms had to be put into use. I suspect AF/MAB's days are numbered already.  

In the meanwhile, though, we can still celebrate true love in a modern way. Instead of Boy Meets Girl, of course, we will have:

"AMAB Meets AFAB"

 A Poem

An AMAB a-wandering near the windmills by the bay
Distressed by the eagles, chopped up below them lay
Was suddenly, like chance, taken at the flood
By a lovely young AFAB, xer eyes as dark as mud.

"That's my kinda AFAB," the youthful AMAB cried
"I must go and meet xer; I'll not be denied!"
The AFAB, quite lightly, trotted down the road
Xer coveralls, quite tightly, xer tuchus they showed.

"Hello there!" said AMAB, "And please pardon me!
I hope you have interest in an A. M. A. B."
"Why, yes," said the AFAB, "and you seem okay.
It's just about lunchtime; what do you say?"

AMAB and xe went to dine at McKlaus's
On hot roasted mealworms and crickets with louses
They toasted each other with beetle juice soda
And strolled to the lake by the People's Pagoda.

"You're just right for me," said the AMAB with heat
"What a great fortune we happened to meet!
What a great future we'd have! Can you see?
You, me, and unassigned baby makes three!"

"Cool your electrons," the AFAB said ruthlessly.
"I like you, but thus far I have acted truthlessly.
In fact, I'm an AMAB, but wished to be other,
So my assignment was changed by birth parent (mother)."

"Worry no more," said AMAB with a cry,
"For no more truthless has one been than I!
For I am an AFAB but lied on the form.
I'd say I was anything for your love so warm!"

They were bonded together in ceremony
No one was sure who was he or was she
But they vowed to be one if their hearts still were in it
And truth never entered their lives for a minute. 

Kaboom!

Sorry I have not been around. When I say everything blew up at once workwise, I'm not kidding. While overcommitting to other things, I agreed to a rush job for extra pay that turned out to have some hidden issues. I felt like a cartoon antagonist (say, Wile E. Coyote) whose tunnel got diverted to a fireworks warehouse by the hero (one Bugs Bunny, perhaps); rising from the tunnel in the darkness, I struck a match, then realized I was surrounded by gunpowder-laden rockets, their fuses lolling my way; shocked, I dropped the match, but before it went out, it caught a fuse and -- 

You've seen that cartoon before. 

As a coworker once told me on a particularly annoying afternoon, "If it was fun they'd call it play." 

Well, nothing for it but to shove everything aside that was shoveable and get the thing done. Which I did, yesterday, and was ready for a nap afterward, at which time of course I got a phone call from someone who almost never calls me. I will leave my phone on in case my wife needs me, thinketh I, because the only other person who might call is Claymore, and he never calls at this time because he's at work, and of course Claymore had taken the day off. 

Nice to be popular, but please, my public, let a guy rest! 

Meanwhile, here's a couple of other thoughts that have popped up for you:

ROOSTERS 

Chicken and eggs are good to eat, but sadly, roosters are part of the deal. When we moved from the city to the exurbs, there was someone in the area who kept a few, and I'd hear the idiot chicken known as the rooster scream from time to time. They don't just crow at dawn, as in the movies; they keep it up all the livelong day. 

As the town demographics have changed, it seems that keeping chickens is now more of a thing to do. These seem to be more hyperactive, possible meth-addicted roosters, who don't wait for sunup at 7 but start around 5:30. When one goes off to the east, another, miles away in the west, says to himself, "I'm not going to stand for that!" and blurts out his cheery tune. None of them have the nice, clear "cock-a-doodle-doo!" cry, but rather sound like kazoo-based kaiju being strangled. They used to say that children should be seen and not heard, but I think that better applies to chickens. 

WINTER

A haiku for you:

Chapped lips, chapped hands, feet

Where can I go to buy a

Full-body ChapStick?

See you tomorrow, unless more stuff blows up, or I get arrested for first-degree rooster assault. 

I like me too.

In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," then presumably coughed a little and raised his eyebrows, looking around with a smile.

I'm not sure that poets have the clout anymore to make statements like that. But that's just fine -- there are plenty of other vocations in which the practitioners have a self-regard that would make Caligula seem like a shy, modest type. 

"Little ol' me? I'm just a kindly 
emperor, trying to help the people."

