Brandon Rogers, almost as good as Brandon Rogers

Artificial light, almost as good as sunlight

Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. I wrote this May 19, 2006. I will most likely rewrite it soon as part B of my book Words Cannot Express. The “B,” of course, stands for book.

My parents had driven to the mobile home dealer in 1971, my father prepared to select a two-bedroom unit from the few models that were available. He would place the unit on a small lot near Lake Texoma, and it would serve as accommodations for their weekend fishing trips.

As they drove, my mother became increasingly nervous, she would tell me years later. She knew she had to tell him something, and she had to tell him right then because the thing she had to tell him affected everything, but most immediately, it affected their purchase of a mobile home.

She didn’t want to tell him. Their children, a 15-year-old boy and a nearly 14-year-old girl, were becoming young adults. In just a few years, they would go off to college, and my father and mother would be alone again.

She must have seen that future clearly — as if time could be measured in inches, one inch equaling one year, and in four short inches, less than the length of her hand measured from the tip of her middle finger to the point where palm and wrist meet, it would be just the two of them driving back and forth to the mobile home. Just the two of them slipping into the boat then slipping the boat into the water.

Just the two of them catching fish and being photographed for the flimsy newspaper published by the lake community. In those photos, they stretched their open-mouthed catch out in front of them, and smiled. The captions of those photos contained their names, the city where they lived, and the length of their catch, measured in inches.

She had to tell him now because they weren’t going to need a two-bedroom unit after all. And if they bought a two-bedroom that day, then she broke the news later, he would be even more pissed off. So she spoke up.

We’re going to need a three-bedroom.

He didn’t understand.

How could he? Twelve years earlier, one of her eggs was fertilized but didn’t make its way out of her fallopian tube. It implanted itself there in the tube, and she lay on the couch in terrible pain — the doctor said there was nothing they could do for her and that waiting was the only course of action — until her fallopian tube burst, terminating the pregnancy. It left her scarred and nearly killed her. She was told she’d never be able to have another child.

So she had to walk him through it, explaining to him that, somehow, more than a decade later, and right at that very moment, a life was growing inside her. She was three months pregnant.

Her own mother had done the same thing, gotten pregnant long after her son and daughter were born. When she found out, she went to visit relatives in another part of the state, stayed with them for several months and returned home nine months pregnant, belly sticking out to here, as my mother put it when recounting the story, holding her hand nearly two feet in front of her stomach for exaggeration.

My grandmother didn’t have to say anything to her husband when she returned. As soon as he set eyes on her, he knew he was about to be a father, again. It was my mother she was pregnant with — my mother whose existence was kept from my grandfather until it was too late for him to put up a fuss about it.

Perhaps my mother would have done the same thing when she was pregnant with me, let herself start to show, let people, including my father, come to their own conclusions. But she couldn’t do that because she knew there’d be a baby on those lake trips, and that baby would need a little room of its own. She certainly didn’t want the crib in their bedroom.

My father didn’t react the way she thought he would. He wasn’t upset at all at the prospect of spending another 18 years of his life raising a child, of hauling a baby to and from the lake. The diapers, the crying and the formula. He was thrilled, probably much happier about the recent turn of events than she was. She hadn’t planned on any more diapers, crying and formula. She didn’t like the thought of their lives together not beginning in earnest until she was 56, and he was 60.

But as he gathered her in his arms and hugged her, perhaps touching her belly, I know she felt relieved, and I bet she felt like she had the potential to be loved by him more than ever before.

Squeetle!

Take a look at my poems as well as the entire issue.

Also, go read this interview with Bruce Covey.

OK, lemme give you a little sneak preview of the interview, just so you’ll be inclined to put forth the effort of clicking through to read it. This question from interviewer Reb Livingston pertains to the title of Bruce’s latest book, Elapsing Speedway Organism.

Reb: Elapsing Speedway Organism. What the hell is that supposed to mean and why should anyone care?

Bruce: Hmmm, let’s see. I’m not quite sure how to answer, so I’ve listed five possible responses below.

A. Elapsing — the passing of time. Speedway — a place in which cars race. Organism — a life form. Everyone cares about words!

B. “Elapsing” is an abstract gerund involving time. “Speedway” is a specific noun (although in this case it’s an adjective) involving space. “Organism” stands for the life within that space/time, thus implying sequence & narrative. Who wouldn’t care about time & space & life?

