And last, but not least, our final (optional) prompt! In some past years, I’ve challenged you to write a poem of farewell for our thirtieth day, but this year, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem about something that returns. For, just as the swallows come back to Capistrano each year, NaPoWriMo and GloPoWriMo will ride again!
Sorry to end NaPoWriMo on such a dismal note. I could’ve gone with some type of spring renewal, but I guess I wasn’t there.
I was just sitting here thinking about how the COVID-19 pandemic will most likely (and rightfully) squash the May Day protests tomorrow, but our US (and nearly global) capitalist economy is just chompin’ at the bit to throw our sick, broken bodies back into the churn, risk-assessment be damned. I hear talk of rushing to get “back to normal”, and it just makes me wonder, normal in relation to what, exactly?
Thanks for hanging with me this month. I’ll see you back here next year, but until then, feel free to hang out and read my infrequent poetry postings.
Look, we could spin ourselves in circles falsely claiming that you or I drew first blood. I mean,
not one to quibble – it was clearly you, though you may indeed erroneously disagree – but it don’t matter no more.
Sure, you had the prettiest grey eyes I’d ever seen, and yeah, I meant that shit, and yeah it was corny as fuck, but well,
have you ever heard an empty cup speak-up, looking for something or someone to fill them with purpose?
I didn’t think it would lead to nothing, and was stunned when it did.
We had fun though, didn’t we? Playing hooky some Thursdays, laughing at shitty movies, disappearing off the grid
into our own private world at a different random Econo Lodge each time looking to not form any traceable patterns.
You had your men on the side, and I had my whole thing going on, but I wasn’t tripping about what this was or where we were.
You said it first, remember? And maybe you thought you meant it, but at the time, I repeated it only because I was naked and afraid of the repercussions of silence.
After allowing time to reflect and to see the whole elephant, I realized that I do care. I care.
But that’s no longer enough, is it?
And I swear to God I never knew I’d meet someone like her after meeting you.
She and I are just synched in ways your sense of surface tensions can’t possibly imagine.
What you and I had was fun, wasn’t it?
And I don’t understand a thing about soulmates, but my mind, heart, soul, whatever gut or animal-instinct you can conjure;
all of them unanimously tell me that I’d be a fool to ever let her walk out of my life,
so… you know…
I didn’t mean to steal your joy, but I’m dropping all pretense for her and only her.
Do you get it?
Try to understand; remember the way you say you felt when you fell for me?
You loved me, even as you were still loving on those other dudes, right? Even as you will be tomorrow, right?
Well, I met her, and everything I am has led me to the moment where nothing else matters except for my pulse synching with hers.
I loved you. I did. I still do. But I can never let her go. ***
There’s a pithy phrase attributed to T.S. Eliot: “Good poets borrow; great poets steal.” (He actually said something a bit different, and phrased it a bit more pompously – after all, this is T.S. Eliot we’re talking about). Nonetheless, our optional prompt for today (developed by Rachel McKibbens, who is well-known for her imaginative and inspiring prompts) plays on the idea of stealing. Today, I challenge you to write a non-apology for the things you’ve stolen. Maybe it’s something as small as your sister’s hairbrush (or maybe it was your sister’s boyfriend!) Regardless, I hope this sly prompt generates some provocative verse for you.
Oh, thank God! I was afraid that this might be one of those Erasure – found poetry prompts that I suck at find so frustrating. Thank goodness it’s just a prompt about good-old stealing! Yay for stealing!
God/Jesus with Adam and Eve, Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1480-1505, oil on panel, 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado)
Eve’s Side-Eye
I’m gonna take the fall for this, aren’t I? it’s clear from the Holy One’s grip on me His glare into the heart of man, unmoved my wrist upturned, defenseless, submitting
Adam’s dumb gaze affixed on His judgement obedient, naked, dense, stupid beast bet he really thinks I come from his rib
fruitful and multiply like rabbits, eh? guess I have no say in the matter then?
mother of original sin? how droll mother of sciences is more like it
He may well yet bring me to my knees here but despite my side-eye, I won’t stay there. ***
NaPoWriMo Day 6: “…write a poem from the point of view of one person/animal/thing from Hieronymus Bosch’s famous (and famously bizarre) triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights.”
