Some Word Play and Desolate Doggerel

Sweeping more fragments out to the curbside blog

Combos Where I Couldn't Make Up My Mind

 

Heat and Stupidity

Heart and Stupidity

 

Comic Dance

Cosmic Dance

 

Honor a Horror

Horror of Honor

 

Maniacs Ate Grapes

Great Apes Ate Grapes

 

Dark Hoses

Dark Horses

Dark Houses

 

Unclaimed Baggage (fragments left in my notebook)

Reach in the falling rain and

descant that drink 

in your easy jeans

***

 

A child raised on maps

sits on the crust of the earth

***

 

The cat uses silence as a weapon

***

 

We've Never Been Here

 

Do you ever wake up and think,

"I've never been here before."

Here being this point in time; and

neither has anyone else. 

Every moment is unknown

for everyone.

Infinite Questions

 

Does infinity have a map

Does infinity have a tail

Should I call it Mr. or Mrs.

Where does infinity send its children to school

Does it have a handicap

Does infinity envy any other fact of nature

It's What You've Been Waiting For

 

Unfold the paper

read the words.

Just Unrelated Pieces

 

I loved you before it was allowed.

As an Illuminati
I defiled my illicit llama

The kids play in the dirt

and pick their scabs

The heart of my hell.

I returned a memory to a friend
that tastes like Italian rain.

END ON A JOKE

My Mirror Jokes

What did the cynic say to the mirror?

Yeah right

What did the passive-aggressive say to the mirror?

If you say so.

The Rouge (A Cento)

Every so often when I finish a book, I try to write a poem from it, this one is a Cento from Robert Price's Ford: The Men and Machine

 The Rouge

One of capitalism's alters
a vast satanic cathedral
All night the Rouge growls
its fires and flares
casting flickering shadows
its furnaces glowing dull red
around the base of its brooding bulk
The industrial guts of America
Europe has its palaces
but America celebrates her native genius
with monuments of a rougher sort.

—A Cento with credit to Robert Lacy, Ford: The Men and Machine

Historical Highways

I mentioned I liked roads. It's a recurring theme of this blog starting with my cross country drive of my own. I've collected a lot of books on roads. Here's one category of books on the history of roadbuilding and of particular American highways.   

1.  First Highways of America: A Pictorial History of American Roads and Highways from 1900-1925, John Butler (1994). A history of the dirt-rock-to-pavement of America's early roads.  Fantastic black and white pictures of early cars, road construction and landscapes.  Bought new.

2.  Coast to Coast by Automobile: The Pioneering Trips, 1899-1908, Curt McConnell (2000).  A collection of early automobile adventures across the the U.S.  The appendix includes a great chronology of early automobile trips. Bought new.    




 

3.  U.S. 1: America's Original Main Street, Andrew Malcolm, Photographs by Roger Straus III (1991). Sometimes called America's original Main Street running from Main to Key West. First half stark black and white photographs; the second half a narrative of short histories.  Bought new.  

4.  The National Road, Edited by Karl Raitz (1996).  A history of America's first federally planned highway.   Orginally established by an act of Congress in 1808, the road originates from Maryland, crosses the Appalachians into the Midwest.  Based on Indian trials and pioneer tracks.  Provides a full history back up my maps and photographs. Bought used at the Raven bookstore in Amherst, Mass.  

5.  U.S. 40 Today: Thirty Years of Landscape Change in America,Thomas Vale and Geraldine Vale (1983).  More on the National Road but a specific slice in time.   Thirty years well contrast by black and white photographs from the same locations--sometimes with the same tree in the shot. Bought used at State Department book store. 


 

6. Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life, Tom Lewis (1997).  In 1919, Colonel Dwight Eisenhower lead an Army convoy cross country.  Over thirty years later, as President, he lead the effort to build the largest engineered structure ever built--the U.S. Interstate Highway system.  Bought new. 

 

7. A Pictorial History of Roadbuilding, Charles W. Wixom (1975). Commissioned by the American Road Builders Association, this book is filled with hundreds of photos from Native American trails to interstate highways and the equipment and engineering that went into their construction. Bought used but forgot where.

ON THE ROAD

Every so often you return to a book that influenced you growing up.  Maybe it's a clique but On the Road by Jack Kerouac was one such book for me.  I read it soon after I finished law school and it pushed me to do my own frenzied road trip— and Odyssey representing freedom and the unknown. The book is now sold over 3 million copies since its first printing in 1959. During the pandemic, I've returned to the book, waiting for that moment when we'll have freedom to move again. To get in the car and drive. Here's my short list of On the Road books that includes a couple others who attempted to retrace and re-kindle Kerouac’s spirit.

1. On the Road, Jack Kerouac (Penguin 1986). I can see how much of an impact made on me since it’s heavily annotated with my pencil markings. I suppose the high points and stay with me always are when he describes is the most fun cross country ride of his life on the back of a flatbed truck with a cast of characters from Iowa to Wyoming and the closing paragraph.  Likely bought at a college bookstore at the University of Pittsburgh. 

 

 2. Kerouac: The Definitive Biography, Paul Maher, Jr.  (2004). A thoughtful and complete biography that details Kerouac’s triumphs and struggles with a seal of approval from Kerouac’s family. A birthday or Christmas gift. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3.  Jack Kerouac‘s American Journey: A Real life Odyssey of On the Road, Paul Maher, Jr. (2007). Maher provides narrative history of Kerouac's different road trips and friends and how they translated into On the Road. Bought online. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4.  Paradise Roadhouse: Jack Kerouac‘s Lost Highway in My Search for America, Jay Atkinson (2010).  Loose retracing of some of Kerouac‘s journeys by journalist Jay Atkinson.