Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Existing in New York City Among the Capitalist Pigs

Foto by tgw, "From Madison Square Park," New York City 2013
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It's All About Capitalism
I hear the liberal (they call themselves progressives these days) pundits spouting all kinds of analyses. Analyses about the rich, about the Middle Class (I contend there is no Middle Class any longer in this country),  about poverty, about Congress being packed with millionaires...and, yes, they speak well on these subjects...BUT...I listen to them prattle on in their learned ways...BUT they all miss the point, the true point, and that is they all talk around the actual problem we have in this country and that has to do with the distribution of money.  It has to do with Capitalism.  Our corporations are run in the manor of the old plantations.  Their eyes are on PROFITS and nothing else.  The way to make the most profits?  That's easy: low wages, the lowest of which are slavery.  If you don't have any money to start off with, you're sunk in this country.  You must find the cheapest ways to exist.

When I was a kid growing up in West Texas, it was quite obvious to me by the time I reached puberty that success didn't have anything to do with ambition or education or wisdom, it had to do with connections.  By connections I mean not only where on the social scale your family was positioned but who your peers were (who you hung out with), how lucky you were (and by luck I'm mean "being in the right place at the right time"), and how talented in terms of what the society needed most you were.  In my hometown, your talent had to do with how well you played sports, especially football, or on how charming and personable you were (in case you had ambitions to become a Christian preacher or a politician) if you didn't play football but were class president or if you were a girl how good a cheerleader or dance organizer you were...simple talents like that.  My ambitions at a young age were to be a writer or a musician, neither talent worth that much in my hometown.  I knew from a young age that if I were to make it, I had to get the hell out of my hometown, either that or buckle down and learn the insurance business or marry an oilman's daughter.

Henry George on Wages

"THERE IS no common rate of wages in the same sense as the common rate of interest, which is relatively specific at any given time and place. Wages vary with individual abilities. As society becomes more complex, there are also large variations among occupations. Nevertheless, there is a certain general relation between all wages. This concept — that wages are higher or lower at one time or place than another — is quite clear. So wages must rise and fall according to some law.
There is a law as basic to political economy as the law of gravity is to physics. The fundamental principle of human action is this:
People seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion.
"Clearly, this principle will tend, through competition, to balance rewards for equal exertion under similar circumstances. When people work for themselves, this operates largely through price fluctuations. The same tendency governs relationships between those who work for themselves and those who work for others. Given free conditions, no one would work for someone else if they could make the same amount working for themselves" (from chapter 15 of Progress and Poverty).

Obama Continues to Kiss Republican Ass 
President Obama continues to amaze me.  He talks out of one side of his mouth one way and out the other side another way.  He's dark and scary on one side, the death list and commander-in-chief and aides-picking side, but he's all peaches and cream on that side that blows hot air into the ears of those who voted for him and expected progressive change from him.  Like on gun control.  President Obama says we need it, at least a ban on assault weapons; yet there's no sign we're going to get any gun control at all during this session of our still Republican-led Congress.  I mean, come on, gun sales are going through the roof.  Why spoil such phenomenal sales with a ban on assault weapons, at least not until the current stock of assault weapons have been sold out.

And then there's this bullshit about this so-called sequester rearing its ugly head on our poor asses this month.  All of this debt talk while the god-damn stock market soars higher and higher, up now over 14,000.  A solution to the debt staring these Congressional idiots right in their ignorant faces: put a stock transfer tax in place...but then how do you do that when Obama picks a god-damn Wall Street nutjob to head the SEC?  Obama continues to wallow in the slop of Capitalist Pig Wall Street.

I thought it pretty sleazy of Michelle Obama to grab some spotlight time by appearing on the Oscars.  And wearing a new slick designed-just-for-her dress that must have cost thousands of dollars to boot.  That to me and old Thorstein Veblen (my Economics mentor) is a sign of conspicuous consumption and at a time when half the damn country is in poverty.  And now Michelle is trumpeting this new Obama super-PAC bullshit where people who are Obama supporters are going to wallow like pigs in the slop of big bucks.  I see Michelle Obama now following in the footsteps of Hillbilly Hillary by seeing a chance for her own political moves after she and Barry have retired to their Westchester County, New York, mansion (they say they're going to live in Hawaii, but I'll bet you a dime to a doughnut they have a mansion here in the 48 somewhere politically viable), maybe one next door to the Clintons.  

