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To see the graceful
design of his child’s stumbles
marks true father’s pride.

Paranthropus appeared in his remains
a southern man robust in cheek and jaw
who gathered nourishment from nature’s grains
and picking leaves and nuts then ate them raw.

His face did not seem gentle, yet contained
an intricate design to fit a niche
untouched by wilder creatures that remained
a coarsened treasure only in his reach.

But in his teeth, the hardest parts he grew,
we see the signs that adaptation, bland,
had led him to eat softer foods to chew
a niche abandoned for sweets close to hand.

Survival of the savory, cusp to root,
the strong nutcracker man was just a fruit.

Read the rest of the story of the soft hard man from Stony Brook.

April was National Poetry Month, which is why I have waited until today to place this sonnet online. After all, the category under which this is placed is called irregular verse, and a sonnet is anything but irregular. I am substituting irregularity in timing for irregularity in form.

A house to die in is the truest kind,
the owner’s spirit sheltered in its heart,
with every passage and chamber designed
to keep the beat of which he is a part.

Except through death, this house cannot be left,
for its beams arching cover and then hide
in shadowed corners histories not bereft
of scenes grown lighter through the bones inside.

Yet, houses are not kept by spirits there,
but through the work of flesh that moving, aches,
and failing in is efforts must prepare
to seek the stranger home eviction makes,

a shade of what its owner once supposed,
a haunting mem’ry of a home foreclosed.

Prairie Home Companion, the radio home of writerly sighing for a country still full of at-home folks who listen to bluegrass in their spare time, is sponsoring a sonnet contest.

Send them a sonnet by midnight tomorrow night, and the staff of Prairie Home Companion will read your sonnet, and if it’s good enough, arrange for it to be read on the air. If yours is the very best sonnet of all, you will win a Sleep Number bed.

Does it seem odd to write a sonnet for a bed? William Shakespeare wrote sonnets, and probably earned money from them somehow, with which he may have bought bread, or a hat, or candles, or a prostitute. It seems more poetic to buy bread, a prostitute, or even a hat from the the proceeds of a poem than a bed. Yet, Prairie Home Companion is sponsored by the Sleep Number bed company, so that’s what they have to offer.

What do you have to offer? Would you offer your sonnet for the chance at a bed? That’s really what you’ll be offering your sonnet for - not a bed, but for the chance to get a bed. The rules of the Prairie Home Companion sonnet contest state: “All entries become the property of Prairie Home Productions and American Public Media and may be read on the air or published in print or electronic form.”

Giving up a poem, especially one so challenging in form as a sonnet, seems more artistic when it is done merely for the chance to have a bed to sleep on, because it suggests the likelihood that most people who enter the contest will surrender their sonnets and not get any bed to sleep on at all, or even a nice letter from Garrison Keillor, or even one of his interns, with a fake signature.

Would you write a sonnet, and then give up ownership of it to a radio show, never to be read on the air, or by anybody else at all, other than your mother perhaps, for the mere hope that you might get a new bed?

If so, what would you choose for the subject of your sonnet?

The call came from Osama, to wit
We must stop cartooning his prophet
We must halt our free speeches
Or he’ll bomb us on beaches
Will we heed the command of a git?

Now come on! Write your own piece of verse
On the news from our grand universe
It’s important to share
We really won’t care
If your try is for better or worse

Starlight sends us this Bush Haiku tonight:

Anachronism,
Bush is too long from age old
To burn as Voice God

Proposal: Search terms are the short-form poetry of our age.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Beams are exposed in
a Unitarian church
by falling plaster.

I walked along the shore in Long Beach,
California,
watching the sandpipers probe
the edge of the water for edible debris
when I came upon a find of my own.
The remains of a bright yellow gallon jug
of some kind of spray or oil,
for keeping insects out of a kitchen
or lubricating a car,
had been abandoned,
washed out
into the ocean,
then cast back upon the shore,
made fragile by the sun,
its bottom and sides broken away.
The cap was still in place,
with the words: Inner Quality Seal.

Merrill Lynch loses
ten billion but need not fear
life on the streets in winter.

A slick promise of
a meal of nutritive fruit
for hair, hanging dead.

Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet

Eating her curds and whey,

When along came a spider (a Ron Paul insider)

Well, what did the spider say?

It’s a terribly juvenile video clip, but if I don’t let Junior out every once in a while, he makes a mess of things at cocktail parties.

Three kittens got spacey,
and supported Mukasey,
Then they began to cry,
“Oh Voter dear,
We sadly fear,
Our scruples we have lost.”

“He supported torture
And what is much more, sir
He rejected rule of law.
We could have said no
But he smiled at us so…
Hey — could you give us some cash?”

What! Lost your scruples,
Is that really trueples?
Then you shall have no cash!
Oh no, Oh no, Oh no,
No, you shall have no cash.

The three little kitties,
Got wound up in bitties,
And they began to cry,
“Oh, voter dear,
See here, see here,
Now our scruples we have found!”

“We agree with you mostly
In speeches we’ll get boastly
And like liberals we will sound.
Oh, sure, it’s too late
But hey, now we sound great
So — can we have your vote?”

What! Found your scruples,
Is that really trueples?
But when there’s a vote again,
Will you ditch them like that
On the drop of a hat?
Tell me, what will you do then?

“Dear dear dear, well well well,
It’s too early to tell,”
The kittens began to squirm.
“We will reserve the right
to do as we might
With the turning of the worm.
But purr, purr, purr,
Oh, let us have your vote.”

What! Too early to tell?
You just might as well
sell your soul out in the square.
If your scruples you’ll ditch
At an impulse or twitch
We can tell you no longer care.

You bad fickle cats,
It is time; that is that.
You shall not have my vote.
Oh no, Oh no, Oh no,
You shall not have my vote.

The problem that the close political allegiance between Rudolph Giuliani and Bernard Kerik poses for Giuliani’s presidential campaign is so straightforward that it can be expressed in the short form poem of a haiku:

Giuliani can’t
give us a clean government
with friends like Kerik.

Kerik has been caught in a web of corruption going back to his days in New York City government as Giuliani’s police commissioner. He is now under indictment for wire and mail fraud, lying on a mortgage application, lying on an application to become leader of the Department of Homeland Security, and tax fraud.

(Source: New York Times, November 9, 2007)