Freedom, honor, enterprise
Fatherhood and faith
The gallant shall not compromise
With heathens at the gate
Fear and hatred breed the guns
Inseminating wealth
Warfare yields the bloody ones
That signify our health
Indignation plants the seeds
That sanctify our culture
Corpses feed the swords of greed
And sate the Holy Vulture
by Richard W. Bray
People are a waste of time
With all their petty wants and needs
Alone I’ll get along just fine
This putrid planet is not kind
It spawned a dirty wanton breed
People are a waste of time
Humans beings: a horde of slime
A mass of filthy carnal deeds
Alone I’ll get along just fine
Creation is a wretched crime
A dirty lot it grows and feeds
People are a waste of time
If someone would just cut the vine
And scatter all the human seeds
Alone I’ll get along just fine
I curse the careless cold Divine
His ghastly garden full of weeds
People are a waste of time
Alone I’ll get along just fine
Richard W. Bray
Playing Risk in the dorm
Was their private Desert Storm
Never seen a soldier bleed
Yet they’re certain that we need
Lumps of hot, flying metal
To get our problems settled
They’re the tough-typing think-tankers
Sorry-ass war-wankers
They’re the last ones to get hurt
Hiding in their daughter’s skirt
Living in a world at peace
Losers can’t get no release
Richard W. Bray
A friend of a friend
Says bigfoot’s alive
He walks his chihuahua
On Huntington Drive
A friend of a friend
Slept on the lawn
He awoke in a hotel
His kidneys were gone
A friend of my cat
Fell out of a plane
The cat limped away
With a minor sprain
A friend of a friend
Is completely insane
Cuz an earwig attacked
And ate up his brain
A friend of a friend
Dropped some mints in his soda
The resulting reaction
Made his kitchen exploda’
A friend of a friend
Keeps a clone in the freezer
With all his spare parts
He’s the healthiest geezer
A friend of a friend
Got a knock on the door
From a friend who died
Twenty years before
A friend of a friend
Saw some lights in space
Then he got probed
In a delicate place
I swear on my life
I’m not a gullible guy
I believe it all
Cuz my friends don’t lie
Richard W. Bray
We’ll spend the people’s money as we please
Entitled to an endless building boom
Living in the District of Disease
We’ll charge a tariff every time you sneeze
We’ll tax your rest when you are in your tomb
We’ll spend the people’s money as we please
It’s still your country we just hold the keys
It’s still your cloth, but we control the loom
Living in the District of Disease
Be sure to pay your taxes and your fees
We need it to enlarge the endless room
We’ll spend the people’s money as we please
We won’t stop until you’re on your knees
Our project calls for universal doom
Living in the District of Disease
We squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze
And everybody else can suck on fumes
We’ll spend the people’s money as we please
Living in the District of Disease
Richard W. Bray
If I had lived a different life
In a different house with a different wife
With different kids and different pets
Would I still feel the same regrets?
Days gone by I can’t retrieve
The past’s a place we all must leave
Though it’s not easy to believe
Lamenting is a waste of time
Hardly worth this little rhyme
Now I must resume my climb
Life’s a trip that goes one way
Today cannot be yesterday
So laugh and sing and love and play
And carry on, come what may
Richard W. Bray
a politician is an arse upon
which everyone has sat except a man
—e.e.cummings
With greed that festers like a stinking flower
Every breath you suck promotes a scheme
The only thing you care about is power
Glory-seeking minions don’t see how you’re
Warping minds by tapping ageless themes
With greed that festers like a stinking flower
All you see are lambs to be devoured
With gluttony that feeds on hopes and dreams
The only thing you care about is power
If I were you I’d always need a shower
You curdle filth and throw away the cream
With greed that festers like a stinking flower
Lackeys sing your praises by the hour
Like starstruck fans support the local team
The only thing you care about is power
Piling up your lies, you build a tower
And live a life that’s nothing like it seems
With greed that festers like a stinking flower
The only thing you care about is power
Richard W. Bray
I had no idea what I was doing when I began the project that eventually culminated in this blog. Looking back on it, I’m reminded of the character played by Richard Dreyfuss in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind who was compelled to mindlessly build that miniature mountain inside his house. I just had to do something, but I really didn’t know what or why.
So I kept writing and reading about writing. And I took some English classes at Cal Poly Pomona. Then one of my professors, Dr. Carola Kaplan, suggested I apply for their MA program. (She advised that if I continued to take classes, sooner or later I would “accumulate” a Master’s Degree.) Many of the longer articles on this blog began as academic papers.
I continued to write until my computer was constipated. So I read the books on how to write the perfect cover letter and I sent out queries and more queries. And all that ever got me was shoe-boxes full of rejection letters.
After more than a decade of unrequited querying, I finally went on an Open Thread at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog and asked the nice people there how much it would cost to start my own blog. When they told me it was free I said, “Thank you so much. If I had known that, I would have gotten myself a blog years ago.”
Sometimes I begin writing a poem knowing exactly what I want to say and it turns out just like I planned. Sometimes. Other times I set out to write something, but I end up writing something else. And sometimes I think I have a long way to go when the poem suddenly informs me that I’m finished.
And sometimes I start with an idea that’s bugging me or just a single word. (I began this poem thinking about how much I like the word notion.) Other times an entire line will pop into my head. Once a line zipped across my brain, but I ignored it. A few days later it returned—louder. It wasn’t until I sat down at my computer and typed it up that I realized that the line was entirely alliterative: My monkey makes my mother mad. But I didn’t know what the poem was going to be about until I had finished writing the first stanza.
