wherein i write a poem for someone

so, as some of you may or may not know i practice a martial art called arnis.  i've been involved with it since i started college way back in 2006.  now, i have learned a lot of things; how to hit dudes with sticks, how to not get hit by sticks, things like that.  i've been able to help teach the class, been able to pass along some of my own knowledge.  it's been an absolutely wonderful experience that i would highly recommend to anyone who has even the slightest interest.  it helped me a lot with self-confidence among other things.  all in all, it was an excellent decision.

and as a kind of 'thank you' to our instructor for teaching us and passing along all kinds of knowledge, every year our club gets him a christmas present.  one year we got him some nice tea, along with a nice tea set.  another year we got him some nice training weapons.  this year we gave him a nice set of kendo armor and some associated gear.  but this year i wanted to do something else, something a little more personal.  now granted, i'm not skilled at making things, and i don't have a lot of money to spend on lavish gifts, so i wrote him a poem.  it's about things i've learned through the years, not techniques or drills, but more philosophical things i guess, more along the lines of life lessons.

lesson plan

face your life head on, straight
backed, controlled, and proud.
only raise fist in defense,
never hate nor rage.

remember that fear does not mean weak,
running in the face of it does.
courage and bravery are both decisions
and it's up to you to choose.

step not from your holy ground
let no foe profane
and when you finally leave this world,
leave behind good name.

wherein caolan and the author imagineer a burger

alright fans here we go.

my roommate caolan and i have imagineered another amazing burger.  let me break this down for you

one half-pound patty
half pound of bacon
table spoon of butter (not just any butter mind you, but a highly specialized butter made by caolan and i.  it was butter mixed with pure bacon grease.  and garlic salt because we're out of regular salt)
bun made out of four regular buns.

i have dubbed it the Triple B, which might be the only thing i have ever capitalized on this blog.  the Triple B of course stands for (bacon)buttery bacon burger.  caolan further specialized his by creating a bacon frisco sauce. how he did this i will never know, his sorcerer ways are too far beyond my mortal understanding.

the patties themselves were cooked in the oven at 350 degrees for somewhere around 15 minutes i think.  i lost track of the time because i was busy looking up bacon grease butter recipes, of which i found exactly zero.  i have created bacon grease butter, this is my legacy.  this is what i will be known for in history.

the main concern i had for this creation was whether or not the buns would hold up.  after all we basically took a four bun thing and cut it in half to create the bun for the Triple B.  it held up reasonably well, until i started dipping the Triple B into ketchup.  i think the stress caused by picking it up and turning it over and doing the tango with it and all sorts of other dance moves/sports plays.  it was then that the move called the Triple B division was created.  the Triple B division is done by flipping the burger in half, and then in half again, creating a monstrosity known as the Triple B tower.  caolan, using the unholy power that flows through his veins, was the first to master this technique.  my attempt only brought shame to my family.  i fully expect to be disowned for my transgressions.

pictures of the Triple B summoning process will be up tomorrow probably, i promise.

also also

TREY FACT OF THE DAY: whenever i talk to my grandmom or granddad my southern accent comes out like a guy on broadway (did you get the joke)

that wasn't the main point of making this blog post believe it or not. a little while ago i gave a friend some ideas for his comic and he decided to use one sort of! hurray for me! here's a link:

http://www.asandiford.com/2011/09/a-tragic-end-not-easily-avoided/

now granted i know you are all going to check that out to support me in my endeavors, because that's what a cavalcade of crazed fans is for. HOWEVER it would be awesome if you checked out the rest of his comics too, which are pretty neat even though his canadian i think

wherein i reveal a secret of my writing process

TREY FACT OF THE DAY(read: POST [read: MONTH OR SO]) i have been drinking hot chocolate like it was going out of style (if it goes out of style i will simply cease to exist).

