Comics – Page 16 – The Coming of the Toads

New Cat, Mew Cat

Have you seen the new cat?
How could I miss?

Big cat.
And fast.

The new cat changes a lot.
Big house, zero lot.

So comes here.
Our lives will never be the same.

They never were the same.
What were we doing?

Waiting.
Waiting for what?

It’s what we do.
How does the new cat change that?

The new cat does not appear to wait.
What are we doing if not waiting?

Wait not, want not.
Want not, think not.

Think not, wake not.
Wake not, watch not.

Watch not, pine not.
Pine not, itch not.

Itch not, cat not.
Cat not, can’t not.

I am a cat.
That I know.

The new cat changes
not that cat.

October 25, 2015

Hep Cats and Restless Nights of Dog Days

Would you care to dance?

Time Over Time

I’m waiting for that special fellow.

Lecture Hall

All in Green

Bell Bottom Blues

Natural Doodle Dance

August Green

Neon Garden

Reading in Bed and The Family Car

Habit

Dance

A Thin Man and Hats

Did you see that?

Bongo Player and Clowning Around

Argument

Surfer

Pervasion

Sawhorses

Mother Earth and Magnetic Waves

It went by in a flash!

Guardian Angels

Word Swallower

Whee Whoo!

On the Boardwalk

Holes

Stained Glass Window

Restless Nights

Sleep

Flying TV

Blog of the Tree of Knowledge

Microbe

Crossing the Bridge

August 6, 2015

“Settings” – a Poem by Eleanor Rigby

“I was mislaid,”
Eleanor Rigby said,
“Amused
at my own voice.”

She sat and sat and sat,
but instead of growing tired,
wrote:
“This poem I write
is for Me only.
Signed,
Miss Understanding.”

She didn’t know
all alone poems
find a reader
sitting,
darning & clicking,
long through the night.

Eleanor Rigby
thought she was writing
only for you.

When suddenly, strings
opened up the sky,
a quartet of likes,
and an aeolian
comment
trilled and thrilled
the air.

July 31, 2015

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July 22, 2015

Photograph of Providence Urgent Care Waiting Room at Noon

Waiting room	Center seat	Back to window
Squeeze my fingers	Under a bitter blanket	Opposite counter
Vertigo	Where?	Merry-go-round stops.
Wall clock running backwards	You seem to have crossed some divide, a distance between following expectations and surprising the reference books on shelves marked Must Remain in Reference Room: No Check Outs – For Scholars Only!	Those were the days of craves Dizzy and Monk and Bird ears. We never worried ears, blood pressure, what gave rise to touch, an orange scarf, blue waterfall behind bridge.
Nurse station	The nurse walks you to the scale, weighs you, takes yr blood pressure, pulse, and temperature. “The doctor will be with you shortly to hear yr confession,” and she leaves you alone to study the posters of the cross sectioned body pinned to the wall.	The doctor knocks and comes in dressed in stole and stethoscope, just like on TV. “I only handle venial issues. Only a specialist can give absolution. But what good is freedom that leads to wild thoughts?”
Waiting Room	Families and individuals. Names called. An ambulance arrives. Para-techs wheel in empty stretcher, disappear into sanctuary. A fire truck appears. Six firemen walk through waiting room like a Rubik’s Cube. Two men in Texas gear waltz across the lobby.	A boy plays with the automatic door. His father. His sister figures it out. A yell and a sigh. A woman crumbles at the nurse’s counter, a Beckett ploy that gets her plenty of attention.
Valet Parking	The sign says No Tips. I hand the parking attendant an Ace which he pockets. Good man!	The drive home.
What the Doctor said	She wanted to see my pocket notebook. “I knew you were dizzy as soon as I laid eyes on you sitting out in the lobby taking pictures of the patients, word pictures.”	In the waiting room waiting continues. Kids run around and play games, laughing. A few people look worried. A couple of folks look hurt, or hurting. A father falls asleep.
The Clinic Closes for the Day	A husband weeps.	A mother changes a dirty diaper.

June 7, 2015

Scamble and Cramble Play Pool

Scamble: Where did these lemons come from?

Cramble: This is the way they play pool in Southern California.

Scamble: I thought they were having a drought.

Cramble: The shooter is called a “Willy.” The Willy takes lime in hand and places it wherever he wants within the dish of billeted lemons, turns around, and pokes the lime at one of the lemons, using the shaft of his stiffened tail as a cue stick, attempting to push the lemon out of the dish, at which point he is awarded another “Willy.” When all of the lemons are in this manner poked out of the dish, the players celebrate with a glass of lemonade.

Scamble: I notice there are nine balls.

Cramble: Yes, this particular game is known as “Nein Ball.”

Scamble: But one of the balls is the lime ball.

Cramble: Yes, that’s the cue lime, also know as the green ball.

Scamble: But if the lime green ball is the cue ball, that leaves only eight balls.

Cramble: Yes, you can also play “Eight Ball.” Most shots are called slop shots. There is no penalty for scratching, as long as you keep your scratching to yourself. If you scratch your opponent, that is called a “Zoe,” and you must put a lemon back in the dish.

Scamble: I never knew pool was so much like poetry.

May 6, 2015

One Night At Flobe’s Pizza Below Frye’s Apartment

Buskers on Hawthorne

Whale Moon

Grand Avenue Beach

Flashing Lights

Neighborhood Poetry Post

Potato Bear Claws

Flobe’s Pizza below my friend Frye’s apartment one night last April was puzzlingly rowdy, so we climbed down to see what was up. The place was steaming, crowded, people sitting on the ceiling, hot cheese slipping, falling pepperoni pieces and mushrooms, while a string band fiddled. The open mic was live, with Pepper, Herb, and Fava’s trio in line on the sign-in sheet to perform Joe’s “Surf Surge.”

