Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

[Bernie01]

My wife says I am too young,
handsome and rich to be bald
as the third moon of Enceladus.

Just completed Orgone
hair restoration treatment
and tomorrow my wife will
not worry herself.

Doctor Bees of South Harvard’s
Hair Transplant and Agronomy
is tracing a new hairline for me
gorgeous as Tom Cruise before
Top Gun’s release.

Naturopathy, oils and obscure
vegetables help, so also electro
stimuli and psycho/pathology
interviews piled on.

The wife says not to worry,
easy for her to say, a cascade
of Marie Antoinette locks winding
like a Honduran hurricane through
the Carolinas, to fall placidly
over her million dollar shoulders.

Who doesn't want drinks with her
even if bald as an aquarium.

[BobBradshaw]

How can I not like the humor of this? I love this romantic stanza:

The wife says not to worry,
easy for her to say, a cascade
of Marie Antoinette locks winding
like wine of Honduran hurricanes
through the Carolinas, to fall placidly
over million dollar shoulders.

although I am a bit thrown by 'wine'....

'bald as an aquarium' is an intriguing description....because what the N offers can't be as adventurous as romance in the South Seas? He can only offer a domesticated love(i.e. the aquarium)? Am I reading this wrong?

I love the opening tone of this, set beautifully by this image:

to be bald
as the third moon of Enceladus

The jumping from planetary images to Tom Cruise's hair to 'interviews piled on' is a delightful leaping in imagery. I'm won over.

[Bernie01]

Bob---

thanks for early feedback.

and, yes, you nailed it. my hope to be funny. top to bottom, all references.

all the references meant to be inaccurate, or just off center.

you questioned wine---me too. first, the poem said champagne. but champagne seemed a cliche. combining wine with a hurricane and Honduras---all distinctly not funny or much in the news---seemed funny to me---well, you see why i bombed so miserably doing stand up live in Los Angeles with my loyal, beautiful daughter sitting ringside.

thanks.


bernie

[BobBradshaw]

Bombing in standup while your beautiful, loyal daughter watches ringside is a poem waiting to be written....

Why not remove 'wine'? Just the image of Honduran hurricanes winding through the Carolinas is an amazing thought...

Marie Antoinette locks winding
like Honduran hurricanes
through the Carolinas, to fall placidly
over million dollar shoulders.

[Bernie01]

Bob---

good solution, done.

The wife says not to worry,
easy for her to say, a cascade
of Marie Antoinette locks winding
like a Honduran hurricane through
the Carolinas, to fall placidly
over her million dollar shoulders.


and you mentioned aquarium.

i ask others to think beyond the first near cliche image. Bald as the desert moon---nice but a bit tired. bald like an approaching motorcycle headlight...maybe. but i found too expansive, i wanted something very limited...aquarium seemed to fit that bill and it was (for me) original and funny.


removing the word wine, would not have thought of that, isn't work shopping great?

writing a poem about standup...she is my heart and soul---maybe that stops me, don't know. with other fathers sitting in the dark at her ballet performances---crying. the only way to understand that, probably, is with a poem, but i just cant't get very far before blubbering.

as i get older and slower, she can finish my sentences effortlessly and with a diplomatic anonymity.

thanks again.


bernie

[SOriz211]

I love this Bernie, but the image of a bald aquarium is intriguing. I've never seen one.

Sergio

[Bernie01]

Sergio---

welcome, ole poetry pal.

Michael, the Forum owner, has a very lively Forum here, think you will like the heat of the water.

now, that aquarium word....

thought it was just right for our narrator who gets most things just a little wrong...

....Bald as the third moon of Enceladus.

indeed, Enceladus is a moon...

but so much for all that...

i tell you a secret...i just love how robert lowell uses the word in his (he says) best poem:\


For the Union Dead

BY ROBERT LOWELL

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.


no connection to baldness---but what can i say? the word is owned by Lowell in my imagination.

heard of a musician called Mogwai?

his cut Take Me Somewhere Nice features a Japanese model with her head inside a futuristic fishbowl---an aquarium to me.

https://www.google.com/search?q=moawai+ ... e&ie=UTF-8


well, sorry now you asked I'm sure...

again, thanks for your comment.

[Billy]

I actually like the aquarium being bald. It's funny and how on earth could an aquarium have hair, anyway. Good, comic poem, Bernie.

[Bernie01]

thanks, billy...


and that is the point....this nice fellow who seems to get so many things wrong....closely patterned after myself....


bernie

[SivaVelliangiri]

I have been reading the poem and the comments.Enjoyed the reasoning in the critiquing session.The poem is a statement in humour. I have heard of comparing the familiar to the unfamiliar,but this beats both.

S

[Bernie01]

Siva---


right on.

and thanks for your comment.

by the, way, i cannot find she Red Book Asian zine. is it closed now?

bernie