okay so i guess something worth mentioning is i have a specific process for revising poetries. i do it as i go along, so really by the time i've finished writing a poem it's already been revised a bunch. granted it's mostly things like word choice and line breaks that get revised but i mean, that counts right? i do occasionally go back and add more to certain poetries, but for the most part nah. does that make me a bad writer? yeah probably. do i care? yeah a little. so i guess what you can take from this is that any poetries that show up on here are still definitely works in progress and i totally reserve the right to say they suck and take them down if they suck so bad i have to take them down.

that being said here is a poetries! it's about a sandwich i made one time

(untitled for now)

a loss of sight and sound means i have an excuse

to ignore the clicking clacking vorpal fangs that are said to lurk

always three feet nearby. Or an excuse to ignore

the high pitched whining nagging banshee scream that i get

from my smoke alarm when I go Dr. Frankenstein with the eggs

and the bacon that I exhume from the fridge. I call my frying pan Igor.

I slice and dice and splice together an abomination and grin wildly

when the grease pops bomb my bare flesh, melting the skin ever so slightly.

The Bacon Tomb is what this monster will be called when it terrorizes the villages

of my arteries. Six strips,

two eggs fried in bacon-born grease,

and untold amounts of peanut butter dripping through the cracks

and holes of buttered bread. The satisfying crunch echoes

in my mouth's cavern while the grease rises in revolt

and the bacon takes to arms

and the eggs boil tar and strip feathers

But I am too in love with my creature to notice my tower burning down.

dudes take some time out of your "busy" schedules

and look at this

http://maquettemouse.tumblr.com/

it has cool things on it

also it has boobs sometimes so maybe not the safest site to browse at work or in a church where god can see you always

So I haven't made a post since like last week or whenever, but that's not my problem. However here I am with a new post that will surely blow your minds! That's right, it's a couple of pictures of what my immediate surroundings look like when I sit down to write something. I figured you are just dying to see this, so here's what's up!

As you can see here, I am hard at work at a draft of a new thing. You can tell I am hard at work because there is a large beer within reach.

In this second picture we can tell I've made a good amount of progress from the first

picture. I not only opened the large bottle of beer, I also poured it into a glass. Also at some point I managed to capture a few wild hamburgers in the wild, one was eaten before I took this picture.

Yes, they were all very delicious.

Here, I have almost reached the end of my writing for today. I know this, because the beer is almost gone. There's a direct correlation there possibly. Also, note how the pen has not changed position. That's because I am so good at writing that I never need to actually write. It's true

Okay so there I was, needing to work on homework but of course that's just no fun, so I sat at my table flipping through twitter. I have a twitter, in case you didn't know. Anyway, I was flipping through twitter, when I noticed a trend. Not a trending topic, I never pay attention to those.

The trend is that my arty farty friends like to live stream things. And for those of you who are too cool for internet stuff, live streaming is where you stream a video of you doing a thing, live. Clever how they got that name right? Right. So I got to thinking, I've never watched one of these live streams. That thought of course led to another thought, a genius thought, a million dollar thought.

What if I live streamed me writing a poem?!

I know right? Genius idea, like I said. Then I took a look at myself and what I was doing and thought about how that would look to someone watching online. For the record, the picture was this: notebook open, one line jotted down, whiskey and coke next to the computer, poet leaning back flipping through twitter on his phone when the kitchen timer goes off, letting him know his Kroger brand macaroni and cheese is done. He then gets super excited and squeals like a teenage girl at a Backstreet Boys concert (don't tell me this reference is old I don't need to feel old). So I was thinking about this image, picturing myself eating Kroger mac and cheese right out of the pot with a bottle of cheap coke and cheaper whiskey next to me I realized my mistake. This wasn't a million dollar idea, it was a billion dollar idea. It could possibly change everything about literature, screw the trochee's heave or whatever, this is it. This, right here and right now. Finally the world could see how literature and poetry is written.

But then I thought about it again and realized how boring and depressing it would be. For both the writer and the person watching. Really, who would want to see that?

(my twitter is @troubadourtofu if you want to know. it might be offensive sometimes so uh)

here are a few lines of a poetry that i am trying to work on, there isn't a lot so i don't know if you can get anything from it really, but deal with it

Every hello is a goodbye in disguise.

