July 2001

                                                 poetry table of contents


Spilled Ink Session

Poems I Didn't Write This Week

I had good intentions of making this a series, but I have
only written 4 in ten years.   2002     2010     2011
The recent Shockoe Reader April NaPoMo issues are beginning to make up for the slack. They serve as a list of links to other brain-spills as well as suggestions for things
you may or may not want to write about, ever.
 

Shockoe Cemetary
 

Bottom Poets : This is a poem about a man who tentatively agrees to join a Richmond Virginia, Shockoe Slip poetry group in the hip and fashionable Shockoe bottom area, also known as "the flood zone", noting at that moment that, "There was once a time when he would not be considered “from  Richmond” unless he had at least ten generations of his ancestors buried in Shockoe Cemetery". He noted also that his wife, of course had "ALL of her relatives buried there, even though it was a difficult task to keep them there, especially when the heavens  opened up and banks of the James River overflowed". The Man never-the-less agreed to join the dubious group, but only if they would take him on as a ‘floater’.

 

Hype and Honk: Poem about a political wahoodra who becomes an amateur terrorist taking out his rage on a TV repair shop thinking that each new fall TV show that includes cars honking horns is a vote for his political views and a victory signal intended for him personally.

 

Torture of Choice: This is about how some people wreck their bodies earlier in life than other people because they take up a dangerous lifestyle, bad habit, abusive athletic regimen, lethal diet or train for a discipline that has crippling effects on hands, necks and backs, people who have the nerve not only to complain about it, but turn around and sue somebody who pays them off with my money.

 

Hypnotic Boysenberry: Reveals a situation where a woman nods off in her chair and the man sitting across from her is thinking of things to do to her while she is sleeping, such things as spraying her with a new aphrodisiac perfume called Hypnotic Boysenberry, only the thought of it causes him to let out a loud oooh hoo hoo hoo which wakes her up.

 

Future Menace : A man is murdered by his cult followers because they believe him to be the ancestor of a mad scientist whose eventual offspring will cause World War Six.

 

How Tender Is My Cursor: An Internet sex guru is arrested and tried for allegedly causing some 11,000 sex related injuries in one year, even though it is a well documented fact that these injuries would probably have occurred anyway according to national statistics and medical record keeping. The trial becomes a circus briefly when one witness claims that a lot of guys would rather admit to fooling around when they were injured than admit to having an eye poked out by a lover while acting out a Three Stooges routine. The trial ends with a conviction of the guru for instigating behavior that would lead to sex related injury, based on the number of people he persuaded to undergo extreme body piercing and tattooing on sensitive parts of the body, and by forcing initiates to belt sand their bottoms in front of thousands of Internet voyeurs.

 

  

Saxophoning While Speed Trap Burned : A poem befitting Caesar Nero as when Rome burned, only this time the culprit turns out to be a sax musician who was just passing thru and who felt no sympathy when the town in which he was fined for speeding just happened to catch fire from an oil drum at the only filling station, spread to autumn leaves and eventually burned down the entire town owing to the Schnook Winds. 
J. W. Hounddogg stood in the doorway of the Last Chance Saloon and wailed along until he had to run from the flames. Legend has it that JW took a bag of ashes to the next gig as a souvenir but decided to scatter them in Schenectady before playing the Troy gig..

 

And finally ... let's hear it for

The Uninhibited South Pacific Island: Poem about a survivalist group that wants to repopulate the earth with their own kind, making Club Med look like high tea at Windsor Castle.  

 

HAIKU 2001

 

Sweet flash of God's light
Please weigh my creative worth,
Sort my ash from soul.

  

If I die unknown
It will be God's fault, because 
Man's a weird model.