Journalists seem to have an enormous self-regard. Maybe they always did, feeling that with the power of their words they were able to assume an authority that required neither education nor invention, just the vote of the public when it purchased the newspaper. Since Watergate, their self-regard as truthtellers in a corrupt world has inflated as respect for the profession and evidence of its independence has cratered. Reporters on the whole seem to be happy lapdogs for the people they like, covering up things here and attacking on command there, whose mistrust by the public grows daily. (Was anyone surprised when the Newseum closed?) And yet if you read a book by a reporter on reporting, he'll tell you that he's not important, the story is, and also, ME ME ME. It's a tour de force of the author's humblebrag, with a few lectures on his Journalistic Ethics tossed in. 

Saints never tell you they're saints. 

Perhaps this egotism is purposeful puffery for journalists, designed to dispel the creeping fear that they really are useless loudmouths. Could be. 

Teachers have really gotten out in front of their skis on this one as well. Yes, they are important for the education of our children (when they do it), and most teachers I know are great people who love what they do. But when did some of them begin to think they were more important than the children's own families? While it's true that a bad family can turn out a bad kid, one bad teacher can corrupt a whole passel of them. Ironically, a little humility goes a long way to earning respect and trust. 

Sometimes I get the feeling too many of them took Plato's Republic seriously, thinking that philosophers ought to be the monarchs and children should be taken from their parents for education. They ought to remember that it might be a nice place to visit, but they wouldn't want to live there. 

Money handlers as a class do not consider their large sums of money adequate recompense for their work. They also demand the respect of the public for the genius that they possess. If you were smart, you'd be rich too! seems to be the thought. They needn't worry -- rich people will always get their tuchuses polished by those who want to know their secrets. They never have to see the disdain of those who find their egoism tiresome, their methods dubious, their gospel damaging. They never have to hear the moans of those who despise how they use their cash for charitable purposes and have to live with the consequences. 

Politicians are and have always been the worst of the lot, able to convince themselves of the good they are doing while stuffing their pockets and crushing the lives of citizens they are meant to serve. I'll give them this -- if people were always coming to my door and begging me for special favors, I'd begin to think less of humanity as a whole. Perhaps that's the best argument for term limits -- as a means of preventing cynicism and hatred among the ruling class.

Successful actors and other performers are perhaps the most revolting of them all. The love of the fans ought to be enough, but the appetite of the ego grows with the feeding. They must be world-changers as well and loved for it. It usually makes them pretty tools for the faddish fanatism of the day. This would be harmless, but it inevitably requires telling us little people what we ought to be doing. Yeah, we all just love that.  

And what of the humble novelist, who sweats away in his little garret, chipping away at his stories like a sculptor trying to draw the angel from the coarse stone? Like moi, in other words? Do we not think that we are hot stuff, and expect to be respected for it? 

Meh -- not me. As with poets, maybe there was a time when the novelist was a person of some societal rank. A million lousy novels and a million good but forgotten books since, those days are gone. Now only a pinpoint of wildly successful and wealthy authors would expect that kind of obsequiousness, and they fall into the money handlers category. The rest of us prefer love to respect. (Although a little money is nice, too.) 

A tragic rime.

 

Saga of the Homophones

Or, Long Knight's Journey into Daze

By Fred Key, Righter

Knight fell slowly on the town

And it hurt him on his knee.

A boulder knight no one could know

It tripped him up, you see.

“This rock has merely hurt my pride;

My hart is much more pained.”

Indeed the dear looked shaken as

He wobbled off, half sprained.

“Sad knight,” his squire said to him,

“Despair misaimed your boot.

I’m saddened to my sole for you!

How sorry is my foot!”

“Alas, the pain is all too reel,

A fishhook in my heart.

It lands my fate I know not wear!

I rend my clothes apart.

I love the Princess Jezebel

If I may bear my sorrow.

The sorrow growls, shows its teeth,

And haunts me for the morrow.

Ah, Jezebel! Beloved one!

Such a gorgeous site!

Yes, her castle is quite nice,

And she’s a bit all right.

I sought to woo her to be mine

I brought a bunch of flours.

The sacks all busted on the way!

Was sweeping up for hours.

Covered as I was I thought

To play a dashing roll.

Alas, she’s gluten-free these days!

She shunned me, on the hole.

When I climbed out I wrote a note

With finest stationary

The note, I fear, I could not send!

