What Could Be Verse?

It has come to my attention, last month, that I have been "laid off" by my "employer." This is good news and bad news. The bad news: i.e., I've been screwed. The good news: as an Artiste, all of Life's Travails are but Grist for my Mill!:

I got Grist in My Teeth!

or Opus 13, My Life Stinks

© Dr. Wes Browning

I cannot contain my elation:

I have an unplanned vacation!

Sure, my life stinks

(And bosses are dinks)

But: due to the fact that I have worked my ass off for the past six years to

earn a living rather than take payment for that permanent mental disability I

am now gratefully fortunate (thanks largely to the Great Depression and its

attendant Administration - I love you Rosy! I really do! I will vote Democrat

forever, just because of you!) that I am going to be able to live like a

jolly starving dog for up to half a year by means of jolly unemployment

compensation.

Here's another easy way to write poems for all you poetry neophytes out there! Say you want to write a poem, but say you're drunk or hungover, or you're bummed out cause you lost your job, or say you're clinically stupid, or all three, or whatever. What should you do? Well, just what any lame artist would do: collage!

Let's see right now I want to write a poem about oh I don't know, oh hell, I'll just write one and see. So I grab my copy of "All the Poems You Were Forced to Read in School So Now You Hate Them and All That They Represent" (by Dead White Poets' Press) - or equivalent - and pick out 3 or 4 at random. Then I "cut'n paste and disregard the waste!" Maybe I kick in a scrap or two from memory and out she comes, another masterpiece!

Un Verset Collagesque

or Opus 14, What Could be Verse?

Copyright Dr. Wes Browning

The gingham dog and the calico cat

side by side on the table sat -

You are beaten to earth? Well, well, what's that?

It's nothing against you to fall down flat,

(The) Living shall forfeit fair renown,

and, doubly dying, shall go down

Then they'll do the hokey pokey

And turn themselves aroun'!

That what it's all about!

-Thanks to Eugene Field ("The Duel"), Edmund Vance Cooke ("How Did You Die"), Sir Walter Scott ("Love of Country"), and a scrap from memory. And thank you, poetry reader, for reading, and a special big thank you to The Fisch, Marion Sue, for her hot French pointers!