Confessions of an Anti-Creator

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Canadian poet, Elaine Stirling, humourous verse, narrative poetry, parody, rhyming couplets

~~rhyming couplets, ad nauseam, for the reasonably mature~~

I’m chewing on a worry bone, sucking out the gristle
for the grand epiphany, precursing my epistle
that is sure to congregate a fascinating crowd
when I lay out all that’s wrong, particularly loud.

I have such wondrous insights, can gurgitate the worst
of everything that’s going on. I burn to be the first,
reminding you I knew it, so you should have just come here
to get your dose of what to think and maximize your fear.

The secret to this day and age is, always be prepared.
Mistrust could be your greatest friend, if only you would dare
to look askance at happiness and hum-di-dums who share
the best of what they see, as if the rest of us would care.

You want a good analogy? Imagine you’re a cloud.
Me, I’m silver iodide, the element that wowed
the scientists in Cold War years who wanted to make rain.
The army paid them millions. Corporations took the gain.

You’re up there floating, nice and light, dreaming of your honey;
I zap a gram of iodide round about your tummy.
Suddenly, you’re feeling weird, maybe even crummy—
start gaining weight & running late, worried about money.

The chemical reaction of my presence from the get-go
will free you like a laxative, and something has to let go.
You’ll look around and wonder who just shat on your parade,
who turned the traffic lights to red and stopped you getting laid.

If I have now convinced you that my worldview is mighty,
we’ll jointly whip up hurricanes of lefty against righty.
From here on, all I have to do is throw you little bones
of breaking news & random blues, I’ve mastered all the tones.

Antagonists, the task is ours to muddy up your story,
distract you from your purpose, keep you boiling, feeling sorry.
Well, now I’ve tinkered long enough to guarantee a shower.
Confetti? Hail? Precipitates are all within your power.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2017
The wonderful image of a mad scientist comes from Designzz.

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Ode to the Valued Customer

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Elaine Stirling, form poetry, humourous verse, parody, The Corporate Storyteller, villanelle

A Villanelle

All I need do is rush you and bore you,
tool die and stamp, units sold, merely digitize
and score you, dear valued customer, woo-hoo!

Smoothly and daily, I frazzle your view
with photoshopped beauty & health, hypnotize.
All I need do is rush you and bore you

with numbers and flow charts, I know what to do
to poison your innate good sense, then to sanitize
and score you, dear valued customer, woo-hoo!

Persuading, dead easy! I’ve built a whole slew
of doubt traps to enslave, victimize.
All I need do is rush you and bore you.

As long as you never slow down to ask who
is in charge, I’ll continue to aim custard pies
and score you, dear valued customer, woo-hoo!

Beyond this cheap dazzle, a market true
thrives where I can’t push in with baubles and lies.
All I need do is rush you and bore you
and score you, dear valued customer, woo-hoo!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014

Tax Season Sonnet

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comic verse, Elaine Stirling, parody, poetry, Shakespearean sonnet, things I can almost say straight-faced, wordplay

Fully tend to that which lies upon your
plate, no better, worse than any other
task. Befriend the picayune and franc d’or
tacks & bytes of commerce, and don’t bother
to swell up for any cause but love, since
indignation only speeds deduction
of the ultimate variety. Mince
the words you cannot claim; calm in action,
sort expenses and receipts of kindness.
Every payment you send out returns ten
fold in revenue. Learn to audit less
by grudge & more by comedy, so when
tax season comes around, in filing
you’ll see, nothing done with love is taxing.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014

Triviotics

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baggage comes in many forms, Elaine Stirling, enjoy this sunny day, humour for the sake of humour please, I'm wearying mightily of tags, neologues, not everything is deep & fraught with meaning, parody, poetry, poetry for word junkies, portmanteau, The Corporate Storyteller

A homage
like pottage
has a huffy
sort of sound.
An homage
like fromage
is more cheesy.