And when I say "I love you", it really means

that I'm sorry, because I will promise you the stars,

but only give you a grain of sand.

so that last post was pretty personal and serious and deep and that is not what i like being so here is a recent poem that is kind of lighthearted!

SWM seeking Muse

single white male looking for whiskey soaked rhymes

and a heart full of blues lines. I need that

Delta sound filling me up inside.

So your flowery sonnets with their flowery

words need not apply.

If the meaning is lost in pretentiousness

it's a mess.

And I don't feel like cleaning it up.

If a poem needs translation

from English to english then

it's worth none of my time.

So let me repeat:

I need that Southern heat, that tea so sweet

it curls your toes

I need vine covered walls and portrait plastered walls.

I need lines that make you feel,

not make you think

so hard you get an anuerysm.

I need the passion, the pleasure of a Southern belle in bloom,

the sound of cicadas

and the company of good

food.

So save your high brow speech for some other forlorn poet

Because I need you

to speak to me

Like a memory filled summer on a porch,

my blood thinned by whiskey and the air so humid

it leaves you

breathless

panting

yearning

longing

for more

so something i've never felt comfortable with is confessional poetry. i hate writing about myself, i absolutely abhor it. it's too personal, it's too close. i want to be able to say, "no, that speaker isn't me. no, that poem is about a made up story, it's completely fictional." i don't want to write about my life, because i feel like my life isn't worth writing about (yet?!). i don't want to write about my emotions because i know that i cannot do them justice. i don't want to write about major events because they deserve more than words that i haphazardly throw together and sentences that i break up arbitrarily.

is it something i'll get over?

i'm sure it is. i've noticed that if i just start writing, what usually ends up on paper is more personal than if i had sat down and developed an idea. i have written down things that i would never picture myself writing about, i have written about ideas that i thought were long gone. it is both a good thing and a bad thing, a blessing and a curse. i feel that as a writer and poet i should be able to write about the personal as well as the distant, i should be able to write about whatever my hands feel like putting on paper. i am starting to get there. i am starting to write more than just stories i make up in my head, i am starting to write about stories i make up with my life. life is all one big story after all, and the best way to live forever is for people to tell stories about you.

whiskey was involved in this blog post.

i am still alive

here is a poetries i quickly jotted down to practice on rhythm. i think it turned out okay. also rhythm is a weird word to spell

untitled (rhythm exercise)

in this frame of my life i'm the boy you never knew

fresh to the world not five feet tall

brown headed boy on the hood of a car

blue honda's hood meeting blue denim jeans

leaning over eyes closed kissing mom on the cheek

saying goodbye or saying hello, does it even matter?

no no no. know that this little kid

with the sunshine hair and the carefree air

always all smiles and laughing all the while

went extinct not too long ago

but a dinosaur fish off the coast of Brazil

came back from the past

so this little kid surely will

hi guys it has been a long time please do not hate on me. i have written a bunch of poetries but this one is my favorite so far. this is the second draft, there is another revision in the works but i actually really like it where it's at right now. so without further ado here it is, i hope you enjoy it.

Thoughts I Had While Flying Home

One

steamboat’s weight worth

of cicadas’ droning

drowning out whatever

my relative says. It’s not important

that the sun hangs low or

that the air is closer to a stew,

thick and bubbling with the scent of heat. I’m numb to it,

the vibrations of countless crystalline

wings blocking it all out

everything

block out the sun

two

times this week I sat legs crossed

head back laughing while the grilling meat

told a sizzling tale, a

spiced up story begging to be

devoured by us eager meat eating listeners

three

days ago we sat while the artificial

stars on our vine hidden porch blinked in time with

their highborn brothers and sisters. And all I

could do was sit and watch, bourbon

in one hand, cigar in the other

four

redneck hick prick bastards

hollering that the South will rise again,

too full of cheap rotgut whiskey to realize

the South they want, She’s not ever coming back

She never really fell in the first place

No, she just changed, she just grew

into something a little less ugly