See? It’s wicked funny. Go read the whole thing already to find out Bruce’s other responses to Reb! What are you hanging around here for? Click, click! (Not to be confused with “Clit, clit!” or “Tilc, tilc!”)

(As an aside, I always misread Elapsing Speedway Organism as Contracting Speedy Orgasm, which also would have made a good title.)

I.
Open, warm
and pour.
Ask for guts
or skin —
something to fill,
to praise.

II.
Lips I bottle.
Plates I lick.

III.
Sit slowly,
my moistening swoon,
my comforting steak.

IV.
You are making men
pop with warming,
with their stew.

V.
Most of them are you,
with different chests.

VI.
Down with wine,
with them.

I edge
from them
to you.

(From them: their.)

VII.
Bones, lips
and you:
the want-groan
of the wanted.

* * *

Written from a Poetry Collaborative prompt to take the words from someone else’s poem and write a new poem using only those words. I used Blythe’s words, of course.

I’m working on a new joint, which I hope to unveil soon. (It makes this place look more than a little shoddy.) I’m so excited, I want to squeetle!* Here’s a sneak peek:

*Squeetle (skwēt’l) n. 1. something terribly cute that makes a little squeaky noise when you squeeze it too hard 2. something that likes to be squeezed in this fashion 3. something that runs around squeaking all the time. v. 1. the act of squeezing a squeetle. Get over here, or I’m gonna squeetle you.**

**I totally made this word up.

*Sprigs was my first blog, which most of you never laid eyes on. The entry is from Oct. 31, 2005.

We all know them. They drive on our roads and work in our offices. They are in the grocery store, in public parks, at the library, in our classrooms and online. They are the people we encounter on a daily basis who deserve to be put in the spanking machine.

What is the spanking machine, you ask? It’s a fair question. I first learned about the spanking machine in college, when one of my friends was writing a final paper in which she compared Darwin’s Origin of the Species with Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. I don’t remember the specifics of her comparison, except that it sucked: She wrote the paper without reading a single page of Origin of the Species. (I just didn’t have time to read it, she told me. She had all semester, I should add.) Then, when she received a “D” on the paper, she had her mother call the professor to complain about the unfair grade her daughter had gotten.

The professor was outraged. She immediately called for my friend to be “put in a spanking machine.” It is a concept that I have carried with me since that day, and it’s gotten me through some tough times. Whenever I see someone behaving badly, I think of the spanking machine and imagine that person in it. I envision it as a device that floats somewhere off in the ether. It’s sort of like Kansas in The Wizard of Oz; you just close your eyes and wish someone there, and poof, they materialize inside the machine.

They are strapped in of course. You wouldn’t want them to fall out and sustain any injuries other than the spanking. After all, they haven’t committed a crime for which they should be punished under the law. They’ve just cut you off on your way to work or double dipped their chips in the communal vat of salsa. Or maybe they’ve done something more subtle, such as interrupt your story so many times you forgot what the hell point you were trying to make. Or even subtler still — perhaps they’ve looked at you askance as you passed by or they’ve screwed up their face in judgment when you told them a story about your pet hamster.

Whatever it is that got them there, they deserve it. These people simply can’t keep getting away with these sorts of things with impunity. So, strapped in the machine, they receive their punishment. The whole process is automated, enabling you to get back to what you were saying, eating or doing when the infraction occurred. The appropriate number of spanks is delivered, and the machine chooses a spanking level that fits the situation: anything from a light pat to a full-on paddling.

After they are plopped from the machine back into the real world, you can be assured these folks, with their newly chaffed rear ends, won’t be bothering you again. At least not any time soon. I speak from experience. I was paddled once in grade school for pulling a boy’s chair out from under him. I didn’t reveal to the principal that I was only trying to pull the boy’s chair closer to me because I loved him and I wanted him close by. I didn’t wish him any injury at all. But that paddling was a message sent loud and cracklingly clear: Do not love boys, and if you do, don’t pull them close to you, the wood of the paddle told me in its rhythmic staccato.

No, those pesky Spankables won’t be bothering you anymore. Not if you put them in the spanking machine.

.

So check this out, Dawg: 100 Percent Honest Day, the Blog.

I have no idea when the next one will be or what form it will take, but it’s so obvious that we need a next one.

So sign up now. It’s easy. Just send an e-mail to 100percenthonestday (at) gmail (dot) com and I will add you to the list of participants and have the monkey servants send you the badge code, if you don’t already have it.

Let the truth-tellers unite! wOOt!