Bittersweet Dry Manhattan.
2 parts good bourbon (or bad, it’s all bourbon)
1 part dry vermouth
3 or four dashes of bitters, I can never tell the difference
Splash of local-grown honey.
Several years before you intend to make this drink, you need to go to a farmer’s market with the girl or boy you are desperately in love with.
Ah, Saint Patrick’s Day, how I love you, and wish I could remember more of you.
More political verse. Been calling them octals since they have eight lines. Now I am considering referring to them as, since I send them to the White House by email, dottawa rima. I know, I know, that’s terrible, and an insult to the form used so well by Byron in Don Juan or Yeats in Sailing to Byzantium.
What can I say? I have terrible taste. You knew that already, right?
Maybe the tone is a bit combative in these. So? Obama’s not a wuss. I am greatly disturbed by Geithner’s Wall Street insider blinders, and when Obama went on Leno the other night, he seemed more interested in coming across as plausible and in charge than he did in actually confronting the problem. In my opinion we have had way way more than enough of officials telling us to keep quiet and trust them. It sounded like he was still campaigning. I DO trust Obama, sort of. But campaign strategy aint gonna cut it, and I think the citizens in a democracy are obliged to keep an eye of their choices.
Besides, who pays attention to poets? We may be the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but in my experience most of the emphasis in that phrase goes on the word “unacknowledged.”
5. BONUS?
The Secretary of the Treasury
paid off his friends first. Why should you be
defending this turkey? We believe in change
all right, you need a little time. Not strange.
But it doesn’t take time to begin, and you began wrong.
Same old greedy story, same old song.
I voted for you, but now you must get rid
of the “expert” crooks: We’re counting on you, kid.
6. YOU ASKED FOR IT
Listen, I hate to break the news to you,
but after the idiot self-righteous clown and his crew
did all that damage to our country, we need
a hero, a Lincoln. Don’t let it go to your head.
The heroes always have to pay a price.
It isn’t rhetoric, but sacrifice.
What’ll it be? Smooth-talking also-ran?
Or do you have the guts to be the man?
7. ON THE REVERENCE WE OWE ELECTED OFFICIALS
As far as I’m concerned, the president
is just a man, not some divine advent.
He campaigns well, and maybe, just maybe,
can throw out the bathwater but not the baby.
I’ve spent nearly fifty years on what I love,
and I’m better at it, when push comes to shove,
than he is at his job. So should I bow
and bend the knee? No way, no time, nohow.
Holy bamboozles, tonight at 121 Millsaps we’re having a mind-blowing show. The Crystal Stilts will team up with the Women and Los Buddies. It’s going to make you think the Velvet Underground got in a Quaalude fistfight with Joy Division, and there’s plenty to go around. We’re calling it “JXSW” since these fine people are heading over to MIGHTY AUSTIN to hopefully become (even more) famous.
Like everybody else, I’ve been using the whitehouse.gov contact function. Sending comments to political types makes me feel helpless, so I made a sort of sport of it by coming up with rules. I wanted my comments to be short (under their word limit) and figured there was no point trying to talk about more than one subject at a time.
Since I’m a poet, I naturally thought of a poetic form. What I came up with is a variation on an old standard, the heroic couplet (two lines of rhyming pentameter). My variation is eight lines or only four couplets long, way under the limit, but who wanted to say that much anyway? Naturally, I use the movement of speech to jazz up what would otherwise be the monotony of meter.
I’m writing them whenever the mood strikes, whenever a subject coalesces from the general furor and seems to merit a comment. A bonus: Though technically speaking I am sure I am just as powerless, the act of construction required to put my thoughts into a form, even a slight one, has done away with my sense of helplessness.
Here’s the first four. There will likely be others. (more…)
. . . the comic of choice for Louisiana’s most discerning house lizards:
Even that lizard knows a femme fatale when he sees one. Which is more than we can say for the book’s protagonist.
