Massive Vague Bird Rises Through Lamescape

Ha! No poem exists to accompany this drawing, you must trust your mind to provide you with one. Be sure and post it in the comments if it happens to be particularly remarkable.

TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Dylan Thomas

We are the dark deniers, let us summon
Death from a summer woman,
A muscling life from lovers in their cramp,
From the fair dead who flush the sea
The bright-eyed worm on Davy's lamp,
And from the planted womb the man of straw.

--from "The Boys of Summer"

It is a tremendous regret of mine that we weren't able to devote an entire month to celebrating the Welshman--our Dylan Thomas+ Crazy Dick Weeklong Interpretive Extravaganza hardly scratched the surface of his fathomless work. Anyway, this illustration should go a long way toward repairing that deficit: here we have a planted womb that has sprouted a baby tree, while the clever occupant of said womb offers up the classic anti-evolution straw man: if humans are descended from worms, then why can't I regenerate my hoe-chopped wang? Indeed! Illustrious refutation!

I Dare You to Name Your Band This

Today in the shower I spent a disbelieving half-hour reminiscing about my early William Jesus Tell phase, during which I was obsessed with drawing parallels between God the Father and William Tell. The poems would go a little something like this: Adam, stooped under the weight of the apple on his head*, passes the apple to Jesus, who accepts the burden, knowing full well that at some point in the future his Father will be put to the test, and will be asked to shoot the apple off his son Jesus' head**, but his father, understanding what is required of him by humankind and history, will decide to shoot the arrow into his face instead***, which maneuver will knock the apple off anyway when Jesus falls insensible and bleeding to the ground! Nicely done, William God the Father Tell!

*Get it?
**Zing!
***Minimal liminal sin of the world, POOF!

TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Hart Crane

*Collapses with exhaustion* See...how much...I love you? How I...am devoted? See also...how much...free time I have?

There you go. I couldn't stand the thought of giving up on my little catchword crabs, so I steeled my doughy body and went once more into the fray. I thought maybe if I drew it very quickly and very simply, Painter would be tricked into keeping it. So here we have a rudimentary Hart Crane interpretation, drawn in approximately eleven minutes, featuring dry grassy groins, which are meanwhile patrolled by crabs bearing catchwords related to the underbrush's dry groin problem. Did that all come across? This line, by the way, was taken from O Carib Isle!, which is a virtual treasure trove of source material. There is Satan in it, and comedians, and doubloons--what more could you possibly want?

Corel Painter Is Making Me Cry

By my count, Painter has eaten five drawings of mine so far over the past few weeks, in various stages of completion. It ate the rat-tail baby picture. It ate the lambkin picture. It ate the rug picture twice. In nearly all of these cases I, not being a particularly angry person, just made a horrible noise in my throat like a watchdog and then started over. The notable exception was when it ate my lambkin, which was a thing of unparalleled beauty, and which catastrophe caused me to uncharacteristically dissolve into tears, how ridiculous. Now it has eaten the Hart Crane picture I was drafting, which I had saved at least a dozen times. When I try to open it, it tells me "insufficient disk space," and when I mouse over the link, it tells me that it contains 0 bytes, which is hardly promising. I will try again tomorrow like a good caboose, but I kind of want to murder someone right now.

P.S. I just lost the second version of the Hart Crane picture. I think I'll be going back to Paint for a while until I figure this out.

P.P.S. I just ate an entire bag of croutons to calm myself. It totally worked!

TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Stephen Crane

"It was wrong to do this," said the angel.
"You should live like a flower,
Holding malice like a puppy,
Waging war like a lambkin."

"Not so," quoth the man
Who had no fear of spirits;
"It is only wrong for angels
Who can live like the flowers,
Holding malice like the puppies,
Waging war like the lambkins."

--Stephen Crane

I can't believe we haven't done Stephen Crane yet. He is ideally suited for my purposes, as this entry makes evident. How, after all, does a lambkin wage war? FLUFFY ARROW, obviously!

TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Admiral Farragut

Elegant Choice and I returned yesterday night from a brief impulsive excursion to Savannah, and I was delighted to discover a nasty artistic treat awaiting my arrival. Loyal reader and fruitful contributor Admiral Farragut has taken it upon himself to illustrate a poem of his own brainy making! He writes, "Perhaps not as inspirational as the original, but making up the lack with its down-home, rock-solid practicality:

I know why the caged bird sings.
It's a bird in a cage. It has nothing to do but eat, crap, sing, or die.
Lacking hands or fingers it cannot even take up basket-weaving
or decorating its cage with artistic swirls
of its own feces.

I know why the caged bird sings.
It's the same reason that I watch television."

I must disagree, good Admiral. I find this about a billion times more inspirational than the original. Is it the part about basket-weaving that heartens me so, or the part about crapping and singing? Impossible to say.

TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Patti Smith?

the deer don't do that
she said
the deer don't do that
--Patti Smith

Elegant Choice could not resist the challenge posed by Patti Smith in the latest issue of the New Yorker. His deer is a thing of evocative beauty, but the deer's hulking companion is more of an enigma. As Elegant Choice explained, it was originally intended to be a bear, but since he "could not remember what a bear body looked like," it was instead given amorphous form and a pig face, not to mention an elegant and taxonomically-transcendent wang. Things that the deer don't do include: barbecuing entire live birds, groping monstrous and mythy breasts, and wearing clothes.

TOTAL CHAOS FOREVERMONTH: Wallace Stevens

ON AN OLD HORN

I.
The bird kept saying that birds had once been men,
Or were to be, animals with men's eyes,
Men fat as feathers, misers counting breaths,
Women of a melancholy one could sing.
Then the bird from his ruddy belly blew
A trumpet round the trees. Could one say that it was
A baby with the tail of a rat?
                          The stones
Were violet, yellow, purple, pink. The grass
of the iris bore white blooms. The bird then boomed.
Could one say that he sang the colors in the stones,
False as the mind, instead of the fragrance, warm
With sun?
    In the little of his voice, or the like,
Or less, he found a man, or more, against
Calamity, proclaimed himself, was proclaimed.

II.
If the stars that move together as one, disband,
Flying like insects of fire in a cavern of night,
Pipperoo, pippera, pipperum...The rest is rot.

Today we are traveling back to our roots, in the body of a doubly-rat-tailed infant, who desires for fleas to guzzle his plague. Beloved Vice-President, how I have missed the bouncy touch of your brain against mine.