Greetings from this poet during the longest night of the year.
May the gradually lengthening days ahead bring peace and good health to you and yours.
Happy Winter Solstice, friends.
Tag Archives: Eric Robert Nolan
No, I am not actually going punk.
It’s a joke. As I’ve explained here before, I messed up giving myself a haircut. Then I realized that shaving most of it off was really my only recourse if I wanted to look vaguely normal. But I left it in a mohawk as a joke. The temporary hair dye and the earring are gags too.
I’d like to think that I didn’t do too bad of a job with the mohawk? It’s leagues ahead of the conventional haircut that I attempted first, at least. (I was doing so well for a while, too. Then I got impatient and started hacking a way at it.)
But I’m still trying to make lemons out of lemonade here. (I’ll never get that idiom right the first time, and I don’t care.) And just to add insult to injury, one of my news reporter friends made the meme you see at the bottom. The b*****d.
So I’m not as much punk as I am a punk. Which is a shame, because I really wanted to cosplay as one of those kids from “Return of the Living Dead” (1985), or maybe good ‘ol Chris Wright from my long ago acting classes. (He had an immense dyed mohawk, and he might have been the only punk at Mary Washington College circa 1991.)
Oh, well. I’ve still got The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” in my playlist. And I shared a Dead Kennedys video on Facebook the other day. (You know which one.) That counts for something.
This was not the evening I envisioned.
That awkward moment when you try to look punk but you inadvertently turn yourself into the god damned Ocean Spray logo.
I’m just waiting for Keanu Reeves to infiltrate a gang of surfers-turned-bank-robbers on my damned head.
(I’ll even help.)
NO BANE, NO GAIN
WHEN GOTHAM IS *ASHES,* THEN YOU WILL HAVE MY PERMISSION TO DIE.
Pandemic mask + Misguided pandemic DIY haircut + Pandemic-induced abiding antipathy = comic book villain.
C’mon, we all knew 2020 would create a new one somehow.
LAST OF THE POEMHICANS.
You’ve witnessed the global pandemic. NOW PREPARE FOR THE GLOBAL PUNKDEMIC.
Because punk never dies.
*Astute readers will deduce that I tried to give myself a haircut, but fared so poorly that I had to adapt it to a mohawk. And even that turned out a little uneven.
Happy Holidays!
I hope your holiday season is proceeding safely and happily.
Full disclosure — I swiped this picture from a pal of mine who is far better at decorating than I am.
Down in the Dirt selects another poem of mine for its newest anthology
I’m so pleased to note here that Down in the Dirt has once again included a poem of mine in a poetry collection. This time out, the magazine published “An Ode to the Paintings of a Newly Discovered Artist” in an anthology it released today, Late Frost. ) The magazine first published this piece in its regular issue last month.
If you’d like to order a copy of the anthology, you can order it from Amazon at this link.
Thanks, as always, to Editor Janet Kuypers for allowing me to share my voice via Down in the Dirt!
Newington Blue Press selects my work for Issue No. 2 of Buk 100!
Great news — I am going to be published in Germany again! The nice folks over at Newington Blue Press have selected one poem and one photograph of mine to appear in the limited edition Issue No. 2 of Buk 100: My Old Man, A Birthday Greeting. The poem is my recent piece “Ode to a New Black Ballpoint Pen.” The photo is of the Shaffer’s Crossing Norfolk Southern Railway Bridge right here in Roanoke.
I am truly honored to learn that my work will appear in Issue No. 2 — especially after several of my poems appeared in Issue No. 1 of Buk 100 back in June. (These were “Guerrilla Poet” and “First Smoke.”) I am also quite happy to see that a photo of my adopted Bible Belt city will appear in a literary publication in Europe.
Buk 100: My Old Man, A Birthday Greeting is a set of chapbooks commemorating what would have been the 100th birthday of Charles Bukowski. Their featured writing and art were selected to showcase “a conversance and artistic involvement with the phenomenon of Bukowski.”
Thanks once again to Matthias Krueger at Newington Blue Press for allowing me to be a part of this unique international tribute to a legendary poet!
By Commonurbock23 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4030361
Your 80’s joke for today.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 