I have been an aficionado of country music for many years, going back to when I was just a young boy growing up in the Midwest. Country music was a staple of my playlist before anyone even had a playlist. And at the top of my playlist has long been Willie Nelson. I was a huge fan of Willie back in the late 60s and early 70s when he wasn’t as recognized as he is today.
One of my favorite Willie Nelson songs, is titled “Bloody Mary Morning” and it is near the top in my “writer’s playlist”, or those songs that I play when I am writing, to help inspire me to greatness. Bloody Mary Morning (BMM) is, in my opinion, one of the most quintessential songs of the country genre, in that it contains several basic elements from which other songs are spawned.
In BMM, a young man from the ‘sticks’ is dumped by his big city sweetheart (in this case a girl from L.A.), and he is headed home (to Houston) to recover from the sudden breakup. On the plane ride home, he succumbs to drink (Bloody Mary cocktails) to ease the pain.
This is a country story that could be rewritten a multitude of times by switching genders, mode of transportation, and type of booze. We could swap a young lady from Alabama heading home from Nashville on a bus drinking wine. Or a guy on a train bound for New Orleans, staring out a window, sipping bourbon from a paper bag. You get the picture. BMM is perfect in its simplicity.
Some sources (and we always trust some sources don’t we), say that Willie wrote this song on an especially rough flight, on an airplane airsickness bag. I can’t confirm that, even though it is a good story. What I do know about the song is that when it was first released in 1970, it was titled “Bloody Merry Morning” and according to Willie, he wrote the song to inspire him to be a better parent. I am not sure how that worked, or how the song was supposed to accomplish that, but the song was reworked and released again in 1972 under the new cocktail driven title. The song became a minor hit for Willie, and it peaked at number 17 on the Billboard chart for 1974, or around the year I picked up on it.
Over the years, I have heard Willie play BMM numerous times, but none quite as movingly as last Friday evening in West Palm Beach, Florida, when 90-year-old Willie took to the stage once again.
Three songs in, Willie broke into BMM and performed the song well. Maybe not as well as he did on Austin City Limits in 1974, but hey, that was 49 years ago!
Willie is always calm and laid back, even when performing an intense song like BMM. And he makes recovering from heartbreak seem easy, and nearly painless, and in the space of an LA to Houston flight, he infers that things can turn around for a guy (with the help of a cocktail or two).
And how do we find serenity in calamity? I found this quote from Willie that might explain it:
I take it not only one day at a time, but a moment at a time, and keep it at that pace. If you can be happy right now, then you’ll always be happy because it’s always in the now.
So, it is all about living in the now! Is that the secret? Is this the fabled ‘here and now’ in which we are supposed to live. A friend of mine told me that his AA sponsor once told him to forget one day at a time and take it one hour at a time, and then one minute at a time if need be. That’s screwing it all the way down to the here and now.
It makes sense. If we can learn to be happy in the present moment, then maybe it is all just a matter of stringing the moments together.
Willie Nelson – iThink Amplitheater, West Palm Beach, Florida, October 8, 2023
In today’s world, with so much tragedy and disfunction going on around us, I think that sometimes we need a bit more frivolity in our lives. Sometimes instead of trying to write the Great American Novel, or write the world’s best poem, simply sitting back and writing something totally silly and worthless can be of value.
Hence the topic of today’s blog. I’d like to mention the value of ‘silly’ poetry. Silly poetry can be a great stress reliever. I discovered the value of silly poetry years ago. My paying job as a technical writer can be stressful, to say the least. Tight delivery schedules, unresponsive management, endless meetings, and long hours can all take their toll on a writer. One time, many years ago, very late at night, while working on a particularly challenging project, I became frustrated and, on a whim, I simply opened a blank Word document and began writing the most nonsensical poem that I could think of. I don’t remember much about the poem. I don’t even remember if I saved it. But I do know that the poem totally removed me from the technical document that I was working on, and when I returned to the technical material, I was mentally refreshed. After that time, I continued to write silly poetry now and then.
So, are there any ‘rules’ to writing ‘silly’ poetry. No. It wouldn’t be silly if there were rules. But generally, a silly poem should:
Make some attempt at rhyming. No stress about that though. Lame rhymes are OK.
Be totally spontaneous – if it doesn’t come easy, forget it. And NO rewrites!!! This poem isn’t going anywhere.
Be relatively short – nobody needs a rhyming spontaneous poem that goes on forever.
