midwest haiku

There is one red leaf,

Reminding that summer ends

And I’ll have to rake.

More pomz

I thought my contemporary poetry attempt went pretty well, so I’m going to try a new one.  Again, I do not like this kind of poetry, but I’m going to approach it with as much honesty as I can (considering I don’t think there’s much honesty in it).  If anyone enjoys contemporary poetry, and/or has some legitimate criticism for this, please feel free to contribute.

Amid the wreckage of Americana,

the lies and the lore,

Two young girls thought I was gay,

while a robot gypsy

said the same thing about my girlfriend.

I’m starting to see a problem that I can’t go further than these short poems.  I can’t go further without explaining exactly what I’m talking about, but on the other hand I think I set up a familiar image without explaining what it was.

Contemporary Poetry

I’d like to draw your attention to poetry.  After some sudden life realizations, I’ve decided to turn my energies to active creation rather than active criticism of things that do not deserve the attention.  One problem I’ve noticed that I have with my own poetry is that it isn’t marketable to contemporary audiences.  Now, I prefer art and poetry to reach out to the world and engage it, rather than reach in to my [inner turmoil/masturbatory fantasies/truths only pertaining to me].  Because of my natural aversion to self-expressive diary-diarrhetic word jumbles, my own work tends to get impersonal and sound pretentious.

There isn’t a magic wand I can wave that makes me more approachable, but I have been working on it.  Strangely enough, my whole argument against contemporary poetry is that it is less and less approachable because it is far too personal.  I do not understand what is going on in one person’s mind, and they don’t seem to want to share it. They’re skipping steps on the journey and not telling me what’s left out – they’re leaving out connections in their argument, and that makes it look like they’re jumping to conclusions.  And I think that’s my biggest problem.  Here is an illustration of my point, written by myself.

Love is failure

when wings of

broken butterflies, spinning

in oil at milestone 124, highway 79

fade to onion pulp and neon

relish in warm rancid bowls

in West Virginia.

Now, I personally think that is hilarious.  I have taken a private, personal memory, shared by only one other person, and convoluted a poem with it’s meaning, memory, and no roadsigns to tell my audience what the hell I am talking about.  The next thing that the contemporary poet will do is remove themselves from accountability, never to reveal the big ’secret’ that the poem sprang from, saying it is because ‘everyone will interpret it how they will,’ but truthfully, it takes away the mystery that the poem relies on.  Or, they will go into overabundant detail, explaining what every word means to them, in order for the poem to take on a meaning beyond the few confusing nonsense phrases the poet vomits onto paper.  It’s about deception, either way.  I want poems to get richer and deeper when I know where they come from, but stand alone without that information because they stand for common experiences rather than the specific event a poet happened to go through personally.

For reading this entire post, I’ll give you a bonus treat.  This link. Enjoy.

The Mad Aardvark under arrest

Someone suggested that I do Vlogging with my daughter, or do a MOG (which I had to Google to find out that meant music log).  It’s funny that it was brought up…

I had this dream several years ago where I did an audio track under the alias “The Mad Aardvark” (hence the name of the blog) that encouraged people to start one-man riots everywhere.  It became a national epidemic, and eventually everyone was wondering who the Mad Aardvark was.  Pretenders tried to take credit, but eventually the police tracked me down.  The dream actually started there, with a cop (my dream cast Denzel Washington in the role) came to my dorm room and arrested me (this dream happened long after I left the dorms, though).  He was pretty cool about everything and let me release a video montage of various television things that was supposed to accompany the audio and made it much less suggestive of violence, before he arrested me.  We hoped for either a not guilty verdict or an early release from prison.

I wish I could remember anything about the audio or the video from my dream besides this one thing: in the video I included a clip from a dream-conjured commercial for Pilsburry cake mix, where some guy makes a shitty cake for his wife and drops it on the floor after all his hard work.  The pile of cake and frosting turns into a claymation scene of the Pilsbury Doughboy holding a cake shapes like a heart.  For some reason that commercial made me go off on something about marketing and subliminal messages, and happened during a more violent outburst on the audio track. 

There was a time when I would encourage one-man riots.  I liked the idea of one person giving into their frustration at how they’re being led around on a leash and engaging in random mayhem, vandalism, cursing, etc.   As a national trend I thought that would make an impact better than protests, or mob mentality riots, or these single-shooter catastrophes.  Just perfectly sane people pissed off and showing it for a change. 

Don’t let them force-feed you mediocrity and tell you their shit tastes like chocolate mousse.  Everything we consume in this culture is designed to numb your senses and make you care less about the fact that you have nothing left to care about.  Don’t just sit there.  Get up, do something, activate yourself.

American Dining

The way we Americans consume life disgusts me.

Handfulls of ketchup-soaked small pleasures are mangled up between our gnashing molars and swallowed, leaving dark red smears across cheeks and chins. 

As a main course, lifestyle is overloaded with extras that cover up the taste of government surplus meat.  Each bite almost too large to fit between unhinged jaws, we choke too often and our words are muffled by bulging cheeks and pursed lips spitting bits of bread.

The American thirst is unquenchable, since each 32 ounce cheap plastic cup is filled with a product designed to encourage refils.

Napkins are free.  Shirts and unbuttoned jeans are otherwise ruined from careless dripping that stains. 

And then we wonder why we feel sick, regretful, ashamed, but proud of our accomplishments in excess, and already looking forward to the next big meal.