The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Category: Poetry

  • Beckett Beatitudes

    Happy are those who have seen Godot
    for theirs is the kingdom of the circus.

    Beat are the Monks whose clapping
    hands lack priggish-holy rhythm.

    Privileged are those who ask
    and can’t get no answer.

    Rich are the old who hear
    sweet silence coming near.

    Beati are the ugly the down
    and out whose beauty stuns.

    Blessed are the homeless
    their room in heaven made.

    Happy the captured silent
    who wear pork pie hats.

    Blessed are the busted
    whose crime is alive.

    Rich are the poor so
    free from distraction.

    Lucky are the fall guys
    the players in the play of the play.

    Canonized are the sinners
    free from all rules.

    Wealthy are the workers
    whose tools are not words.

    Blessed are those who fail
    for they have their degree.

    Happy the ignored their
    ignorance unsurpassed.

    Abite the teachers who tried
    and failed to teach nothing.

    Blessed are those damned
    to fame and taken amiss.

  • Directional

    You must work at the edge
    of an ocean to know
    your ebbs and floods

    the absurd churn
    of the daily news
    tar between your toes

    my sister Barbara’s
    handmade cards
    poetry without steps

    Eric gave me a card
    wild stone staircase
    like a waterfall

    spilling down
    a treed hill
    shade and light

    neither the top
    nor bottom
    shown

    the strides switchback
    rise this and fall that
    at the same moment

    one climbs up
    one descends
    one walks around

    town
    the park
    the neighborhood

    here and there
    makes no difference
    which way you go

    there is no peak
    experience
    no all-time low

    each section
    its own part
    fragment of time


  • The Blob

    It absorbed all
    who approached
    near its lovely light
    who hid there
    clearly out of sight.

    It was a blob, its blue dazzle
    embraced, encased
    in its light shell
    all who posed for it.

    Like the moon
    it was one’s own
    reflection mirroring
    all who imitated.

    Hand held, powerful
    like the spermaceti
    candle when it lit
    half the Earth.

    The other half
    of course burned
    in darkness but
    safe from the blob.

  • Say It Isn’t So

    Say it isn’t so
    whisper in my ear
    it’s so soon for you to go
    stay young with me dear
    don’t make me grow old

    Say it isn’t so
    blue eyes once so clear
    freckles on your cheeks
    falling disappear
    your skin where soft as milk

    I used to slip the clutch
    voluptuous your lips
    your grip so loose
    say it isn’t so
    that now you’ve let go

    There is no instant
    metamorphosis
    when bliss gives way
    to the fish flouncing
    in the bucket on the pier

    Say it isn’t so
    we’re all out of bait
    you can’t remember
    our last happy date
    the old commiserate

    but must go down alone
    say it isn’t so
    the best time of the day
    when your eyes close
    peace comes a wave

    bubbles at the shore
    at the tideline we talk
    unsure is it going out
    or coming in
    say it isn’t so

  • On So & So On

    In the beginning
    it was so
    and so on

    Soon sown
    then three
    to party

    Grown from seed
    and so on
    the invitations.

    So the old fisherman
    though years since his
    boat out on the water
    still sold more fish
    than he caught
    and when asked
    by the economist
    how this could be so
    said so few are called
    but many who so choose.

  • To the Lighthouse

    It was not a real
    lighthouse tho near
    the ocean in Hermosa
    and hornful of warns

    Sunday afternoons free
    we listened to hot jazz
    players coming together
    & going this way & that

    And nights were cats
    in the lot out back
    came for scraps
    a tuba sized cook

    tossed evenings we
    could afford only
    one drink and out
    for a walk on the pier

    in a fog or clear breeze
    round midnight round
    about midnight waves
    breaking into ivory

    silk blouses blowing
    below to the empty
    beach behind us
    and Pier Avenue

    and to The Lighthouse
    its beacon leading
    light sinking in the must
    of music business.



  • The Hottest Day

    Looking about for something cool to read,
    for today is scheduled to be the hottest day,
    and I recalled Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha,”
    its beginning lines:

    “In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Sal-wood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, together with his friend Govinda, son of a Brahman. The sun tanned his light shoulders by the banks of the river when bathing, performing the sacred ablutions, the sacred offerings. In the mango grove, shade poured into his black eyes, when playing as a boy, when his mother sang, when the sacred offerings were made, when his father, the scholar, taught him, when the wise men talked.”

    Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse, 1922

    Sounds cool, but Siddhartha,
    as we now know,
    had a long row to hoe
    before attaining coolness.

    Siddhartha might have been a member
    of what Gertrude Stein named
    “a lost generation”:

    “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose… The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits…. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.”

    Ecclesiastes, King James Version

    The wise men in my youth
    would have near
    a cool drinking beer
    to go with the flow.

    Honeydew beach
    and rollicking surf
    in the morning
    chores in the afternoon
    sit out with the family
    in the evening
    when the sun goes down
    in the shade of the olive
    tree, the Chinese Elm
    and the three carob trees.

    Meanwhile, waiting for rain,
    Walt Whitman:

    And who art thou? said I to the soft-falling shower,
    Which, strange to tell, gave me an answer, as here translated:
    I am the Poem of Earth, said the voice of the rain,
    Eternal I rise impalpable out of the land and the bottomless sea,
    Upward to heaven, whence, vaguely form’d, altogether changed,
    and yet the same,
    I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,
    And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;
    And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own
    origin, and make pure and beautify it;
    (For song, issuing from its birth-place, after fulfilment, wandering,
    Reck’d or unreck’d. duly with love returns.)

    The Voice of the Rain, “Sands at Seventy,” Walt Whitman

    Of course, “the voice of the rain” in places today
    is not so quiet and “soft-falling,”
    but seems on the attack;
    something absurd
    has been disturbed.