My Funny Farm My monkey makes my mother mad He also aggravates my dad He took his car the other day And drove it to the Hudson Bay My kitty cat is kooky too He likes to strut down to the zoo And tell the tigers to all stand back If they don’t want to get attacked I have a hamster named Houdini And though he is rather teeny He’ll quickly pick a thousand locks You could not hold him in Fort Knox My kangaroo’s a real joker Up all night playing poker His friends come to destroy the house I think I shoulda’ got a mouse I got a hippo last July He really is one swell guy Everything he does is super I got a giant pooper scooper Living on this funny farm I know my pets don’t mean no harm But both my parents moved away And no one wants to come and play Richard W. Bray
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I took an English class from a poet named Robert Pinsky. (Actually, it was at Berkeley in the mid 1980s, but many Northern Californians would argue that Orange County is about as far away from Berkeley as I could get.) Since that time, Mr. Pinsky has received a great deal of well-deserved acclaim. Thus I frequently see him on my tv promoting poetry. A few years back I heard Pinsky say that whenever someone asks him about when he started writing poetry, he responds by asking: “When did you stop?”
I stopped writing poetry in sixth grade and took it up again about twenty years later.
Here’s what happened: I was teaching at a boys home in a special education program for SED (Severely Emotionally Disturbed) students, which was quite an education for me. These kids were intimate with poverty, violence, addiction, rape and murder in ways I will never comprehend. (Actually, I do know a thing or two about addiction.)
Sometimes they would tease me by asking me if I were “street.”
“Of course I am.” I would reply.
“Where you from? Inglewood, Nickerson Gardens, South Central?”
“That’s it,” I’d say. “I’m from South Central Claremont.”
I’ll never know how much good I did working with those kids, and the only life I saved was my own. But it did lead me back to writing poetry. The most coveted book in our meager little school library was Where the Sidewalk Ends, a collection of funny poems by Shel Silverstein. It is a work of immense skill.
In a state of profound ignorance regarding what such a task would entail, I decided that I wanted to write a book like Where the Sidewalk Ends. So I went to the library and got some books on verse, meter, and rhyme. Some time thereafter, although I still barely even understood what poetry was, I somehow sat down at my EMachine and wrote “Myrtle Myers.”
I’ve read a bunch of poetry and thousands of pages of criticism since then. I even went out and got myself a Master’s Degree in Literature. But I don’t think I’ve ever written anything better than “Myrtle Myers.”
“Myrtle Myers” is, of course, a very conservative poem. (How did that happen?) It was not written as an allegory, but it sure reads like one. When I wrote it, however, I was mostly thinking about the power of denial, a major theme on this blog.
Myrtle Myers
Myrtle Myers bought some pliers
At the hardware store
She took them home and all alone
She broke down the door
The next day she found a way
To make the toilet flood
She took a wrench from daddy’s bench
And made a great big thud
Unperturbed, her mother purred
“Well, girls they will be girls
All this rage is just a stage
She has such darling curls”
Then Myrtle took an evil look
At her mother’s dress
It made her think and with some ink
She made a lovely mess
Yet with rage unassauged
She shaved her sister’s head
With kerosene and gasoline
She burned her brother’s bed
Undistressed, her father guessed
“It’s just a child at play
They’re just jealous, those who tell us
To have her put away”
Her parents planned a party grand
Just to celebrate
Her twelfth birthday, and by the way
Myrtle showed up late
No girls nor boys bearing toys
Decided to attend
Although assured the girl was cured
They feared their lives might end
As her family huddled, scared and befuddled
By her piercing stare
Myrtle growled and then she howled
“I publicly declare
“This can’t be true! What did you do
To make them stay away?
You’ll all be blue and live to rue
This catastrophic day!”
Myrtle made a bomb that day
Intending to destroy
Her own home town and miles around
And every girl and boy
But in her hurry, she forgot to scurry
Away from her invention
She’s gone away, I’m sad to say
Results of ill intention
Her parents pleaded all she needed
Was love and understanding
And though it’s true that we all do
Life is more demanding
It takes affection to give direction
And most kids do not mind
Those restrictions and prohibitions
Which seem to some unkind
Richard W. Bray
So many now have joined the hapless dead
As though a contest—how many can we kill
By sending others’ children off to war
The health of the state is unchecked power
Which feeds on frustration and unmet desire
This lust for blood that we confuse with love
Catenations bind us by our love
In webs of hate that recollect our dead
Murder machine fulfills the group desire
To locate people God wants us to kill
In fear a people shall relinquish power
To cowards who will always answer: War
The terrified succumb to endless war
It’s easier than proffering our love
In times of doubt the people will trust power
No matter if million end up dead
If you look and sound like those who kill
Killing you is what our dead desire
Humans have a basic born desire
To eliminate our enemies with war
Enemies exist for us to kill
Who’s the Fool who said they must be loved?
Enemies are only good when dead
Enemies embrace in lust for power
Millions murdered in pursuit of power
Pelf and power propagate desire
Desires undeterred beget more dead
The dead are mere ingredients of war
Death is all the tyrant knows of love
And Thanatos consummates the kill
Words enliven hearts we send to kill
Empty words engender frightful power
Some died for freedom, others died for love
Zombies march in cadence of desire
When unleashed the platitudes of war
Sing a dreary song of walking dead
Among the ruins, love decries our kill
Dreamers of dead are quick to kill for power
Unchecked desire is the seed of war
Richard W. Bray
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