Heart Gears

Sometime poetry is a wave that sweeps you away.

Noodling about, recently I stumbled upon the words of Darcy Dennigan, and was swept.

I want to read her book, "Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse" from whence come these words.

(Link to my earlier post of Herrick's poem, Corrina's Going A-Maying)

Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse

It was a geologic instant.
Fine-bone plates moved under the Pawtuxet
& up sprang West Warwick. In an instant
the houses were up & the shutters open.
Then the paint was peeling all over town.
Then the instant passed with a shudder
& all the houses fell down.

The lilacs die. The lilies of the valley. April & May blow up & away.

"We are ready to live as before,"
says the last bald priest to the last white-May-dress girl,
who touches her chalked hopscotch sidewalk
& beneath her palm detects an earthquake
& in a gutter puddle sees her skull
& on her tongue catches a white blossom,
the last one. With her chalk she bawls
"The spring days are going to the graveyard."

The pet goat eats poison oak. The puppy bites the bitty lamb. All the kitty's whiskers fall away.

The little Lamb girl straddles a Chrysler Plymouth,
queen of the car parade, with a kitty
in her arm crook & a hand to the crowd.
She calls out, "I can see the end from here"
& tosses all West Warwick some Tootsie Rolls.
The Chrysler driver blows his horn.
Where have all the May-dress girls gone?
—To the classroom, for learning Latin & blushing
over Queen Dido's open, bebassing mouth.

The dust turns to tar. The rain to chalk. Undertakers cart snow angels away.

My hearse slides by a girl astride a puddle
wearing her mom's wedding gown. A downpour
smacks Arctic, Natick, the Greenwich Inn.
All the front door keys to all the places
I have ever lived drip from the dogwood tree
& chime in the wind. The girl in the gown
sinks. The puddle turns to a pond. West Warwick,
my West Warwick, drowns. Drowns world,
my clapboard castle & the moonface I was living in.

Sentimental Atom Smasher
by Darcie Dennigan

So this guy walks into a bar and asks for a beer. Sorry,
the bartender says, I only sell atom smashers

And the guy says well isn't that America for you—
every happy-hour Nelson's a homemade physicist and no thank you,

just an ice cold one, but it's too late—suddenly, he's on his butt
in a ballfield where handsome men are chasing a ball over grass

sad grass, yellow like the hair of his once-young mother!
and again he says, no thank you—I've seen this movie before

And the bartender says it's a joke and you're inside its machine...

Hey, the guy wants to say—I'm not the guy—I'm me
I'm just a guy who walked into a bar. I'm just a guy who retreats

to his car for a private cry. Instead he sniffs and cries out—
The sky smells like the bologna from when I was a boy!

Ahh, says the bartender, ahh yes. Someone has left
the refrigerator door of the cosmos open a crack

And the view! cries the guy. The beauty of an atom smasher,
says the bartender, even from the cheap seats you see

clear into 1952. And the guy, squinting into the distance,
starts to bawl. Maybe it's the vendors hawking

commemorative popcorn, or the programs promoting emotion
("the matter of the universe!") printed on material whose pulp

was milked from the trunk of a winesap apple tree, but—
What's the matter? says the bartender. And the guy says,

I'm confused. Am I allowed to be homesick in a joke?
Yes, the bartender says. It's elemental, the bartender says—


How streets are downtrodden atoms and falling leaves are aflutter
atoms and beer is over-the-moon atoms. The moon's an atomizer

of all matter's perfumes: And the guy starts to parse it out—
Wait, I'm not smart, but if emotion's a material substance

then when a leaf falls in my lap and I hold it,
like an about-to-be-abandoned baby, I'm touching "aflutter" in 3-D?

Dear fluttering leaf!
Streets—I'm sorry for stepping on you! Apples—for coring you, and beer—

* * *

A guy walks into a bar,

—actually just the beer-drinking bleachers of a ballfield—and says
is this some kind of joke?

Well, says the bartender who has observed the little lamb
and the tyger burning bright and tickled their particulates,

because your life has lately been stagnant, we have yoked you
to a joke and we await the gasp that will gas up the cosmos...

Just then, there's a hit at the plate—and it's going,
it's going—gone to smash the guy in the skull

And since baseballs are made of nostalgia atoms, the guy,
with concussion, says I want to buy a coke for a nickel

I want to install apple pie perfumemakers in the crotch of every tree
Bartender, bring me dried nosegays! Start the stalwart pageants!

