Day 21 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2014

21 is one of those numbers that's invested with everyday magic in our culture, somehow. Blackjack, for example. Or just the whole notion of "lucky 21." The age to vote. And majority in general, though in many places 18 is the majority age. Beyond the teens at any rate. Don't know where I'm going here, but let's hope Day 21 is a lucky day, where adults act like an adult, where we all win, maybe. Rock on. "For today’s prompt, write a 'back to basics' poem," suggests Robert Lee Brewer (Poetic Asides). Maureen Thorson's prompt today is "to write a 'New York School' poem using the recipe found here [an exercise created by Thom Donovan] . . . many 'New York School' poems display a sort of conversational tone, references to friends and to places in and around New York, humor, inclusion of pop culture, and a sense of the importance of art (visual, poetic, and otherwise)" (NaPoWriMo). Let's start with Alan. "I'm feeling fractious and facetious today," he says. "By the way, all characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." Kemo Sabe I’m telling you, Joe, since you left Johnson City has gotten to be one big foul-up. By chance I was spending some time at Poor Richard’s with members of different departments throughout the damned campus, and I was discussing the misery felt by our colleagues. Then Pat (you remember—he played a bit part as a salesman on Seinfeld) began echoing my curt comments, like how the Athletic Department was like a Viagra commercial put on for alumni, and he started laughing until he remembered a story about Henry Winkler, who once was the Fonz but is now huckstering reverse mortgages aimed at poor people as old as my parents, but then in the day he was featured in magazines as a sex symbol and met at a plaza in south San Diego a maritime officer wanting to prove he was cooler than Fonz, so now I’m most distressed by the concept of actors’ perspectives on fame, how it matters for power, but power dispersed in a way where the actor’s an object who might not be able to sell his own face — Clayton Moore, you remember, was getting injunctions preventing his wearing a domino mask in appearances as the Lone Ranger because the production affiliates who own the character don’t want old men in the suit; now remember that Pat could draw Social Security, if not already, and I took a bite of a salad I’m eating to knock my weight down, while the sandwich that Pat has is oozing all over, so juicy my mouth is rejecting the lettuce, and I am uncertain about why chance meetings occur when Pat suddenly makes a bizarre observation about matrimony among some professors who have long affairs, dump their wives, and then marry the students whom they’ll cheat on later, as if infidelity has some expression of faith in romantic ideals, and we said in agreement these guys are afraid they are dying and, maybe, instead of entanglements, getting a brand new perspective would help, but I laughed because I know these guys and a woman whose exploits in amorous proclivities have eclipsed even those of Fonz Winkler himself, in the day, if we set aside faculty emeriti, which I have absolutely a miniscule chance of becoming, for reasons you know, that I’m making myself disappear into woodwork, but laughing makes Pat think about a new story involving a middle administrator and a chair who would scare a real biker and not a pretender like Fonz. Come back home, Joe, the joke’s been on me for so long, I’m believing the future has gone Balkanized like my job. —Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes     [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Okay, and here's my best shot at a New York School back-to-basics poem. Life and Death and Art So, Kathy, you’re the closest person to a New Yorker I know — well, of course you are a New Yorker, but upstate or central or Finger Lakes or whatever, and you know I’m talking about NYC, no offense — and now I’ve forgotten where I’m going with this. Oh yeah, it’s 4:06 in the PM, on the 21st of April, 2014, and I’m sitting in my office trying to imagine myself in Grand Central Station or at the freakin’ top of the Empire State Building or in Times Square but I can’t make it work, though I can kinda get the smell, you know that mix of BO and street exhaust, like humanity every-stinkin-where: “Oh, the humanity!” Wait, that was crass, sorry, I wanna take that quote back. This is starting to sound like a Denise Duhamel poem — is she New York School, well she lived in NYC for a while, I think — but that would be quite a feather in my hat if I did succeed in doing Denise Duhamel. Well, not like that, sorry Denise. So I’m getting the humanity smell right but then instead it turns into a smell like death. You know, if I’m gonna do Denise (sorry Denise), I’ve gotta be all about life and all the cool funny things that go on everyday. But no, I’m just getting death. D-E-A-T-H in capital letters. Fuck. So I’ll try to think about Valerie Bertinelli and Jenny Craig. Did I tell you I’ve had a longstanding crush on Valerie Bertinelli? But Jenny Craig makes me think about bodies wasting away, oh shit. My writing buddy Alan Holmes is losing weight right now and he’s eating a lot of salad, but he’ll be all right. Yeah, fuckin’-A, he’ll be golden. Am I dreaming? No, I’m in Iowa. Though if I was dreaming, I’d still be in Iowa although in the dream, I could be in New York. I know you wish I was in New York. But upstate, not in the city. Though we could both go to the city. And eat an apple. A big one. Sorry. But anyway, it’s death death death. Okay, let’s think about somewhere in middle America, in the wide open spaces. Like Tennessee, which is where Alan is. Johnson City. But I’m really thinking Knoxville. Oh damn, that’s where the Body Farm is, the original one. You know about that? At UT they have a research facility where they leave corpses outdoors in all sorts of different environments — well, as many different ones as you can have while still staying in Knoxville — to study how humans rot. Decomp, I think they say. You ever watch CSI? You know how they can tell how long someone’s been dead by what larvae have hatched out? They learned that at the Body Farm. Fun, huh? We almost had a body farm here at my university, it was going to be an indoor one, but the legislature wouldn’t fork out the funding. Crazy. I mean, it couldn’t smell any worse than a hog confinement facility. Wouldn’t it be a blast to see Jessica Simpson and Kate Perry visiting a hog confinement facility? They’d both be good troopers and tough it out. But Lady Gaga, if she did it, I wonder what weird ideas she’d get. Anyway, I guess the topic for the day, lucky 21, is the body farm. We all gotta decomp, right? So let’s learn all about it. That would be the ultimate back-to-basics journey, huh? Your skin starting to slough off, like you’re a snake molting. My flesh composting into good dark soil. I imagine my soil would be darker than yours, and your soil would have freckles. And eventually, there’d be a vine growing out of your soil, and another vine growing out of my soil, and they’d entwine together and make great grapes in a warm clearing in the sun, like in a Van Gogh painting with purple and blue and tawny yellow brushstrokes all over. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Alan, I gotta thank you, bud. I was pretty blocked except for the Body Farm back-to-basics thing until I read your poem. And then I knew what to do. Just had to let it flow. Channel Frank Freakin' O'Hara. Here's a YouTube video on the Body Farm. Watch out: it's pretty graphic. The title of this video is quite sensationalistic . . . pay no attention to the title. The Body Farm — or as it's officially called, the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Center — is an internationally respected and renowned research lab. Here's another video: "Secrets of the Body Farm" — an hour-long documentary from National Geographic. Enjoy! Won't you comment, please, friends? To make a comment, look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. If you don't see that, look in the red line that starts Posted by Vince, find the word comments, and click it once. Ingat, everyone.   ヅ

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