“Roses Are Red” is my fourth entry for the 5-Day Poetry Challenge:
“Roses Are Red,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
This poem doesn’t rhyme,
Motherfucker.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015
Photo credit: “Rosa Damascena Rozino Village” by Plamen Agov • studiolemontree.com. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
After a shaky Season 1, the second season of “The X Files” showed it coming into its own and becoming the classic sci-fi horror show that I remember. I’d give it a 9 out of 10.
The program got scarier, tighter, and better directed. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson settled into their roles, and became the unique characters fan loved, and their trademark dry banter and sexual tension finally appeared. The overarching plotlines and themes also more or less really made their first appearance in Season 2. The conspiracy and “The Project” finally take shape, with characters like Alex Krycek, The Well Manicured Man and Bill Mulder becoming part of the story, and the sadness and sense of tragedy that pervaded the series became a part of most of the show’s episodes – even the standalone monster-of-the-week episodes.
There were really only four misfires — “Little Green Men,” “3,” “Firewalker” and “Fearful Symmetry” were weak. The rest of the season was quite good.
Some of the eps, like “F. Emasculata,” “Aubrey,” “Irresistible,” and “Our Town” were genuinely scary. Just about any fan of the show will name the hilarious “Humbug” as a classic. And the mythology episodes, while not always frightening, were at least great sci-fi thrillers – especially the fantastic and perfect classic eps, “Colony” and “Endgame.”
Great stuff.
I wrote this a few months back; today it is my third entry for the 5-Day Poetry Challenge. [EDIT: the formatting is fixed!!]
“hens staring upward,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Please
stop
fleeing me so frequently at Atlantic City.
It happens every night now.
I
look
over at the slot machine you occupied and only see
some strange man, finer than I am, and industrious.
All the ringing bells announce
his inauguration.
All the flashing lights
strobe his sharper features.
It makes me wake and makes me
artlessly craft a
hard discordant poetry.
Remember Atlantic City?
We took a flight despite its easy drive.
It’s a funny word, “flight.”
It can mean
to seize the sky as the cardinal might
and the hen cannot –
the conquest, the flashing red ascent to sky and space.
Or it can mean departure,
as one escapes from another.
Just
about
three times a week
I am at that strange and nameless airport in my sleep
where the planes will not take flight.
High white walls vault up.
The hangars all are locked and vacant.
Clocks speed backward.
Incoherent porters
clutch and curse at suitcases.
The bathrooms smell like beer.
Other would-be passengers
harbor nascent aneuryisms.
Children chatter like hectic apes.
Their fathers all are drunk, their mothers
suffer black and scandalous sudden miracles in the airport lounge,
each reaching orgasm
at the taste of stale sandwiches.
Convulsing, their eyes roll back
Their slow moans hasten into screams,
Their slim arms raised, but
Indolent husbands with rictus grins
will only clutch at their jackets,
at hidden iron flasks.
All the long lines lead
only to exits.
All the flight announcements
are harshly lit in dead and inscrutable languages:
strange Aramaic,
or Latin’s various precursors:
embittered early Germanic and
jumbled Etruscan.
Only two words are clear:
“DEPARTURES HERE.”
I need to fly to you.
I need to see you in person but
the attendants in my nightmare all
are comatose at the counters.
Sleeping pilots sag in chairs.
In an airport bar,
the dead slouch over snifters.
A bartender is bones.
Down a white corridor
A stewardess in sing-song voice
will wrongly remember a verse and reduce
Dante to gibberish.
Shakespeare is made as profane
as a syphilitic kiss.
On her lips, Eliot
becomes a barking dog.
My ticket is illegible –
its scrawled words
read like the bray of an ass,
or my own words.
You left me once.
Now stay
in the various safe and certain places free of sadness found
in the attention of better men.
Please, Audrey.
Please.
It was human for you to leave me once
But cruel for you to do so
over and over and over in my dreams.
Upon waking I can only console
myself with stilted meter
and the misspelled names of cities.
I
am
unsaved by my similes,
mere alliteration and unmeasured verse in an amateur’s awkward
clutch of unkempt metaphors,
the thinly veiled and even conscious
failed emulation of Auden,
the maudlin, the guttural hen
aspiring to such song as only the cardinal is capable.
Your
last
words to me are now familiar nocturnes.
Stars will nightly light your verbs.
Every waning moon will arc
over your exact nouns and careful platitudes,
Your eloquence in leaving me,
The precision in “goodbye.”