So the old District of Corruption keeps on keepin' on the same old downhill paths while all the cats with their hands in the pot are getting richer and richer and farther away from those beneath them, like the poor bastards who have to clean their shitcans and wait on 'em hand and foot and guard them and keep them safe for democracy.

I was reading where one of the biggest crooks in the District of Corruption, Mitch "Piece of Shit" McConnell, has had his income soar from being worth a mere 4 million bucks a year or so ago to around 22 million lately.  Where did those extra 18 million bucks come from?  Oh, that the American people (the stupidest people in the world) had the guts to throw these bums out on their pompous asses.  Of course, if you promote such revolutionary ideas, watch out for one of those drones to come floating in over your vulnerable ass when you least expect it.

Here in New York City today (March 1st), the extremely crooked Metropolitan Transit Authority pirates are raising fares on the commuter trains and raising the tolls on all the bridges coming into the Apple.  I assume it's necessary to pay all those big-shot salaries and consulting-firm fees and to also make up for the huge cost overruns on the world's most expensive office building, Number One World Trade Center that once was called the Freedom Tower.  By the way, I'm proud to say, I didn't think these shysters could come up with an uglier structure than the old World Trade Center towers, those the amazing Saudi-Arabian jihadists blew down in one of the greatest military invasions in the history of military warfare, but, hey, with this multi-billion-dollar White Elephant, they've managed an architectural miracle...Number One World Trade Center is a max-tacky piece of crap building.  [That area of Manhattan, by the way, has been declared a serious flood zone now that Hurricane Sandy showed New York City it's not an invincible location.]

Want to read something that'll make you puke as you try to balance your check book, pay off your credit cards, and worry about how you're going to meet the next mortgage payment on the house?  Here ya go: http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/

thegrowlingwolf(yes, I'm a Capitalist pig wolf in sheep's clothing)
for The Daily (Weekly) Growler 

More Art from (my old friend) Will Shuster: 
Will Shuster in his Santa Fe, New Mexico, Camino del Monte Sol studio where once I, thegrowlingwolf, lived with my late Mexican-Choctaw-Welsh wife and our three dogs (Skookum, Skigor (a Malamute and a Husky that had belonged to Will), and Queenie (a thoroughbred Airedale)) and where I had many great conversations with Will as we sat around the fireplace drinking cheap vodka.  Will preferred vodka because it was filtered through charcoal.  Will suffered badly in those last years of his life from emphysema which he contracted during a mustard gas attack in World War I.
   

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Existing in New York City Lame Brained Among the Christians

Foto by tgw, "The Flatiron Building from Madison Sq. Park," New York City 2013
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Say Goodbye to: Van Cliburn, a young man from Texas who went over to the Soviet Union and wowwed 'em playing Tchaikovsky.  When I was a little kid, Van's mother tweaked me on my cheek and called me a 'good little boy' after hearing me play a Chopin Etude.  I never met Van, but my brother did.  Van Cliburn, 78, American pianist, bone cancer.
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Say Goodbye to: Marie-Claire Alain, one of the greatest organists of all time.  A student of Maurice Durufle and Marcel Dupre and teacher of U.S.'s  George C. Baker. Marie-Claire Alain, 86, French organist.  Watch Marie-Claire playing Bach on one of the world's great organs; check out her amazing pedal work...Bach ain't easy to play, folks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2oCX9woz9U
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Say Goodbye to Magic Slim, while you enjoy going back to Mississippi with him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1KqDOs9wo 
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Say Goodbye to Cleotha Staple, of the Staples Singers.  Cleotha had the deep voice of the three sisters...she's the one who stood to the left of Pops (Roebuck).  She was the only sister born in the Mississippi Delta.  Here's the Staples Singers doing "Why Am I Treated So Bad," so cool, at the Monterrey Jazz Festival in the early 1960s.  Real honest religion, eh?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFBHOtN5ssc

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Existing With a Bitch of a Cold
Trying to think through sneezing fits and with a head full of what feels like scrambled eggs, the runny kind, like I use to love in huevos rancheros, is like trying to think in Russian when you only speak English.  A cold.  A god-damned cold.  I hate colds.  They are totally useless.  I went from not ever having colds prior to my heart attack to now having a cold every few months.  My immune system must be shot to hell by the many meds I take daily.  I know, I'm an anti-pharmaceutical dissident.

