Thursday, November 22, 2007

Thanks

Take two, They're free!
I'm giving them away today!
Special occasion!
One day only!
Supplies are limited.
Act now!
Don't miss out!
Hurry!
When they're gone, They're gone!

5 Comments:

Blogger Lane Savant said...

Dans l'autre mots;

Danke,
Nehmen zwei, sind sie frei!
Ich gebe sie weg heute!
Spezielle Gelegenheit!
Nur ein Tag!
Versorgungsmaterialien sind begrenzt.
Tat jetzt!
Vermissen Sie nicht heraus!
Hast!
Wenn sie gegangen werden, werden sie gegangen!

10:55 PM  
Blogger Glenn Buttkus said...

You are more than welcome, and I am sure that you deserve our thanks and praise and affection, even though often you pretend to be a distant curmudgeon. Hope your Turkey Day went well, and that your family held you affectionately in their hearts. I know, real sentimental, bordering on schmaltz. Melva and I only had one daughter and our son-in-law over yesterday, but it was a joyous occasion. Joel helped me put the selves back up in the furnace room, now that the super sump pump is functional and extant.

I do fully intend to make the magnificent journey all those miles and minutes north to witness and bathe myself in your music on Friday next.

Hey I was reading some Alexie this morning and I found myself weeping at his touching prose. I stopped for a time, and the Poet Buttkus stepped up the desk and began to scribble anxiously, wanting to express his "feelings" about said weeping. I edited it and typed it up, and I include it now in my comments:


TEARS OF A KLOWN

Like Palmer says,
“I’m an old man”,
Almost ancient enough to let my uncle
Pay me to reduce the workforce
By One;
Yet hell, not really old,
Not so old my forehead wrinkles
Are deeper than the tread on my steel-belted radials,
Not so old that I cannot
Make love to a woman, or chew a bloody steak
If I so desire;
More kind of young-old, newly old, barely old—
Still passionate, angry, sweet, powerful midst my weaknesses,
Very aware that there exists a plethora of moments,
Those throbbing gaps and spaces in my life,
Ready, willing, and needing
To be stuffed with my emotions,
my insights, my genitals, and my intellect.
Oh yes, to be sure
I still have eddies of ego and anvils of angst
To be served up steaming fresh, spewed out,
Spittle-showered and shared
With those strangers
Who hear me, see me, read me
And whom I may never meet.

But damn let us not forego or forget the other stuff,
The old man stuff;
Aches and pain, baggage memory, sense memory, lethargic colon,
Failing hearing, restlessness, sleeplessness, punctuated with
Vicious unprovoked attacks of CRS,
And most significantly
A tenderloin tendency to burst into old man tears,
Hatching a squad of hot droplets,
Or just a rivulet of sensitivity,
A bothersome streak of dampness down
My scarred cheeks.

You know I weep
While watching movies,
I cry while reading some touching prose or poetry,
I blubber when my wife reads aloud
Some love poem I have written for her
In front of family and friends,
I pry open the flood gates when my television screen
Is choked with hundreds of flag-draped coffins,
When I realize that our children are being sacrificed
Innocent and misdirected
To the pious Petroleum Gods, philosopher kings, robber barons
And politicians.
I really cry when my wife has a full-blown orgasm,
Or when I look at my grandchildren,
Or just at their pictures.
I even dampen up some when I stare
Into the beautiful brown eyes
Of my hundred canine-years old matriarch, Taffy.
Am I a defective facet of a man,
A true bleeding heart,
A poet whose poems are never read?
Yes. No. Perhaps.

Hope and faith never die,
They are just momentarily interrupted.
If there is anything credible
About those cosmic and metaphysical answers
I have settled for in my heart,
Then I can appreciate that age itself
Is but a callous construct, a measly measurement of men, by men,
But not of Mankind Prime;
Age is just a way of honoring the history of my husk,
And as I tremble and trudge through the turmoil of time,
I remember what many of my buddies learned to say to get through the day
While serving in the maelstrom of Viet Nam,
Steeling their innards to the horrendous reality of war—
“It don’t mean nothin”,
Because of course it meant
Everything.
It truly saddens me today
To recall that as a young man, tough as Mailer, crazy as Vonnegut,
I held back my tears, cuz
I was no candy-assed faggot –that came later, finding a need
To conceal that part of my nature
Until my hair has begun to turn gray,
And yet another war has seized my semi-senility
And shaken it violently.

So just do it,
Weep old men,
Let your wise tears flow copiously
Over the wounds of this world –
For you have earned that right.
You have been given a gift of power, of retribution, justice, and closure.
Use it wisely
And may it serve you well
As you vividly remember
That whatever our place
In this new Millennium,
We all stand as equals
When day gives up its play
And night wants to mantle our melancholy;
Just as the sun disappears deep down behind and beyond the horizon,
Forcing the sky to explode with vibrant gold, yellow, and orange,
Causing the exposed bellies of clouds to fill up with blood red light;
Or just a few dark hours later, or perhaps earlier
When this mysterious blue orb rotates steady on its axis,
Unflinching, unstoppable, inexorable, and like magic
Saul reappears, shooting up the place with its rebirthed brilliance,
Like a spirit adolescent spraying and radiating his Spider Man shorts
Before his eyes catch fire
And his visual cortex
Turns raw righteous shards of lunging light
Into imagery, into beauty and all the rest of it;
So that we merely particles of sand
In the muscles of the great cosmic mollusk,
Can spread our arms, ready to meet and greet,
Like Crow with his dark wings,
Vibrating and ready to conjure up those colors within us
To perfectly match the music of the day.

Glenn A. Buttkus November 2007


2007 is coming to a close and we still cling to worn-out solutions, and have to face the consequences of our democracy. Let us hope that 2008 gives us respite, succor, and unclogged arteries.

Glenn

4:28 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh my Dearest Doug:

How wonderful that your incredible music will be played in public. It is way beyond time for you to begin to step up and be heard, so that those naysayers and small-minded antagonists out there will begin to respect and revere your gargantuan talent.

I like it, too, when you let the poet Buttkus put some of his "free verse" onto your blog. Don't tell him that his poetry is really just works in progress, that there is no real meter, rhyme or magic in it. Yet it is effective, modern, muscular, methodic, and thought-provoking. This man is like a chameleon. He writes like whomever he is reading. He wrote like you, like Brautigan, like P.K. Dick, and now Sherman Alexie. Is he a poet or a just a poetic copy machine? Only time will tell.

Enjoy your moment in the moonlight, while those musicians play your compositions. I will be there too, of course. I will be the one in the white dress, sitting in the back, kind of hard to see in the shadows; but I will definitely be there at the Good Shepherd Chapel, cheering on my lover man, continuing to take my role of Muse seriously.

Hugs: Emily

4:37 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hallo, LANE!
Erstaunlich gutes (wenn nicht perfektes) Deutsch hast Du geschrieben! Allerachtung! Nur köennte ich die "Danken" nicht am 22. November bestellen, das ich in der Türkei nicht in der nähe eines Computer war.
Tschüß,
Anonomann

1:56 AM  
Blogger Lane Savant said...

The German translation was provided by;
http://babelfish.altavista.com/

The mockery of American advertising cons doesn't come through very well.
But thanks are a better product than a lot of junk one can buy for no other reason than it's that time of year again.

A distant curmudgeon, eh?
I was trying for obstreperous.

If only to find out what the word meant.

11:32 AM  

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