In a trough

If this is all you have to complain about, you're doing great.
– Playdough, ca. 333 BC

I'm in a writing trough right now.

Might change any minute. Hopefully will.

Triggered by:

1. Too many calls from an ageing parent who has excelled in laying guilt trips on people for most of her 86 (soon to be 87) years.
2. Overload & exhaustion, including from having been exceedingly "creative".
3. Back pain.
4. General Unlust*.

Now would be a good time to write something Bukowskiesque. He always managed to milk the most blabla situations for something marketable.

*A wonderful German word for which there is no exact match in English. Perhaps "disinclination" would not be so bad.

Self-accounting

Perhaps it's not such a bad idea for a blogger to once in a while muze over whether blog objectives have been reached or where things are going. An unedited interview with Jackie Shannon from the Bloggo Times sheds light on these and other issues.

JS: With a pretentious title like "World So Wide" your blog definitely invites scrutiny.
LB: I didn't intend it to be pretentious. Just wide.
JS: What? Oh. Haha. ... Let's see. Yes: With a title like that, one would expect something comprehensive, something that covers lots of areas. One thing that seems to be missing is razor edge reporting on political events.
LB: Sorry. I live on the edge of town, and the razor cuts off the news before it gets to me.
JS: What? Oh. Haha. I see.
LB: Also, I must say that there are lots of people out there who do a terrific job of reporting. There's no need for another poor job from me. Take, for example, Quirky News from Ananova. Where they recently reported on a swan in China that is friends with fish and regularly feeds them.


JS: You read that column regularly for news?
LB: No. Discovered it just this morning in search of quirky news.
JS: Thank you for these kind words, Mr. uh ...
LB: Blumfeld. That's all right, sometimes I forget it myself. Thanks for stopping by, Jackie de Shannon.
JS: There's no "de" in there.
LB: Sorry! Confused you with somebody I used to listen to.
JS: Anyway: toodleloo.
LB: One last thing. I do cover a wide variety of topics that are both pertinent and relevant. Like pastoral elegy, going back to Old Greek times. If you want me to, I'll go back even further. Babylon, Atlantis, you name it – I'll deliver the pastoral elegies. I do fibonaccis, that's leading edge technology.
JS: That's all nice and well, but –
LB: I mix (up) classical Indian music with poetry I write, report on the weather sometimes. Perhaps not often enough. But in sharp edge fashion. I write about coffee, warm-ups, rumors, sighs, wind-downs, even quoting García Lorca and Robert Bly.
JS: Gotta go. Bye!
LB: I added a haiku in Hindi the other day, for God's sakes! That's India for you, an old and upcoming nation. It's a wide world out there, and I take my nibbles. By the way: I can report that the weather looks very promising today! Blue sky, cherry trees in bloom, lots of pollen in the air making me dread hay fever ...
JS: (sound of door slamming)

Fibbing Fats

Oh
Fats!
Come on
and let the
good times roll, forget
Blue Monday. Kansas City here

he
comes.
Hello
Josephine
meets whipporwill calls
in his blue heaven walking to

New
Or-
leans to
see red sails
in the sunset when
his dreamboat comes home. Ain’t it a

shame:
the
nimble
black fingers
no longer pound the
piano. The moon did stand still.

– Lenny Blumfeld (cprt. 2007)

Note*
Brought about by Tad Richard's Fats Domino fib in the comments of Gregory K.'s The Fib: "Perhaps you shouldn't try to write Fibonacci poems while listening to Fats Domino."
*Just can't leave the notes alone, can I?

A Hindi haiku

अमावस कि रात
मदिरा में चांद डूबा
पेई सुंग शिव जगेय

– Richa Dubey (copyright 2006)

Originally posted by the author in transliteration on her blog khwaab-i-fursat, where this haiku can also be read in her own English translation.

Open letter to the author

Dear Richa,

Your poems are wonderful. Unfortunately, your blog has been inactive since the end of last year, and there is no link with an e-mail address. Otherwise I would have asked for your kind permission to post this haiku in World So Wide.

Please get in touch if you stumble across this posting.

Kind regards,

Leonard Blumfeld

Mareike condensed

Not
one
crumb is
to remain
unaltered. This all
is our purpose on this planet.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2007)

History
This afternoon in her kitchen, Mareike in a few sentences summarized our obligation to the mineral world. She specifically quoted “crumb” as a member of this world.

Please let me sleep

A fibonacci poem based on raag chandrakauns (late night)

Please
let
me sleep
the sleep of
regeneration
with the world’s tendrils unfurling

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2007)

Note
The idea behind this one is that the world's (or universe's) forces seeping into sleep are behind sleep's regenerative or healing effect.

Four-letter fib

In
a
crossword
puzzle: four-
letter word with fif-
teen letters. Which one would that be?

– Len B.

(© 2007)

Contradition

Fib
is
no more
math than the
syllable counting of
fuddy duddy poetry days.

– Lenny B.

In prose continuation: So if you feel like writing R&B fibs inspired by Beepop Alula that's just great. Let 'em rock!

Tired night fib

It
is
kind of
surprising
that a fib can be
squeezed out of this exhausted mind.

This might be one last mind prick-up
of the ears, one late
openness
to the
uni-
verse.

– Lenny B. (cprt. 2007)

Note
Female part of diamond revised at daylight the next day.
That's OK, I think.
I am the master of my blog.
At least that – one kind of freedom.

Ode to loneliness

This
is an ode
to
loneliness

It has
neither
an anode

nor, you
guessed it,
a cathode

– Leonard Blumfeld (copyright 2007)

Invitable note
Written in an attack of musing about loneliness and its pain and omnipresence even in the presence of others, and using or mis/abusing the 3-part form of the ode (strophe, antistrophe and epode), see Wikipedia.

Invitable afternote
This "ode" could be simply read as a joke, but it might possibly invite further speculation along the lines of what should preferably happen between anode and cathode and what the result is if nothing happens or if these two movers are removed. Enough said!