When I have a cold, I find it impossible to think beyond the handiness of the nearest tissue (that for me is toilet paper...the kind the bears who shit in the woods use) should my beezer start dripping or I suffer a marathon sneezing attack.  If it weren't for the insanity of television for me to laugh my ass off at, I'd go stir-crazy.

For the best guffaws while suffering a cold (a pestilence, I assume, sent by all the gods hand-in-hand against a nonbeliever like myself), I watch Christian television.  Unbelievable what Christian idiots sincerely believe.  Now that I can no longer find Pastor Melissa Scott on any of my Jesus-Jive channels (her beauty and sexuality brought me closer to God than I've ever been), my favorite Jesus-peddlers are The Reverend Jack Van Impe, Doctor (Doctor of Holy Jive) Mike Murdoch, and the totally insane Reverend Rod Parsley.

Like last night while my nose was running with Olympic fervor and between bouts of unholy sneezing, I watched old Brother Jack Van Impe (of course Jack's a Doctor, too) preaching a great fire and brimstone sermon based on several things that that creepy old Godless fart, Henry Kissinger (Henry being a Jew, according to Christian piety-pushers, though now a nonbeliever, will get a second chance to accept Joshua ben Joe as the Messiah since he's of God's chosen folk), had said a couple of months back about Barack Hussein Obama being the god-like head (the anti-Christ in Christian terminology) of the New World Order, terrorists (al-Queda) stealing Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and using those nukes against the Good Ole USA, Iran developing nuclear weapons, and a coming nuclear war led by a combo of Russia, China, and Iran against poor little helpless Israel.  Jack was whooping it up madly, slinging out scripture verses like a human machine-gun to back up his claim that all our coming history was already laid out for us in this combination book of Jewish legend and the New Testament fable of Jesus the Christians call the Holy Bible.
 Brother (and Doctor) Jack Van Impe (an accordion player, too, by the way)

Then on down the channels I came upon Dr. Mike Murdoch troweling for money in the seas of believers pockets, billfolds, and bank accounts.  Old Mike was "looking" for 70 of the faithful to "plant a seed" of one thousand bucks in the ministry of a truly mad idiot of a Christian medicine man, the Reverend Rod Parsley.

Rod (I'm sure he's probably a Doctor, too) Parsley fightin' Old Ned

According to Dr. Mike and his disciples, if 70 of these numbskull believers plant a thousand-dollar seed in God's garden, God's gonna open up the heavens and spill dollars back down on them like manna on the Chillin' of Israel when they were trapped out in the wilderness way back when they were Chaldeans.  I'm thinking, wait a damn minute, if God's already got bales of money up in the Central Bank of Hebbin', then why the hell does he need 70 goofballs to scratch up a thousand bucks a piece to keep Dr. Mike Murdoch and the Reverend Rod Parsley in Rolex watches, Armani suits, Mercedes, and Rolls-Royces?

Doctor Mike Murdoch

After watching these Christian clowns scheming to part the faithful from their meager savings, I've come to the conclusion that the true GOD of us all IS MOOLAH...Money!  Moolah is the God not only of Christians, Muslims, Terrorists, the U.S. Armed Forces, but also of every man, woman, and jack in the world.  Warren "Junk Bond" Buffett even though he's worth billions still bows down at the feet of the mighty Moolah praying for even more billions, currently so he and a group of hedge fund preying mantises can take over the Heinz Empire  (Brother John Kerry's source of endless bucks through old Charlie Heinz' ex-wife).