Portmanteaus
on the other hand
by emphasis give
the sense of a busman’s
foot, except they’re
baggage, which is
how I would define
the urge to spell
the word for blended
words, portmanteaux—
a triviotic bit of truly
nothing much.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

Kit, my Kaboodle

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authenticity, brave new leadership, duality, enjoyment, free verse, honouring feelings, humour, individuality, intention, light and dark, lightness of being, my voice is my voice, nagual, parody, poetry, satire, self-importance, self-pity, The Corporate Storyteller, uniqueness, vibrational reality

I have a caboose
at the end of my train
with an imp that enjoys
thumbing noses and moons
at the sun when a new dawn
arises my eyes need to blink
and the imp sees his chance
and he hangs from the tail
where he shouts at the passing
terrain, whatcha you gonna do
now, pretty boy?

My imp’s name is Kit, and I do
try to shush him, though not very
much ‘cause he’s got the touch of
a jester at heart, and my brain with
its lore is a bit of a bore, and my
soul isn’t whole unless I can
laugh at the bridges we burn
and the tracks we lay down
and pretend when we crash
that they weren’t our
own handiwork.

The thing is, we all
have to run on the steam
that we bring, and if mine
blows too hot or too cold in
your face, and yours makes
me yawn, we could still show
some grace—not go stupid nutty
all over the place, when our tracks
must diverge. I have no intention
of leaving sweet Kit at the station
or anywhere else for I love how
how he thinks and he sees and
he laughs—he’s divine. Yes,
Kit, my kaboodle, is mine!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of caboose from http://www.bbcrc.org

Neighbours: A Creepy Little Horror Poem

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a bit of silliness, Elaine Stirling, eleven syllable lines, hendecasyllabic, humour, minding one's business, my crush on Alfred Hitchcock, nosiness, parody, perception, poetic justice, poetry

Those people that keep to themselves, curtains drawn,
have you seen? Never say where they go when they
smile, say hello. Something funny going on,
you can tell ‘cause he walks slow and sneaky, way
after dark, doesn’t smoke—what’s the point? He should
stay in the house, it’s not safe in the park, and
the woman, her arms black and blue with tattoos
so the bruises won’t show, mark my words! No good
ever comes when you let loose your guard. A hand
will reach in, snatch it all. Don’t sing me the blues
when your house crashes down. You heard it here first!
…
Ka-ta-boom!

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image from the 1954 Hitchcock film, “Rear Window”

Refunding Fire II: A Septime

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brave new business leadership, Elaine Stirling, form poetry, humour, metaphysics, narrative poem, parody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, septime, The Corporate Storyteller, the Power of Three, tonal realities, vibrational reality

“For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”

(The first installment of the 3-part narrative poem, “Refunding Fire: A Sestina” can be found here.)

~~~

The tone read, you have reached the end
of conversation. Greater Diesis now says
you may proceed. With what, wha, wh…? Even
echo was giving up in my spiraling effort
to return fire to the Customer Service
nether gods with no hind end in sight
to guide me, I could only grope and hope.

Welcome to twenty-three degrees. We hope
you have enjoyed the fright. The effort
to speak without speech, to view sans sight,
I don’t care what anybody says—
the jar of fire surged—here resides the end
of lies! Don’t try that again, mortal. Disservice
the gods, what, you think you can get even?

The place was neither hot nor cold. Effort
to think sucked away out the bitter/sweet end
of where I used to have fingers and toes. Hope,
Pandora, last thing in the box, in dreary service
to hubby, Epimethius, fun-killer, myth says,
but do we listen? If none of us can even
fathom truth, what’s the diff, hind or foresight?

Sightless, imagination had come to my service.
Three surrounded me, only numbers uneven
seemed to rule in these chambers. No effort
conjured a macaw with man’s face; the sight
of Diotima, Socrates’s teacher, gave me hope;
the third, unsmiling old man, set of keys, says,
Call me Rock. How’s it feel to reach the end?

Pyth had warned me of the trap. Whoever says
the stupid earthly things, keep in your sight.
I nudged the urn forward. We’ve come to the end
of uses for this fire. We cook with microwave, hope
that eating raw will slow down time, even
though we must know better. Can you service

my request? Three pinwheels spun, a sight
that made my ears pop. Too few carry hope
for mankind; this once mighty fire can’t service
like it used to. Fire power, huh! You can’t even
imagine—I shut my no-mouth in an effort
to remember, this is a place of forgetting, End
of all ends, who cares what a paltry human says?

The guy named Rock jangles his keys. Even
Macaw Man rattles at that noise. Service,
by custom, requires exchange, calmly says
the priestess Diotima. To meet your end
you must give up the means. This no-sight
of humans creates and sustains no hope,
though to your credit, you are surrendering effort.

To hope or pray I can convey the sight
of fire’s service vanishing is beyond my effort
though goddess says, firmly, there is no end.

