confused classical hay(na)ku

t
h
e

h
e
e  l    o  f

Achilles*      (*his sandal)

Today the
postman brought
me a giant
squid from
20,000 leagues
beneath the
sea. I was so
looking for-
ward to having
battered jumbo
calamari rings
for dinner but
it didn't survive
the journey, &
squid soup
just doesn't
cut it somehow.

A follow-up on yesterday's post

HEALTH Minister Nicola Roxon has dumped one of her new men's health ambassadors over his "abhorrent" views about homosexuals, but her other appointee is still railing that "extreme feminists" are on a witch hunt to get him.

Ms Roxon said today she took full responsiblity for failing to vet the candidates properly before they were appointed this week.

Bird
shadows frightened
him.    Their         silence.

rendered prost(r)ate

The Australian Federal Government has appointed six "men's health ambassadors" to spur men to watch their health and seek regular medical check-ups and tests for prostate cancer.

One appointee said his rural background and 30 years experience as a hairdresser and hair colour salesman made him uniquely suited to the role. Two of the others co-wrote a paper that claims homosexuality is a mental disorder and that gay people are more likely to molest children.

Hopefully, since they haven't drawn the same amount of press coverage, the remaining "ambassadors" might actually have some credibility.

phroemase

out of srots

millions, billions, trillions, zillions, sillions

sillion: n. An extremely high number of hits on a literary blog. [Middle English, from Old French milion, probably from Old Italian milione, augmentative of mille, thousand, from Latin; combined with the Modern American poetic nominative (Ron) Silliman.]

Which was what adding a Magritte codpiece to Google search did for my Series Magritte.

Magritte & my father

Series Magritte #35

The Liberator

I have always thought
of the subject as
Italian. The patriarch of
a transported family, sugar
cane growers in North
Queensland, the first here,
able to speak a little
English, his wife far less
because she never mixed
outside the community. He
is a picture on the wall
or a watcher at the festival
parade, no breath left
to play the tuba in the
marching band, no longer
able to keep in step
with a step he never really
was in step with. Eyes
on an embellished past as a
diminishing present passes by.

*

I see echoes of my father
also. Non-Italian. Freemason.
The attache case with the regalia
hidden inside, the pearled
candelabra reminding me
of jewels & embroidered
aprons. He never talked to me
about it. I never asked. He
never talked because I didn’t
ask. I never asked because
he never talked about it. Round
& round. We never came close.

*

Never a liberator. Quite
the reverse. A tight hold
on the family. Rationed
freedom. We escaped by
becoming birds or keys or
pipes or wineglasses. Every-
day objects that could always
be replaced. He never
noticed. The space inside
the outline is as it has always
been, a shadow of himself, how
he’d always seen us. The
eyes in the pearled lorgnette
are mother’s eyes. She is
held tightly. A second cane.

My father

once read Kerouac's The Subterraneans in an attempt "to understand me".

He didn't like the book.

Google tells me

it's 110 years since Magritte was born.

It's also 110 years plus a few months since my father was born. He used to wear hats—they were de rigeur for his times. I have a memory of seeing a photo of him in a bowler. I could be wrong. It might just be wishful thinking, an attempt to find a point of commonality.

My
dreams are
made of polyurethane.

Consequence. I am
insulated from
them.

The sign says it all

"My quietness has a man in it"

The painter Grace Hartigan, to whom Frank O'Hara dedicated "In Memory of My Feelings", one of the greatest poems of the last 50 years, has died.

The photo above is of the painter & the poet at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in the 1950s.

But who will stay to be these numbers
when all the lights are dead?

Today the
postman brought
me an invitation
to nominate
my favorite
Impressionist
painting. What to
pick? I've been
weighing up the
crows & ponds.

eN  
c
o
m
p
a
  Ss

This "old man" talk

that's floating around — here & here, for example — is making me feel much younger than my years.

Thanks, guys!

A snippet from Leonard Cohen

"Dylan and I were having coffee in Paris a few years ago. He was doing Hallelujah in concert and asked me how long it took to write. 'Oh, the best part of two years.' He said, 'Two years?' Kinda shocked.

