One towering oak
Can’t a healthy forest make;
No one thrives alone.
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Haiku 5 Jul 2018
Well dressed highway verge
Adorned in buttons and lace:
There’s no rush to mow.
Senryū 17 Jun 2018
That staccato click
Shattering morning stillness:
High heels on sidewalk.
For Scooj… In Passing.
Somewhere, below, lies
Bristol, famed for it’s street art;
An ever-changing
Desert of stone walls, stencils,
Spraycans, and wheat-paste,
Chronicled by one poet,
And honored by another.
Where? When?
Like Schrödinger’s cat
I exist in quantum flux
Time and distance merge
Between Here and There
Between sea and sky
Between clouds and nothingness
A moment of peace
Sorcerous Science
Film Photography;
one more lost spagyric art
like all other alchemy.
Senryū 11 May 2018
My inner poet
Mourns your harsh assertion that
Letters are mundane
A Humble Collection
Poets collect words,
Weave them into matrices,
Fractal filigrees,
Knit together dreamscapes,
As few words as miles
From this lonely earth
To our bright, beloved moon.
This finite dictionary
Yields infinite expression.
Name That Tune, Greg
Ahh! That hollow roar,
passive-aggressive bellows
of an impotent tyrant,
~
Grasping desperately
for any shred of respect,
oh, so richly undeserved.
Another Star
To my nameless friend,
You know full well who you are,
Allow me to express,
For the bloodshed prevented,
My profoundest thanks.
It would not do for young love
To result in amputation.
Spring’s Bitter Pill
It’s spring… and it’s time
For furious rants
About the damned spawn
Of amorous plants.
The roads and the cars
Are all sporting a glaze
A Residual effect
Of this damned chartreuse haze.
Go out in the sun?
I’d love to… but can’t,
That yellow-green mist
Makes me cough and pant!
I fight to get by
In so many ways;
Happily this lasts
Just a few days.
Waiting
This mournful face hangs
In a long abandoned hall
Waiting silently
For a jovial ringing
Destined to be unanswered.
A Rant On Character Realism
Of late, many of my female friends on social media have been bemoaning the limited and often misogynistic descriptions of female characters in books written by male authors. Many feel that they, personally, would never be described by male authors because they lack a “proper feminine image”.
In response to these, not wholly unwarranted, criticisms I find myself pondering literary character descriptions in general regardless of the gender of the author.
Do female authors do a better job of creating realistic male character descriptions than male authors do with female character descriptions? Do you think I would get a more accurate character description from the likes Nora Roberts or Danielle Steele?
Somehow, I have an equally hard time seeing my self described favorably in a work of modern fiction penned by a woman. In fact, I imagine something like this:
“He certainly rippled- or maybe jiggled- beneath his, overly tight, oxford button down as he hastily stumbled down the steps of his mid-town office block to hail a cab, no doubt, to take him the three short blocks to the nearest Chinese Restaurant where he would, undoubtedly, bury his feelings of professional inadequacies under a small mountain of Szechuan Chicken and plot his revenge against all those who failed to see his worth.
What does it say about our society that fictional characters are, more often than not, simply stereotypic caricatures that perpetuate distorted and unhealthy images of human value? How often is a fictional hero or heroine that is a fully formed person with merits and flaws and underlying beauty, humanity, and value realistically concealed beneath an unflattering mortal shell?
Not very often. Because, I suspect, even when authors write stories with characters like this, editors reject them because “it will never sell” and mainstream film makers never make movies from them because they won’t be able to cast any “A-List talent” to take a role like that and without the glitterati of a major box office draw, it’s “just another art film”.
