poem

Someday I call your name… (a poem)

2015/01/08 — Leave a comment

I was at the Half Price Books in Seattle this morning, where I found a vinyl copy of Origato Plastico, the second LP by the late, great Plastics.

Plastics were made up of Toshi Nakanishi, Chica Sato, Hajime Tachibana, Masahide Sakuma, and Takemi Shima. During their relatively brief time together, they released three LPs and a few singles; the third album, Welcome Back Plastics, consisted of re-recordings of songs from their first two albums, and was released worldwide—including the US, where it was called simply Plastics. If you were around back then (1980/81), you might remember them from the video for ‘Top Secret Man’ that was shown on SCTV (the video for Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime’ was aired during the same episode). If you weren’t, you might still be familiar with the Stereo Total cover of ‘I Love You Oh No!’ (re-titled ‘I Love You Ono’) that was used in a number of commercials.

In any event, when Plastics split, Toshi and Chica went on to form Melon, a more club-oriented group. (Tachibana continued making music as a solo artist, while also doing graphic design; Sakuma became a respected producer (he died of cancer in 2014); Shima joined Sakuma in the d.e.p, but I don’t know what else he has been up to.) Melon released two albums and a number of singles, including the club hits ‘Serious Japanese’ and ‘Hardcore Hawaiian’, before Toshi went on to form the Major Force label and Chica moved into the fashion world.

You can find a number of Plastics and Melon videos on YouTube; they’re well worth checking out.

Anyway, to finally get to the point, I wrote the following poem using as many Plastics and Melon song titles as I could…

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Urban pillow fort (a poem)

2015/01/06 — Leave a comment

The January 6th prompt in The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is to ‘[w]rite a poem that begins with the image of a stone, then add at least five of these words to it: kamikaze, landslide, spill, bridge, vaccine, read, red, hollow, mismatch, tilt, freeway, pillow, harmonica, fairy shrimp.’ (I skipped the ‘extra credit’ part, which involved ending with ‘a soup image’.)

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Scenes from Al-Veddy Suicide: The Movie (a poem)

2015/01/05 — Leave a comment

I had this bizarre dream the other night.

In the first part, I was watching previews for this wacky animated movie called Al-Veddy Suicide, created by these guys working under the name New Light City. (Imagine South Park taken to bizarre, illogical extremes, with even more tasteless jokes and inappropriate scenarios.) The previews were showing on this glass trunk-like thing in the lobby of a movie theater; the top of the thing was the actual screen, approximately three feet by six feet in size. On the side (end), a rectangular opening provided a glimpse at the segments of the previews, each of which displayed a still from the movie. Most of the poem below describes what I saw during this part of the dream.

In the second part, I was hanging out with the guys from New Light City in their studios, while episodes of their show were playing over the P.A. system (instead of Muzak®). One of the sketches imagined what news broadcasts might sound like if the news were being read by very unqualified anchormen—for example, someone who had failed the test to become certified in some completely unrelated occupation or profession. A loop of a scene showing a plane crash played on an editing workstation. One of their worktables had drafts of posters for the movie: one poster showed a sleek Darth Vader-like figure; the poster next to it showed the setting for the scene that was looping on the workstation.

Normally, I would try to write a very detailed description of what I remember from the night’s dreams (more detailed than what you have just read); instead, I attempted to put it into a poem—as a nice change from the more introspective stuff I usually write.

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Meatloaf and crackers (a poem)

2015/01/05 — Leave a comment

I was trying to follow the January 3rd prompt in The Daily Poet by Kelli Russell-Agodon and Martha Silano, which says to use fifteen words that you don’t normally use in your poems. I opted to grab several books and pick random words. Unfortunately, I wasn’t satisfied with the results I was getting, probably because I was still choosing the words—and they tended to be the kinds of words I would choose, whether or not I had used them before. So, I ended up with a tanka.

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