Stuck to my reliquary!

I made a book of poems for her;

Enclosed it in a phial.

But all the pages jammed in there

So it was not worthwhile.

Once more I leapt upon my horse

And took him by the rain

Which meant I had to shower off

That horse is such a pain.

At last I rode once more to her

And to her castle peek

I found my interest peaked in her

As in her bath I sneak.

Once more disaster struck, for she

Whose love I tried to steel

Had me tossed out upon the tush

And that raised quite a wheel.

I rolled back home and now I sob

Thwarted in love thrice.

What a scandal! What a waist!

And the rest of her was nice!

You clearly see me in such pane

All riven by love’s wars!

And thus my tail is at its end.”

He pointed to his drawers.

“Such a poem of -- whoa!” the knight

Herd from his faithful flunky

While chasing off a pesky flock

Of sheep who all smelled funky.

The squire said, “A lesson, lord,

Is learned by eye or ear.

And yet ignored, for it is said,

You can’t get there from hear.”

✍🏰🐑

Bad poems.

I know two things that should prevent me from writing this blog entry:

1) I have written plenty of bad poetry -- some unintentionally; and 

2) People are out there, trying to do their best for their loved ones, and shouldn't be ridiculed for it.

But part of my Saturday afternoon was spent on the porch with baby dog Izzy, and the music from a birthday party half a mile away was as loud as if it was on a speaker next to us. During a pause in the entertainment -- the musicians were good, the singer, well, not so much -- a family member got up and read a poem to the birthday person. Thanks to the miracle of modern loudspeakers, everyone within a mile got to hear it. 

Woof. 

"This'll wow 'em!"

I'm not saying people should write poems for birthday parties like Robert Frost. Robert Frost would have written terrible poems for birthday parties. Fights would have broken out. People would have left, angry. What I'm saying is, if you want to say something nice about the guest of honor, just say it. Don't be cute and rhyme it in some approximation of poetic meter, and then read it aloud with the da-da-da enthusiasm of a fourth-grader on mandatory speech day.

The writer always has to mention everyone, lest they offend anyone by leaving them out. What do I mean? I mean they all sound like this:

Arnold, we love ya

Your friends are all here

We’re happy to toast ya

With whiskey and beer

Remember those days

Growing up in the Heights

Block parties and girls

A few switchblade fights

We had so much fun 

In the high school you know

You won your diploma

When you promised to go

One day you met Joanie

Her hair then was red

Your first gal who didn’t have

To put a bag over her head

And soon came the little ones

Jill, Pete, and Joe

Pete’s up for parole now

In six months or so

The family was growing

And you said what the hells

I guess we’ll get hitched

Out rang wedding bells

You worked for the city

The union’s great pride

Doing God only knows

Running bets on the side

You’re old and your fat now

And so you’re retired

You’re leaving for Florida

On account it’s required

So we say happy birthday

And we raise up a toast

To Arnold, our brother

Who we love the utmost

(Drunken cheers)

Actually, that party might be fun. Just leave before the fight breaks out and everything would be fine.

Homeworkinator.

The Guardian (because we have to go outside New York for important news about New York) reports that New York City has banned students from using artificial intelligence for schoolwork:

New York City schools have banned ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that generates human-like writing including essays, amid fears that students could use it to cheat.

According to the city’s education department, the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York’s public schools. Jenna Lyle, a department spokesperson, said the decision stems from “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of contents”.

The first indication that artificial intelligence was being used was that some actual intelligence was being shown by the students. 

Meanwhile, in artificial intelligence news reported by the New York Post, a group using AI to make dirty pictures has been booted from Kickstarter and Patreon. This was interesting to me, because I thought Kickstarter and Patreon only booted fund-raisers from conservatives. 

But getting back to the school situation. This has gone much differently from what I was expecting as a kid. Take, for example, the kids' book Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, from the series of science fiction books by Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams. This 1958 book was still in the library when I was a kid, and it was ahead of its time in a lot of ways. The hero, Danny, and his pals are given access to a new supercomputer, which they proceed to use to write their homework for them. But (spoiler alert!) in the end they find that since they had to enter the data for the computer themselves, they wound up learning anyway. Darn you, computer! Making us learn!

