Did Shakespeare Have Pet Monkeys. BPI & Halliburton. Blogging.

I have long suspected William Shakespeare housed several (interconnected and extended) families of monkeys in the old gray barn out back, there behind Playwright Alley, Stratford-on-Avon. And I am not alone in my insanity but write here only of myself.

And said monkeys were variously fed according to Mistress Shakespeare's many whims and provided with pens and quills and Elizabethan-appropriate paper. Then set to work. Day and night they scribbled.

Bananas were the joy of the Empire. The sun never set.

I know this because I had to summon the spirit of the Shakespeares' monkeys this very morning. I was called to My 3,000 Loving Arms to "approve" a comment on the Kerouac posting in April, and in my wanderings about my own blog unintentionally clicked "New Post." I thus embarked on writing this posting.

If there IS nothing new under the sun, life must have been more dreary in ye British Empire than we have previously been led to believe. And to think. Gwenyth Paltrow hadn't been born yet.

Can I detail the ways I dislike that woman? Sure but why bother. And I won't deny her skill as an actress.

Order in the court. A monkey wants to speak, and so on; not much of a threat to a monkey, is it. No wonder the sun did finally set. And thank goodness for that, as I was really tired.

The monkeys are indicating it is time for a wee bit of cuddling and nit picking. They don't seem capable of destroying generations of life and natural beauty in the Gulf of Mexico, do they? Ah, but the monkeys didn't do that.

Halliburton and BPI did. The monkeys, being willing to risk being monkeys, speak. "Shame and shame again," they say.

Our oceans are weeping. Our coastline is weeping. Fish and birds weep. Good souls weep.

Brother Shakespeare has written of the evil men and women. They end days with a sword in their vile heart. From his quill to God's ear. From God's heart to the damaged earth. Please.

(I'm glad I wrote this posting. Always say yes when you click, New Post.)

We Are Jack Kerouac (poem)

Carol Novack & co.'s Mad Hatter's Review is at it again.

It is through the offices, as it were, of Mad Hatter's, both the review and a reading I was part of, I learned how to mash a poem (use lots of butter). For the latest issue I offered up two poems, "We Are Jack Kerouac" and "hAve You Been Married, the Sister asK" which was first published by Other Rooms Press (Ed Go, co-editor). "Jack Kerouac" was pulverized.

Here is a link to the Mad Hatter's table of contents and, therefore and perforce and by logical extension and thusly and so on, both poems: http://bunkmagazine.com/madbunkers/layout/unmashed.htm .

I'm also pasting "We Are Jack Kerouac" here. It was included in my collection, The Future Is Happy, BlazeVOX [books}, 2009.


We Are Jack Kerouac

Though not in the sense
we were born in Lowell Mass
or beat it out of there to
get famous, though we
gassed up and burned rubber
in Lowell Mass and in
other states and cities
we hitched rides and smoked
cigarettes on route 66 and
interstate 90 and on weed
and acid on a crazy-eight-
curlicue of L.A. freeways
merging like a concrete Möbius
swapping out autos so on
Thanksgiving-Friday in
nineteen seventy something
we knew that sensory swirl
would be ours, daily everlasting;
in the daily everlasting we'd
lean into endless curves,
and though laws of identity
have things equal to themselves,
i.e., Jack = Jack, there's
the poetic corollary that things
are equal to much that's wild
and so beautiful, like our
holy transfixion on birds
thrumming wings in
the blue guitar of dreams.
But truly we're Jack Kerouac
when morning light catches
now our thrumming adventures,
embarked on long ago.