Busy Day

I've almost finished work, and have a few minutes before socializing and then setting out to see and hear world finger-picking guitar champ Don Alder, with his friend Masa Sumide (over from Japan). Verna organized the concert, and will be singing a few songs with them, as well. I'll be at the door extracting greenbacks and recipes for cajun chicken casserole.

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My friend Marc composed a hilarious affectionate parody of Walt Whitman's "Song Of Myself" some time ago, renaming it "Song Of My Wank". During the middle stretch, he became stuck and asked me to complete verses 34-36 (the first of these obviously hard to match in any way as to a light-hearted take-off). So here's my rendition of verse 34:



Now I tell the unofficial history and future of culture
(Six-pack gym-ridden nulliparous G.I. Janes
Escaping their dreary nine-to-five cubicles,
The millions and millions and millions are noisily dumb even today).
It is the tale of the murder in cold blood of creativity in the young men and women of
…my past generation.

Retreating from glades with ornate, proud calligraphy on Erato's breastplates,
Hundreds of brilliant poems stuck stillborn, ripped from quivering uvulas, was the
.... price they paid for refusing to march lock-step with the Man.
Essenin going insane, Mayakovsky turtling and retching in private, Trakl
.... overdosing with hundreds of gored soldiers circling like crimson mandalas.
They retreated, befuddled and silenced, gave up their satires and maledictions,
Oblique lyrical ironies, recording mirror-horrors,
.... and marched off the lines of bloody parchments.

They were the glory of the race of oracles,
Matchless with metaphor, symbol, character assessment, moral compass,
.... admonitory darts puncturing the penguin pomposity and brute stupidity.
Large with dreams, turbulent, handsome, proud, and affectionate,
Not a single one a flunky bureaucrat or regurgitating poltroon.

Technocrats wielding advertisements for the good life massacred them all, it was
.... a strikingly beautiful summer day.
Equivocating bland daggers of clichéd halitosis covered them in three hours.

None obeyed the command to convert to ad execs or political speechwriters.
Hart Crane jumped overboard, Berryman jumped from the bridge, Cesar Vallejo --
.... grave and proud -- starved amidst overfed burghers.
Djilas jailed, Mandelstam vaporized,
Rimbaud, just past seventeen, gun waving, put down his pen in disgust
.... at the middle-class who machine gunned the remnants with job offers
.... of gold-plated pensions, company vehicles, comprehensive medical for
.... fat chins and skinny souls.

At eleven o'clock began the burning of the poems
In all the minds of the fledgling imaginative.



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edit: I see the marathon line doesn't work with this layout, making for unintentional enjambments. Ah, well ....