The book's authors could not foresee an Internet, a place with so much information so easily within reach. There is still a catch -- a kid who used a computer to retrieve data from the Internet and write his papers would find that his papers contained a lot of garbage information. However, considering its probable nature and the positions of teachers ("January 6 was worse than the Civil War! Herbal supplements can cure cancer! Men can menstruate!"), the kid would probably still get good grades. 

I guess if kids want to get through school and be as ignorant on the other end as they were going in, that's becoming more likely, and for a variety of reasons. I would have warned against that in the past, but as Tommy Grey once wrote, “Where ignorance is bliss, Tis folly to be wise.” Good ol' Tommy, always making with the epigrams. 

A bombogenesis Christmas.

The barometric pressure fell like lightning
While the pressure mounting everywhere else tightening
The grimaces on faces far too cold
"For this stinkin' weather I'm too old!"
Cried frozen folks from ages 8 to 90s
As north and south alike all froze their hienies
The weatherman said bombogenesis
Not one on many bingo cards, I guess

Winter weather report bingo 

The airports were all clogged with canceled flights
Delays and strays and families spend a night's
Disgruntled misery at the flyways
Still better than disasters on the highways
Snow and ice and tires uninflation
Can make a catastrophic situation
Be careful as you travel friends, and I pray
God see you safe on Christmas all the way.

Edison and Santa Claus.

Thomas Edison gets a lot of flak these days, mostly I think from people who identify with Nikola Tesla. It's true that Tesla got the high hat from Edison when he worked for the man, but most people did. Most people did from anyone they worked for back then. Edison was also mostly deaf (probably due to scarlet fever) and so would have been a lousy communicator anyway. Plus, Tesla was a very strange man, and put off a lot of people.

In a way, Tesla won, with the help of George Westinghouse. Both of them believed in the utility of alternating current over direct current -- Edison's direct current generators would have required far more and smaller generating stations than alternating current, which made A/C perfect for Westinghouse's Niagara generator and for electrifying the White City, the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, as well as for major metropolitan installations. 

Well, Edison just had to resign himself to his million other inventions -- and dollars. 

But I'm not looking to criticize Edison today. I want to give him the ho-ho-holiday thumb's-up for his work with that other bulky gray-haired legend, Santa Claus. 

First, Edison's workable lightbulb was a wonder, and with it and his partner and friend Edward H. Johnson he created the first string of electrical Christmas lights in 1880. At first these lights were not practical for home use, requiring professional installation, and the public was understandably nervous about electricity. But Edison's company General Electric was first out with a Christmas light set in 1903, and over time they became more popular. 

They certainly are pretty. I always am especially saddened, of course, when I hear about dangerous mishaps with these Christmas lights -- people lose homes and even lives when electric decorations are misused or faulty, but imagine what was happening when people put actual candles on their trees. (I always refer people to the Consumer Product Safety Commission's safety tips on how not to electrocute or burn anyone or anything with electrical decorations. I assume their advice for putting lit candles on trees is: Don't.) 

Edison also helped Jolly Old St. Nick more personally when his movie studio released a short film called "The Night Before Christmas" in 1905: 

It was the first film version of the famous poem "A Visit from Saint Nicholas," but not the first live-action film of Santa; that was done in Britain in 1898. (An interesting run-down of the first 10 Christmas films ever can be found at the Reel Rundown site here.)  

Of course sound film had not yet been invented, but Joseph Miller, who posted the Edison film on YouTube, says that the music heard on this reel was "added some time later which appears to be cylinder recordings from about the same time period, with the exception of 'It Came Upon A Midnight Clear.'" 

I like all the business about Santa getting the team ready to ride.

Edison himself may not have been very jolly, but he helped make the celebration of Christmas an expression of civic joy as we know it today. As we wait for the capital-L Light in the Darkness to shine, we can have some cheer from the small-l lights at Christmastime. 

Thanksgiv-a-lingle.

So, this was making the rounds.

And . . . yeah. It's hard to argue with it, actually. For such a popular holiday as Thanksgiving we ought to have some popular songs to celebrate it. Instead, what do we have? What comes to mind for you?

"Over the River and Through the Woods" -- I think this old wheezer got its second legs by being sung at the end of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving by the gang riding -- in what now would be ILLEGALLY! -- in the back of the Browns' station wagon. And what is that song all about? Going to Grandma's house for a celebration in a snowy season. Sounds more like Christmas than Thanksgiving to me, unless you live in Buffalo, God help you. But indeed the poem was published under the title "The New-England Boy's Song about Thanksgiving Day" in 1844, according to Dr. Wikipedia. No one knows who set it to music. 

