"Always be drunk. That's it! The great imperative!"

It's National Poetry Month, so I wanted to share a little poem with all 3 of you loyal readers out there. I somehow had never encountered this poem until today, when someone posted it on the private Facebook group for my neighborhood pub, The Brendan Behan (yes, there's a private social group for pub regulars in addition to the standard FB page, and of course, a pub named for Brendan Behan would have a bunch of drunken literary fanatics). It's by a French writer named Charles Baudelaire, and while this translation might not be as remarkable for its use of language/imagery/poetic devices (I can't speak to it in French, although there is a picture of the original French below), I think it accurately sums up the artist's mind (by exploring and exploiting substance abuse and addiction, naturally, because art.)

And so, without further ado: "Get Drunk."

Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
Get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

Meanwhile, if you want some more poetry, my good friend Brian McGackin has been sharing a new poem by a different poet for every day of the month over on his blog. And take it from me — his taste in poetry is at least as good if not better than his taste in friends.

High Infidelity

In doing research for an article I'm working on for Quirk Books, I pulled out my personal copy of High Fidelity (the novel) by Nick Horny. And what do I find inside?

Handwritten song lyrics. Except, it's not my handwriting. And I'm pretty sure I've never lent this book out to anyone to borrow. Eerie, right? And yet, kind of poetic.

So obviously, I laid claim to it (despite the fact that it's, erm, not very good), and turned into a found poem for Five By Five Hundred (which also worked out well because it's been a busy few days, between taking my poor chinchilla to the hospital with a broken arm, and sitting on the "Tweet This?" panel for Arts In America).

"Sonic Death Monkey" at FiveByFiveHundred.com

@Horse_Ebooks: The Poem

@Horse_Ebooks is my latest obsession — a spam twitter account intended to sell, well, eBooks about horses. In order to avoid being deleted as a spambot (which it is), @Horse_Books tweets random phrases from...well, no one's really sure. Sometimes, they're obviously sample lines from various eBooks about horses. Other times, they're just little two-word bursts, like "Boating Needs." If you're really lucky, you'll get some brilliant non sequitur gem like "I wanted to make love to her like a crazed weasel. I wanted to make love to her like I was an aroused teenage boy at a drive" (Yes, that was not a complete sentence, which makes the whole thing that much more ridiculous and hilarious) I decided to scroll through the @Horse_Ebooks twitter account and compile a list of some of my favorite 2-7 word incomplete sentence tweets, and turn them into a Found Poem. It was a lot harder than I expected it to be — some of those tweets make no sense whatsoever, and are even hard to string into some kind of narrative logic — but I'm pretty entertained by the results, and I hope that you are too!

"The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution in 50 Themes" (yes, that title is a complete tweet in and of itself) at FiveByFiveHundred.com

(also — follow @Horse_Ebooks, because it's hilarious, and I guarantee it will brighten up your day)

Just Another Manic Monday (for a crazy lady)

For some reason, every awkward/terrifying/bizarre thing that happens to me when leaving work gets turned into a silly, traditional poem. Don't know why. Just run with it. There's this woman who walks up and down Massachusetts Avenue near my office, carrying a mirror out in front of her and admiring herself while she walks. I always just assumed she was insane (and that her vanity happened to be a side product of said insanity), and let her walk along her merry way, insanity and all. And mirror.

That is, until this past Thursday, when she assaulted me on my way to the train (on my way to the airport, on way to DC, on my way to another train, on way to Cadillac Carl and his Crimson Cadillac Company, on my way to Maryland for a wedding, on my way to a bus in New York City, on my way back to Boston. But I digress). "Liar!" she screamed, "You are liar! Liar! You bad! Evil Liar! LIAR!" etc., etc., with a bloodcurdling shrillness that was so wretched that it actually gave me goosebumps and left me shaken up for the next half hour. I don't frighten easily, but having a crazy Asian lady with a mirror run at you screaming "Liar!" like you just raped and murdered her family — well, that can be a little intense.

So naturally, I immortalized her madness in a poem. Enjoy!

"The Manic Mirror Maid of Massachusetts Avenue" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

The Internet: Giving Dumb People a Voice

I've been pretty busy writing and re-writing the script for my play True Believers, but we finally start rehearsals today, so I'm pretty excited. Despite the gazillion pages I've written/re-written in the past week, I knew I still had a post due for Five By Five Hundred. I ended up scouring the YouTube comments on my Glenn Beck/J. Jonah Jameson mash-up video and found one particularly vocal YouTube commenter, whose breathtaking (really, the only word for it) diatribe I mined to create the "Found Poem" that makes up this week's entry. It does go a little past the 500 word mark — but it was all too priceless to pass up.

Oh, and also, please note: I did no copyediting of any kind. I simply add line breaks for emphasis. The text appears entirely [sic].

I'd like to take a moment to thank the Internet for providing ignorance with a voice, and providing the rest of us with a constant stream of entertainment and funny pictures of animals.

"Race and the Internet, According to Hogwild19100" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

Things We Don't Talk About

Just a short post for today, as I've just started on the workshop for my new play True Believers. But I was able to find a little bit of time to knock out a quick poem for Five By Five Hundred titled "Things We Don't Talk About." It's about things. That we don't talk about. Like that.

"Things We Don't Talk About" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

Bugs Bugs Bugs

I visited my parents' house in Connecticut over the weekend, and enjoyed the blooming of my dad's freshly landscaped backyard while I caught up on some writing. At one point, I looked out to the yard, and never before have I seen so many inchworms in one place at the same time. I can't even tell you what their silk was attached to; I'm pretty sure they were falling straight from the sky, maybe riding on clouds or something. Either way, it was a provocative image, one that inspired this week's post on Five By Five Hundred. Enjoy!

"Inches Away!" on FiveByFiveHundred.com

The Catcall of Cthulhu

Continuing with my theme of bizarrely humorous erotic encounters, my latest post on FiveByFiveHundred.com explores the fine between making love and being consumed by 10th dimensional evil alien pre-human tentacular Lovecraftian beast-Gods. Mostly inspired by this picture:

Hee-hee. Silly HP Lovecraft.

"Cthulhu Do You Love?" on FiveByFiveHundred.com