Money truly does make the world go 'round.  Like I said, it doesn't matter if you are Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Atheist, already a billionaire, or as poor as Job's turkey, we're all on a daily basis striving to get our grubby little hands on a bale of large-denomination bucks.  Go to any gambling casino and look at the suckers lined up by the thousands praying for their God to load them down with a jackpot.  Check out the number of fools still falling for the Nigerian money scams.  Go in the stores where they sell Lotto tickets and scratch offs and watch the idiots buying hundreds of dollars worth of chances to hit that week's Lotto jackpot, even though it plainly states on the backs of Lotto tickets that your chances of hitting a Lotto jackpot are 20 billion to one.

Dr. Mike Murdoch brags openly about loving money, about having several mansions, about having Gulf Stream jets, about having his own private zoo.  And old Dr. Mike is such a sleazy bastard...he's sleazy looking from the get go, with his dyed hair and dyed beard lighting up his devil head and framing his devil face.  Yet, in spite of my cold, I laugh my ass off watching old Dr. Mike scam the fool Christians (Holy Rollers getting rolled) out of their hard-earned bucks.



Pastor Melissa Scott, still the official The Daily Growler spiritual guide and Holy sex object.

thegoingtohellforsuregrowling wolf 
for The Daily Growler

Keeping Up With the Sun (Our Real God)
CHANCE OF FLARES: New sunspot AR1678 has developed a delta-class magnetic field that harbors energy for strong explosions. NOAA forecasters estimate a 45% chance of M-flares and a 15% chance of X-flares during the next 24 hours. Solar flare alerts: text, voice.  

Saturday, February 09, 2013

Existing in New York City: Where We're All Walking Targets


Foto by tgw, "Flatiron Building from Madison Sq. Park," New York City, 2013
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Say Goodbye to: Donald Byrd, jazz trumpeter who I first dug on an album called Free Form (1961) on the Blue Note label.  Donald was one of the many, many native Detroiters who were a part of the post-bop jazzmen who left their mark of redefining jazz in terms of freeing it up from its sort of frozen state after Charles Parker, Jr., died.  Donald Byrd, 80, American jazz trumpeter.
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We Are in the Process of Recolonizing Africa 
From John Pilger's Website (JohnPilger.com):
"Long planned as a "mission" for Nato, not to mention the ever-zealous French, whose colonial lost causes remain on permanent standby, the war on Africa became urgent in 2011 when the Arab world appeared to be liberating itself from the Mubaraks and other clients of Washington and Europe. The hysteria this caused in imperial capitals cannot be exaggerated. Nato bombers were dispatched not to Tunis or Cairo but Libya, where  Muammar Gaddafi ruled over Africa's largest oil reserves. With the Libyan city of Sirte reduced to rubble, the British SAS directed the "rebel" militias in what has since been exposed as a racist bloodbath.

"The indigenous people of the Sahara, the Tuareg, whose Berber fighters Gaddafi had protected, fled home across Algeria to Mali, where the Tuareg have been claiming a separate state since the 1960s. As the ever watchful Patrick Cockburn points out, it is this local dispute, not al-Qaida, that the West fears most in northwest Africa... "poor though the Tuareg may be, they are often living on top of great reserves of oil, gas, uranium and other valuable minerals".

"Almost certainly the consequence of a French/US attack on Mali on 13 January, a siege at a gas complex in Algeria ended bloodily, inspiring a 9/11 moment in David Cameron. The former Carlton TV PR man raged about a "global threat" requiring "decades" of western violence. He meant implantation of the west's business plan for Africa, together with the rape of multi-ethnic Syria and the conquest of independent Iran.

"Cameron has now ordered British troops to Mali, and sent an RAF drone,  while his verbose military chief, General Sir David Richards, has addressed "a very clear message to jihadists worldwide: don't dangle and tangle with us. We will deal with it robustly" - exactly what jihadists want to hear. The trail of blood of British army terror victims, all Muslims, their "systemic" torture cases currently heading to court, add necessary irony to the general's words. I once experienced Sir David's "robust" ways when I asked him if he had read the courageous Afghan feminist Malalai Joya's description of the barbaric behaviour of westerners and their clients in her country. "You are an apologist for the Taliban" was his reply. (He later apologised).