So that's one, but I guess it doesn't count as a "banger." Neither do a lot of our popular Christmas songs, though, and I'm not sure I'd like to see a lot of them done in a modern style, let alone as Thanksgiving songs. "All I Want Stuffed for Thanksgiving Is You" may seem to have a kind of charm, but -- nah.

It's easy to say that Thanksgiving's theme of gratitude is too solemn for ribaldry, but come on. It certainly can't top the night of the birth of Christ for solemnity, and we've been celebrating that in every degree from contemplation to drunken spree for two thousand years. So let's try digging a little harder in the hit holiday mine shall we?

I have to say, it doesn't get much easier. Even Mark Steyn, the radio deejay turned political commenter, wrestled with it in his book A Song for the Season. For Thanksgiving, he chose the utterly unexpected song "Jingle Bells" -- unexpected, that is, unless you'd read his essay about it when it originally appeared on his blog.  

Just in time for Thanksgiving, here comes, er, "Jingle Bells" - which was written not for the Yuletide season but, allegedly, for Thanksgiving. In Boston, in the fall of 1857, the city's leading music publisher, Oliver Ditson, introduced the world to a new song called "The One-Horse Open Sleigh".

Steyn notes that racing about fast as possible in unprotected sleighs pulled by speedy nags -- and maybe with speedy nags, IFYKWIM(AITYD) -- was quite the pre-Civil War craze. New England certainly can get cold enough by Thanksgiving to let loose the horses. (It's 36 degrees in New York City as I write this, and you can usually subtract a few degrees and add a couple of inches of ice and snow to estimate the weather in Boston.) Steyn writes: 

...what I find oddest are the claims of Christmas Songs Made In America and many similar books that the song was written for "his father's Sunday School class on Thanksgiving 1857". I'm willing to believe that at Thanksgiving a young man's fancy turns to snow, at least in those distant days before Al Gore's global warming project sent the mercury rising. But no Massachusetts Sunday School is going to teach its charges a song whose lyrical preoccupations are racing, gambling and courting:

A day or two ago
I thought I'd take a ride
And soon Miss Fannie Bright
Was seated by my side...
Now the ground is white
Go it while you're young
Take the girls tonight...

Hmm. He's got a point.

But it's no good; all songs about snow activities are eventually sucked into the Christmas oeuvre, and "Jingle Bells" got there a long time ago. 

What are the other choices, then? "Turkey Lurkey Time" from the 1969 Broadway show Promises, Promises sounds promising, but it's A) all about Christmas and B) got a title that makes me want to Hurly Wurly. Adam Sandler did a comedy song on Thanksgiving almost 30 years ago, but we're not looking for parodies here, and if we were, we'd look for better ones. (It's no "Chanukah Song," is what I'm saying.) I applaud Ben Rector for giving it 100% on a country song:

It's fine -- it's got the usual country song lists -- goin' home, my town, families, football, love -- and maybe it's made it to the PA in your local supermarket, but it hasn't cut any ice here in the northeast as far as I can tell. It has some real heart, so thumbs-up on that, Ben.

A couple of years ago I noted that Irving Berlin took a crack at Thanksgiving for the film Holiday Inn, in which all the songs are pegged to different holidays with mixed results. The number "I've Got Plenty to Be Thankful For," is one of the better ones, but it's never become a standard -- maybe because Christmas does shove aside all Thanksgiving numbers, or maybe because it's a love song, and in the movie Bing does a rueful duet with his own recording, having a lonely Thanksgiving after his girlfriend has been stolen by Fred Astaire. As far as I can tell the song has never had a successful cover version. 

Surely the old-timers 100+ years ago in Tin Pan Alley coughed up a Thanksgiving song or two, right? Well, probably -- God knows they churned out songs on all kinds of topics, all day, every day, hoping one or two would stick in the public consciousness. I note there was a number called "A Thanksgiving Song" in a book of Tin Pan Alley tunes, but I can't track down whose it was and who may have recorded it. 

I admit I'm no musicologist, though. 

A search through the AllMusic site brings us many songs with Thanksgiving in the title, and I hope you'll enlighten me if any others have really made it to the big time. 

