Mary
(sometimes just Sue)
is
fulfillment
underlying all
how exceptional and wonderful
quickly either male
or female

Mary
original
fantasies
may seem to push
her

undisguised
Mary comes
is judged

improbably
the puzzle
Mary
is
a flaw
is an annoyance,
is also apparently not a flaw

NBC took this off youtube, but here we are.When I saw the Palin speech, I wondered just what the writers thought they were doing. The answer: poetry.

Noooooooo. Donnnnnn’t Answerrrrrrr Thaaaat!

This is Fred Colby’s introduction of Albert Gore’s band at a square dance in 1938:

“Some thirty or forty years ago, two brothers ran for governor of Tennessee. The one on the Republican ticket, and one on the Democrat. And they went around over the state fiddling. The Democrat was the best fiddler, and he was elected. But the Republican was a very shrewd man, as they have to be in Tennessee. So, he waited until the Democrats nominated a man who couldn’t fiddle, and then he ran again and was elected, about twenty years later.

“Well, our–the music for our square dance tonight is furnished by Albert Gore’s band. Albert and six other men, they ran for Congress in the fourth Congressional district. And Albert, he was a little young, but he was the best fiddler, and we thought he’d be the safest man. His band is going to give us the music for the square dance tonight.”

Listen to Albert Gore’s band perform “Soldier’s Joy” at the1938 National Folk Festival, Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C. May 1938

5 MINUTE CHOCOLATE MUG CAKE
4 tablespoons flour
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons chocolate chips (optional)
A small splash of vanilla extract
1 large coffee mug (MicroSafe)

Add dry ingredients to mug, and mix well. Add the egg and mix thoroughly.

Pour in the milk and oil and mix well..

>Add the chocolate chips (if using) and vanilla extract, and mix again.
Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts.
The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don’t be alarmed!
Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.
EAT ! (this can serve 2 if you want to feel slightly more virtuous).
Now we are all only 5 minutes away from chocolate cake at any time of the day or night!

Ancient Gem-Studded Teeth Show Skill of Early Dentists.

And to think, I hate to go to the dentist

But I am.

Went to get my hair cut this afternoon, a necessity I try to avoid, because I have never been enamored of beauty parlor/spa/salon-type places.  Granted they don’t smell quite so bad as in the fifties, and the implements no longer look as if they were created to produce a legion of Brides for The Monster.  There is one thing, though that will most likely still be around this time next century (assuming anything of human civilization is still around).

What do you bet that no matter what future grooming entails, the practitioners will want to talk.

Can’t I just get it over with and get out?

No.  Couldn’t when I was so young I had to sit on a stack of phone books and catalogues and magazines to have my hair “done”, and I can’t fifty odd years later.  I understand that the business is not gender-specific, but I’d be willing to bet that the average man going in for a haircut will not have to face what I did this afternoon.  A bridal party.  Not just a group of people getting ready for a wedding.  No.  It was a freaking PARTY.  All the females preparing for the big event were brought in a chartered bus (which filled half the parking lot), and were wining and schmoozing and having their hair and makeup done whilst having a lovely time chattering like so many starlings.

And I had to wait for them.  Appointment or no.

Why not leave?  I did not want to be rude.  God, but I am so southern I make my own self sick.

I waited through a couple of cups of coffee.

It was only about the same time my stylist appeared that I found that I could have been getting properly sloshed on gratis wine instead.  Such is life.

I have spent the past several weeks writing poetry.  Sorta.

That wouldn’t be surprising.  I like the way that poetry makes you look at things from fresh angles.  That and the fact that my writing is a bit on the embroidered side to begin with make writing verse a natural for me.  But I do not enjoy reading it.  Way too much work to get the full meaning from something with layers and layers.  I tend to read to find out what happens next, and I’m no better about that in my 60s than I was in my teens.

So, decades ago it occurred to me that if I were not going to read poetry, it didn’t seem right to write the stuff.  An ethical choice.  And I’ve stuck with it for the most part with a detour now and then when prose would not say what needed expressing.  That’s been happening a bit more often lately as my ability to hold coherent thought for any length of time has been disintegrating.  Don’t even get pleasure from complaining any more, and that’s pathetic.

But late last month, I ran across some mention of a writing challenge.  A poem a day for a month.  And that caught my interest.  As I learned with the novel, you can do almost anything for a month–not necessarily well, but the action is possible.  And NOT doing things is another subject entirely.  So I decided to do it.  Put on my best what the hell attitude and signed up.

Me and about a thousand people started April with a poem.

It has been interesting.  And not all that difficult.  After all, it doesn’t even have to rhyme.  “The best words in the best order”; Coleridge didn’t say a thing there about meter and rhyme pattern.  So I have managed something every day, and if it has sometimes been bad writing, and if it has sometimes been out of left field, that doesn’t matter.  I have done it.

And yesterday I came to the Sestina.  If that had lobbed at me during the first week, I’d have quit then and there.  But after twenty-seven days, and with the end at my fingertips, I was not about to surrender because of a form.  (now, to give ‘em credit, the powers did allow for an alternative, non-sestina, but that did seem like a cop out.)