Which brings me to my latest silly poem. It all started about ten years ago when I listed a pair of cowboy boots for sale on eBay. I purchased the boots in the mid-90s before my wife and I left the North Country and moved to South Florida. They were a great pair of boots, but South Florida is not ‘boots’ country. This is flip-flops and sandals country. Therefore, my boots remained in our closet taking up space for years before finally, at my wife’s urging, I decided to part with them. I listed the boots on eBay for $100, about a third the amount I paid for them, thinking they would be gone in a week. But that didn’t happen. Nobody wanted my boots. A year passed, then another year – until I forgot about the boots. My boots languished on eBay and in my closet. Then one day, I remembered them and lowered the price to $50. That should do it, right? Naw – the boots wouldn’t sell. Nobody wanted them. Finally, before dropping the boots off at Goodwill, I lowered the price a little. Again, nobody wanted the boots…until last week…
Driving home from an evening out on Saturday, the familiar eBay cash register went off on my phone: ca-ching! You’ve made a sale. When I got home and checked my account, I was shocked to find it was the boots that sold…after all these years.
“They’re going to Fresno, California,” I told my wife.
“Good,” she said. “I think they will be happy there.”
And so, if you are a reader in Fresno, and you have just ordered a pair of cowboy boots from an eBayer in Florida, this silly poem is for you. Enjoy the poem and the boots:
My boots have gone to Fresno.
My boots have gone to Fresno But in F L A I’ll stay UPS picked them up today they’re on a westbound highway.
Thru rain and hail, and twisters and sleet they’ll be a whole lot happier now on someone else’s feet.
I’m scribbling stanzas of wild eyed poetry, hasty words jotted across the page of a spiral bound notebook. April damned near faded into May, a young girl stretched face down on an orange blanket, waves rumbling in from Wast Africa tumbling over and over words of distant explorers still pressed against the hot breath of the distant Sahara.. to end here, in late spring in Ft. Lauderdale.
A lady of middle years squeezed into a lavender bikini reads romance, digs her toes into the wet sand, hot breath of melanoma muttering Sun gods frighten her for a moment but she hastens back to the beach read…
I write another stanza but it is so hard. What about an easy beach read for a change. What about a simple clean exit. Include the best of the best, don’t miss anything. A book missing its last chapter is failure.
Louis L’Amour rides again at the Cat 5 Bar, a shirtless overweight local sips a Mai Tai as he reads oblivious to the churning the humming the hot beach beat pounding surf. Hot iron on the high plains, hot sand more hot, hot. hot.
It’s cool inside now says the last smoker in North America as she exhales a white/blue plume of 1950s Americana into the lifeless afternoon air, and she’s waving the only newspaper in the western hemisphere. She says she’s despondent because of the rental market. Screw the investors she says. And screw the politicians and the Russian oil oligarchs. Read the papers, they’re taking over. They’re coming in now like daylight through the blinds of a cheap motel — and they’re driving up the insurance rates.
A man of the cloth passes by like a grey ghost of the Apocalypse. A worn King James Version under his arm, pamphlets in his hand, hot in a dark jacket and dark pants and white Sam Smith sneakers. Have faith he says, to no one in particular.
It is hard to let something as important as the National Day of Encouragement go by unnoticed, so I won’t. If you are not aware, September 12th , is the National Day of Encouragement. It wasn’t on my radar, but when I saw it on my desk calendar, I investigated it and found that this day has been designated such since 2007. The date is the product of the Encouragement Foundation at Harding University in Seary, Arkansas.
The date was first recognized by a proclamation issued by Seary Mayor Belinda LaForce. The day was further promoted by Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe who designated the day a state holiday. Sometime after that, President George W. Bush then declared the day to be nationally recognized, and the rest is history.
In the words of Andrew Baker, today’s organizer of the National Day of Encouragement:
“Our goal is to challenge people not to just think about the idea of encouragement, but to do something that will encourage someone else … even if it’s simply speaking a kind word…”
At first, I thought why do we need a special day set aside to promote encouragement? But upon further reflection, I decided it isn’t such a bad idea. With so much negativity in the world right now, we need all the encouragement we can get, toward any endeavor we are trying to complete. And since everything that I write about here at EEOTPB is related to creativity, who needs a word of encouragement more that aspiring writers, novelists, poets, songwriters, painters, and anyone trying to create art for art’s sake or who are creating art for a living?
So, I am truly behind this Day of Encouragement, and I am going to encourage someone today.
