Back-Up Bliss (Blues Lyric)

 

You know I love you baby

you know I crave your kiss

you know I love you baby

you know I crave your kiss

so don't act all broken-hearted

when I say that you're my back-up bliss

Slip out the back door baby

when you hear the front door key

slip on out the back door baby

when you hear the front door key

now don't get sad

dontcha get all mad

cos back-up bliss is what you are to me

Come and rock me baby

smooth and sweet as summer wine

come on and rock me baby

as smooth and sweet as summer wine

main squeeze ain't got nothin'

that could make me give up this

time with you, my cool and crazy back-up bliss

__________

Process notes! I was blasting Robin Trower's Rock Me Baby while putting away groceries. Now there is a coffee creamer I just have to have, called Natural Bliss brown sugar oat creamer. The store doesn't always have it, and it lasts for months if it isn't opened, so when I get about half done with my current jug, I buy a back-up before I get too low because running out just isn't happening, not at my house! So, I was putting away groceries and grabbed the new Natural Bliss and said, "Oh yes, my back-up Bliss!" That's when the light bulb came on over my head. Sounds like a blues rock song! And voila! Here it is, with tongue firmly in cheek!

Music: Robin Trower Rock Me Baby

I'll Wipe That Enigmatic Half Smile Right Off Your Face, Chica

 

Mona Lisa and I sit at my kitchen table, sharing croissants.

(I have no kitchen table.)

I'm about sick of her stupid smile.

(Mona Lisa isn't even here.)

My dog wanders up and asks if there'll be anything else.

(My dog can't talk.)

I slip a revolver out from my skirts and lay it on the table.

(I'm wearing sleep pants. I own no guns.)

Sorry, says Mona Lisa. She says that all day long.

(Paintings don't speak.) 

I blow her brains out.

(She has no brains. That's why she's annoying.)

I clean up, then marry my dog.

(You can't marry a dog.) 

I whisper in his ear that the gun was unloaded.

(There was no gun, no Mona Lisa, no table.)

I hope you enjoyed this poem.

(Poem?)

______

for Word Garden Word List--Inspector Pancakes Helps the President of France.

Music: Donovan There Is a Mountain

The Legend of Large Larry Lilliput

 The Hollywood heavy left the bughouse

to become a public gangster,

then dynamited the studio

out of some imagined rancor.

"I am the King of the Eskimos!"
he declared with eyes gone glassy

and wore in his hair a plastic rose

convinced it looked quite classy.

His career was a catastrophe

playing ghouls and goons

but they say he gained some mastery

in the place where they count the spoons.

After a time, he married a mime

who made crickets seem loquacious.

They had nine kids--one sublime

and the other eight pugnacious.

He coughed and keeled and passed away

in the middle of his biggest caper.

You can't even visit his grave today--

he vanished into vapor!

______

posted with profuse apologies to Alicia Suskin Ostriker, the subject of this week's Word Garden Word List. 

The image is of Lon Chaney Sr. 

Music: Betty Booom & Ashley Slater Spooky Scary Skeletons

Greta and Ted, A Love Story

 

image by Corinne Geersten

Ghosts don't normally send fire through the mail, but they tend

to be a little bit muzzy-headed, the dead.

Water stamps temper these communications slightly

but flame is a Gypsy and wanders brightly,

making suggestions of passion on the carpets where they end.

Greta, not knowing she is dead, not knowing she's a shade,

sends these immolations postage-paid

and if such silly wooden houses go up, if roofs collapse,

then their occupants' lives, like hers, will lapse

and you can't fight infernos with a lemonade glass.

Poor Greta, sharing hell with the taciturn Unabomber,

who wishes all kinds of ill upon her,

who stinks and mumbles and never changes clothes or shaves

so that when one letter is returned to sender

she will blow and burn so that none can mend her.

Lonely Greta, sullen Ted

with a packed pipe and a black rose on their summer-dry graves.

_______

for Sunday Muse #214.

"The Meaning of Life" a poem by Gladys Schlump (CosmicUnicornPoet)

 

O candle of life, smoking grayly,

in life we give light, even if palely

til the snuffer snuffs us and we smoke away daily

then croak and leave our life that was fail-y.

Animated wax that our bodies are

cannot be kept, nor thrown very far

to live in bliss on a faraway star

something something John Agar.

Realms of bliss realms of light

some are born in Cleveland Heights

some are born in Cleveland Heights

some are born to see I'm right.

So, return to Him who barfed us forth

be He Rumpelstiltskin or Nanook of the North

scooped up in the dust pan of life and fate

something something pomegranate. 

_______________

Shared with Sunday Muse #195. Be worthy, rabble.

This beautiful arrangement created by Penelope "Pippie" Zugronski. 

Notes: My entire life has led up to this poem. It is a form called Intestin Bloque, which means Interesting Stanzas. This poem is included in my collection The Very Interesting Poems of Gladys Schlump and also appears in the November 1956 issue of Detached Retina: A Compendium of Torpid, Impenetrable Verse. Finally, this poem won the prestigious Itchy Rash Award for Poetry, given annually by the Debilitating Head Injury Guild of Stockholm, Sweden. Enjoy! (but not TOO much. It's unseemly.)

Actor John Agar with his collection of irrelevant booshwah.

Pool Party

Olympic freestyle w/ jungle animals was an instant hit.