I gotta be honest here; I hated this prompt. I didn’t enjoy viewing the art nor all the nightmare fuel within it (and there’s a lot going on here). Your mileage may vary, but I was pretty close to skipping this one when my eye caught the scene of God/Jesus, Adam and Eve. That scene compelled me to write this.
An ethereal inversion;
the television’s moonbeams
combining with darkness
masking our mockery;
our shared laughter at
your expense for once
instead of your typical
plucking at our insecurities
with orchestral precision; you,
still the chillest cat in the room,
but your arsenic-tipped wit
replaced by Bible psalms,
and sincerely, instead of
your standard
“The Lord is your shepherd, you shall not want”
atheist parodies.
You didn’t seem to mind,
but in the upside-down,
for once,
the egg was on your face.
I awoke still laughing
at your absurdity.
Dad, you were such a
magnificent bastard back then;
just a gloriously
belittling jackass.
I feared drawing your attention
almost as much as I craved it.
We all hated verbally sparring with you
because you’d gut us like catfish
while taking far more care
not to drop cigarette ash on
your freshly cleaned carpet.
We hated being victims
almost as much as we loved
being living witnesses
to your eviscerations.
But this time, we got your ass.
We ganged-up and nailed you
and that pompous Jehri-Curled afro
to the fucking wall.
You took it surprisingly well
given your massive ego,
but there was no mistaking it;
Boom! Roasted!
On a night we all saw
our man Jordan
get dunked on
and his Bulls lose
by thirty points.
I awoke still laughing
at your comeuppance.
I reached for my cell
to give you a call to remind you
and rub it in your face again;
that you’d finally been dunked-on
by those you’d repeatedly roasted
countless times; after all,
they say you only roast
the ones you love, right?
But as I grabbed my phone to dial you
the punchline came; I remembered it all;
that it was only a dream;
that not once did we ever
get the better of you;
that you probably never would’ve
been cool with that anyway;
that we never watched MJ
lose by thirty with you;
that I’d long forgotten
your phone number;
that in my contacts list
there was a blank spot
where your name should be;
that I hadn’t spoken to you
for nearly a decade,
months before you died.
The Real Truth (Or Why Nobody Asks Me to Deliver Toasts at Weddings or Family Feasts)
And what
do any of you
know of Truth?
None of you would know it
not even if it rose in the east,
set in the west,
and pelted you with harmful UV rays
as you lean into his warmth,
grinning like a slow-cooked idiot.
Slowly he rises,
bringing light, warmth,
and terminal cancer,
the indifferent promise
of life and death.
We’ll sing in praise of the former
screening the latter
with sweetly scented chemicals
that lead to a sweeter-scented
terminal cancer.
Life, like the sun
which nourishes and imperils us,
is a massively limited,
egregiously finite
string of things that don’t matter,
and the only constant is
its inevitable return to the lifeless void;
this inevitability is not to be
praised nor condemned, for
to try is to embrace the lie,
not that it matters how infinity is received,
for it will be visited upon you inevitably
and nothing you leave behind,
not even progeny, not even monuments,
not even this truthful tribute will matter,
for none of it will outlast the inevitability.
Life is a lie, death is the Truth,
and I know of no one, good or evil,
who has faced this Truth
with grace and equanimity
who has ever lived to tell the tale.
Now stop wasting everyone’s time
and let us enjoy this bountiful harvest
grown in the light of Truth.
***
So, yeah, someone is harvesting my content for clicks and kicks, and that’s not really ballin’ to me, so I think this just might be my penultimate entry, folks!
“…the moon steals its shine from the sun, and no one ever gets the two confused. Take it as a compliment.” -Art Teacher to Riley, The Boondocks, Season 1 Episode 12, “Riley Wuz Here”
So, yeah, my blog has been harvested without my consent. My online friend who runs the idorun blog was kind enough to notify me.