"These bleak comedians are straight out of Evelyn Waugh and allow us to feel the bracing breeze of history and hypocrisy. The "Islamic terrorism" that is their excuse for the enduring theft of Africa's riches was all but invented by them. There is no longer any excuse to swallow the BBC/CNN line and not know the truth. Read Mark Curtis's Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam (Serpent's Tail) or John Cooley's Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Pluto Press) or The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski (HarperCollins) who was midwife to the birth of modern fundamentalist terror. In effect, the mujahedin of al-Qaida and the Taliban were created by the CIA, its Pakistani equivalent, the Inter-Services Intelligence, and Britain's MI6.

"Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, describes a secret presidential directive in 1979 that began what became the current "war on terror". For 17 years, the US deliberately cultivated, bank-rolled, armed and brainwashed jihadi extremists that "steeped a generation in violence". Code-named Operation Cyclone, this was the "great game" to bring down the Soviet Union but brought down the Twin Towers."
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Sad Ending of a Military-trained Gun Nutjob
Christopher Kyle bragged of being the military's most successful sniper of all time.  He bragged of over 200 long-range kills, one an Iraqi woman holding a hand grenade, one an Iraqi holding a rocket launcher who Kyle shot with a long-range high-powered rifle from over 2,000 feet.  Kyle was the perfect gun-toting stooge for the U.S. military who teaches you from day-one even before you are issued your first weapon their "kill or be killed" attitude.

Chris's Jesus-lovin' West Texas daddy had him shootin' weapons starting when he was eight years old.  Many a Texas eight-year-old has had the same experience.  One of my old friends from West Texas high school days who recently died had this experience.  His mother and father were totally enmeshed in the arms of their Jesus; yet, this family had a private arsenal of multiple rifles and two handguns.  I myself on many occasions joined this guy and his brother going out on the backroads along the Callahan Divide shooting their rifles at jackrabbits.  (These brothers were also into collecting snakes, especially rattlesnakes, of which there were plenty in the wilds around our hometown.) The first time I ever shot a pistol was with this guy.

Later, in the U.S. Army I learned to shoot many weapons, the M-1 and M-15 rifles, a Browning Automatic Rifle (a BAR), a submachinegun, a .44 caliber pistol (a sidearm), and as an artillery officer I got to shoot really big guns, Howitzers; I was even involved with shooting off a Long John missile down at Fort Hood, Texas, one disgustingly hot summer.  Since the army, I've never owned any weapon.  My dad rather than teaching me how to hunt taught me that usually if you owned a gun you were going to have to use a gun.  My dad's choice of self-protecting weapon was the butcher knife, which was also my mother's favorite weapon.  I've seen both my parents wielding butcher knives, my dad attacking a pestering IRS agent with one and my mother actually poised with one in defense against her attacking sister.

So good ole gun-toting hero Chris Kyle was taught by his Christ-lovin' daddy and the U.S. Navy to kill or be killed and Chris killed a lot with his superrifles (over 200 kills in Iraq) only ironically he and one of his guntoting buddies were killed by another military-trained guntoter at a shooting range in Erath County, Texas (right up the road from my hometown).

"[Eddie] Routh, 25, of Lancaster, Texas, was arraigned Saturday, February 2, 2013, on two counts of capital murder, according to Sgt. Lonny Haschel of the Texas Department of Public Safety. He was taken to the Erath County Jail for holding under a $3 million bond.[22] A friend of Kyle said the suspect was a veteran struggling with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).[23] Kyle and Littlefield had purportedly taken Routh to the gun range in an effort to help him with his PTSD." [I assume such therapy for military guys with PTSD backfired on Chris and his pal.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Kyle

Two Artists I Never Heard of But Are Now a Couple of My Favorites
The first artist, Clovis Trouille, I was introduced to by my old friend, L Hat, of www.languagehat.com/ fame.  From weimarart.blogspot.com. comes this dude's story:
Clovis Trouille, Religieuse italienne fumant la cigarette, 1944

"Camille Clovis Trouille (1889-1975) was born in La Fère, in the Picardie region of France. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts of Amiens from 1905 to 1910. With a name worthy of a pseudonym (to have "la trouille" means to be afraid in French), Trouille paddled upstream in a river of Christian morality, military patriotism and bourgeois ostentation with lightness, irony and obstinacy. His erotic and gaudy work delivered a slap in the face to both religion and war (Trouille considered war to be an "infamy", one which had permanently traumatised him). He was drafted on 2 August, 1914. The First World War made him an anarchist and his painting followed suit."