The flashing rebuke in the narrowing blue
of your eyes is concise.
The blue-black and deepening, freezing dark violet
of heaven will always observe your departure,
your ordered logic.
Its witness is the vacuum.
Its witness is the endless expanse of space.
I
write
but my words
are only hens with dull black eyes –
hens staring upward –
beholding the sky and its occasional
darting scarlet of cardinals in flight.
I
love
but my words
are only untidy, unmannered motifs –
as devoid of hope or order as
feral children in the snow, starving in a March forest.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015
Photo credit: “Helsinki-Vantaa Airport departure hall 2, international terminal,” self-published work by Antti Havukainen, via Wikimedia Commons
**********
I am cheating
on the 5-Day Poetry Challenge
merely by adding
line breaks to a sentence.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015
*****
(I suggest that this piece works on a number of levels, most notably the levels of “suck” and “I am really busy today.”)
Let’s try this again … after wrestling with formatting issues, I have somewhat better presented my first entry into the 5-Day Poetry Challenge:
“You’re a Broken Phonograph,” by Eric Robert Nolan
You’re baggage.
You’re a scratched penny on a gravel street.
Your memory is a cheap souvenir from an ill-advised journey that is wished forgotten. You were purchased drunk on a mercilessly hot noon at a roadside stand. The vendor resembled Browning’s “hoary cripple” — all eager eyes and veiled laughter. His smile is frequented by gold teeth — intermittent shining sentries on a rampart grin. His front pockets are stuffed with bills, like twin plump denim ticks; their fangs are dollars’ corners. Your overpriced bauble shines at midday, but every additional dusk renders it lower into dulling shades of deep sepia. The paint flakes off — it falls to the windowsill now like the dead wings of moths. The wise advise its removal; the paint is toxic.
Your image is the aged face of a staid statesman on a stamp, an unremembered lawmaker.
You’re a broken phonograph.
You’re a photo of a burned out building.
Your presence is a preening blackbird at the lawn.
You’re quick to open your legs, but slow to close your mouth.
You’re easy sex, but difficult company.
You’re a cheap date, but a costly acquaintance.
No matter where and when another man will lie beside you, you’re alone.
Your future is all awkward mornings, sunsets that are calls to arms, disenchanted midnights, men misunderstood,
“friends of friends,” “friends” instead of lovers, men recommended, men paid for,
their loins emptied first, their hearts emptied after, both by your mouth,
men slipping out, at sunrise, stealthily before you wake, like cats smelling better breakfast elsewhere.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015
Photo credit: “Musee Baud,” 2015, by Rama, via Wikimedia Commons
… in light of the spree killing tonight at Emanuel A.M.E. Church. I am only just reading reports now — the victim count is unclear; the gunman is still at large.
Charleston’s people are absolutely wonderful. I went there a couple of times during my college days, and I do remember Calhoun Street, where the church is located. I was amazed at how genteel and goodnatured the city’s residents were.
CNN: Charleston church shooting: 9 killed in what officials call a hate crime
So I received an e-mail yesterday from my Mom in New York — she said she and my sister were on their way to a “goat farm and shoppe.”
Uh … okay.
Precisely what should such a proprietor offer that would interest my family? What does the “shoppe” sell? Goat-themed products? Like t-shirts and mugs? The goats themselves? Does the archaic spelling of “shoppe” suggest that these are medieval goats?
I mentioned this on Facebook, and a whole bunch of Virginia friends “liked” the status. Apparently goat farming and shopping are things with which they can identify?
PLEASE do not suggest that my mother may have brought home a baby goat.
Photo credit: “Chevreau”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 fr via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chevreau.jpg#/media/File:Chevreau.jpg
Dear Lord, Charlize Theron is a fantastic actress. It’s amazing what she can communicate with just her facial expressions and line delivery, even when her dialogue is sparing and simplistic. She’s also a superb physical actress, has great scene presence and is stunningly beautiful. Why not simply call this movie “Furiosa?” It’s really that character’s story; the titular “Mad Max” says and does little that is plot-relevant. He is a superfluous character who is here only to attract the fanbase for the original “Mad Max” movies.
Theron is one of two things that “Mad Max: Fury Road” has going for it. The other is pure spectacle. I don’t love this movie the way that everyone else seems to (I’d give it a 7 out of 10), but I really did enjoy the action, special effects, costume, prop and set design. This is like a modern “Ben Hur” (1959) on acid — the characters, weapons, sets and vehicles look great. This movie is like a really good heavy metal album cover made into a feature-length film.