For anyone who might want to try, and there are plenty of masochists out there, a sestina is a bit like sudoku with words, or the dictionary playing musical chairs.  There are a gazillion variations, but the root is:  six words.  The form is six verses, each with six lines, capped off with a three-liner.  The same six words are used over and over to end the lines, but they have to be in a different arrangement with each verse.  And if that makes no sense…  Say my poem begins with the six lines:

He had one

She had two

They made three

But wanted four

I had five

and puppy makes six

The words–one, two, three, four, five, six–at the end of the lines are what we play with.  You come up with five more verses and none of those words can be in the same position in the poem a second time.  “One” can end the second, third, forth, fifth, or sixth.  And then one less than that, and on.

When you make it to the end, the tercet uses all six words, two to a line.

It made my head hurt, but I wrote the damn thing.  The disturbing part is that I can see how you could get hooked.

Never say never.

This is what I wound up with.  It’s not good, but I wrote it and it is mine.

The Nymph Refrains

I am not bright.
Not bright enough for you, Lucifer.  The sun
will not stop in the heaven
at my command, nor will the blue
sea turn to gold
for me.  I cannot dance on air.

You want a magic air,
Lucifer, one for transmuting straw and gold,
And I cannot for all your bright
and cruel beauty, sing down the sun.
Apples will grow blue
before I sing that song, or god will step down from Heaven.

I want the heaven
of your bright
regard.  The blue
vaulting sky knows you are air
to me, and sun,
and more by far than gold.

But I could lose the sun,
Lucifer.  And lose all promises of heaven,
If I cannot ignore your gold
and honeyed words.  And even god can see your bright
sweet whisperings turn air
to mead and strip the sky of blue.

If ever suitor blew
hot and hotter, it is you, with your air
of I care not, and the heat of the sun
in your hands.  You burn gold
with your most glancing touch, and give lie to heaven
making midnight bright.

You cannot, trickster, have what gold
is mine by right.  My tunes belong to blue
day and sunlit air.
The gift of heaven,
and none of yours.  You can not steal from me, Bright
Star, to quench the sun.

I have no spelling air to call the sun,
to wrench the gold from day and steal the light of heaven.
My soul, I cannot write blue songs.  I am not bright enough.

Now and then Jim sends me a little something from the PortSide list.  Lots of leftrants and chatter.  Generally pretty humorless.  I find the Right a hell of a lot funnier, and some of it is even intentional.

Now, this proves that it’s all in how you look at things

Obama is a two-faced liar. Aw-RIGHT!

by Greg Palast

For SuicideGirls.com

January 29, 2009

Republicans are right. President Barack Obama treated them like dirt, didn’t give a damn what they thought about his stimulus package, loaded it with a bunch of programs that will last for years and will never leave the budget, is giving away money disguised as “tax refunds,” and is sneaking in huge changes in policy, from schools to health care, using the pretext of an economic emergency.

Way to go, Mr. O! Mr. Down-and-Dirty Chicago pol. Street-fightin’ man. Covering over his break-you-face power play with a “we’re all post-partisan friends” BS.

And it’s about time.

Frankly, I was worried about this guy. Obama’s appointing Clinton-droids to the Cabinet, bloated incompetents like Larry Summers as “Economics Czar,” made me fear for my country, that we’d gotten another Democrat who wished he were a Republican.

Then came Obama’s money bomb. The House bill included $125 billion for schools (TRIPLING federal spending on education – yes!), expanding insurance coverage to the unemployed, making the most progressive change in the tax code in four decades by creating a $500 credit against social security payroll deductions, and so on.

It’s as if Obama dug up Ronald Reagan’s carcass and put a stake through The Gipper’s anti-government heart. Aw-RIGHT!

About the only concession Obama threw to the right-wing trogs was to remove the subsidy for condoms, leaving hooker-happy GOP Senators, like David Vitter, to pay for their own protection. S’OK with me.

And here’s the proof that Bam is The Man: Not one single Republican congressman voted for the bill. And that means that Obama didn’t compromise, the way Clinton and Carter would have, to win the love of these condom-less jerks.

And we didn’t need’m. Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!

Now I understand Obama’s weird moves: dinner with those creepy conservative columnists, earnest meetings at the White House with the Republican leaders, a dramatic begging foray into Senate offices. Just as the Republicans say, it was all a fraud. Obama was pure Chicago, Boss Daley in a slim skin, putting his arms around his enemies, pretending to listen and care and compromise, then slowly, quietly, slipping in the knife. All while the media praises Obama’s “post-partisanship.” Heh heh heh.

Love it. Now we know why Obama picked that vindictive little viper Rahm Emanuel to run the White House schedule: everyone visiting the Oval Office will be greeted by the Windy City hit man who would hack up your grandma if you mess with the Godfather-in-Chief.

I don’t know about you, but THIS is the change I’ve been waiting for.

Will it last?

We’ll see if Obama caves in to more tax cuts to investment bankers. We’ll see if he stops the sub-prime scum-bags from foreclosing on frightened families. We’ll see if he stands up to the whining, gormless generals who don’t know how to get our troops out of Iraq. (In SHIPS, you doofusses!)

Look, don’t get your hopes up. But it may turn out the new President’s … a Democrat!

******
Greg Palast’s investigative reports for BBC and Rolling Stone can be seen at www.GregPalast.com. Palast is the author of New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse.

Please subscribe to our reports at www.GregPalast.com.