More! More! The Daily Growler Art Lovers Cried

"Trouille always wanted to stay independent. He never wanted to depend on galleries. Almost all of his life, he worked as a restorer and decorator of department store mannequins in Paris. He only painted in his spare time. His work consists of only a hundred paintings which he reworked, sometimes for years. Trouille would probably be surprised to see that his paintings are currently trading between 250.000 and 300.000 Euros.

 
Clovis Trouille, My Funeral, 1940

"Fascinated or amused by his own mortality Trouille painted a triptych of paintings entitled: My Funeral, (above), My Burial, (1945) and My Grave (below). My Funeral displays a magnificent carriage passing through the streets of Paris followed by a parade of bishops, soldiers and dogs.

A
Clovis Trouille, My Grave, 1947

"In My Grave ghostly women lurk around the cemetery wearing bats as loin cloths, on the gravestone we can read "Here lies the artist who lost his life while earning it". At the top of the vault the face of Jesus Christ appears. Clovis Trouille laughed to the very end. He died on 24 September 1975 in Paris. You can see more of Trouille's work here."


And How About Alden Mason...Ever Heard of HIm?

Alden Mason (1919 - February 6, 2013) was a widely traveled American painter, particularly noted for his controversial murals. 




"Low Tide"

Mason taught at the University of Washington...he was a native of Seattle.  The fact that I never heard of the man until I read of his dying (on February 6th) doesn't mean he wasn't known.  There are so many great individualist artists that don't get known in this world.

"Whatsit" from 2009

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler 

The Art of (my old friend) Will Shuster:
 "Tio Vivo"

Sunday, February 03, 2013

Existing in New York City as a Poet

Foto by tgw, "In Madison Square Park," New York City, January 2013
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READ ALL ABOUT these sorry crooked bankers, including Barry Obama's (have you seen photos of Barry skeet shooting at Camp David?) ol' pal, Little Jamie Dimond, and how this rotten-to-the-core bunch of pirates are not only too big to fail but too big to JAIL:
http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/
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Say Goodbye to: Lavonne "Pepper" Paire, All-American Girls Baseball League catcher and RBI leader. Pepper Paire, 88, American AAGPBL baseball player: 


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Say Goodbye to: Essie Mae Washington (Thurmond), old asshole Strom Thurmond's black daughter by his 16-year-old Black house servant.  You see how lousy and sorry our lyin' dog politicians are? "Hey, now, you all, as Ol' Massuh, I had a biblical right to fuck mah house nigger gals back in them days," said ol' scumbag Strom right 'fore he kicked the bucket.  Essie Mae Washington-Williams, 87, American schoolteacher, daughter of Senator Strom Thurmond
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I Am a Published Poet
When I was young and wild-eyed and vigorous and rude, I wrote poetry.  I suppose they were good poems since all the poems I wrote in those days were published.  I published over 25 poems from the 1960s into the 1970s...and then I stopped writing poetry.  I have never been able to write long poems.  Like Lord Byron for instance, or one of my favorites, Sam Coleridge, or like Walt Whitman, or like Ezra, or like Wilde (I truly have loved The Ballad of Reading Gaol since I was a kid:
So with curious eyes and sick surmise/ We watched him day by day,/ And wondered if each one of us/ Would end the self-same way,/ For none can tell to what red Hell/ His sightless soul may stray),
Short verse!  That's my metier now.  I am currently working on putting into a collection the hundreds of short verses I've recently written that are housed in the myriad piles of school-kids notebooks (my latest one made in India, I just noticed) in the shelves that surround my loft bed.  I've even started recording some of these verses to a CD, me reading them with my composing and playing piano interludes between them.

What are poems?  Yes, certain people are born to poetry.  My maternal grandmother was a published poet.  She published two books of poetry in the 1930s.  The last book my brother the writer published was a book of poetry.  I was amazed to find my brother's poems seemed to be almost exact reflections of my grandmother's poems.  My grandmother wrote short verses; therefore I'm born to her poetry perhaps, though we're not related in terms of reflection.

