Category: Poetry

The High Road

An intricate series of hoofprints
on the stale lithograph
we’ve come to call home
has bled insignificantly–
but not unnoticeably.

Yes, that’s correct. Hoofprints
have bled just enough
for this observer to comment.

Now, I’m aware that there are countless crackpots
who espouse the virtues of anti-vaxxers and birthers,
and this would be right up their alley.
However, I choose to take the high road.

A wise individual once told me
that the low road is the slipperiest,
because the maintenance people need to mop
more often than on the high one

(they have the kind of smelly chemical
floor cleaner that doesn’t dry as quickly
(and they’re always out of wet floor signs)).

Strange New World

Hey folks, hope you’re all doing well in this strange new world we inhabit. This is a checking-in kind of post, where I spill my guts about my creative progress.

I suppose it would have been a good idea to make some kind of goal for this year, but that all flew out the window around these parts in about mid-March. My enthusiasm for the craft suffered, which is funny when you consider that I was doing less to occupy myself than ever before (which you’d think would contribute to a more robust oeuvre, but I ended up atrophying more than anything).

I’ve had plenty of times in the past where I’ve fallen into a ravine of amotivational behavior, and this here pandemic was all I needed to justify my paltry output.

That all being said, I’ve decided to retroactively give myself a goal to accomplish–one that’s already been accomplished! Wow, I did it!

The goal I’d just concocted is/was to reach 1,031 total posts by Halloween, 10/31/2020. Yes, I’m aware that this dating style is backwards for some of you, but it was just too convenient not to use.

The main takeaway from my creative career has been to stop seeking significance in every little detail of every little thing. Of course you can extrapolate and discover the innate meaning of the universe in pretty much anything, but those things need to be brought to life in order for you and others to dissect it in such an insane manner. My issue has always resembled getting bogged down in the significance of the idea/piece before actually composing it (sometimes without even jotting down a single word, losing it forever).

That makes for a nice segue into my new-ish passion of drawing! I’ve posted 15 drawings (as of this post) in the past 3-4 weeks, which has really been a nice cushion for helping me to exploit the algorithms.

Aside: I’ve always been aware of the power of algorithmic computing, but I’ve chosen to ignore it because I’m either too stubborn or I think my work will suffer as a result of the “interconnectivity” and “engagement”. Who even knows anymore? I’ve decided to cave in and tag the bejesus out of my work now, and I feel that all traffic is good traffic (unless it’s a bot or something, but WordPress is a great engine for helping me identify organic viewership anyway, so whatever).
Additional aside: the number of unique tags assigned to my posts has shot up to over 8,300, and soon I’ll be able to say “IT’S OVER 9,000!!!!!!”

The execution of my drawings has definitely improved since the beginning of quarantine and all that jazz, so I figured I might as well exploit those skills on the intarwebs, as they’ve been met with universal praise in my personal circles. But that drags us into the conversation about people’s friends and families blowing smoke up their artistic asses even if the work sucks. I’ve always had that kind of thought on the back burner when people compliment my work, since I have a perfectionist bent (and perfection is impossible, so that kinda sucks).

In conclusion, I’ve become inspired to keep on chugging with my work. Even though the internal naysaying is just as strong as ever, this feels like a sustainable model for providing “content” to “the world”. The fact that I have to refer to my work as “content” kind of makes me want to vomit, but I suppose we need to exist within the times.

Cheers, everyone!

-Aidan

Big Whoop

A man named Garvey sedated me once, though the whole outcome could have been avoided. We’d begun feuding the week prior, a trivial dispute over the price of corn muffin mix. Stupid, right? Well, this Garvey feller sure didn’t think so. And it just so happened that his friendly neighborhood drug dealer unloaded a ton of vicodin on him that week, so he was bound to sedate me whether or not we disagreed on anything. I may live to regret having anything to do with that man, but life is a rich tapestry that deserves its fair share of intrigue.