What does that mean exactly? I’m not entirely sure, but it certainly seems like a type of plagiarism. Go ahead and see for yourself, witness the theft of my hard-earned shine – granted you may be buying the underwear gnomes who run that site another free pair of underpants by clicking the link, but I’m not tripping. The reason will become clear when you continue reading.
My initial response to potentially being plagiarized was a weird sense of pride (“Say, word? My craft is now actually good enough to be stolen from? That’s kinda dope!”) Next, for a moment, I became vexed (“How dare someone steal my intellectual property! I worked long and hard on those navel-gazing ghazals about all those attractive women I wish I had slept with! If anyone should be making money off those self-satisfied missives, it should be me!”)
But the more I thought about it, and the more I learned about it, the less sense it made. It’s never been about the money for me. Sure, I had grand designs as a wide-eyed youngin’, but my learned poetic excursions have been a moderately inexpensive hobby to me.
Let’s discuss my poetic content at face value; For nearly two decades, I’ve been dabbling in online poetry using various media (including a poetry collection I self-published through Lulu). During that nearly-twenty years, my net income from my poetry could pay for a cup of coffee and exactly half-a-haircut.
No one is clamoring to pay for any of my web stuff on the strength of the content, and I get that. But crimes of economics have taught me that people usually steal things for – oh I dunno… some type of profit? If there’s no profit in my words at face value, then where does the profit reside?
My instincts tell me that it must be the site traffic that is somehow fraudulently aggregated to a point where sponsors unwittingly pay the cyberthief a fee for driving clicks their way. Which means that I wasn’t singled-out (I average less than twenty unique views per day; not exactly rolling in Skillshare sponsor dough) but I was harvested along with countless other unwitting blogs.
In fact, if you’re a blogmate of mine hosting your blog on free\public blogs like Blogger or WordPress, chances are high that you’ve been harvested too. Go ahead and check for yourself. Buy those dickheads another pair of undergarments in exchange for knowledge of your own site’s harvesting.
I’m not as special as I thought. Oh well. I’ll get over it.
So I’ve been harvested, and some nefarious entity is probably getting paid in cryptocurrency or some other underwear gnome-economics I don’t know about. Now what? What do I do about it?
Many bloggers are justifiably outraged enough to jump through the hoops of a DCMA takedown. Others have found that the harvesting blog is just an unsophisticated blogroll-type of aggregate that can be foiled by making their copied posts private.
I’m inclined to go another way.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit. Perhaps this is the very catalyst I need to shutter this blog for good (as well as my old one over at Blogger). Fighting some damned greedy money-bot trolls over my hobby is not why I got into online poetry. Life is too short, and the absurd time and economics of this make it a non-starter for me.
I will miss the wonderful community we’ve cultivated here, especially my friends at dVerse, Poets United, Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, as well as all of my online friends too great in number to mention individually. I haven’t decided on a switch-off date, but it will most likely be fairly soon.
So, what next then?
Well I’ve been flirting with the notion of hiding all my nonsense behind Medium’s $5 monthly paywall. (I have a free presence there right now.) Again, I don’t expect to be swimming in a pool of money over poetry about some naughty dreams I had, but the economics makes more sense to me now. At WordPress, I bought the domains cosmicrubble.com and mylibidowearsatuxedo.com for $100 annually. Well recently, they lowered their price to $60, assumedly to remain competitive with Medium’s plan.
But here’s the rub; while WordPress’s response to intellectual theft is basically “We’ve already got your money, we’re not being robbed directly, we don’t see a problem here, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”, Medium’s paywall won’t allow for some random yokel to do a drive-by smash-n-grab on my shine, ya dig?
Also, if I develop enough traffic, my $5 monthly fee could eventually pay for itself. Imagine having a secure online presence essentially for free. I know this is beginning to sound like an ad, but I have imagined it. This may sound naive or glib, but I don’t want to think about intellectual theft anymore than I have this weekend. I just want to write about my love of my family, life, and words without worrying about someone turning it into a click for free underpants.
A friend once told me that I’m worth more than I give myself credit for. Well actually, several friends have told me this, including my best friend, the Wifey. I think I’m finally starting to understand what they mean.
Hephaestus’ Waste & Cosmic Rubble 