Recently after coming under the care of a new-to-me doctor at Bellevue Hospital (I recently wrote a post about this beautiful woman having deceived me via her beauty and charm into allowing myself to be immunized with a couple of vaccines after I had sworn many years ago (after a stint in the U.S. Army) that I would never allow myself to be vaccinated), I was introduced to the Bellevue Literary Review, of which this doctor is its editor-in-chief.

First of all, yes, I was surprised to find that a hospital had a literary review.  Second, I was further surprised on getting home with the copy given me by this doctor to find that it's a very well-done and totally high-brow (bet you haven't heard that term used in a very long time) in terms of its format and content.  It's a combination of short stories and poems supposedly all having to do with health and care and hospitalization and the traumas and/or jubilations surrounding such subjects.

I got about halfway through this issue of the Bellevue Literary Review finding the short stories interesting, one of them very intriguing, all of them well written, and the poetry in the same boat...until...I came to a poem...a poem that threw me for a loop.  I read it and reread it and I began to try and conjecture what the heck this woman was meaning in this poem, but for the life of me, I stayed thrown for a loop every time I tried to make sense out of it (yes, I know, poetry makes its own sense through its own particular definitions of sense).

Here's the poem.  It's entitled Elegy in which the film degrades by Anne Marie Rooney, an award-winning poet who's a native of New York City.

1.

She has seen the angle a man shudders into.
The slab of haunch a promise.  This woman
whose face opens like a butcher's knot.
"Both my daughters know how to grieve,"
she says, but something beats against
this.  Past the window, a blind of rain and dirtier.
If tonight I flatten to a list.  "Shabby and hot"
is what she called me, and then I showed her real fire.

2.

So this arrow opens its fever: Where there is one
cut there are five.  To say nothing of the light
is to say nothing of how a dead mom can warp
cankers into lovers.  The thickness of sickness
swelters and under its skin.  Still the beauty
of the body's swollen crown.  All is gilted
mars.    Peel back the spears, the bitter thistle.
             Eat only the heart.

3.

The slab of haunch a promise: a slow answer
takes hold.  By hour's end, what is left of her story
will turn clean.  What is left
will turn the water at the bed
of the one who breaks into wave.

Tell it like this:
The yarn of the body unravels.  Then the body
unravels.

I'm still stunned...and this is about the sixth time I've read this poem.  Yet, the Bellevue Literary Review poetry editor must have immediately seen the poetic value and meaning of it and declared it publishable.  But to me, it's too jigsawed for me to see the picture meant when the jigsawed pieces are fitted together.

Ah, poets!  Wondrous human works they are.  What makes certain people driven to poetry?  There's no money in it.  The Bellevue Literary Review pays you in copies or subscriptions.  There is money in it I suppose if you can land a teaching position at some college somewhere.  I studied poetry in college.  My teacher loved Whittier; but Whittier put me to sleep.

Astraea

'Jove means to settle
Astraea in her seat again,
And let down his golden chain
An age of better metal.'

Ben Johnson 1615

O POET rare and old!
Thy words are prophecies;
Forward the age of gold,
The new Saturnian lies.

The universal prayer
And hope are not in vain;
Rise, brothers! and prepare
The way for Saturn's reign.

Perish shall all which takes
From labor's board and can;
Perish shall all which makes
A spaniel of the man!

Free from its bonds the mind,
The body from the rod;
Broken all chains that bind
The image of our God.

Just men no longer pine
Behind their prison-bars;
Through the rent dungeon shine
The free sun and the stars.

Earth own, at last, untrod
By sect, or caste, or clan,
The fatherhood of God,
The brotherhood of man!

Fraud fail, craft perish, forth
The money-changers driven,
And God's will done on earth,
As now in heaven;

I'm sorry, John, you still put me to sleep; just like, I'm sure, a Quaker service would.

In Whittier's sleep I fall
A night's knocked out state
On morn when I awake
Whittier's snores abate

This doesn't mean I hate Whittier.  He was a good man.  And besides, what better way to drop into a deep sleep, which of course is very healthy.

thegrowlingwolf  
for The Daily Growler

The Art of (my old friend) Will Shuster:


Will Shuster Aspens Near Taos