The world's top swimmers, driven by ambition and terror, amused the crowd with feats of athletic derring-do.

Behold the gentle panda

blocking lane three

and the gnu in two

basking elegantly.

It was indeed unfortunate about the hungry tigers

diving in and disturbing the plastic markers.

Next, we offer soccer w/ lion pride.

Test audiences loved it, sponsorships galore!

That's tonight at ten.

Gymnastics w/ wolverines tomorrow at four.

______

for Sunday Muse #144

The Welder (dedicated to Carl von Cosel)

The welder with the sickly wife

replaced her failing parts with metal

so as to preserve her precious life

albeit with skin more plating than petal.

She was calm and sweet and very grateful

and in him placed her faith and trust

to restore her as best as he was able

even after she began to--sadly--rust.

A stove pipe neck, a ball bearing eye

forestalled the Reaper's pitiless visit

even as neighborhood kids would cry,

"Holy honking shit, what IS it?"

Her lips of bronze, her lids of tin

and her gams of ducts meant for the furnace

made his bride a gadget so lovely to him:

"Ain't no other contraption as fine as her is!"

______________

The most famous work by the celebrated American poet Aldous W. Bates. The poem first appeared in Popular Metallurgy in the June issue for the year 1913. Bates was, in fact, married to what we would now refer to as non-bio companion named Alice Menzies, who had previously been part of a steam engine. They had one child, a boy, who the couple named Boot. The child showed early promise as a can opener before succumbing to an over-fondness for WD-40 and dying in obscurity in 1957. A full account of the life and work of Aldous W. Bates is available in book form under the title "Hard and Steamy: A Love Story" 353 pages, Slagheap Press 1931. The volume is renowned for both its fearless eroticism and the inclusion of a formula for what was, at the time, a newly discovered alloy. 

Source: The Sunday Muse #111.

Cat In Communication With Distant Planets

Cat in communication with distant planets 
thinks you would be more interesting if you were
a fish
or a cardboard box.

Distant planets communicate that personal transformation is possible.
Fins or corrugation become you.
Get cracking. 
__________

timely feline advice courtesy of Sunday Muse #85.

Bonus advice: don't settle. Become a fish IN a cardboard box. Your cat will thank you.

Good News / Bad News

The good news: everything has been saved,
locked away for you:

real love, sunny skies, and on and on.

The bad news: you need a key to open the door.
You have to make the key yourself.
The lock is in a foreign language.
No interpreter.

The good news is, the world turns and turns.
Tides come in, then go out.
The equator is a ring on which hangs the key.
Already made, already spoken

by your own hand;
from your own mouth.
_____
  
For Susie's challenge at Real Toads.

Pigeon Superstition

Why did they put a ledge here?
I've got to get you out here.
The cop's got erudition--
he'll read me Yeats in prison.

He called you on his cell phone
cos baby you're my love jones.
I'm out here on a mission--
it's pigeon superstition.

Three steps left will make you be
my bitchin love eternally;
and if that fails, then turn around,
and magnetize you downtown.

If you come and if we fall,
we'll look like ants but feel like gods.
We won't blame the Irish cop
if we come to a sudden stop.

Backwards counting down by threes
will bring your smokin' self to me.
It's not infatuation fiction--
it's pigeon superstition.

It's you and me and Walden too,
that's what superstition do.
________

for Out Of Standard at Real Toads. "Pigeon Superstition"

Thanks to Jarrod Dyson of the Kansas City Royals, who famously quipped "That's what speed do."

The song whose melody just happens to fit. Thank you Susie Clevenger.

 

Review of "Mother"

Mother by Linda Ann Rentschler

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Here it is, The Worst Novel Ever Written. I only read it all the way through as a sort of exercise in endurance, and to see how laughably awful the writing could become. Here's the answer: really, really awful.

Rentschler is the Queen of hyperbolic, cheaply emotional scenes populated by cardboard characters from central casting, described in utterly talentless prose, as they act out plotlines that are so unlikely and/or boring that to read them is to experience a massive die-off of brain cells. You know that completely talentless housewife at the local adult ed writing group? It's Rentschler. No, strike that. That's unfair to the housewife.

I don't know what weird time warp Rentschler lives in, but while her story is supposedly set in the present (the book came out in 2007), her college students listen to their music on "albums" and cassettes (!) with nary a cd or a mp3 to be found. Her two main characters meet at a luncheonette, over cherry Cokes. Wait, it gets better. The grief wall in the student union has pictures of deceased celebrities, but they are all old, like John Lennon, JFK, and Marilyn Monroe. The only "new" name she mentions is River Phoenix! No Kurt Cobain in Rentschler's world.

The whole book seems more like 1957 than 2007. Even while on her big adventure of taking time away from her family to (gasp!) smoke cigarettes and (shock, horror!) stay up past midnight and (facepalm!) have a tarot reading, her main character keeps lapsing into musings about housecleaning and casseroles.

All through this novel, everyone is always bursting into tears, falling down, having conniption fits of wild emotion at the drop of a hat. This includes women, men, everybody. Also, the main character, Mary, relentlessly treats everyone as if they were eight years old. For her son's eighteenth birthday, she and her young friend brainstorm and hit on party hats, noisemakers and cowboy napkins. Then Mary runs out and buys him a puppy! Lord above.

Like I said...Worst. Novel. Ever.



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