My attention wandered, though. The action is often difficult to follow, thanks to too much Michael Bay-type directing. Tom Hardy is really just a one-note character as Max, despite efforts to render him in depth with cliche flashbacks of a lost family. And I liked this guy a hell of a lot in “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012); I thought he made the masked Bane a great villain with physical acting that compensated well for an obscured face.
I submit that this is a somewhat brainless movie that barely qualifies as science fiction. We have a sparse opening montage that tells us about world-ending wars for resources, and then the rest of the movie is really just an extended gladiator battle in the desert with baroquely costumed bad guys. It’s like a monster truck rally.
It’s sometimes fun, but it doesn’t make a great film. The good guys are too thinly drawn to engender viewer sympathy; the bad guys are too cartoonish to be scary. You also need to turn your brain off, lest certain questions occur to you:
1) Doesn’t gasoline degrade over time? I don’t think it would be worth warring or bartering for after a year or so, unless there are oil rigs and complex refineries to seek and develop it. We see evidence of neither.
2) What do people eat, out here in the never-ending desert? The disappearance of “green places” is a plot point; there is no arable land.
3) How often does this dictator (“Big Joe” or something?) give his subjects water? Once per day? I thought dehydration killed or immobilized people fairly quickly.
4) Where the heck are we? I hear a lot of United Kingdom accents.
5) I’m pretty sure that blood transfusions don’t work like that. And even if they did, you’d see a hell of a lot of opportunistic infections in such unsterile conditions.
6) Why does one young woman immediately fall in love with a sleeping barbarian whose teeth are spray-painted silver?
Whatever. I’m not saying that this is a bad movie; I’m just suggesting that it’s a little overrated given its current accolades by fans. It’s fun enough, if you’re in the mood for a “Mad Max” movie.
[WARNING — THIS POST CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR SEASONS 2 AND 3 OF “HANNIBAL,” AS WELL AS STEPHEN KING’S “THE DARK TOWER” SERIES. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.]
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This could be overeager nerd eisigesis, but something jumped out at me immediately in the second episode of this summer’s “Hannibal.”
When Will Graham greets Abigail Hobbes at the beginning, he wonders about “some other world.”
The doomed young Abigail responds: “I’m having a hard enough time dealing with this world. I hope some of the other worlds are easier.”
That’s “worlds,” plural — not “another world” or “the next world.” It sounds a hell of a lot like the doomed Jake Chambers’ famous line towards the end of “The Gunslinger,” before he falls to his fate: “Go then. There are other worlds than these.”
Graham goes on the discuss string theory: “Everything that can happen, happens.” This dovetails perfectly with the idea of the nearly infinite parallel universes that comprise different levels of “The Tower.”
Then other story parallels occurred to me:
1) Both Abigail and Jake are children of surrogate fathers who are on a crusade (Graham’s pursuit of Hannibal Lecter, the Gunslinger’s quest for The Tower).
2) Both are specialized, cold-blooded killers by training (Abigail’s bizarre tutelage by her serial killer biological father, Jake’s training by the Gunslinger).
3) Both are willingly sacrificed by their surrogate fathers. (NBC’s show makes it clear that Hannibal is also a father figure to Abigail.)
4) Both characters were sacrificed by the show’s/book’s title character.
5) The memories of both haunt the stories’ protagonists as a recurring motif. Both appear to drive the heroes insane.
6) Both characters are ostensibly dead at some point, and then are quasi-resurrected by a surprise plot device. (Abigail has been secreted away by Hannibal; Jake is returned from a parallel universe to which he was consigned.)
7) The loss of both characters are tied to themes of forgiveness. (Jake forgives the Gunslinger for letting him fall; Graham explicitly forgives Hannibal for Abigail’s loss as part of the show’s overarching theme.)
It would be fun and perfectly viable to imagine that the show’s events transpire on a “level” of The Tower. The differing continuities of the original books and feature films could even comprise other levels. King makes it clear that “twinners” are character analogs living in different universes.
But I am probably just imagining things. I also thought that Hannibal’s reference to his “person suit” in this season’s first episode was a reference to “Donnie Darko” (2001): “Why do you wear that silly man suit?” And, in retrospect, that seems like a coincidence.
“It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.”
— from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” 1897
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 
