Bug-Inspired Poetry

These two poems were written awhile back, set in motion by an encounter with a live scorpion inside my friend's house. Their current posting, however, was inspired by a litter of baby praying mantises (mantisi?), crawling, adorably, around my mom's front porch. They are the cutest thing!

It's my first attempt at poetry! How novel!



Untitled ("Mona Lisa never swatted a fly, so far as I know." ?)

Mona Lisa never swatted a fly, so far as I know.
Her hands are--of course--too virtuous
(notice the absence of a wedding band!)
to be soiled by the guts of a hairy shit-eater.
But did she ever have a picnic ruined
by a swarm of bees or ants or locusts?
Were her delicate, enigmatic features
ever contorted in disgust or anger or flippancy
by her accidental penetration of a lacy spiderweb?
Could she ever have been put at peace
by the gentleness of a butterfly or the incongruity
of a caterpillar's breached cocoon?
To show her these things now would be an insult,
of course, to beauty, to her, and to the bug.



Still-life, With Obstruction

When he spotted the spider, nimbly crawling
Over the apricot, the painter had a choice:
Preserve the integrity of the moment
And include the wayward creature
On the canvas, among the stationary fruits,
Inviting critics to establish it's meaning
Beyond the magic of it's arbitrariness,
Or admit the impermanence of it's passing
And excise it's cursory, scrambling self
From the art of inanimation.
He was ensnared, he thought, aptly.




Well, what did you think? Were they okay? Were they lousy and amateurish? What's up with the weird connections to art & painting? Did you get lost in all the unnecessarily indulgent "thesaurus" words? (Don't be afraid to say you didn't "get" it. It's not your fault.) Do you love (and, simultaneously, loathe) bugs as much as I do? Do you have any suggestions for improvement?

"I can't just sit at home and do nothing..."

The deadly earthquake that hit China nearly a month ago continues to deeply affect a lot of people. Cartoonist Coco Wang has written and drawn some amazing sequential art, documenting real-life stories of hope and tragedy. Read the ongoing set at paulgravett.com.

Wang writes: "Thousands of heart-breaking stories are happening 24 hours non-stop everyday, some are so sad that you can hardly bear, some are incredibly moving that you just can't stop crying... I wanted to go to the front to help with all those people ... but I heard that the traffic needed to be kept totally clear for rescue transportation at the moment. ... I have never felt more proud of my country and people ... their love, courage and kindness rock me to my core! I am going to send you comic strips almost everyday from now on, I hope you could know something about the earthquake in China, although you don't have to do anything, but I hope you could feel our love and hope."

Read the ongoing collection here.

Follow My Logic: from Dante to 'Big Brother'

I've been reading Dante's Divine Comedy, and that has me thinking about the Seven Deadly Sins. In John Ciardi's introduction to his own translation, he writes that, of the Seven, "Acedia is the central one, and it may well be the sin the twentieth century lost track of." Ciardi says that while Acedia is generally translated to English as Sloth, there is simply too much lost in translation: it's not just laziness or physical slovenliness--it's more of a spiritual failure, "the failure to be sufficiently active in the pursuit of recognized Good."

Now--follow me here--whenever I hear the word "sloth," I always think of "television." Perhaps that's a result of reading Devin O'Leary's "This Week in Sloth" entry in The Alibi, which features some of the noteworthy selections in the week's television schedule, or perhaps it's actually the result of the same attitude that fueled O'Leary in the first place: an interest in making fun of a wide range of the TV viewing spectrum, and the overwhelming existential torpor and depression that comes with it.

So, to the point: While I was reading about the Cantos of Hell (and thinking about where I'll fit in), I immediately thought of the time* that I watched an episode of CBS' Big Brother and kinda liked it. (...You know the show. The one with the dumb gregarious sluts pretty people, participating in ridiculous stunts, parading themselves around on national television in order to win two minutes of fame $500,000.) And though I, like, knew that something interesting was probably on public television (i.e., the Good) that very second, I still chose to ignore the truth. And therefore I am going to Hell.

Does anybody else ever feel like there is something out there that goes waaaaay beyond a "guilty pleasure," something that is so fundamentally evil, that by watching/listening to/reading/choosing it you are going straight to Hell?

*Oh, and that time I watched Big Brother? Yep, this past weekend. The same weekend I also spent my time watching Saved by the Bell.