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Now, in a matter totally unrelated to the National Day of Encouragement, I want to pass along a link to a poem that I very much liked. I came across this poem when I was doing some research on my last post about composing poems on phones, and I had intended to link to it then, but I didn’t, so I will now. The poem is titled “Texting” and it is by the great British poet, Carol Ann Duffy. I am not sure if Carol Ann Duffy composed this poem on her phone or not, but since it relates to this theme, I am linking to the poem here:
A few years ago, I was eating lunch at an outdoor café. Halfway through my club sandwich, a thought darted across my mental palate – not just any thought but a terrific first line for a poem. I needed to jot it down fast, but I had no pen and paper. Who carries a pen and paper these days. I repeated the words over and over thinking I would note it when I got back to the office. Of course, by the time I returned to my desk, the words to the epic poem I had hoped to remember were long gone. I tried to compose the line, and I came close, but it wasn’t the line that I had thought of an hour earlier. When I told my wife about this later, she said, “Why didn’t you just make a note on your phone?” Embarrassed for overlooking something so obvious, I muttered that I hadn’t thought of it.
A few days later, I had not only an idea for a poem, but the first half dozen lines for one, ready to be set to paper. This time, I opened the Notes app on my Samsung Galaxy phone. After tapping a few keys, my Pulitzer Prize winning poem was committed to the cloud for eternal safekeeping.
At the time, I intended to use my Android Notes app to only store a few raw poem ‘materials’ and not to be used to complete a piece of work. Soon, however, I discovered just how easy writing a poem can be when using only the simple Notes app on my phone.
The first poem that I wrote was not nearly as good as I had originally thought. In fact, I was disappointed in my product (yes, I consider poems a ‘product’). But I had mastered a new technique for capturing my ideas on-the-go. Over the next few months, I would find my Android phone a most convenient tool for writing poetry. I found myself composing poems in restaurants, motel rooms, on airplanes and just about anywhere else that inspiration found me.
Of course, I came to the game far too late for this to be real news. After doing some internet research, I found out that poets are composing on their phones every day and there are now a number of poetry apps for both Android and iPhone that are quite popular. These apps allow you to share your poems with other users. I have installed two of these more popular apps, Poetizer and Miraquill. I’ll let you know how it goes as I familiarize myself with them.
In the meantime, what would a blog about telephone poetry be without a poem that I wrote on a phone? This poem I wrote while sitting on a Florida beach one afternoon. When considering a topic for a new poem, sand came immediately to mind:
Sand Crushed quartz – metamorphosized granite muscovite and feldspar washed across half a continent, remnants of runoff from a West Virginia coal company wash plant, still catch lazy afternoon sun. Distant visions of a hard glacial tide slowly rising for the first time in ten millenniums, swept clean in a thousand Rivers; down The Kanawa, down the Potomac, force fed into the Ohio and the Savanna and the ambling blackwater Edisto. A million years before Sherman and Sumter, and the white washed porches that face The Swanee. Crushing, rushing to the great Atlantic; pulsing pulverized pieces of the Great Sassafras Mountain and Mount Pinnacle now churned beneath the toes of a hundred fifty thousand toes (on any given day).. oh the great continental grind pepper of the eons.
Like the poem, or hate it, you must admit it’s not every day you see the word ‘metamorphosized’ used in a poem. Thanks for reading. Mahalo – Ed.
At 2:47 AM, the bed shakes and I wake. My body is cold. The sheets are tired.
I tell her there has been an earthquake and the Cumbre Vieja volcano has just dropped 179 million tons of rock into the Atlantic.
She says: “it is not an earthquake — there are no earthquakes in Florida – at least not in the middle of winter – it’s not earthquake season” But I look out the upstairs window, east, toward the ocean.
The wall of water, I say could be up to 110 feet tall, – maybe more.
Go back to sleep she says, there’s no earthquake, and there are no water walls. And don’t mention the Cumbre Vieja again — tonight.
But I can’t sleep so I go to the kitchen to make tea.
I sit on a stool by the bar watching TV while a weather girl in a lavender dress explains that the day ahead will be just like the last – 82 degrees, partly cloudy, no rain, no earthquakes, tsunami risk is low.
I watch until I weary of her cheer,
and then I switch to a 24 Hr. news channel where a grave but engaging, field reporter is broadcasting live from a war-torn foreign country and I am cold again
I looked at the stars last night and I saw Saiph winking at me – like she does – – the little nymph…only 730 Light years southeast of South Beach… Oh you shouldn’t have – you waif…you should have waited until I could join you out there in the Universe…we could have waltzed among the stars, we could have gone to the ends of the earth together, or maybe to the end of the heavens, poking fun at the light years jesting of time and space, putting them both in their place. We could have prodded old Orion to pick up the pace. We could have instructed Neptune to take it out back and get it out of his system and we could have asked the Universe if the great God is listening. Time is fleeting… it’s between you and me now. No need to inform the others. Lie back upon your Jimmy Buffett inspired beach blanket, my Love. Wait for the moon to rise over the horizon.
Ed's end of the planet books 