    Likewise, the blue sky
    and this week’s yellow period
    we for months awaited
    comes down today
    like a cast iron lid
    where we sit
    like a cake
    rising
    in an oven.

  • Changing Fonts

    Sometimes, mornings, sitting at the laptop, waiting for the groundwater to rise, words to develop, appear, as in a photographer’s darkroom bath, I play around backstage in the blog with fonts and settings and such as are available via the WordPress setup. The urge comes similar to that of wanting to move the furniture around in one’s pad, or rearrange the Picasso or Matisse paintings dotting the walls. Or move the plants around. I would tell you all how this is done (i.e. changing fonts), but I don’t want to be responsible for anyone crashing their blog and watching nine years of exceptional poetry or original street pics washed down the drain. And I’m not an expert, just an experimenter.

    Anyway, you perspicacious readers with good eyes for this sort of thing might have noticed a number of changing fonts experiments this morning here at the The Coming of the Toads. And, effective with this post, I’ve switched the entire blog to new fonts: Playfair Display for the Heading Font and Fira Sans for the Base Font.

    Other fonts I played around with this morning include EB Garamond, which I thought elegant but too light and tight, and Space Mono / Roboto, which I found fun and modern in a way one might be nostalgic for comics from the 1950’s. I thought Bodoni Moda interesting. But in the end, for now, anyway, I settled on changing sitewide to the Playfair Display and Fira Sans fonts. These are available via Global Styles in WordPress – at least in this, the “Seedlet” theme, they are available.

    While my primary concern when it comes to choosing fonts is to find something simply easy on the eyes, I want the type to attract the reader without calling too much attention to itself. At the same time, I find the historical background of font development interesting. For example, looking up Fira typeface in Wiki, I found this:

    “With the name Fira, Mozilla wanted to communicate the concepts of fire, light and joy but in a language agnostic way (sic) to signal the project’s global nature.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fira_(typeface)

    Joy! And not only that, but I found that Fira Sans is used by the governments of both New Zealand and Iceland – their “font of choice,” according to the Wiki page I consulted. Ok, ok – if it’s good enough for them…

    Again, I’m not an expert, of much of anything, let alone fonts, but if one is to spend as much time as I do writing, typing, blogging, “publishing” (as it were), drawing, cartooning, doodling, it seems inevitable one’s interests will or might or should include typeface and type design. There you have it.

    Display font derives from sign making, text typically larger than the text found in the body of what’s printed. It seems most display fonts were originally hand drawn. Of Playfair Display, I found that it’s a font created by one Claus Eggers Sørensen. Who knew?

    One consideration choosing fonts and in fact doing anything on the blog these days, is the fact that readers are using all kinds of devices – desktops, laptops, tablets, phones – to access and read blog posts. So you want something that will lend itself to a variety of formats and devices. What you see is not always what you get.

    The Coming of the Toads blog, which dates posts at least monthly from 2007, and which began as a kind of addendum to adjunct activity, has gone through a number of changes in “theme” (template) design over the years. (Has anyone noticed?) Currently, the blog uses a “minimalist” design open to the WordPress block formatting. This seems for now a good fit for the drift to ever more poetry posting I’ve been lately most interested in doing.

  • After the Fall

    After the fall before it was all
    over knowing all along wrong
    from the start belief belittled
    after awhile persistence paid
    well and the interlude did not
    feel like a slump who sat still
    felt trapped and everyone all
    worked overtime all the time
    along the line here and there
    a smile a smell a breeze even
    if the windows wouldn’t open
    not there not in that building
    which like a fortress ship full
    of pink dresses tight collared
    pinched and pitched swollen
    with wariness almost fearful
    slow not quite sure diagnosis
    acute nervousness jim-jams
    and on pajama day all asked
    who sits here without benefit
    of knick-knacks pics of all the
    kids the stout spouse keeping
    house and at the all sporting
    game asked in all seriousness
    why do you all do what you
    do and all could answer the
    question without already all
    knowing the answer plainly
    clearly concisely in the land
    of milk and honey hidden
    behind partitions attached
    to all the others in confetti
    filled aisles tolerable hours
    what a waste they all said
    their baskets full of bread
    but in the end the trends
    the lines of best fit all fell
    it was all about math all
    along days numbered fell
    they all fell and in falling
    looked for a place to land
    without breaking in pieces
    some fell up some fell down
    the ones who often played
    the clown cried and claimed
    all fell and all broke in the
    office of the one doomed
    it was like after a war all
    fallen astrew forced hands
    held together with screws.

  • Come, eschew the myth

    Come, eschew the myth
    of Dionysus,
    the cafe with jazz aged
    aperitif,
    give me ice cream
    to stimulate my spirits,
    and a parlour guitar,
    not bitter liqueur,
    for my digestif.

    Yes, let Bacchus
    and his buddies
    revel with the devil,
    give me chocolate
    raspberry swirl.

    Don’t say, “Out of peaches
    ‘n cream, try a frosty
    fruity pilsner.”
    Ok, bait and switch,
    if you can add a scoop,
    please, and make it float.

    The evening passes slowly
    amidst dark cans clatched
    down the dry alley where
    sleeps Suzy with Sobrius.

  • Wait!

    Who waits for Godot
    (rhymes with da dough)
    wants an oppo
    waiting for the doe
    in the dell –
    won’t you wait with me?

    Waiting for Godot
    for Larry, Moe, & Curly Joe
    for onomatopoeia to blow
    its toupee into the tree
    on a country road.

    Waiting for snow
    to cover the fallen
    waiting for the obvious
    and the obscure.

    Waiting for a
    tree to grow
    pi to round
    oh even
    waiting for you.