Yeti 3

About time. The third issue of Yeti is out and it is excellent.

I bring good news

Otherwise Known as Rambini the Great wrote this column
in The Stranger in April in which he posed this sad question:
What happens when you're presented with cold, hard evidence that the comedy you grew up loving simply isn't funny?

I've yet to share his exact experience but recall all too well my letdown the last time I watched M*A*S*H. Ouch. Maybe if they could edit out that lafftrack.

But, as the title of this post alerted you, I bear good news! The Far Side is funny! I'd say "funny again" but unlike the shows Sean bemoans, The Far Side was always funny. It's just that there
was way too much exposure. I believe that's referred to as "overexposure." In my college dorm it was common to come across a room door covered entirely in Far Side clippings. Man, was that a treat! You got to kill five minutes chuckling! The problem was that the kids would never rotate the selection and, thirty on this door, forty on that door...soon you'd read the same one fifty times. Add to that all the tee-shirts and birthday cards and, before long, I wouldn't have stepped over a Tri Delt to look at another recontextualized viking. Not that The Far Side went away. In fact my bored feelings towards it had a few years to get lukewarmer, thanks to the Page a Day calendar Dup's parents gave him year after unbeliveble year. The defintion of desperation at the Dump? Dying for a Dilbert calendar.

With Gary Larson retired the Far Side was pretty much gone from my life.
But then--you can see this coming--a few weeks ago at work one of those cheapo perfect-for-stockings-sized colletions everyone got for Christmas back in the '80's showed up at work, just one more in a series of random volumes that appear when you got a lot of mentally ill people who aren't shy about digging where I wouldn't think to dig (This week also turned up Allan Stein by Matthew Stadler and Don't Pee on My Leg and Tell Me it's Raining by Judge Judy). Bored and wary, I flipped through it. And it was funny! The Far Side is funny! Again! I laughed at every cartoon, and laughed even harder with the joy of having my long lost friend back. I'd read them all before, of course, but enough time had passed that they seemed fresh as ever. This stuff is classic, timeless. What a weird, happy feeling. Maybe this means after a decade or two I'll be able to return to The Simpsons. One can only hope.

Poem Eight

After some delay
Here's poem eight
Let me know what you think.
Thanks.

MADURAI

Through grit
of blurred absolutes,

through moonlit soot settled
on certain Western eyes,
barnacled in stucco deities,

the temple-complex towers at Madurai become
Mars’ Notre Dame shaken upside-down and dipped
in impossible paints,

a thousand of the most forgotten, flat Earth
dropped-off Catholic saints, heads
sucked through their own stigmata, emerging

movie monster-hued in gargoyle asanas.
A scimitar for each new arm,
their eyes cross in that trembling, petrified

gratitude usually reserved for
just-seduced fourteen year old boys,
or resurrected lard rolling in mud.

Tonight their tongues blister asterisks, throb
insomnia, still blue
wary of the food, and wary

of the moonlight’s intentions
for the Golden Lotus Tank
where actual gods

once tossed to judge
by a simple floating test the poems
of the Tamil Sangam.

And where the sunken,
failed verses still disintegrate rejection
molecular, eternal.

Lotus-shaped on the map, this town
attaches smoke roots to the sagging sky’s
bottom swirl

of bats, the saints’
newly Hindu ears hearing even
sonar as mantra.

The bats’ low swooping taunts a patchy mutt
into an ever-constricting-circles
limping of her own hunger

that eventually twinges
dark-distressed ripples
every angle and alley of Madurai.

No dropped chapatti, not one thrown chapatti, no handful of rice.

By morning the town’s invisible
white jeweled heart
will have diffused in a murky sputter’s mud-shot mist,

a new obscurity
slurring up the intersections
in charred hair tangles.

Even the traffic wardens
softened and torn, black
straw, food for bulls.

Right on, Rigo!

Lorcaloca just posted some great news...Rigoberto Gonzalez's second
poetry book, Other Fugitives and Other Strangers, has just been
accepted by Tupelo Press.

And, the dude just got awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in non-fiction. Go, go, Rigo!