However, I do have a suggestion for an older number that really does suit the day. It's from a Broadway show, almost as old as Promises, Promises, but like that show also had a breakout hit (in the case of the former, "I'll Never Fall in Love Again"; in the latter, "Day By Day"). I'm referring to Godspell's "All Good Gifts," which hits every note in the purpose of the holiday of Thanksgiving. Yes, it's hippie music, but it's grateful hippie music. 

 And there it is -- we thank you, Lord, for all good gifts. Sounds like Thanksgiving to me. 

Sail and hull.

A small ship battered close to shore

No harbor finds it to secure

Left its sails up far too late

In drowned hope to escape this fate

Now too close, and keel to pole

Twisted, tossed against the shoal

The wind too strong to pray escape 

The stones that grind and shred and scrape 

As lashed and racked with wind so full

Sails rounder, tauter than the hull

Now chewed upon by teeth of stone--

The able-bodied, fate unknown. 

The ship appears to bob but not

The ruinous wind pins to the spot--

And when the wind its whim will change

And tide is turned, and disarrange

The sails and shrouds, no more near break,

Drop dead, and low tide moved to wake

And drag the ghost ship toward the deep

The water full enough to sleep.

And so then down, into the sea

With no more mighty blast to be

Ground above as teeth on bone

Illusive life, no more is shown.

Some writers go through hell.

Haiku, low tide.

 Five haikus for summer

Summer sands and skies
Just you and me and the sun
And eight million more

Balloon floats over
The ocean in perfect peace
Kid lost another

Mighty sun above!
Bringer of summer's bounty!
Burns me like bacon

Sausage and peppers
Zeppoli and soft-serve too
Indigestion calls

Dark eyes upon me
My movements, grace and fluid
Stupid ring toss game

Pate.

Alas, poor Yorick, fellow of jest

For joshing, no doubt was the best

Now for sure his skull is shiny

As mine old scalp, or baby heinie

I drive the car and mirror glance

To see one tailgate there perchance

And lo! My hairless head is seen

Within the glass of my machine

The mirror taunts my fuzzless pate

As hairless as a china plate

My father, his hairline did bequeath 

His will did list no hair beneath

My follicles failed, all tired, old

Before their time and left me cold

Now hats, beneath which I must hide

For warmth that nature won't provide

A collection of caps that grew in size

As hairline crept north from my eyes

The sand trap in the rear grew vast

Sahara size, I found, at last

So, cover up that scalp with cloth

To hide the skin that nature's sloth

Has left me high and dry and bare

With just a stray hair here and there

Alas! Poor hair! I knew you when

But now is now, and that was then

At least by one fear am not haunted

Could not grow man bun if I wanted. 

Bug off.

 

New tree.

Mr. Philbin asks if I'm going to post a photo of the new tree. He hinted in a way that seemed to indicate I would be letting down the side if I didn't, having dragged you all through the traumatic loss my thundercloud plum through old age and black knot, then through the pulling out of the stump with chains and the final removal of the stump itself via root & stump picker, leaving a large hole that remained unfilled for weeks. 

I said Sir, you insult me. I left out many of these grim details when I told the story. But yes, I will invite readers to see the new red maple I put in the hole last week. And here it is. 

I know it's kind of underwhelming. Even the hole looks bad. 

The hole will be improved when I get some more dirt and some mulch this week. The tree, well -- time takes time. 

I have gotten some good plants from the big garden chains, but in this case I wanted to go to a local place with a good reputation. You know what that means: 💸💸💸 But it was worth it. The tree is more than six feet tall now, and was trained with an eight-foot-long bamboo stick, so it's straight as an arrow. Its leaves are fresh and stuck on pretty well. I won't say I got a bargain, but if it lasts as long as the other maples nearby, it could be amortized to a few bucks a year. Well worth it for the shade, the water and soil retention, and the beautification of the property. Holes in the ground usually don't lead to better property value, unless they're small and on the putting greens.

My wife winced when I told her that this hole project (har!) cost about $400, beginning to end, and it didn't make me want to jump up and cheer either. But, c'est la tree. Only God can make a tree, says Mr. Kilmer, but it was up to me to buy the thing. 

"Poem" doesn't rhyme.

It occurred to me that the word poem does not actually have a rhyme. Ironic, isn't it?