His sister, Nancy, had her own agenda when it came to handling the G-Man. Having lived with him a majority of her life, she’d developed an ingenious coping mechanism for dealing with his ridiculous foibles. Any time he began ranting about the military industrial complex, the go-to strategy would be to bring up the time he’d run into Steve Harvey while jogging on the riverfront–near the Wrigley Building. That would immediately stop his conspiratorial theorizing and send him spiraling through all five stages of the celebrity run-in phenomenon. Turns out Garvey is this joker’s last name. First name: Steve.

Originally, Nancy had only been prepared to shift her brother’s mania away from excessive government spending, but she eventually developed a secondary strategy out of necessity. After letting Steve go on about the Garvey/Harvey thing for a couple minutes, she’s gotten quite skilled at channeling his enthusiasm into a creative jag. Now–since Garvey prefers to make ink drawings, Nancy has set up a corner in her apartment designed solely for her brother to zen out after he gets a little too worked up about the 10-second exchange that he and Steve Harvey’d had. The passion lends itself to the page as he jots up a storm. He doesn’t want to burden himself with any extra material possessions, so he leaves all his creations at Nancy’s place. Nancy has turned a tidy profit from his efforts, since Steve-o gets worked up quite often. It’s reached the point where Nancy could take a year-long hiatus from waitressing and not feel pinched for a minute of it.

So yeah, I let Garvey sedate me. Big whoop. I was hoping he’d feel bad about it and draw me a nice picture that could finance a backpacking trip through the Black Forest.

Never Beat a Gift Egg in the Horse

Never
beat a gift egg
in the horse.

Highly Questionable

Sidling in,
repping their mostly-appointed
(somewhat trifling) hunting knife
bent at just the right juncture
for the victim’s own reckoning
with justice,

the unwell bowie knife salesman
had just a few more destinations
on the booze cruise they’d set out upon
for the sake of at least trying to relocate
that former spark once unquestioned
[but now highly questionable].

Rest Easy

Enter Groucho Violent,
star of the nerves and streets,
a double threat if there ever was one.

His reputation precedes him as witty enough to turn a phrase and hard-knuckled enough to know when to admit defeat in the face of a petulant and pernicious foe who, in all likelihood, believes that their position of power has been handed down to them from the LORD ALMIGHTY, and any little rivulet of diarrhea that escapes their corpulence is to be rendered an earth-shattering development in the field of extrapersonal material management, now and forevermore.

Groucho is no stranger to the justice-enforcement arm of things. When his even-keel demeanor and righteous self-taught martial arts techniques combined on one fateful and blustery Flag Day eve, the Justice Jab was born. If you’re still unfamiliar with the singlemost effective crimefighting maneuver ever concocted by man or beast (in Mr. Violent’s last-ditch effort to uncover the overall reason as to our lack of humility when confronted with reasoning), you have some real catching up to do.

The Justice Jab is a miracle worker when the recipient of said jab needs to be awoken from the haze that they’ve come to accept over time, through sheer laziness and self-disrespect. The haze’s effect causes but is not limited to: depression, sluggishness, flatulence, lack of interest in things one would normally enjoy, unjustified sporadic agitation, and death. Such a disconcerting malady comes as a direct byproduct of this world we’ve inherited (through no fault of our own). Rather than face the music, the vast majority of we, the privileged few, have chosen to consume the content created specifically to manipulate our emotional and physical dependencies more efficiently and cheaply than cocaine ever could.

So the next time you see Groucho Violent
meting out swift street vengeance,
you can rest easy
knowing that he’s doing humanity a service.

Muse

When the Muse
presents herself to you
as fully and openly as any artist
could have ever possibly hoped
throughout human history,
all one may do is thank her
for taking the time to schedule a visit.

Her glory is unmatched when it comes to graciousness and humility; she shares no physical boundary with the human system we’ve come to regard as the established norm for what we’re supposed to embody as advanced beings on a planet where the other most-advanced large-brained mammals still “talk” in the form of growls or roars or yips or screams or ticks or pretty much any form of communication not considered oral language on par with what we use in our daily lives (let alone the kind of language a doctor or Spanish teacher needs to decode on a regular basis).