And the moon's spritzing its perfumes and the phlegm is thick and fast
And the bartender says time to wallow in byproducts:

Where we planted peanut shells, we got shaky, palsied trees
Where we planted nickel cokes, we got nicked cans

Where we planted baseballs we grew large, sad eyeballs
as we watched for something to grow. Still, still

we atom-probe: In a dark building a child is
about to be born. The smell of bread is about to

break. And our guy is going, O spring evenings!
How I used to stand yelping in the alley by the bakery...

Who are these boys throwing baseballs? Who is this baby?
O bartender, tell me, what is the message in this light rain?

But the bartender's dark eyes are flying
over centerfield, over the rooftops and watertowers of the joke's

universe, over alleys and cold valleys of refrigerator light
toward an aptest eve where these street kids are hurling a ball into

the moonlight and the moonlight is curdling into freon...

Poem. (Inspired by recent events). By Soupbucket.

Each day, I hear the crunch of entropy,
The universe disassembles.
My car, okay, not new,
But newer than me.
A gearbox.

A drive shaft.
Universal joint.
Universal.
Entropy.

Four-wheel-drive.
But sometimes none.
Or one.

It churns,
Steadfastly,
mud.

Drive shaft.
Centre differential?
Hm.

Entropy.

And below my hearing range,
Rust.
Degrades.
Slowly.
Shiny steel
To
Red powder.

So close, the mysteries of the universe,
Displayed in this
Universal joint.

Comments;- At last I notice a backlog.

Sorry, folks... If you left a comment, and I've only just noticed. -I enabled comment moderation as an experiment, but didn't realise that Blogger wouldn't tell me that there were comments. I have remedied the issue and apologise profusely.
I keep writing blogposts in my head... but I have blogger's block when I get here. Ho Hum.
I'll get unstuck, eventually.

Levitating Kayaks

This one's for Dave.

It's a Flyak, from Norway's Foilkayak.com

This Door is Alarmed

I thought it only looked a little nervous.

Labio Dental Fricative

Sorting through my blogger editing archives, I found this post drafted long ago, but not published, so I thought I'd chuck it toward the light, in view of my paucity of posting.

Labio Dental Fricative



The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.....
This was in response to a post by The Inner Minx, and the ensuing comments thereon.
"Soubriquet said... Oh , hello, me again. See there was a misunderstanding about Labio-Dental Fricative, and a correspondent suggested it was suggestive, and that my comment was naughty. It was the Labio bit that brought about the tut-tuttage.So, let me clarify.Ladies, this is NOT about dentists in your undercarriage, the labile constituent of a Labio-dental fricative is your bottom lip... No, the one on your FACE...Labio-dental fricative describes a sound, made by passing air through a narrowed channel (fricative) modified by the bottom lip (labio) meeting the upper teeth.(Dental)So Labio-dental fricative is a linguistic term to describe a sound. In English, the letters F and V are labio-dental fricatives...The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band sang a song of that title. To which I referred.
Sheesh! surely you all knew that?"

Labio-Dental Fricative (Stanshall/Innes)

Cannibal chiefs chew Camembert cheese
'cause chewing keeps 'em cheeky
Big Fat Fred sticks fur to his head
'cause he thinks fur makes him freaky
Benjamin Bland and his Bugle Band blow the blues bi-weekly
(Yee hoo hoo!)
How many pies can a porpoise poise on purpose if she pleases?

I got up at eight, it was half past two
I said to myself, "Well, how do you do?"
I've gotta get on, so I soon got off
Stuck a clean shirt on, and had a good cough
Back at the boozer, a bloke I knew
Said he knew a secret no one knew
He pinched some snuff, and he sniffed and sighed
So I pinched his snout, and he replied,

"Cannibal chiefs chew Camembert cheese
'cause chewing keeps 'em cheeky
Big Fat Fred sticks fur to his head
'cause he thinks fur makes him freaky
Benjamin Bland and his Bugle Band blow the blues bi-weekly
How many pies can a porpoise poise on purpose if she pleases?"

Here am I a sailor
Seabirds fly above me
Listen to their cry
See them in the sky above me
Here am I a sailor
Fishes swim below me
Even while I sleep
Growing in the deep below me

I rode a long worm to the end of the line
I asked Tin Man if he'd tell me the time
He took off his hat, and he took off his head
Took off Max Bygraves, here's what he said,
"You take first right and second left."
The man in the moon says, "How's your chest?"
The man in the sun says, "Have another one!"
So we're all tanked up and singing along

Cannibal chiefs chew camembert cheese
'cause chewing keeps 'em cheeky
Big Fat Fred fixes fur to his head
'cause he thinks fur makes him freaky
Benjamin Bland and his Bugle Band blow the blues bi-weekly
(Mmmmm, mm)
How many pies can a porpoise poise on purpose if she pleases?

