I’ve made it my business for the last couple of years to write stories in a couple of lines. You have to have pregnant thoughts. The words have to do double and triple duty. There must be ambiguity, hints of things around the corner you can’t spare the text to explain, but not just plain obscurity. You can’t waste time. Since there can be no filler between the important stuff, any filler you rely on takes the place of important stuff and the attempt fails.
Paul McCartney is supposed to be a kind of amiable dunce to John Lennon’s sophisticated artiste. A music hall tuba player gone global. If so, then what the hell is this? It’s worthy of Yeats or Joyce, and neither of them could play the radio.
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been; Lives in a dream Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door; Who is it for?
All the lonely people Where do they all come from? All the lonely people Where do they all belong?
Father MacKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear; No one comes near. Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there; What does he care?
All the lonely people Where do they all come from? All the lonely people Where do they all belong?
Ah, look at all the lonely people
Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name; Nobody came Father MacKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave; No one was saved
All the lonely people Where do they all come from? All the lonely people Where do they all belong?
“The creator, the artist, the extraordinary man, is merely the ordinary man intensified: a person whose life is sometimes lifted to a high pitch of feeling and who has the gift of making others share his excitement. The ordinary man lives by the creative spirit. He thinks in images and dreams in fantasy; he lives by poetry. Yet he seems to distrust it. He clings to the notion that a poet is a queer and incompetent creature, a daydreaming ne’er-do-well, an eccentric trying to escape the business of the everyday world, a soft and coddled soul.
Almost the opposite is true. History is the record of men who were not only poets but workers, men of action, discoverers, dreamers and doers. Sir Walter Raleigh’s exploration of Guiana and other expeditions in the New World brought him fame and envy. Sir Philip Sidney was a soldier whose gallantry on the field of battle is a deathless story. Geoffrey Chaucer, “father of English poetry,” was a diplomat and secret agent on the king’s business in Europe. John Milton was Cromwell’s fighting foreign secretary.
Nor have poets failed in labor and industry. Ben Jonson was a bricklayer. Robert Herrick was a jeweler. Robert Burns was a plowboy. William Blake designed, printed, and sold his own books. William Morris manufactured furniture. Long before he became known as the greatest American poet of his time, Robert Frost worked as a farmer, a bobbin boy in a Massachusetts mill, a shoemaker, and a teacher in country schools.” -Louis Untermeyer
The Kitchen Chimney
Builder, in building the little house,
In every way you may please yourself;
But please please me in the kitchen chimney:
Don’t build me a chimney upon a shelf.
However far you must go for bricks,
Whatever they cost a-piece or a pound,
But me enough for a full-length chimney,
And build the chimney clear from the ground.
It’s not that I’m greatly afraid of fire,
But I never heard of a house that throve
(And I know of one that didn’t thrive)
Where the chimney started above the stove.
And I dread the ominous stain of tar
That there always is on the papered walls,
And the smell of fire drowned in rain
That there always is when the chimney’s false.
A shelf’s for a clock or vase or picture,
But I don’t see why it should have to bear
A chimney that only would serve to remind me
Of castles I used to build in air.
The Intertunnel loves police blotters. Lots of newspapers and websites grab mugshots from police websites and get a few jollies looking at the ebb and flow of squalid run-ins with the law. It allows some people to easily find other people to look down their nose at, and so feel better about themselves for no reason other than they’re currently at large. Since every celebrity of every sort is arrested more or less weekly (it’s how they got all celebrified in the first place, sometimes), there’s a luxuriant undergrowth of familiar faces standing in front of a concrete block wall holding up a number in a desultory fashion, too. Those are fun, of course, but they can’t compare to small town police blotters.
I publish the Rumford, Maine police blotter at the Rumford Meteor most every week. It’s notable for the lack of notable crimes, mostly, and the achingly small sums involved in everything. There’s not a lot of poetry to the entries here, and pathos is in short supply;
11/26 – 6:57 PM, Ptl. Miller investigated a gas drive off from a local business. Suspect was located and returned to pay for the gas. No charges.
Its lack of CSI Wherever material is not a detraction for me. Regular people bumping along are interesting. And so it was to fertile ground that reader and commenter Dinah broadcast her suggestion to look into the Bozeman, Montana police blotter. It doesn’t disappoint. It’s got a no-nonsense Jack Webb kind of vibe, with just a hint of Fife:
At 1:20 a.m. a female was found walking down Seventh Avenue wearing pants and a bra. She said that her boyfriend had taken her shirt and kicked her out of the car.
An employee of a Main Street business reported “intoxicated or high” teenagers were approaching store customers. Officers determined the teens were not intoxicated.
A mother called for help after her 3-year-old daughter’s thumb got stuck in the top of a Parmesan cheese container. The girl’s thumb had started turning blue.
An injured ram was reported on the west side of U.S. Highway 191.
Cash register tape that unrolled may have triggered a burglar alarm at a North Seventh Avenue store around 3 a.m.
A man was warned around 4 a.m. about his loud singing as he was walking to his vehicle in a parking lot on East Main Street.
A man got out of his vehicle on North 19th Avenue to yell at another driver around 3 p.m.
A woman reportedly threatened a man on Facebook.
A vehicle stopped in the middle of Springhill Road around 9:30 p.m. with bright lights on belonged to a man looking for his cat.
A caller captured a weasel near Catron Street around 2:30 p.m. A wildlife agent was contacted.
Someone egged a forklift parked near Cedar Wood Circle and Thatch Wood Lane over the weekend.
A Montana Rail Link employee asked deputies to keep an eye out for anyone trying to steal grain out of derailed rail cars near Heeb Road until they unload them Wednesday.
Three intoxicated males were “flipping the bird” to passing vehicles on Tracy Avenue at 1 a.m.
Someone cut the tail off of a man’s horse on Cameron Bridge Road.
A 20-year-old female was arrested for stealing sandwiches from a business on 11th Avenue.
A group of teenagers hanging around a construction site on West Lamme Street around noon weren’t doing anything; they were just hanging around.
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