And then we started talking about a song of his called I And I. I said, 'How long did you take to write that?' He said, 'Oh, the best part of 15 minutes.' I almost fell off my chair.

And the thing is I lied. Actually, it took me closer to five years. Of course he lied, too. It probably took him 10 minutes."

&, yes, it is a Nigerian scam

& it's got quite a history!

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22I+am+sending+you+this+e-mail+from+the+city+Library+and+I+only+have+30+min%22&num=20&hl=en&safe=off&filter=0

Seems like someone has accessed David's contact list this time around.....

Is this a new variation of the Nigerian email scam or a genuine cry for help from David-Baptiste Chirot?

I received the following email in both my Otoliths & personal accounts. The sender was given as david_chirot at yahoo.

How are you doing today? I am sorry i didn't inform you about my traveling to Africa for a program called "Empowering Youth to Fight Racism, HIV/AIDS, Poverty and Lack of Education, the program is taking place in three major countries in Africa which is Ghana , South Africa and Nigeria . It as been a very sad and bad moment for me, the present condition that i found myself is very hard for me to explain.
I am really stranded in Nigeria because I forgot my little bag in the Taxi where my money, passport, documents and other valuable things were kept on my way to the Hotel am staying, I am facing a hard time here because i have no money on me. I am now owning a hotel bill of $700 and they wanted me to pay the bill soon else they will have to seize my bag and hand me over to the Hotel Management, I need this help from you urgently to help me back home, I need you to help me with the hotel bill and i will also need $850 to feed and help myself back home so please can you help me with a sum of $1,550 to sort out my problems here? I need this help so much and on time because i am in a terrible and tight situation here, I don't even have money to feed myself for a day which means i had been starving so please understand how urgent i need your help.i have decided not tell my family so that they will not be worried.when I return I will tell them and they will understand.
I am sending you this e-mail from the city Library and I only have 30 min, I will appreciate what so ever you can afford to send me for now and I promise to pay back your money as soon as i return home so please let me know on time so that i can forward you the details you need to transfer the money through Money Gram or Western Union.Hope to hear from you.
Regards,
david

My first suspicion. I have two email addresses for David, neither of which is a yahoo account. True, it's a reasonably valid sounding D-BC email, but why create a new account with a different providor for this email unless the sender was appropriating the name? But, whether or not it was genuine, I am in no position to assist financially, so I replied, copying David at his gmail account, to say that I was sorry but was unable to help.

An hour later (despite the fact that the 30 minute time window mentioned above was well & truly over when I opened the first email) I received the following reply.

Dear Editor,
Thanks for the mail,I am so happy for your repply am so greatful . i promise you as soon as i get back home i would pay you back.i would like you to send me the money through western union to the hotel mangament because of the problem with the lost of my passport.so make the payment with the information below, for i am still lucky cos i have found someone to reas me 800,doller in the next 30 minut so please do not tell any one about this i only trust and confirm in you ,so please any amount you can possibly reas for me now plaese send it now i need to retoun home

Name:clement leleji
Address:Ekko Hotel and Suites Room 6
State: Lagos
Country: Nigeria
Zip Code: 23401

After you have made payment,Send your payment details such as
sender Name:
MTCN 10 Digits:
Test Question:For who?
Answer:
Amount sent:

Make the payment. Thanks and l hope to hear from you very soon.

David still appears to be continuing posting to his blog & contributing to the Buffalo Poetics list. So, forget suspicion. Make that fact. It's a scam email as far as I'm concerned. A Nigerian scam email, of a never before seen variety, the stranded poet genus. No longer several million dollars appropriated by some now dead relative that needs to be liberated to a foreign bank account once details & a deposit for expenses has been sent, but a low level, possibly generating only a few thousand dollars, Nigerian scam that recognizes that we poets are poor.

(added an hour later)
The first email has arrived again in my personal account, but this time Gmail has classified it as spam. What has happened in the interim to warrant the change in status?

T=O=M=A=T=O

"Who else would have eight tomato plants with individual trelisses and only come up with 590 tomatoes?"
—E.R.T.; The Blind Chatelaine's Keys, 11/9/08

An
inquisitive hay(na)ku
for Eileen Tabios—

is counting tomatoes
the new
poetry?