Human Behaviour

Right now, Iceland is in the news in Britain, mainly because of the collapse of its banking giant, Landsbanki, and the subsequent suggestion by the Icelandic government that the reported several billion pounds of money placed there by british investors, (such as the Local Government Association (LGA), which represents local councils, which said that 108 of them had deposited nearly 799 million pounds (one billion euros, 1.4 billion dollars) in Icelandic banks) is unlikely to be paid back.
Transport for London, the agency responsible for the capital's public transport, had 40 million pounds invested with Landsbanki's subsidiary, Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander. Fifteen police authorities had nearly 100 million pounds invested in Icelandic banks, according to the Association of Police Authorities, with London's Scotland Yard authority saying it had 30 million pounds invested.
This put our government in such a tizzy that Prime Minister Gordon Brown was moved to a cunning stroke... Let's use our newish laws designed to stop terrorists money laundering through british banks.... And seize all Icelandic assets in Britain!

Some of that money's not been there very long. Foreign banks got a lot of british money as british banks wobbled under the hit they took with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the U.S.
Here's the take on Landsbanki's Icebank on the 18th September, less than a month before it collapsed.


"A large number of savings account holders in the UK transferred their funds to Icelandic banks on Monday, reports Mbl.is Icesave, a savings account offered by Landsbanki, and Kaupthing Edge, a similar high interest product offered by Kaupthing Singer Friedlander, saw a surge in business after UK customers lost faith in their own banks, according to Kaupthing.
“Savers in the UK became somewhat nervous of their banks and moved their money over to us,” said Gudni Adalsteinsson, managing director of Kaupthing’s Treasury Department.
The share prices of major British banks such as HBOS and Barclays plummeted in value on Monday, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers investment bank in the US. Kaupthing said that Monday was in fact the fourth best day of business since it launched its Edge savings account in February this year. The two Icelandic banks have completed this year’s refinancing of ISK 820 billion (USD 8.7 billion, EUR 6 billion) worth of loans and next year’s is well underway."

These market experts are so wise, we should always trust their utterances, shouldn't we?

This rather sets the cordial relations between the U.K. and Iceland back a bit.
Almost to the Cod Wars...
Or the British invasion of neutral Iceland in 1940.

Anyway, it seems we are seizing Iceland's assets even as I write. I would argue that using the anti-terrorism laws is of course, nonsense, and I expect Iceland to challenge the legality of Brown's move, and he's hardly in a position to criticise the Icelandic state's lack of foresight, as Prime Minister Brown, with a number of years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, britain's top money-man, under his belt, proved no more prescient as british financial institutions collapsed and were bailed out by the state, following the New York debacle.

Here to Cheer you up, is Iceland's nuttiest song-pixie, crazy as a box of frogs, but oddly appealing :-

Björk




HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

If you ever get close to a human
And human behaviour-
Be ready to get confused
There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic
To human behaviour,
But yet so, yet so irresistible
And there's no map
They're terribly moody
And human behaviour
Then all of a sudden turn happy
But, oh, to get involved in the exchange
Of human emotions is ever so, ever so satisfying
Oh oh, and there's no map
Human behaviour, human
Human, human behaviour, human
Human, human behaviour, human
Human behaviour, human
And there's no map
And a compass
Wouldn't help at all
Human behaviour, human, human
Human behaviour, human,
Human behaviour, human,
Human behaviour
There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic
Human, human
Human behaviour
Human.
There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic
Human, human, human, human.

It's So Quiet

It's oh so quiet : it's oh so still
you're all alone : and so peaceful until

You fall in love (zing! boom!)
the sky up above (zing! boom!)
is caving in (wow! bam!)
you've never been so nuts about a guy
you wanna laugh you wanna cry
you cross your heart and hope to die

'Til it's over and then
it's nice and quiet
but soon again
starts another big riot

You blow a fuse (zing! boom!)
the devil cuts loose (zing! boom!)
so what's the use (wow! bam!)
of falling in love

It's oh so quiet : it's oh so still
you're all alone : and so peaceful until

You ring the bell (bim! bam!)
you shout and you yell (hi ho ho!)
you broke the spell
gee, this is swell you almost have a fit
this guy is gorge and I got hit
there's no mistake : THIS IS IT

'Til it's over and then : it's nice and quiet
but soon again : starts another big riot

You blow a fuse (zing! boom!)
the devil cuts loose (zing! boom!)
so what's the use (wow! bam!)
of falling in love

The sky caves in! the devil cuts loose!
you blow blow blow blow blow your fuse!
when you fall in love

Ssshhhhhh...