But, more importantly, what is its content?
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)
Note
Inspired by a similarly titled poem by Kathryn Bevis, which has lots of detailed content, I came across at the Poetry Society UK site. I decided to not only question the title of the poem but also the content, thus taking it up one notch.
Read today we should
all be grateful for any-
thing and everything
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)
Note
I really did read that today somewhere on the oh so social media. “Anything and everything” would include drab streets, right? Like the Roman street with its crumbling brutalist architecture eternalized in the photo above.
PS:
Anyone interested in drab street photos like the one shown here please get in touch!
Sunny afternoon,
late January. At home
alone, cat sleeping.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)
Note
Razor edge of time reporting, glimpse of a time span that lasted for a while. I’d actually planned to write this in my head before I even got home. I knew that the cat would be sleeping. He does that about 16 hours out of 24.
Found out this morning
I have neither spider web
photos nor smoke pix
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)
Notes
I’ve been known to participate in some photography challenges where you’re invited to post a photo to match a given topic. This made me realize that I have nothing suitable for at least two topics. The above smoky picture is actually a fake – the interior of this room looks smoky but in reality the smoke was the result of a dirty window through which I shot the photo. As to spider web photos, I have nothing to show. Must try to look for webs!
There’s nothing wrong
with this poem.
No need to look for it.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2024)
Note
A variation of Richard Brautigan’s poem of the same title, in which he says “There is something wrong with this poem. Can you find it?” (Quoted from Brautigan’s collection Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt from 1970.)
A grinder
is digging into the wall
painfully
And there’s
nothing
I can do about it
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2023)
Note
The reported truth and nothing but. I could have added “except write a pedestrian poem about it”, but then it would have been more than 6 lines. And we wouldn't want that, would we?
Bla ble bli blo blu.
Foreign: blé blö blä blò blù.
And so are you too.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2023)
Note
Undoubtedly not a good start. Or is it? Symbolisms galore in the photo: something in the mirror while getting passed by the future.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)
Note
First-hand experience in Rome this afternoon as the whole city is getting ready for the carved pumpkin festival.
Photo by David Menidrey on Unsplash
if I sound naive,
but is baited breath like bad
breath? Would like to know.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
Of this aerial view
Almost nothing remains
The ghost of the steeple
No longer smiles
Gliding over the ancient hills
Again and again
You meet nothing
But worn-out straw hats
The glasses are empty
But no one notices
The glasses are empty
And no one notices.
And you
What will you do tomorrow
And you
What will you do tomorrow
Of this season gone I won't forget anything
Unless September insists
On erasing it
Talking again and again
About what has just been
I unwillingly wipe the salt
Off my hands
The glasses were full
And someone emptied them
The glasses were full
But someone emptied them
Now I know
What you'll do tomorrow
Now I know
What you'll do tomorrow
– Gianmaria Testa (1958-2016)
Title of Italian original: Veduta aerea. Translated by Johannes Beilharz (© 2022). The song is from the album Altre Latitudini of 2003.
The following video shows Gianmaria Test performing the song at another venue in the same area of Germany (Baden-Württemberg), the Franz K. in Reutlingen (May 4, 2010).
Silver horseshoe
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)
Note
I occasionally wonder whether there is a practical reason for this facial jewelry...
Dedicated to my dear wife
“No-one except you
wears wide cord pants – I don’t want
to be seen with you!”
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)
Went to the toilet. Came
back – a job had come and gone.
Lucky someone else.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)
Note
Once again: the truth and nothing but.
In today's fast-paced always-on environment, going to the toilet for a minute or two can make the difference between getting and losing out on a job.
And I didn’t even go golfing! (Reference to Gary Kildall of Digital Research, developer of CP/M, an early PC-age rival of MS-DOS. Supposedly he turned down a meeting with IBM because he preferred to go golfing. The lucky winner was Bill Gates of Microsoft, who did have time for IBM and sold them on his operating system. This is the story as I remember hearing it in the 1980s - veracity not guaranteed.)
Life dictated by
fever and saturation
readings – sheer terror.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2022)
Note
Some reality from my battle with the virus. A bloody oxygen reading of less than 90%, so the doctors say, means you should be hospitalized.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2021)
Note
So I’ve come back to a form (fibonacci) I used to practice a lot for a while and then didn’t for a long time. Nothing but the truth in this one – the waters of the sky are coming down on Rome in varying degrees of mercilessness, and it’s so dark you can hardly call it day.
Rain, umbrella and
wind conspire to lift me up
like Flying Robert.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2021)
Note
Pretty much that kind of weather here in Rome this morning of October 11, 2021. Inspired by a poem in Der Struwwelpeter (1876) by Heinrich Hoffmann, a book of more or less moral tales everyone in Germany knows. The illustration is by the author (Hoffmann) himself.
Can’t tie my shoes –
cat’s playing with the strings.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2021)
Note
A seriously underfilled specimen of the form, but based on nothing but real events.
Can’t bring myself to
read poems that are longer
than ten lines or so.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2021)
Notes
First of all – why should this truth be sad? Only for myself, I must admit. Others may concur, disagree or simply don’t give a flying fog. It’s a free world, peotry included. (Think I just created a word! Peotry ... like poetry mixed with peyote.) Anyway, all rubbish. What brought about this rubbish? I was looking for enjoyable poetry in the famous Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (famous because – at least in my days at the university – it was a standard book to carry around for English and Creative Writing courses). I started at the back of the hefty volume, thinking those poems had to be by the most modern and least stuffy poets. I believe in brevity in general, so I was really looking for something short, but nothing doing! Even James Tate’s “The Blue Booby”, which starts at the bottom of page 1387 with 3 promising ultra-short lines but rolls on for most of the next page, ending with “like the eyes of a mild savior” – a line I actually like. It really packs a punch. If only there weren’t so much in between. Well, pardon me, it’s the old grouch speaking again, having accrued more than 10 lines of negatively ranty prose by now. I know for a fact that long poems exist. I even know one person personally who wrote a long poem (thankfully it was still in the making when I knew her) and said she loved long poems! The sad truth actually is that people who like poems (period!) are a very, very tiny minority.
A gadget, a card,
several USB cables.
Hot, tedious hours.
– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2021)
Note
Had nothing specific to say (seems to happen often ... I’m speechless in view of what’s happening in the world) but nonetheless felt the need to assert my cyber presence. Drastic change is needed – but who’s going to do it? 100,000 poets alone can’t.