~~~

Please stay tuned, if you are enjoying this,
for the conclusion of “Refunding Fire”.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of Pythagorean comma can
be found at breakfornews.com

A Note on Form: The septime is a poetry form of my own devising. It consists of seven, seven-line stanzas with a concluding three-line envoi, 52 lines in total. As with its medieval predecessor, the sestina, a selection of end words (that don’t have to rhyme) repeat in differing order. While the sestina creates a spiraling pattern, the septime offers an experience of randomness, disorder—even, depending on your theme, chaos.

To create the pattern grid, number your first stanza end-word choices as 1234567. Subsequent stanzas appear as:
2nd: 7462153
3rd: 4175236
4th: 5346721
5th: 2617345
6th: 6753412
7th: 3521674
Final 3-line envoi:
1st line: 76
2nd line: 543
3rd line: 21

Refunding Fire: A Sestina

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brave new business leadership, discord, dissonance, Elaine Stirling, Epimetheus, foresight, form poetry, hindsight, humor, integration, narrative poetry, parody, Prometheus, Pythagorean comma, sacred geometry, sestina, The Corporate Storyteller, the unresolved

“For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted and at two or three removes, when we know least about it.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay, “The Poet”

Volte-face: This being a labyrinthine fragment of a convoluted map, while true to form, lies, by necessity, three removes from the title’s premise and cannot, therefore, guarantee reprieve or escape from situations that exist or may have existed prior to the reader approaching this work. Re-reading may or may not be of further assistance.

My task began, as many do, with meaning well;
some learn by sight, others by repetition of sound,
I, of latter bent, having been for so long blanketed
had not heard the Titan who stole fire has a twin,
dull-witted thunk, Epimetheus, who goes about
unsetting fires, never quite managing but bad enough

that a magus named Pythagoras saw fit enough
to ask for volunteers none too bright who might, well,
consent to go to hell, and since I’d had about
enough of people’s whines & mockery, the sound
of someplace deeper held appeal. Have you a twin?
Pyth asked, before I signed. Nope, just me! Blanketed

thus with solitude and ignorance of how wet-blanketed
our species had agreed to be, I brought enough
of twinéd rope and kit to wend my way along twin
spirals that descend to nether studios so well
entrained in resonance—this is hell?—that no sound
can be heard and no thing can be talked about.

You’d think in such a place—Xibalba, Hades—about
which we are warned from infancy, still blanketed,
there’d be no sights, no complementary sound
apart from souls on fire, crying out, “Enough!”
This home to deviants where not quite perfect d…well
were monochord in their deploring of the hindsight twin,

brother of Prometheus. What comes before twin
thinking, Foresight, matters most, yet you fuss about
the done and did, as if the world had darned well
better know how miffed you are! Now you’re blanketed
in afterthought, fires erupting everywhere, enough
to make you think there is, or that you’re in, Hell! Sound

familiar? They were looking straight at me, their sound
of perfect fifth, just major third, while a trepidatious twin
inside my head was twanging. I do not know enough
of theory musical, although I paused when talk about
harmonic ratios to Mayan myth conjoined. Fire blanketed
creates the Smoking Mirror, Pythagoras knows this well.