Of course, the always-helpful site RhymeZone, friend to writers of song and limerick, tried to come up with a few. 

2 syllables:

bro hymn, ho hum, know him, loham, low hum, pro-am, show him, spoem, throw him

3 syllables:

below him, roboam

4 syllables:

jeroboam, rehoboam

Meh. Take away the ancient kings and all you have are weird combo words and sorta rhymes. As example, RhymeZone shows that no less a person than Oliver Wendell Holmes resorted to a near-rhyme for "The Iron Gate":

Where all goes wrong, and nothing as it ought?

Old age, the graybeard! Well, indeed, I know him,--

Shrunk, tottering, bent, of aches and ills the prey;

In sermon, story, fable, picture, poem,

 

It's not bad, but there's still something imperfect about it, more suited for light verse than anything serious. That's okay for a trash poet like me, who just diddles with words for laughs, but Ollie W. was a pretty serious guy. "Poem" is not "pohim." It's not quite Tom Lehrer rhyming Harvard with disCARvard, but it's in the same zip code.

I like to play with the rules themselves rather than just look the other way. If you've hung around this drugstore for a while you know that I wrote a poem about eye rhymes (words that look like they should rhyme but don't) and words with silent letters, as well as verbs that defy reason and words with very few rhymes. My favorite may be my ode to Wile E. Coyote, though.

Rather than follow a standard rhyme scheme like A/B/A/B or A/B/C/B, I wanted to simulate the chaos of a Looney Tunes cartoon, where the storytellers follow a structure but all within is crazy. This was my rhyme scheme:

A

B

C

C

D

D

E

F

G

G

E

B

F

A

I

I

Every line has a line that rhymes, but most of them are not where they ought to be. I'm not sure it succeeded, and may have just confused people, but I was happy when I was finished.

Surely, not since the time of Roboam

Hath been such a wackadoodle poem

Roboam: "You can say that again!"

P.S.: Those who remember H.R. Pufnstuf might be interested to know that RhymeZone came up with a scant few rhymes for orange, which are even worse than the ones for poem. However, Witchiepoo was wrong; there ain't no rhyme for oranges. 

Winter haikus.

Snow falls on the path
One flake, two flake, three flake, and
Oh my achin' back

Dog sits on the ice
Rejoicing in nature's bliss
He got a fur coat

My friend has moved south
Shows me pictures of beaches
He can go cram it

Some ski in winter
Some sled, some skate, and some board
I pay the gas bill

Snow is the only
Weather with which you can play
Gimme a yo-yo

I hate summer's heat
But I won't die picking it
Up with a shovel

Silence is golden?

In the supermarket halls
A bin of dog toys calls

A bunch of wiener dogs in Christmas cheer.

They are long and they are grinning

Like they've had too much fun sinning

Full of fluff for teeth and squeaking for the ear.

Let us get one for the puppy!

He's so super-pepper-uppy

These are just the kind of thing that he will use!

He'll nuzzle it and bite it

He will massacre and fight it

And then meanwhile he will not chew on my shoes. 

On the morning of the day

As the humans ply their way

Down for coffee and prepare to find their stuff,

Here comes puppy all a-seething

Acting like he still is teething

And it looks like he is fixin' to play rough.

He's a crazy little boy!

Someone quick! Throw him his toy!

Tell him it was sent here to him by some elf!

Let him rip apart and caper!

Let him tear apart the paper!

He can open up the present by himself. 

It's the toy that he's undoing

And he sets right into chewing

Like this thing's a meal for hungry carnivores!

There's a foot off and a nose!

There's an ear--and there it goes!

Within minutes there is fluff upon the floors.

Puppy had a bunch of fun

As he ripped apart the one

Big present Santa left him as his treat. 

And while he enjoyed the violence

I know I enjoyed the silence

From the satisfied young golden at my feet.

Snowzimandius.

I met a traveller from a muddy place,

Who said—"One small and footless step of thin ice 

Rests in the yard. . . . Near it lies the face,

Of mud reversed from snow a visage lies, whose grimace,

And icy lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which lasted, stamped once on a snowman's noggin,

The hand that crafted, on the snowman's head;

Within the mire, these words appear:

My name is Snowzymandias, King of Toboggan!;

Look on my Works, ye Frozen, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that minuscule print, alone and bare

The lone and yellow grass stretch far away."