I’m honored today to see my poem “Delaware Sheets” published by The Piker Press. You can find it right here.
As always, thank you, Editor Sand Pilarski, for allowing me to be a part of The Piker Press community.
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“L’amour Blesse,” Jules Lefebvre, 19th Century
“Love Hurts.” Oil on canvas.
“Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint.”
“Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society.” Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”
— from Stephen King’s The Stand
Photo credit: By Stephanie Lawton – https://www.flickr.com/photos/steph_lawton/7634622516/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50296410
It’s all about branding.
Maybe the Kurds should have worn swastikas on their uniforms, so that Donald Trump would support them.
Photo credit: Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ Rally. Anthony Crider; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:37, 9 April 2018 (UTC) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D
“And we are here as on a darkling plain …”
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
— from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”
Photo credit: Vittorio Zamboni vittorio_zamboni [CC0]
Poster for Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” Cox Theatre, circa 1949
Cincinnati.
Why do I feel attacked?
The meme below was created by J.D. Smith. I’ve met at least two of these criteria. I’m embarrassed to say which.
Gonna write me a poem based on a pun.
Gonna call it “No Poem Intended.”
“The Gnarled Monster,” Gustave Dore, 1870
Engraving.
“Asking what judgment waits/ My person, all my friends,/ And these United States.”
“A Walk After Dark,” by W. H. Auden
A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.
It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shamelesss a stare;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead
Now, unready to die
Bur already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.
It’s cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People’s Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.
Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.
For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.
Occuring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:
But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.
“Chihuahuaiku,” by Eric Robert Nolan
All the little dogs
chasing and biting me can
just go f*** themselves.
Photo credit: By David Shankbone – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5136536
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 