Frye and I occupied empty seats at the end of a rambunctious table in the corner, and Joe got in line to order some pizza and orange soda. The porthole sidewalk window next to our table was occluded with steam, the string band zipping, and a couple without a table was dancing, one with the pizza the other with the beer. Suddenly, Willa and Raymond took the stage with ukulele and tambourine.

They sang of an old photo of Joan Didion sitting in a Corvette, holding a cigarette. A young man riding a piebald pony rode up to the takeout bar and ordered a veggie pizza with extra garlic and sauce. He fed his pony a breadstick. Joe came with the orange soda and said the pizza was a forty-minute wait. He poured us each a glass from the pitcher, sparkling yellow, not as orange as we had expected.

Joe sat by the porthole orb. He saw flashing lights, paisley globes filled with silver and gold light. The bubbles flew like electrified parameciums escaping down the side of the window, along its tarnished curved brass edge. Big Dada announced Joe’s pizza would not be ready until September. By then no one would be reading poetry any longer than a tweet, and that before they realized what they were hearing.

By the time Joe’s name was called (“Pizza ready for Joe!”), he had grown a pony tail and Frye had gone bald. Pepper, Herb, and Fava were on tour somewhere in the Midwest. I had tired of waiting and moved back down to Southern California to be near the beach. Every day I ride my bicycle along the Strand, watching the surfers come and go without a thought for pizza or poetry.

April 24, 2015

Hep Cats in Cash Clothes

March 6, 2015

Two Hep Cats and the Cool Comma

Scamble: I met a comma at the bus stop this morning. … Did you hear what I said? I said, I met a comma, at the bus stop, this morning.

Cramble: Be wary of commas. They’ll be on you like fleas.

-Did you know the apostrophe is the feminine form of comma?

-Band of punctuation pirates, the lot of them. Some witch of an exclamation point once hexed me into a pair of parentheses.

-Yes, life is hard enough without being labeled a parenthetical expression.

-Imagine impossible to break away from the vice grip of your parents.

-The bus stop comma seemed a cool enough little fellow.

-What was he up to?

-Just pausing, to say hello.

-I once dated an apostrophe, a beach volleyball aficionado, as I recall.

-Cool comma wasn’t going to the end of the line, Line 15, though, where the periods have apparently gentrified the neighborhood, the so-called Pearl District.

-No more comma splices. A few fragments, still.

-What’s the point of periods, anyway? We never really stop we get up and go again. He got off at the very next stop, the cool comma did.

-Why I prefer the express bus no all of that stop and go busyness biz.

–Punctuation implies patience.

February 21, 2015

Mkgnao!9: Alien Cats from Outer Space (A Minidrama)

Abducted by alien cats from outer space and whisked away to a faraway planet then shot back to Earth from a circus cannon cocked with physicist rubber string theory, a cat cannonball, Scamble tries to interest Cramble in a tabloid worthy extraterrestrial tale!

Cramble: [Silence]

Scamble: “And you have nothing to say?!”

Cramble: “Does this have something to do with my recent cloture motion?”

Scamble: “No! The cat planet is called Mkgnao!9. It’s all bushes and trees, birds and fish, and dunes of kitty litter. It’s a cat’s paradise. Everyone there is a hep cat!”

Cramble: “If all are hep, none is hep.”

Scamble: “Nonetheless, no matter what radio station you play, Mantovani! The planet is lush with the sounds of birds and strings and bugs flirting about hither and thither and streams of white wine full of fish on the lark. I’m thinking of moving to Mkgnao!9. Do you want to go with me?”

Cramble: “Sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch? I’ll bet there’s a downside.”

Scamble: “Their oceans are filling with used kitty litter.”

Cramble: “Making it difficult to know how to pack. In any case, how will you get back to Mkgnao!9 if the hep space cats don’t come pick you up again?”

Scamble: “Silence, Exile, and Cunning.”

Cramble: “Here you go with that James Joyce cheap cheat imitation literary allusion stuff again. Anyway, I don’t get the connection.”

Scamble: “Joyce is the patron saint of cats up on Mkgnao!9.”

Cramble: “Lucky Jim.”

Scamble: “I’m going to write a memoir about my Mkgnao!9 experience!”

Cramble: “Sounds wild. I’ve heard the memoir form is popular these days. I was thinking of writing one, but I can’t seem to get past chapter one, “Begot to Nap.” But why don’t you create something new? Wasn’t that the gist of Joyce’s gig, to repair in the garage of his brain the broken bicycle of his island, rally the folks to a new way of riding, or words to that effect?”

Scamble: “I just did!”

Cramble: “Did what?”

Scamble: “Create something new!”

Cramble: “What?”

Scamble: “Mkgnao!9!”

Cramble: “It’s a good thing the id is kept out of sight.”

Scamble: “Do cats have an id?”

Cramble: “Everything’s got an id, if only you can find it.”

February 19, 2015

Hep Cats in Love: Valentine’s Day Comics

Writing Backwards

Will you be my Valentine?

Creature from Muscle Beach

Questions Before Going Out: Scamble – I’m in here! Are you going to wear that tie with that shirt? What time does the bus come? Do I have time to paint my nails? Do you think any mice will be at the party? Did Jack and Esme find a kittysitter? Have you seen my claw sharpener? Can you change the litter before we leave? I love coming home to a clean litter box. Did you notice how I put that in the affirmative? Cramble: Do I have time for a nap?