Their harmonies were sounding off, as if cacophony that lay about
Prometheus’s twin multi-hatched with them. Already over-blanketed
with enough—no, too much data, I could not see things faring well.

~~~

The volte-face, about face, disclaimer, recant that began this sestina I wrote last, so it looks, in Epimetheal hindsight, like two more episodes will follow—not necessarily in sestina format. I hope something happens; I’ve never tried refunding fire before. Nonetheless, while this narrative awaits further unfolding, there are many embedded clues for the adventurous traveler who may have embarked on his/her own explorations.

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of Pythagorean comma from
Overtone Music Network

Decrastinators’ Workplay Song

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brave new business leadership, Elaine Stirling, frustration, humour, Law of Attraction, life is supposed to be fun, neologues, parody, poetry, procrastination, The Corporate Storyteller, time management, vibrational reality, wordplay

One is now, soon
is never, later ate
by alligator. Crock is
that which says I will
and after while, an
other while, and yet
another, other while
doesn’t do the thing
or things you’ve
kindly asked—or
maybe not—the
croc, you see,
makes promises
but doesn’t ever
really ever do
the thing you want
them most to do
the way you would
have done the
thing if you had
done the thing
yourself. Boom!

Now crastinating’s
no big deal, for time
in time when time
is right will furnish
all, but what I’m
anti in the pro of
all procrastinators’
“Whoa!…” is how
they make the
someday that is
never any one day
rudely push away
the fun that comes
with every sun day,
place of rest is here
today (the sun came
up, uh-huh, it did!)
and here is where
Creation sees the
best of who and
what we are: I’m
number One and
so are you and
she and he, but
what and when
and how and
whether, all that
stuff is up to me
and only me, not
any of those
others.

The bottom line
is this: I do not
have to wait and
stomp and snuff
to start again—
Procrastinate, you
are and ever will be
late, you make a
really lousy date—
I’m starting now
without you,
“Bye!”

~~~

Procrastinate: from Latin, pro (in favour of) + crastinus (tomorrow)

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
Image of skipping from Class May, 2010
at foothillforce.org

Warplay, Wordplay, where to hang the Swordplay?

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battle of the sexes, creativity, Elaine Stirling, humor, narrative poetry, parody, taking oneself less seriously, The Corporate Storyteller, vibrational reality

READER ALERT: The following poem contains adult content and urological references, and is only marginally intended for the easily offended.

Some poems are bridges
some poems are bombs, not
as in duds but incendiary
gauntlets thrown down
in melee, and often picked
up by well-meaning neophytes
who love to deplore that they’re
walking through valleys where
angels keep score.

High dudgeon, low dudgeon,
piques in between, the wars
of the poets have been waging
since Adam showed Eve
what he wears on his sleeve—
this was after the snake—but
she couldn’t see through
the veil of tears till she’d
cried herself out, and now
it is Adam who weeps and
she who is trying to peel off
the heart and tuck it back
in where it won’t get so
railed, so bludgeoned
and peed on.

The wars of the poets are
God’s mini-screen, a virtual
means during rounds of good
care to view the perplexities,
confounding vexities, soupçons
of friendship and rhymes
that put sex at ease.

Lord help the butcher,
the baker or thief who
wanders unknown into
realms of the poet
because all that he
thinks that he didn’t
believe will magnify,
tighten and give no
reprieve until he
accepts that every
arousal of anger
and spleen that he
felt so obliged to
avenge in extremis
has a physical
counterpart down
near the—

gals, if you think
you’re above all
that horseplay, that
poets exist for the
one, two, three, four
play, I’m sure you
will have an enjoyable
ride, but the poet
he writes for the
moon and the sky,
so prepare to be
trampled, or else
learn the craft; in
addition to joy, it will
make things much
easier when you think
you are seeing yourself
in the poems he wrote
all those times he
was pissed, and
now all he wants
is a satellite dish.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013
–image of crossed swords
from Roblox